Featured Image by Alexandre Dulaunoy Under Creative Commons License

By far one of the most important things you can do in your magick and psychic development is make contact with your daemon/HGA, or what the kids call the “higher self.” (Myself, I’ve developed a strong distaste for language with the new age taint on it so I’ve decided to bring daemon back, but these are all interchangeable in modern spiritual language.)

The daemon is the part of your soul that is manifesting you.

All things exist in spirit before they rise in matter – that includes you. Your body and personality are the structures that enable your daemon to project its consciousness and enact its will in this world. It is not bound by time and it doesn’t suffer from amnesia. It represents everything you can be in this life and the union between you and your daemon is the foundation upon which you can evolve beyond your existing perspectives and limitations.

If there is a universal purpose in life, it is to discover your deamon’s reason for creating you and doing your best to embody its will.

While I do not believe every circumstance of our lives is planned and agreed upon before we incarnate, we have some sway over things. We get more input the more we develop our souls. We are in a perpetual cycle of creating and rebirthing ourselves.

This is spiritual evolution writ large. Your daemon pushes you to become yourself (and an ever more refined version of yourself) as you progress through life and different incarnations.

You And Your Daemon Are the Same

You are not separate entities, but you may experience this aspect of you as an external consciousness when you first make contact.

We are conditioned to ignore our instincts and we are traumatized into believing our soul’s yearning is immoral, impractical, or otherwise needs to be repressed for our own good and the good of all.

When we make contact with the daemon or feel it urging us down a path, it seems alien because we have forgotten who we are in all but the most superficial ways. This is where talk of the false self/ego comes in – that’s what it’s about.

It’s not a conflict between matter and spirit per se – between our animal instincts and the god within ourselves. It is a distorted lens through which we view our flesh as separate from our souls; it is an identification with circumstances and external things that do no matter and that say nothing about who we really are.

The daemon is us stripped of our flesh and all Earthly concerns. It is our undiluted essence – it is our joy and our fear and love and hate expressed without hesitation or apology. It is concerned with the Earth otherwise it would not have dreamed us into being, but it isn’t concerned with this world as though it is an anchor chained to our necks. It sees this world as a canvas to create.

It put us here in order to become.

Your True Will is Your Life’s Purpose

Free will is a topic that deserves its own articles and videos.

The short version of my perspective is that we don’t have a lot of free will when we’re born but we can gain greater amounts of freedom the more we learn to keep ourselves centered and not get yanked around by our impluses, emotions, and external pressures.

This inevitably aligns us with our daemon. We would have no drive whatsoever to move toward improvement – much less have an idea what “improvement” looks like for us – if we didn’t have that part of us that remembers who we are underneath it all.

You don’t need complex rituals to contact your daemon. The connection is deep and cannot be severed; it is merely unconscious until we make ourselves conscious of it.

Contact is not as earth-shattering as older texts and stories may have you believe. I, for one, don’t believe in enlightenment. More to the point – I don’t think it’s meaningful. There is no state of perfected consciousness. For anything to be perfect it would have to be static, and anything static – unchanging – is dead.

You’ll have peak experiences when you are consciously communing with your daemon, but you won’t live in that state perpetually. I don’t think anyone would want to. When I think of it, it sounds maddening. I like coming back to Earth after I feel like my nervous system has been annihilated and I’ve merged with that vaster aspect of myself. It certainly expands my awareness, but I would be a useless mush person if I constantly lived in what I’d call an enlightened state based on how others have described it.

Living in a way where communion between yourself and your daemon is constant and the line between you and that part of yourself gets thinner and thinner is viable, but it’s a long and unglamorous process, and it may be kicked off spontaneously. As with all things, it’s not lightning strikes and moments of revelation that shape us and change the course of our lives; it’s the things we do consistently and the choices that take us deeper into our center or further away from who and what we truly are that define us.

Throw Away Your Expectations

The first time I knew I was communing with my daemon it appeared to me as an ex.

It was 2020. I dreamed I was in my stepfather’s house – the one I lived in as a teenager. A coworker of mine had stolen my copy of Yoshi’s Island and he acted sketchy when I caught him and told him to give it back. He did, but he never acknowledged taking it.

I stepped outside and my ex was sitting in the white van my stepfather drove. In the real world, I felt like we needed a heart-to-heart to close things out proper but there hadn’t been a real opportunity for it, and I wasn’t yet aware I was dreaming. I told her, “we should talk.”

She responded by speaking in garbled language I didn’t understand. I shook my head and asked her to repeat that.

“She” grinned in a way my ex never would. “That’s right – you always did like to hold onto things.”

I was suddenly conscious of how much of my dream was laden with nostalgia and a longing for an earlier time.

“She” continued. “How does this morning sound?”

I was aware it was my daemon at this point and that I needed to be up early for work. I didn’t want to skip out on sleep, but I figured if I could consciously commune with it after I woke, I’d take the opportunity. “I can do that.”

“She” responded quick as lightning – “That’s absurd – no one wants to talk in the morning.”

My daemon grinned real wide at me, and I s quinted as I answered “we’ll find time to talk.”

I share that story to demonstrate that the “higher self” is not all warmth and fluff and love. It will not placate you about your bad decisions or go along with the absurd idea that rotting in bed with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s qualifies as self-care.

If you want to be coddled, you will never hear your soul when it speaks to you.

It isn’t cruel for cruelty’s sake; the personal daemon doesn’t like suffering that doesn’t serve a purpose. (Unless you’re into that.) But it will set you straight where it needs to. After all – it is you, and if you’re not fit for the purpose it has for you then life gets a lot harder than it has to be.

It’s not about surrender to an external will; it is about surrender to your own will. That is where you find actual freedom and where choices mean something. Free will is exercised when you decide how you will go about what you aim to do and how you will experience it; going against your soul’s calling is a choice, but it’s a choice that turns you into a slave to mere impulse and consumption.

Entire books can – and have – been written on this topic, but this is where I start when explaining to people what all this means. No description is adequate; your experiences will be entirely your own once you dive in.

If you’re looking for a place to start, sit in the quiet or go for a walk in nature, invite your soul to speak, and pay attention to whatever bubbles up. Your daemon wants to connect with you, too – more often than not, we just need to give it room to speak.

Linktree