At the center of our consciousness, like the nucleus of a cell, lives a “spark of mind” that represents the blueprint each of us is designed to be – a unique expression of the archetypal Self. The Self is the regulating, harmonizing, and meaning-giving agent of the psyche, always seeking balance and wholeness. This “divine spark” is every human’s embodied soul. It is the very core of our essence.

Gnosticism has always been about our bigger story. The Gnostics always knew that we are “more than what we look like,” and that we’ve had to take on the human condition in its entirety, both the good parts and the bad, to know it all from the inside out. Otherwise, we could never transform it. And they believed this is what we came here to do. We’ve had to learn to blend our spiritual soul with the human personality, called to be the archetypal Self as we travel through this sensual world. Though we probably don’t consciously remember it, the Gnostics believe Humanity made a pact with our Heavenly Father to come here and do just that. And this, of course, is our bigger story.

The Self has a spiritual or God-like quality to it — far greater than the ego can attain. It functions as an inner Spirit Guide. Though the ego always seeks to run our lives — and frankly, believes that it does –it must develop a relationship to our divine nature; otherwise, we will continually live in a string of often-meaningless ego pursuits with no sense of purpose to our lives. If life loses any sense at all of its sacred purpose, we can feel rudderless, depressed, or even sometimes suicidal during our very worst times. But thank goodness, as spiritual beings we have nostalgia for the sacred, and this perpetual longing to be someone greater than these little human egos keeps us moving along a pathway to wholeness. No matter how difficult our lives can sometimes become, or how hopeless we may even feel, the true Self never leaves us. The archetypal Self is the human template God made us to be. In our essence we are immortal beings who are never born and never die.