Inner Light or True Nature

Connecting with the Inner Light is the birthright of every human being. There are times when we’ve all been in touch with it: the exquisite sense of being in love—when you’re “home” in your partner’s arms, perfectly content and fully present; the ecstatic moment when you feel as if you’re in the right place at the right time, living your purpose in a graceful way; the mystery of moonlight illuminating the landscape when you sense the living soul of the natural world.

These experiences of being at home in yourself, centered in some essential kernel of what it is to be human, are profoundly natural. They’re both “inner” and “other,” in the sense that when you’re in that center of goodness within you, you also feel connected to a greater wholeness—a higher intelligence—that’s hard to express in words but has been called many things, including wisdom, God, the Source of Being, or Ultimate Reality.

Sages from all of the world’s wisdom traditions tell us that such experiences of “true nature” are expressions of our essential inborn humanity—like the nectar that’s the subtlest and most exquisite essence of a flower. True nature lacks the self-consciousness, fear, and compulsive need to make things happen in our own way, which creates so much suffering and unhappiness. Aligning with true nature allows freedom to move into alignment with larger currents of wisdom and bring new ideas to fruition.

Think about Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, or Martin Luther King, Jr.—their personal alignment with a larger Source was not only a matter of singular importance to them; it was the center out of which their lives, and their service to others, flowed. When there’s alignment between personal essence and a greater intelligence, happiness and purposeful action well up like sweet water from an underground source.

Whether you realize it consciously or not, the experiences of daily life are a form of feedback about whether you’re getting closer to that state or farther away from it. Are you all stressed out, with a mind that won’t stop running in circles, or can you rest in the contentment of your own true nature and wait for wisdom to arise of its own accord? In one of the most ubiquitous spiritual metaphors, are you asleep, locked into your own fearful fantasies . . . or are you awake, present to conscious choice and the infinite possibilities that each moment contains?

The parable you’re about to read will make the ancient spiritual concepts of being asleep and waking up—and of following guidance that’s freely given by a loving Source—more transparent. Then we’ll explain what the Soul’s Compass is and how you can use it to guide you on the journey of becoming a Homo sapiens caritas: the kind of wise and loving being whom we believe is the ultimate perfection of human life.

Written in the 2nd century C.E., the Hymn of the Pearl—also known as the Hymn of the Soul—is a Gnostic poem that’s a parable of the soul’s journey and the essential questions Who am I? and Why am I here? Gnosticism was a 1st- and 2nd-century spiritual movement oriented to direct knowledge of the sacred, which the Greeks called gnosis. This tradition most likely predated Christianity but was also thought to reflect the experience of Jesus, although eventually it was considered a heresy. Nonetheless, the Hymn of the Pearl made its way into the apocryphal Christian gospel the Acts of Judas Thomas the Apostle. It’s a map of the soul’s journey home—the human migration out of a separate sense of self ruled by fear and the need to control (sometimes called the false or egoic self)—to true nature or the Inner Light, whose expression is love, clarity, and co-creation with wisdom itself.

Continued on page 2: 'We’re hardwired for God' »