An ancient metaphysical question, a personal search and the beginning of a living body of work
Original Essence is a longstanding metaphysical expression for the originating reality of a being. This essay traces several of its historical meanings and the personal search that led me to ask how Original Essence flows through a human life.
If this is your first time reading my work, I am Marlyne. My friends call me Lili.
I write to express what moves through my soul and to search for answers to the deepest questions alive on my path. I have made it part of my mission to share what I discover as a way of contributing to, and perhaps helping, others on the same quest to understand who we truly are and how we can become the truest expression of what we came here to be.
This work began as a quest for freedom: a deep desire to choose my own path and break free from the laws, contracts and ways of being and doing that I had inherited from my place of origin.
Not because I did not love my ancestors, my family, my lineage or the place where I was born. I did. But something within me was leading me toward a different path.
If you have ever been on a quest like this, you know the fear of the unknown: the fear of leaving behind what you have always known and who you were supposed to be to create a new way of living.
The great question for me was:
Who am I? Seriously, who am I?
I loved the people surrounding me, but I could not find my place.
Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do? What if they stopped loving me? What if I ended up alone because I was different?
Loving my friends, my family and the life I had was not the problem. The problem was the persistent internal whisper I could not silence:
Who am I?
Who am I beyond the rites my family said we should respect?
Who am I beyond the church I attended with my parents every Sunday?
Who am I beyond the laughter, the broken heart and the many circumstances of life?
I needed to know.
Finding myself began to matter more than the possibility of ending up alone. Deep down, I already felt alone within myself because the people around me could not always see or understand the multitude and intensity of the questions I carried.
And so I began my quest to find my true origin: the essence of me.
Original Essence did not begin with me
Through my research, I discovered many others who had contemplated related questions. Finding them made me feel less alone.
So, if you are on such a quest too, welcome.
Original Essence did not begin with contemporary spirituality, the wellness industry or any modern teacher who has built work around the phrase. It appears to belong to an enduring human quest, one that has emerged across different traditions and different periods of history.
But where does the expression itself come from?
From what I have found, the expression belongs to a much older metaphysical inquiry:
What is original in a being? What is the originating reality beneath everything acquired, inherited or constructed, and how does that reality become present through life?
The historical record does not give us one universal definition. Different philosophical and mystical traditions approached Original Essence through their own understandings of divinity, nature, creation and human existence.
What they show us, however, is unmistakable: people were contemplating and defining Original Essence centuries before the expression entered contemporary spiritual language.
An older metaphysical lineage
In a modern English translation of the ninth-century writings of the Japanese Buddhist philosopher Kūkai, the “three secrets” through which all beings and the Buddha are equal are described as:
“The three secrets in which all things and the Buddha are equal. This is the original essence of all beings.”¹
Within Kūkai’s esoteric Buddhist philosophy, this points toward an original condition of non-separation. The essence of a being is not isolated from ultimate reality. Body, speech and mind participate in the same reality embodied by the Buddha.
Centuries later, the German mystic and philosopher Jakob Böhme placed Original Essence within a Christian metaphysical understanding of divine origin. In Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, written in 1618-1619 and translated into English in 1648, he wrote:
“For behold, the Father is the original essence of all essences.”²
Here, Original Essence refers to the eternal divine source, that from which every other essence and manifestation proceeds.
In 1683, the English mystic John Pordage offered an even more explicit definition in Theologia Mystica:
“Eternal Nature is an original essence, that is, it is the first created essence out of whose fruitful womb all created essences do proceed.”³
For Pordage, Original Essence was a generative ground: the first created reality from which other created essences emerged.
These definitions are not identical.
Kūkai points toward the original non-separation of beings and ultimate reality. Böhme speaks of the divine source of all essences. Pordage describes the first generative ground from which created life proceeds.
Yet each use carries the idea of metaphysical firstness: that which is primordial, originating, irreducible or generative.
Original Essence, then, is not a phrase invented by contemporary wellness culture. It is part of a much older human attempt to understand the relationship between source, being and manifestation.
