Be Born of the Spirit

Q: Which path of The Way is most direct?

A: The Way is spiritual birth. Jesus told Nicodemus, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom [consciousness] of God without being born of water and Spirit." In physical birth, there are two paths: a long and difficult labor or a quick Caesarian section. Similarly, in spiritual birth, there is the long and tedious path of rituals, purifications, and austerities of monastic living. Like the birth canal, it's very narrow. That's why Jesus likened it to the eye of the needle, and a rich man's ego with all its accumulations and attachments was like a heavily burdened camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle. To be spiritually born, one must shed all attachments and identifications. The spiritual Caesarian section is the initiation of death and resurrection. For both paths, a midwife is required. Monks require an abbot to maintain discipline. Initiates require a teacher or guide who has gone through the fiery baptism of the Spirit and is egoless.

The Essenes, Therapeuts, and Gnostics had techniques for direct connection with God. These mysteries were kept secret and only known to the inner circle of initiates to prevent them from being misused. They were persecuted as were all mystery schools, such as the Phythagoreans, Templars, and Druids, and were driven underground. The collective unconscious ego cannot stand the truth that the ego is nothing but a phantasm. Sometimes, all it took was one ego to destroy an entire school like Crotona.

Through fasting, darkness retreats, silence, and other sensory deprivations along with meditation on the One, the Whole, spiritual birth was obtained. The mystery schools had a symbol for this, which I showed you in a dream last night, a line over which was inscribed a circle. The horizontal line represents the human life in the matter plane with a beginning and end, and the circle represents eternal life with no beginning or ending, which overwrote the line. In the Greek alphabet, this symbol is the letter theta. It was also a symbol used by ancient Egyptians with a fiery circle to represent the Kosmos or Universe. Theta is similar to the letter teth in the Phoenician alphabet used to describe the wheel, as in the wheel of birth and death. Theta was used as an abbreviation for Thanatos (death). It also means divine. For the Egyptian, Greek, and later mystery schools it was used as the symbol for spiritual birth. Wholeness supersedes incompleteness. Immortality replaces mortality. Spirit overcomes matter.