The inner knower has generally been spoken of as “the holy spirit” in the western tradition. It’s a perfectly fine term, except that it no longer really says what it was originally intended to say, which is something that often happens to words as time passes. In some cases, they tend to take on a meaning that’s even the exact opposite of their original meaning.

A case in point is the word “prevent,” which 500 years ago meant just the opposite of how we use it today. Now, we use it to mean impede or stop, whereas five centuries ago it meant precede or come before, from the Latin venire, meaning “come”—come ahead of.

One reason to use the term inner knower to refer to the holy spirit is that “holy spirit” has become so distorted an idea in the minds of vast numbers of people.

When people hear the word “spirit” in the context of spirituality, it tends to be regarded as some sort of essence—an otherworldly reality that’s entirely separate from our natural being and the material realm in general. However, spirit is really a dimension of the natural world, not something ethereal, as can be seen from how we talk about a horse that’s spirited or a child that’s got “real spirit.” It means they are really alive, awake, alert, tuned in.

A deeper study of the western tradition also shows us that the idea spirit is something separate from the natural world is completely false. There was originally nothing dualistic about the word spirit, which denotes not some ghostly essence but aliveness, in the sense of consciousness, awareness, inner knowing. 

The expression "holy spirit" is speaking about a healthy frame of mind that’s awake to the whole of reality, or what in the East is often referred to as “mindfulness.” It has to do with a level of consciousness that empowers us to live a life that’s whole, or wholistic.

Yet again, we have to be a bit careful with our terminology because “mindfulness” isn’t about thinking—isn’t a mental activity that requires effort. On the contrary, mindfulness is being present in whatever we are doing, so that we are aware of the whole and therefore able to act with the fullness of our being, instead of in an imbalanced way from just partially awake aspects of ourselves.

This is why, at least at this time in our development as a species, we prefer the term inner knower when speaking of that aspect of us that is able to bring us divine guidance.

It’s said in the tradition that there was a time when the holy spirit “was not yet given.” That is, the quantum shift in the human brain that allows us to become attuned to the divine insight that is able to flow from our essential being hadn’t yet begun to occur in our species.

That’s not to say there weren’t individuals in both the East and the West who were deeply influenced by divine consciousness. On the contrary, there are many accounts— going all the way back to the time of the Upanishads in India and the Hebrew Scriptures almost a thousand years before our current era—of individuals and even communities that became empowered by this higher level of consciousness. Still, the shift to a new paradigm hadn’t yet got underway on a broad, global scale.

The idea that divine consciousness hadn’t yet been “given” to our species resonates with all of us if we just think about it for a moment, as does the need for each of us to as it were “receive” this consciousness—"receive holy spirit." The fact is, each of us has experienced what it's like not to have "received" the holy spirit yet, because until we began to wake up, we were as blind as a bat when it came to our true nature. When the light went on, our whole world began to change.

The reality is that divine consciousness with its capacity for bestowing inner knowing has always been available, though it takes an evolution not only of the physical brain to a certain level of complexity but also of us as individuals in our personal development before we are able to “see” with what the East refers to as “the third eye.” Once our eyes are opened, we truly live in a “new creation.”

The coming of the spirit—that is, our opening up to a whole new level of awareness—begins a process of progressively living from insight, rather than making decisions from thinking out how we are going to conduct our life.

For many of us, learning to live from insight instead of from a great deal of agonizing analysis of external factors proves initially taxing. We have a hard time discerning the difference between our true inner voice of divine Presence and all the other voices—from parents, teachers, peers, and society in general throughout the years of growing up—that play in our head almost constantly.

Somewhere along the way, there comes a time when our inner knower isn’t something we any longer have to separate out from all the other voices in our head. How this happens for each of us is different, but the effect is the same for all of us: we relax into simply being the knowing we seek.

The early western tradition had a term for this, as did the eastern tradition. In the East, it was thought of as enlightenment. A person shifted into living from their true inner light in a stable way—it was no longer hit-and-miss. In the West, this experience of enlightenment was called “baptism of the holy spirit,” an expression that has been horribly distorted since when it was first used. What the expression points us to is a point in our journey when we have simply become immersed in the new consciousness, to where it’s pretty much our everyday reality.

In conclusion, let’s return for a moment to the idea that there was a time when the holy spirit “was not yet given.” This is such a pivotal insight—that it is given, and not something we have to agonize over. We don't have to struggle to "try to get there," as so many needlessly find themselves doing.

We can’t tell you how this happens, only that it happens. Eckhart Tolle talks about how it happened to him in the opening pages of The Power of Now, while Michael Brown relates his experience in The Presence Process. Both of these Namaste authors came into this in very different ways, and each of us has our own unique experience of how it became a reality for us.

One thing we do know is that the more we relax in a state of trust, and allow life itself—which is infused with the divine Presence—to lead us, conscious living does indeed become our everyday reality (a topic we will in due course take up in Part 3 of this Journey). Inner knowing becomes our modus operandi.

Opportunity for Self-inquiry and Sharing: 

1. Can you pinpoint in your own life a time when you first began to catch a glimpse of the fact that what you thought was your true self was in fact a learned way of getting through life that covered up who you really were?
2. Do you recall a subsequent time in your life when the glimmer burst forth into brilliant daylight, so that you entered into the new consciousness in a way that began to impact the whole of your life?
3. Are there aspects of your life in which you are presently sensing that there is more light to come—areas in which your inner knower is seeking to enlighten you and raise you to a whole new level of living?
4. If you belong to a faith tradition, whether western or eastern, do you find yourself increasingly able to reinterpret the various creeds, hymns, chants, affirmations, and other statements used in the tradition more in accord with their original sense, in the sort of way we have reinterpreted the meaning of some of the terms used in this lesson?