My search did not begin with the phrase
Long before I encountered this historical language, I was already living the question.
I was born into a deeply spiritual ancestry in which metaphysical practices, mystical experiences and invisible realities were not abstract ideas. They belonged to the world from which I came.
I also knew that I did not want to follow every path that had been placed before me.
That decision created a profound question within my life:
How could I remain connected to what was sacred in my lineage without being bound to everything I had inherited from it?
I was not trying to abandon my ancestors. I was trying to discover where inheritance ended and where my own life began.
I wanted to understand what belonged to my soul and what belonged to generational repetition.
What was intuition, and what was fear?
What was truly mine, and what had been carried through me without ever being consciously chosen?
I pursued education, journalism, business, leadership and life in different countries. I learned how to begin again and how to build a life from very little.
But changing circumstances did not necessarily change the deeper pattern.
At one point, I had to face the unsettling realization that I could cross an ocean, enter a new environment and still reconstruct the same fundamental life.
The location had changed. The deeper architecture had not.
That recognition changed the nature of my search.
I was no longer asking only, What should I do with my life?
I was asking:
Who am I beneath the lives I have learned to build?
What remains true beneath ancestry, conditioning, accomplishment and adaptation?
What is trying to live through me that cannot be reduced to a role, identity or inherited map?
That is where my search for Original Essence truly began.
Perhaps you arrived here through a different question.
I am curious: What is your quest?
Whatever it may be, I am certain that it will guide you through unexpected paths and reveal something you could not have discovered by remaining where you were.
My own quest guided me toward deep service and writing. The fuller story of that journey can be found in my book.
What I mean by Original Essence
Within my work, I define Original Essence as:
The irreducible living truth of a being: the unique way Divine Essence becomes present through a particular human life and seeks expression in form.
— Marlyne Lili Lack
Original Essence is not merely a personality.
It is not a label, archetype, diagnosis or externally assigned identity. It is not another map someone else can interpret and hand back to us as the final truth of who we are.
Nor do I understand it only as who we were before conditioning.
Conditioning can conceal, fragment or interrupt our relationship with what is true. But Original Essence is not confined to a forgotten version of ourselves waiting somewhere in the past.
It is alive.
It continues to move, communicate and seek expression through the life we are living now.
This is why my inquiry is not only concerned with remembering Original Essence. I am interested in what happens next: how we recognize it, develop a relationship with it and allow what is most deeply true to participate in the way we live.
The complete answer cannot be borrowed.
It must be encountered, questioned, embodied and lived.
A living inquiry
My quest has deepened, and my work has evolved.
I did not stop at asking what Original Essence is. The inquiry led me toward a deeper question:
How does Original Essence flow?
That question became Original Essence Flow™.
As I continue to live, contribute and deepen this work, I do not claim to have finished studying Original Essence, nor do I present Original Essence Flow™ as a closed or completed doctrine.
It is a living body of work, one that continues to unfold through research, writing, observation, spiritual practice and lived experience. It is also shaped by the people whose paths cross mine and by the questions that arise when inherited explanations are no longer enough.
My work today is part of that continuing inquiry.
The fuller story of how this search began, and the experiences that brought me back to the truth of my own life, belongs to my book, Live the Dream in the Body.
The inquiry as it is presently unfolding can be found through my writing, my company and The Apprenticeship.
This is not the conclusion of the inquiry.
It is an Origin Point.
References
1. Kūkai, Shōji jissō gi (The Meanings of Sound, Sign and Reality), c. 821-824, quoted in Taikō Yamasaki, Shingon: Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, trans. Richard and Cynthia Peterson (Boston: Shambhala, 1988), 115. The words “Original Essence” belong to this modern English translation. Read the translated text.
2. Jakob Böhme, Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, written 1618-1619, trans. John Sparrow (London, 1648), chapter 4, §56, 55. Read the historical English translation.
3. John Pordage, Theologia Mystica, or the Mystic Divinitie of the Eternal Invisibles (London, 1683), “What Kind of Principle Eternal Nature Is,” Answer 3 [ET 64]. Read the historical text.
