Higher consciousness

Higher consciousness is the consciousness of a higher Self, transcendental reality, or God. It is "the part of the human being that is capable of transcending animal instincts". The concept developed in German Idealism, and is a central notion in contemporary popular spirituality.

Fichte distinguished the finite or empirical ego from the pure or infinite ego. The activity of this "pure ego" can be discovered by a "higher intuition".

Fichte (1762-1814) was one of the founding figures of German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. His philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant and those of the German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

According to Michael Whiteman, Fichte's philosophical system "is a remarkable western formulation of eastern mystical teachings (of Advaita)."

In 1812 Schopenhauer started to use the term "the better consciousness", a consciousness

...[that] lies beyond all experience and thus all reason, both theoretical and practical (instinct).

According to Yasuo Kamata, Schopenhauer's idea of "the better consciousness" finds its origin in Fichte's idea of a "higher consciousness" (höhere Bewusstsein) or "higher intuition", and also bears resemblance to Schelling's notion of "intellectual intuition". According to Schopenhauer himself, his notion of a "better consciousness" was different from Schelling's notion of "intellectual intuition", since Schelling's notion required intellctual development of the understanding, while his notion of a "better consciousness" was "like a flash of insight, with no connection to the understanding."

According to Schopenhauer,

The better consciousness in me lifts me into a world where there is no longer personality and causality or subject or object. My hope and my belief is that this better (supersensible and extra-temporal) consciousness will become my only one, and for that reason I hope that it is not God. But if anyone wants to use the expression God symbolically for the better consciousness itself or for much that we are able to separate or name, so let it be, yet not among philosophers I would have thought.

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