Words leave their spiritual trace in a room. Many years later, people standing in that room can still be affected by the words that were spoken there so long ago.

How is that possible? It’s like this: when you see that the essence of each person is spirit, you will see that it is your spirit that makes use of earthly experience. Your life will change, your friends will disappear, you will outgrow or leave your jobs, and your body will die, yet your spirit will be moved and changed by all that you have undergone. And as your spirit is moved, it transforms itself.

While your spirit is in your body on earth it expresses itself in many ways, some of which are too subtle for the unawakened human to even detect. Dreams, intuition and the voice of conscience are the most accessible of these, and most people could train themselves to learn from them. However, it is also possible to awaken to one’s pure Spirit, and to learn from it directly. This is what is commonly spoken of as the Higher Self. The pure Spirit that inhabits you can – depending on its own state of development – contact even higher sources of wisdom, and if you can contact your own Higher Self, then you have access to that wisdom, too.

What is meant by “higher sources of wisdom”? Here is a story that may help to illustrate the concept.

A child stood alone in a forest at midnight. She had been abandoned and left to die, and she was very hungry and thirsty and tired. There were tear-tracks down her dirty little face.

A tiger roared nearby. The child was nearly paralyzed with fear. Suddenly a man, who seemed to be made entirely of light, shimmered into view in front of the child. He raised his hands and a shower of light rained over her. After a moment, he offered to grant the child one wish.

The child felt confused and uncertain. She thought like this: “Mommy and daddy are dead, so I can’t wish to go to them. I don’t want to be eaten by the tiger, so I can’t stay here. I’m so hungry, but if I just ask for food I’ll still be here in the dark, and the shining man will surely go away. But if I just wish for him to stay, I’ll still be hungry!” She stood for quite a while gazing at the shining man. Finally, she said, “I wish for you to be my father.”

By recognizing the enormous bounty that would naturally flow from parent to child, the child brought herself into a position of true security. In her innocence, she knew instinctively how to assure her own survival and also her own access to love and light, because she knew that this father would never abandon her nor leave her without sustenance. She had accessed her higher wisdom to help her make that choice.

Your higher wisdom is available from the day of your birth, and it has nothing to do with the brain’s intelligence. In the story just told, the shining man allowed the child to make the choice. Higher wisdom does not coerce or command or control or demand. It offers, and it waits. Sometimes one’s circumstances must be really terrible before the opening to higher wisdom and pure spirit can take place. Desperation, fear, grief and panic can prompt a person to pray for help, and the asking is the beginning of the opening.

Of course you doubt that a shining man will appear to you. But the shining One is within you now, and that One is always asking you to choose your wish. If you wish for things that pass away, you will eventually, however long it takes, be left alone and wanting. If you wish, instead, for that One to sustain you, you will be given what you need for eternity, for that is how long your spirit will persist.

Since your spirit is eternal, that means you require a source of love and nourishment and support that is also eternal. And that means nothing less than God will do.

Your spirit being eternal, it follows that those great spiritual beings who lived on earth in the past are still spiritually alive in another realm. In the same way that you can contact your own pure Spirit, some people can contact the Spirits of these great ones who explored the limits of their own relationships with God. Through this contact, the enormous wisdom of those saints and teachers is still available to help people on earth. The words that they spoke still linger in the world, still affect our spirits, still give us strength to follow in their footsteps. Read their teachings, Listen for their words, Listen for your own words. And then your spirit will evolve in its relationship with God, who will protect and care for you.