What Does It Mean to be Reborn in Real Life?
Stories of Easter are nice and all, but where does spiritual renewal and maturation meet practical living?
Hot off the heels of an Easter holiday which celebrates resurrection on a religious level, how might we understand rebirth on a practical level? I am not talking about attaining the dramatic lives and works of saints, nor of the great sacrifices of martyrs like Joan of Arc. I am talking everyday you and me. How might we shake off the husk of our former selves as we grow into a higher and deeper, more spiritually in-tune version of ourselves? And, what is it that holds us back?
I think this whole spiritual thing has been made rather intimidating: Go off into the mountains and find yourself? Become Mother Teresa? Discipline yourself to be on the straight and narrow? Accept Jesus, or Buddha, or Brahma and live according to a mythos emanating from their presence?
All of these presumptions share one weakness: They further alienate you from yourself and get you to concentrate vicariously on the spiritual lives of others. It is as if spirituality could be gained by simply soaking up the sun of spiritual adepts. Yet each one of these saints, sages, and spiritual avatars, came to their OWN relationship with a deeper and higher spirit, and it does not appear that their experience is, in fact, transmissible. They may, as Jesus did, “die for our sins,” or as Buddha, “create enlightened paths,” but their examples do not of themselves simply infect us and cause us to be redeemed, elevated, or illuminated.
We must come to our own relationship with our souls and our spirits, under the wisdom and guidance of that spirit directly. This can be perhaps helped BUT NEVER DISPLACED by counselors, parables, texts, videos, meditations, prayers, fasting, and whatever other practice is meant to clear a path toward the Holy, the Spiritual, the Source of our own being.
Joy vs. Sin
In fact, most spiritual practices are meant to start us out by purifying us, preventing us from being glutted by illusions, distractions, and seductions of an exaggerated sensual life. Again we are talking about surrendering the UNBALANCED sensual life. Its balanced and appreciated state is vital to spiritual development and enjoyment! Who would dare declare that deeply inhaling the scent of a rose is anything other than a prayer.
What is sin?: Anything that takes us away from pure presence, from deep regard for our spiritual nature, and from our habitation in God and God’s spiritual habitation in us. We unwisely concretize and reify sin, giving it an enormous and unnecessary power. We ought not focus on sin itself, for sin is merely the PRIVATION or absence of spiritual presence and purpose. We ought focus on what CAUSES us to sin. Why do we shrink from this “day that the Lord hath made” rather than “rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118).
Much is explained by trauma and pain. Our rather primitive nervous systems are apt to being overwhelmed easily by the demands of the world, and we accentuate this with our own self-created suffering— anxiety, worry, etc. This pain inclines us toward the bad anti-spiritual habits of fear, fantasy, and entitlement, driving us to seek ways to replace or ignore the life right in front of us.
This strategy of life substitution and avoidance can only cause greater alienation from the spirit in the medium to long term. Certain esoteric teachers call this diversion-directed, pain-avoiding orientation as “the path of the moon.” This is compounded by addictive material striving and acquisition. We compile a “bucket list” of commodified experiences but to what end? Even the mainstay joys of family, romance, and wealth, are strung together like a beaded necklace, falling apart as aging and death fray and break the cord that bind these experiences.
Adding to this delusional arc, we have a whole profit-driven global industry which maximizes the exploitation of our time, money, and attention by promoting the worst sins in us— anger, lust, envy, materialism... But what are they appealing to? It is as if they think we are single-celled amoebas drawn to food and flippering feebly away from danger. What if life were an unalloyed, transcendent, and deeply immanent joy, that is actively IMPEDED by our preoccupation with finding possessible, manageable pleasures?
What fools we mortals be. Here we are given the joyous “path of the sun,” everything from a rose, to a delightfully misty day, to a fond lick by a dog in the park, and all we can think of is how to sprint to the next obligation, vacation, or peak experience.
Joy is, if anything, only found in the aware and appreciated present. If that present, and our attendance to it, turns up long held-back painful memories, then we ought to stay with them. Old wounds are old friends. They have been with us through thick and thin, and we would do well to repay their friendship by holding them and loving them, rather than running away from them into the arms of the next shiny object.
Rebirth: Salvation is the beginning, not the end
We tend to be like innocent and naive children when it comes to spiritual birth and rebirth. Our own salvation is not the end, but the beginning of a spiritual journey. We are “saved” as we give ourselves over to spirit in faith AND action, perhaps when we stand up for ourselves enough to retrieve ourselves from a destructive romantic relationship, a dehumanizing job, a toxic family member. We can be justly gladdened and deepened by our courage on behalf of our authentic human selves, but we are now embarking on an aware, mature journey, and putting away “childish things” even as we embrace our ever-creative child-like spirit.
In most religions, Western Christian religion in particular, followers are kept in an infantile space where “God will take care of you”… just “accept your salvation” and all will be provided. How convenient. The “adults” (the priests) will be your parents, and you merely need to follow what they tell you, and lead a socially respected, reasonably devout life to get into heaven.
