Born Again

The Quick Study Series : V

In a creative experience in which … even death … is subject to the immutable laws of re-generation of the universe … we find the issue of accountability … an inescapable part of life's experience. Sometimes we are born again to do just that … it is the definition of the Buddhist Karma. But the term ' born again ' … has come to mean many other things ... of which the principal interest is the the very nature of life and death.

 

Does the born again individual relate to his former self? Does he remember any of what he used to be? How does he account for his present condition? If a man went … in search of … the experience of being born again … is he likely to encounter the fact that … the child has now grown into the adult?

 

The ' in search of ' effort is a rigorous and exhaustive exercise … that leaves no stone unturned in its efforts. Ultimately it has a boss greater than its peers to satisfy … it must satisfy its impulses and its own life force … and the agents of the life force … who are the guardians of the creative energies and its impulses.

 

On stage … a magician saws a person in half … and then has them ' turn up ' entirely whole …  without as much as a scar to show for the experience. Off stage … and in real life … where such an event occurs … the person sawn in half would be faced with a thousand questions to explain their re-generation from death … possibly leading to serious psychological conditions … in doing so. The fact that we don't encounter … such issues in our societies … persuades us that … the person wasn't really sawn in half.

 

In rising from a fall … we are faced with something peculiar … the sensation that … we were always that from the beginning … that we merely imagined a fall. But where we institutionalize the practice and ritualize a baptism event … in front of eye witnesses … it adds to the nature of the transformation … and helps us to leave behind … that which we were caught up with … with the apparent agreement of society. We were after all … married in a church … in front of such witnesses. The Indics refer to the experience as ' twice born.'

 

Someone or something obviously manages such transitions that we go through. The literature on such inquiries refers to the issue of ' semantics ' … as if it is simply a matter of words. A further study into the matter would reveal something more than words … it would refer to a ' naming convention ' … a tedious and fastidious manner of referring to meaning in very specific terms … and preserving its rigidity of purpose.

 

A sneaker manufacturer in Great Britain … had proposed naming a new design as ' Isvara.' The word is a revered term in Indic context for the highest experience of spirituality. To suggest stepping out with it on the feet … would have represented a ' naming distortion ' for Indics. They protested and the name was withdrawn. But we do encounter such distortions in other ways.

 

The term ' born again ' carries the precise meaning we bring to it. It is not an actual event … like childbirth … but it represents an experience of someone in the living. It says the man saw himself come back to life … and unlike the man sawn in half … he continues to inquire about it.