In the Buddhist tradition, they speak about something called our true nature, our unconditioned being. Other traditions call this ’soul’, ‘essence,’ ‘pure consciousness,’ or ’spirit.’ If we take away all the names, and relate to this as a direct and simple experience, actually accessible for us all, what is it? How does our true nature express itself? How does it move in the world?

For me, one of the simplest ways to approach this is  through the term ‘basic goodness.’ There is, in the deepest part of every human being, a goodness that is absolutely natural and uncontrived. This understanding is about as far away from the notion of ‘original sin’ as we could ever get. In our western world, the notion of original sin has gone so deep that it permeates many of the basic structures of our thought, belief, and perception. We see things that are wrong, broken or evil in ourselves and in the world, without any awareness of a deeper ground, a more fundamental nature that is always available.

To awaken to basic goodness engages us in a radically different kind of life. Poets like Mary Oliver glimpse this new way of living:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting,

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

How do we begin to see, to recognize, this basic goodness?

I had a small and quite ordinary moment this summer, when it revealed itself. We had been at a festival on the other side of our lake. A few hundred of us spent a beautiful day together: playing, strolling, talking, eating, and dancing. For one of the last dances of the night, an African band fired us up-got us stomping, shaking, leaping and singing; until we forgot that we were separate people with separate little lives.

When the dance was over, we piled onto the ferry, which was packed with people from the festival. I left my car and went up onto the deck to watch the sun slip down behind the blue mountains. There was a deep and palpable sense of fulfillment and quiet joy that drenched every inch of the boat. The movement and speech of everyone I saw flowed from an open heart and a mind at rest, a sense of ‘no strangers on board.’

At one point I turned to watch a seagull wheeling into the last light of the sun, and knocked my water bottle off the bench. It rolled over to a corner of the deck and under a ledge. Before I could move to get down and retrieve it, a small boy dove for it, flat down on his belly, scrambling to reach under the ledge. He grabbed the bottle, leapt up, and handed it to me with great jubilation.

The energy and delight that he transmitted as he passed me that bottle was as if he had been waiting the whole day for that moment. I thanked him and he left immediately. He was clearly not waiting for anything from me.

I stood there, letting the grace of the moment expand inside me, contemplating this small gesture of his that was unpremeditated– unmotivated by any sense of gain. His mother had not said to him, “Johnny, please get down and pick up that lady’s bottle.” He had not responded from any kind of idea, any ’should’, any demand. I realized that I had witnessed, in that brief moment of generosity, a perfect expression of basic goodness.

As the first stars appeared over the water, I found myself lost in wonder, knowing that this nature is something we are born with, something natural and uncreated. Then we forget.  Our conditioning takes over, we disown our basic goodness, and embark on the unending project of trying to fix what can never be fixed, trying to find what has never been lost.

How would we live if we knew, on a cellular level, that every being on earth has an indestructible drop of basic goodness living inside them, waiting for the moment when it can display itself, without motive, without agenda, and without fear?

with love