Esoteric Christianity 6 To Be Born Again, True Meaning

The topic of being born again is one of the more popular prevalent phrases in modern Christianity. When we talk about being born again, traditionally there are two categories of interpretation.

The first type of interpretation is a conversion experience, a transformation or enthusiasm when someone turns towards a spiritual, in this case, Christian doctrine, turning their life toward that doctrine, in which prior to that they were not living in some spiritual way. Something came about which caused them to change and have a firm conviction about a particular sect of Christianity. Now they believe, they profess their belief, because that is how they interpret the scripture: if you believe and speak as if you believe in it you are born again, born again as a new person in the spirit because you are trying to live a spiritual lifestyle.

The second common interpretation (some sects of Christianity combine the two), the second aspect is to participate in some kind of ritual, namely baptism, that if you are baptized with all of the elements of the ritual being present, by the authority of that church, you are baptized, you are member of that church, you are born again in that church and by consequence that now means that you are “born again.”

We are not here to deride any of those things, because rituals can be powerful, they are meaningful, and very good. Having a spiritual enthusiasm is also very good, we can even say necessary. But to simply believe yourself now to be a spiritual person and to even honestly want to live a spiritual lifestyle and you happen to go back to your Christian roots in order to do that, that is also fine, but from an esoteric standpoint this all misses the point.

What we will talk about today is exactly how to understand “being born again” from an esoteric component. In the previous lecture we spoke about the cleansing of the temple, just for some context, we have been going through the book of John interpreting various chapters and verses from the book of John, from an esoteric or Gnostic standpoint.

Last time we had a whole lecture about the cleansing of the temple and the symbolism behind that. The basic gist of that is, whenever Jesus or another person in the Bible is doing something, it is not meant to be read as a simple historical artifact, it is not meant to be read like a newspaper.

People believe today that they will be born again if they accept the stories of the Bible. They say “I believe that Jesus cleansed all he merchants out of the temple. Because I believe that happened I am inspired to lead a spiritual lifestyle.” The stories of the Bible can be understood in different levels. It is in the most introductory level to look at the stories of the Bible as a type of generic teaching of the past. The real esoteric, inner aspect of that teaching is: within us there is a temple and our own temple is our own soul, our inner psychological activity, but we have a mess inside, we have merchants inside of our own temple and we have to cleanse that.

We talked about the meaning of the cleansing of the temple, that there is a actually a work of psychological meditation and learning how to extract consciousness from our egotistical desires.

Now, talking about being born again is the other half. Cleansing the temple is about death, while our topic today is about birth.

Because within ourselves we have a lot of problems, confusion, darkness, this is why the world is full of all of those things. Contradiction, confusion, darkness, hatred, anger… we do not find tremendous amount of peace, but it is very easy to find the opposite of that. That is all a manifestation, a symptom of what is going on inside of us, in our mind and in our heart. If we see a lot of craziness out in the world it is because there is a lot of that within each of us.

What is important is to look inside of ourselves and see our contradictions. That is one part of it - that is a life of work, it is not a one, two-week process but continually looking, meditating, looking within yourself, introspecting analyzing exactly what is going on inside. You can say that there is a science to that.

Not only do we need to extract or remove these egotistical elements from our soul but on the other half we have to actually develop something new at the same time. This is the idea of being born again: that what we are presently is not a complete human being, what we are presently is just the embryo of what a real human could be. A real Christian is someone who has completely developed their soul. In truth there are very, very few Christians, and we aspire to that.