Every truth ever discovered -- each new light that will ever burn bright -- already exists in our consciousness. All we will ever know and share about love, humility, compassion, and sacrifice -- the secrets that will reveal and then resolve old sorrows -- awaits us within ourselves. Hidden in this truth is our great promise, both as individuals and as a race of beings.
I call these timeless ideas that ignite and stir us to remember our forgotten spiritual heritage "seeds of fire." The momentary sharing of a timeless luminescence -- is one of the earmarks of any seed of fire, such as this one offered by Paracelcus, a pioneer physician and alchemist of the German Renaissance: "Man does not know himself and does not use the energies hidden in him, nor does he know that he carries the stars hidden in himself and that he is the microcosm, and thus carries within him the whole firmament with all its influence."
Such soul-stirring insights that reach in and remind us of nobility lost -- illuminate the skies of passing time, like stars on a moonless night. Yet, by their far-flung light, we don't just read the history of our possibilities, we are also made aware of a latent interior greatness that awaits us now. This means that regardless of when in time, or where on earth, one of these truths appears, its effect is always the same. By its deft touch, "the sleeper awakens" and the meaning of our life takes on a whole new magnitude: we perceive the presence of an immeasurable, if not divine life whose possibilities are somehow recognized as being the same as our own. The Gospel of Thomas (60-140, Egypt) supports this important idea: "When you know yourselves, then you will be known and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty."
Whenever we come upon such a "seed of fire" -- some new thought or insight that awakens us to a part of ourselves unknown only a moment before -- we realize that we are not alone. These sometimes shocking moments make two things clear at once: First, someone "out there" -- whose "footprints" we have stumbled upon -- knows us better than we know ourselves, for they have awakened us to a truth about ourselves that we didn't know a moment before. And, for having now been introduced to what amounts to a higher level of our own awareness, we also receive another gift beyond description: the realization that within us already lives a body of timeless wisdom that is more who we are than anything we could have ever imagined ourselves to be.