This earth-parent path is not at all the “path of the sun”. The mystic path fully recognizes the necessity of virtue and freedom, as well as the need to free oneself from the power of sin or vice. If you lead a degenerate life, no amount of spiritual generation is going to rescue you from yourself. "If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:23) One must be open to change from a higher source. Spiritual change cannot MERELY come from oneself. It is a co-creative act between you and Spirit starting with your decision to “give up the world” (and its values and mandates) for the guidance of spirit.
Sin may be what you are being saved from, but what are you being saved for? Your own idyllic dwelling in Paradise? How selfish is this motive, and inconsistent with a liberated spirit! You are being saved to LOVE GOD and NEIGHBOR. It is the start of a new orientation, away from “stranger danger” to “love your enemy,” because, once awakened you understand that we are all equal children of God.
As Christian pastor (and closet mystic!), Oswald Chambers says, we are saved or sanctified from sin in order to be CONSECRATED in love. We are FREED to love. No longer is love a duty but a vital expression of our rebirth into spirit. We do not care for others as a matter of duty in order to have a get-out-of-hell free card and guaranteed tickets to heaven, but because it is deeply joyous and fulfilling to do so.
We imagine that when we are sanctified we are delivered from temptation; we are not, we are loosened into it; we are not free enough to be tempted. Immediately we are sanctified, we are free, and all these subtleties begin to work. God does not shield us from any requirements of a full-grown man and woman, because his aim is to bring many ‘sons of glory’; not emotional, hysterical people [or infantile ones], who can withstand and overcome and manifest not only innocence, but holiness.— Oswald Chambers, p. 228, The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers
The saintly life
In short, we are freed to the saintly life purely vested in Love and the the universal responsibility that comes from love. We are REBORN not as newborn babes (though there are some aspects that reflect a newborn), but as mature ADULTS. We can no longer pretend to hide our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to the pain we cause ourselves and others. No more can we huddle behind a game of moral peek-a-boo as a child is apt to. We adults are fully responsible for the rapacious effects of profit-driven greed. We adults are responsible for the mass murdering of children in Gaza. God didn’t drop those bombs. We, morally-abominable adults, did.
So many people seek to retreat into the alleged innocence of childhood. I say “alleged” because a four-year-old Palestinian child has seen more and grown up more than the average American retiree. Spirituality does not have a chronological bias. It comes from trial, decision, and faith. When most in Western culture make up stories about how hard it would be to lead a virtuous, saintly life, what most of them are doing is making excuses for their comfort, supported by empire, and gained at the EXPENSE of others, rather than in sacrificial service to them.
That is FAR from mature OR moral OR spiritual.
Consecration
Consecration means I dedicate this life to Spirit and to the enhancement and protection of ALL the children of Spirit, including ALL of creation— rocks, plants, animal, and planet Earth included. I move from “flaw” (confessing my sins and “trying to be a good/not-bad person”) to “FLOW.” I have done my backwork— purgation, purification of sinful activities, mortification, the death of my own godhood, the chastening of my overweening ego, and the surrender of “my right to myself”, illumination/enlightenment, awareness of my Real and Spiritual nature, sanctification, initiation into spiritual adulthood, consecration, courageous and steadfast commitment to the spiritually adult life as a disciple of love and “the divine in me and me in the divine,” and divinization or deification, union with Love and merging with a God that is Goodness itself, transcending even notions of virtue.
This lends a whole new meaning to the phrase “be good,” doesn’t it?
Rebirthing and growing by cultivating a practice of spontaneous joy
Again, I reiterate, this process is not the laborious devotion of a monk, nor a Herculean task where one uses greater and greater will to reach loftier and loftier spiritual heights. Quite the opposite. One lets fall away the neuroses, habits, and harm of a tightly-constructed and controlled “adult” world. This world is not only more infantile than that of children inhabit, but far more blatantly destructive and evil. Perhaps this is why Jesus said that one must actually “become like children” to reach the Kingdom of Heaven. Are we to educate our children to become far lower in order to survive? Survive for what?— so we can created ever greater wars, environmental destruction, and concentration of power and wealth? No. We should be teaching our children, and ourselves, the opposite. We should be REBORN into:
Positive rebellion against the brutal “powers and principalities” by exposing nefarious practices and actors, and organizing non-violent civil disobedience to companies and individuals who profit from vice in all its forms.
Being wholesome. Withdraw significantly from all unhealthy activity, including drinking alcohol, caffeine, processed foods, refined sugars, mundane vices, etc. and “indulge” (i.e. treat yourself) to life- and love-enhancing activities like prayer, exercise, meditation, walks in nature, and so forth.
Seriously simplifying life and dramatically reducing material consumption. Make practices like sacred reading, sun salutations, making your bed in the morning, writing in a journal prayer as PRIORITIES which open and close your days. Reducing consumption and helter-skelter commitments has the added benefit of freeing up time for reflection, silence, and the wonderful renewal given by doing nothing.
Develop a hidden creative passion that you have been putting off. I am going to take guitar lessons, because music is calling me spiritually. This will replace much of my idle, semi-productive work on puzzle solving. Why not let the spirit come through me and into music, rather than figuring out the pre-fab answers to mind benders created by other people!
Spend more spontaneous time around and tutelage under children and dogs. They are great instructors in letting go of petty worries and anxieties and bring forward the necessity and superior power of joy, spontaneity, and affection.
All blessings,
Zeus