Essence or Soul or Higher Self

[Wayne]

Could someone explain n a way I could understand what the difference is between essence, the soul, and the higher self. They all sound alike to me.

Thanks!

[jk]

I don't think there is a clearly defined way these are used in MT, but mostly it seems to be Essence = Higher Self (although sometimes I think this includes the rest of your Entity?)
Soul seems to be used more in a fragment sense, that is fragment of the whole Essence, with specific overleaves.

[John Roth]

Could someone explain n a way I could understand what the difference is between essence, the soul, and the higher self. They all sound alike to me.

Thanks!

I usually see the term soul as meaning the repository of information relevant to the physical plane life, thus the term "Soul Age." It's not at all the meaning used in other spiritual teachings, so it's not all that widely used.

Essence and High Self seem to be synonymous.

Understanding, of course, is up to you.

John Roth

[Dave]

All of those terms could be used interchangeably if you don't want to get too technical. I sort of like the term soul used to denote a single incarnation and rely on the term essence to represent the collective self, or repository that contains all previous incarnations, including the kitchen sink, I suspect. But I don't think it matters that much.

And you could make a similar argument with the term, fragment. I've heard it used to represent both essence and the individual incarnation. Essence is indeed a fragment of the Tao and the soul in our body is a fragment of essence. It's all the same source energy, though, so how you choose to assign these terms is a matter of personal preference.

Best,
Dave

[John Roth]

All of those terms could be used interchangeably if you don't want to get too technical. I sort of like the term soul used to denote a single incarnation and rely on the term essence to represent the collective self, or repository that contains all previous incarnations, including the kitchen sink, I suspect. But I don't think it matters that much.

And you could make a similar argument with the term, fragment. I've heard it used to represent both essence and the individual incarnation. Essence is indeed a fragment of the Tao and the soul in our body is a fragment of essence. It's all the same source energy, though, so how you choose to assign these terms is a matter of personal preference.

Best,
Dave

That viewpoint impedes communication. There's a reason why technical terminology (jargon if you will) doesn't always mean what the same word means in the wider culture. That's also the reason why some people get really bent out of shape when the mass media appropriates a term that has a well-understood meaning and perverts it to another meaning. For example, take "hacker." It originally meant someone who sits at a keyboard and hacks at a program he's writing. The media perverted it to mean someone who breaks into someone else's computer.

[jk]

Fragment indeed seems to have several meanings, as an MT term. I found the concept of even smaller fragment interesting and helpful - the concept that Essence has left many Fragments of itself throughout the Universe and its on its journey of collecting them and slowly becoming whole. Even closer to home, on even smaller scale, we, as individuals are becoming a greater whole during our lives, by integrating our own fragments during our lifetimes. People who we used to know long time ago and have not had a long contact with or who did not accept this process in us, might be living with a fragmented idea of us (and we of course might be living with a fragmented idea of them). Perhaps everyone is actually living with only a more or less fragmented idea of another, as one cannot really truly fully know another. Heck do we even fully know ourselves?

[Dave]

All of those terms could be used interchangeably if you don't want to get too technical. I sort of like the term soul used to denote a single incarnation and rely on the term essence to represent the collective self, or repository that contains all previous incarnations, including the kitchen sink, I suspect. But I don't think it matters that much.

And you could make a similar argument with the term, fragment. I've heard it used to represent both essence and the individual incarnation. Essence is indeed a fragment of the Tao and the soul in our body is a fragment of essence. It's all the same source energy, though, so how you choose to assign these terms is a matter of personal preference.

Best,
Dave

That viewpoint impedes communication. There's a reason why technical terminology (jargon if you will) doesn't always mean what the same word means in the wider culture. That's also the reason why some people get really bent out of shape when the mass media appropriates a term that has a well-understood meaning and perverts it to another meaning. For example, take "hacker." It originally meant someone who sits at a keyboard and hacks at a program he's writing. The media perverted it to mean someone who breaks into someone else's computer.

I was just tossing out some different ways of looking at these terms, John. ;-)

Dave