 20. Baptism (of Spirit) |
Jesus goes on to say :
Do not be surprised because I have told you all must be born again. The wind blows where it pleases and you hear its sound but you do not know from where it comes and where it goes. Such is every man who is born of the Spirit." Nicodemus answered saying to him: "How can these things be?" Jesus answered, "You are a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly I say to you, we speak only what we know and we testify only to what we have seen and yet you do not accept our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how then will you believe me if I tell you about heavenly things?"
Here is a fragment of primitive esoteric teaching, an example of Jesus secretly teaching somebody from the official temple who asked for the "real stuff." Nicodemus approached Jesus as if to say, "You are not in public now. You can let me know what is really happening." And Jesus gave him a bit of esoteric wisdom.
In this passage Jesus says that the secret of realizing his teaching is to be born again. Today there is a great deal of emphasis on being "born again" in the Christian tradition, but the born-again dogma of popular cultism is not the same as Jesus' secret Teaching. To be "born again" today is, for some, a genuine religious awakening. But for most people it is to accept the exoteric message about Jesus, to believe in Jesus as God who has incarnated in order to perform a bodily sacrifice that has paid for our sins, and to look forward to being saved when Jesus appears again. One is thus born again in the sense that one is no longer troubled by life as it is. One's hope has been reborn. The born-again movement is basically about awakening to the conventional consolation of exoteric religion.
Jesus, however, taught a spiritual process. The word "Spirit" is used several times in the sequence of remarks documented in this passage. "If a man is not born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is Spirit." In the passage from Genesis that we considered earlier, Man is shown being born of the Spirit. He is brought to life, given existence, through the Spirit, which is breathed into him. Likewise, in the beginning of the Gospel of John, Jesus talks about God as Spirit and says that God must be worshipped in Spirit and in truth. The esotericism and the religious opportunity communicated by Jesus is a religion of the Spirit, a religion of conversion from the conventional, materially human point of view of existence to a point of view of existence in which everything is seen to arise as a result of the Divine Spirit, to be infused by the Divine Spirit, to be identical with that Spirit.
What is born of the Spirit is Spirit. The process of esotericism communicated by Jesus is about conversion to an entirely spiritualized point of view:
"If a man is not born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." What does the water refer to? In the first chapter of John, John the Baptizer says: "I baptize with water, but among you stands One whom you do not know. He is the One who comes after me and is ahead of me, the One even the strings of whose shoes I am not good enough to untie." And later John says: "I come to baptize with water, but the One who comes after me baptizes with fire." John the Baptizer is associated with baptism by water, yet Jesus says you must be born of water and the Spirit.
The religious process of the primitive community of Christianity was a process of two stages of baptism. One was baptism with water. Those who came to Jesus' disciples and to Jesus personally were confronted by a kind of Spirit-religion preaching, and, if they responded, they were baptized by water. Baptism—by water is part of the ancient tradition of sacramental worship. Water cleanses. To be baptized by water is to be converted on the basis of "hearing" the spiritual message. The other baptism was baptism with fire. In the ancient traditions of sacred ritual, fire is the element identified with the Spirit. Jesus is saying that we must be baptized with water and we must be baptized with the Spirit. The process whereby we are born again is realized through the process of baptism in the religious or esoteric cult of Jesus.
Thus, the process that Jesus recommended is to "hear" the teaching that God is Spirit, that we come from God, that if we fully realize that we are born from the Spirit, then we are Spirit, and that our life must therefore be based on the presumption that we are Spirit, that God is Spirit, that we commune with God spiritually, and that existence is a spiritual process that continues through time after baptism. If you responded to this teaching, the first thing you would do, having been converted, having heard this teaching, is to repent of your entire point of view and all the actions you have performed based on the presumption of the flesh, the presumption that you are just a mortal being. You must repent of everything you did and thought and now think that relates to a non-Spirit view of existence. You must be converted from your limited, mortal point of view.
