True nature is the single element, the elixir, that makes transformation possible. We cannot transform without the interaction between true nature and our life situations, between true nature and our own individual experience. It’s true that human consciousness can transform without the presence of true nature, but that is more of a horizontal transformation: Throughout our life, we can increase our knowledge or expand our emotional range or learn new skills. But the individual consciousness cannot grow spiritually, cannot awaken to itself and express that awakening, without the presence of true nature. As the transformer, true nature transforms itself from one guise to another; that is what a transformer does. Sometimes it is the truth, sometimes it is the light, sometimes it is a form, sometimes it is a teacher, and sometimes it is a student. True nature is the inner secret of the dynamic of realization, the dialectic between individual practice and Total Being. Because true nature is the nature of the individual as well as the nature of Total Being, it links them as the agent and the grace that illuminates, awakens, transforms, and liberates. True nature is the intelligence and the love that makes practice an expression of realization. True nature is the inner teacher and also the external teacher. How efficient and how good the external teacher is depends, in our work, on the extent to which the teacher is able to embody and express the inner teacher. The inner teacher is one facet, one face, of true nature. True nature is the truth and it is also the teacher of truth. It is also the teacher of how to recognize the truth and how to discern the truth.

At this point, you might be thinking that there is something called an individual consciousness that goes through something else called a process of transformation and results in another thing called a mature human being. And although this is true from one perspective, from the view of totality, we see that true nature is the transformer, the transformed, and the transformation. It is the catalyst for transformation, it is what is transformed, and it is the resulting transformation. By clarifying and developing the individual consciousness and its capacities, true nature, in turn, realizes itself in new and more comprehensive ways. It transforms itself in order to reveal elements and facets of its nature that require greater capacities and more maturity of individual consciousness. The individual consciousness is the organ through which true nature expresses and realizes itself. As individual consciousness transforms, it develops its own sense of individuation as a personal presence, which is the sense of being a person of true nature, a person that expresses true nature in the world. But there is more to the development of human consciousness than individuation. It can develop in terms of its realization, as well as its capacities of discernment, of freedom, of dynamism. In this path, the full development and maturation of individual consciousness is the metamorphosis into the indestructible inner spiritual body of freedom. This is the full realization of being an individual human being and being the totality of being as two sides of one reality; they are no longer experienced as two at all.