Have you ever been in a situation where you hear someone say something, and it sounds new but also familiar.  Almost like something you feel you knew before but had forgotten.  It’s like waking up.  Maybe more specifically, it’s like something is waking up inside of you that has been slumbering, so to speak.  You sense that it has somehow been there all along, yet here, there is a freshness and a vitality that comes along with waking up to it.  You want to welcome it and embrace it.  And sometimes the delight and joy that you experience on account of this awakening compels you to share it with others.   John’s Gospel (JN 15:26–16:4a) speaks to this inner testament hidden within from the beginning:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father,
the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father,
he will testify to me.
And you also testify,
because you have been with me from the beginning.

This is the testimony from the beginning that Jesus the Christ has been and that we will be.  Jesus is assuring his disciples that they are an integral part of the advocacy of the Good News – God with and in us always – specifically in terms of testifying to that Spirit of Truth, New Life Itself!  This is the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth that blows through our inner recesses allowing us to hear, perhaps again, what we have known somehow all along.  We feel it somewhere in our body even, that this is True.  God has always been here, otherwise we would not!  It’s the familiar truth about who we are –our very essence. 

The spiritual teacher, A.H. Almaas, speaks of this awakening to essence as the ultimate task of our lives, that it is our lives.[i]  Essence involves fulfillment, which is astonishingly freedom from our desires and expectations.- the freedom to simply see and be who we already are.  When this happens, and we become less attached to the qualities of our personality, we feel expansive and this expansiveness allows us to see this same essence in others.  

We hear of how this happens to Lydia in the Acts of the Apostles (ACTS 16:11-15).  Paul and the apostles had walked out of the town of Philippi in order to pray by a river, when they encounter Lydia:

We sat and spoke with the women who had gathered there.
One of them, a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth,
from the city of Thyatira, a worshiper of God, listened,
and the Lord opened her heart to pay attention
to what Paul was saying.
After she and her household had been baptized,
she offered us an invitation,
“If you consider me a believer in the Lord,
come and stay at my home,” and she prevailed on us.

The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.  I imagine that what she heard Paul saying was new but also familiar to her.  The prompting was to pay attention.  Perhaps in the depths of her being, she was realizing who she really was and that precious realization expanded her from within.  Her response to this expansion was to share it.  “If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my home.”  Inasmuch as she was inviting the Spirit of Truth newly awakened in her to abide within, she was also outwardly moved to hospitality and inclusion.  Finding her essence as it reverberated from Paul’s voice, she joined in the spread of this Essence of Truth, testifying to it with her hospitality.

It is important to note though that Jesus points out the shadow side of this Spirit of Truth and Essence –  namely, the cost that it will exact.

“I have told you this so that you may not fall away.
They will expel you from the synagogues;
in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you
will think he is offering worship to God.
They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me.
I have told you this so that when their hour comes
you may remember that I told you.”

The hospitality of the Good News, the awakened Divine essence within us, is not always welcomed.  It can seem threatening to others and twist minds and actions so that people can actually justify their ‘moral’ actions against you and others as a way of ‘offering worship to God.’  The unconditional essence of that Spirit of Truth carries with it a radical freedom that others, who have not experienced it, can find off-putting and frightening. 

A. H. Almaas, describes this as the freedom that comes from the nonattachment to all else but that essence.  In this freedom from all, yes, there is the reality that you might end up all alone. The ultimate price for divine intimacy, accepting the essence of your gifted being is the ability to tolerate your own aloneness and integrity.  There can be no outward conditions that must be in place for Essence to shine through.  If it’s conditional, then it’s not truly yours.[ii]   In Christ’s language this is the very way of the cross!  In the same vein, the embrace of this cross of essence is an opening outward that invites others into that freedom.  That invitation can be seen as a confrontation, to be rejected or accepted.  This is the radical nature of this freedom!

There are no real prisons for the essence awakened within us by the Holy Spirit of Christ.  Our only confinements are the extent that we allow our circumstances and conditions to determine WHO we are.  Essence will shine forth and resonate so long as we cultivate and practice the real freedom that it grants.  When we accept the invitation of Lydia to come and stay at my home, then we can practice not only hospitable embrace of essence shared in community fellowship, but also engage that abiding essence in the face of the direst conditions and circumstances, wherein the Spirit of Truth can miraculously testify even more powerfully and expand sometimes invisibly more than our hopes could ever see or imagine!

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[i] A.H. Almaas, DIAMOND HEART, Book One, Elements of the Real in Man (Shambhala: 2000), 108-109.

[ii] Ibid., 119-121