The goodness of our true selves—do we believe it?

As pure water poured into pure water becomes the very same, so does the Self of the illumined man or woman verily become one with the Godhead.  ~Katha Upanishad

Easwaran notes that for some reason, it is very difficult for us to accept our divine nature. “This has always puzzled me. We pay money for books about how destructive we are. We stand in line to see movies that emphasize our capacity for making trouble.” Then, when Jesus comes to tell us that the kingdom of heaven is within us, we say, "There must be some mistake."

It is to convince us that our real Self is always pure and eternal that men and women of God keep arising among us.

More than anything, we need to hear their good news that the source of all joy and security is right within. In the Hindu scriptures there is a precise term for our real nature: the Atman. All it means is "the Self" - not the little self, the changing personality with which most of us identify, but the higher Self, our real, changeless personality.

For me, this is expressed in our tradition as The Holy Spirit. Our true self is our Christ-self, the higher, perfected consciousness that resides within all of us. Our true selves are un-conditioned, and reflect God’s Self in a pure, unsullied way. I see this most dramatically in the lives of the three year olds that I am privileged to work with each week. They are, at the root, so loving, so sensitive.

I do understand the ‘fallenness’ of my humanity—of all humans—I do not need to be informed by the strict viewpoint of Calvin’s “depravity” of man to know this, but it comes when the pure unsullied self has been tainted with the sin of the worldliness all about us.

In many ways—the knowledge that the Kingdom of God is within us, and within all of us as we are gathered as a Kingdom Community—is the Good News. There is eternal life available-now.