Find Rebirth in What You Already Are
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
John 3:1-8
Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
Psalm 51:6-12 (Responsive Reading)
Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;
you taught me wisdom in that secret place.
Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins
and blot out all my iniquity.
Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
Read the written message below with music videos
Many of the awakened sages speak of coming into a naturalness of life as they uncover the Divinity at their core. They say that their behaviour starts being dictated by their greater self, the Universe, God, and no longer by the earthly reactions to pressure and conditioning that their old self, their ego, used to exhibit. This coming into the naturalness of life is often expressed as coming into the love that we truly are, coming to know that our very consciousness or awareness makes us all one as the very “light” of God (as Christ called us). Many sages speak of this and some even go as far as to call it “being born again.”
When speaking about those who have been “reborn,” Jesus said, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” For many, these words have been a conundrum, a verse to skip over like so many other of Christ’s sayings. For those of us who make salvation and rebirth about falling into some religious box, truly going where the wind takes us sounds like quite the opposite to our idea of being saved. Even for the rest of us, the idea of “following the wind” sounds full of pitfalls and relationship blunders.
However, according to awakened masters across traditions, it is often quite the opposite. Yes, some relationships may fall to the wayside, specifically those mostly dictated by controlling and dominating impulses, but most often our healthy relationships are allowed to bloom as we uncover the Divine Heart at the root of who and what we are. And yes, some vocations may seem to be disrupted by a new sense of freedom as we come into rebirth, but as we know our world centres too much on “this is why you’re paid” and much too little on the natural workings of community, Spirit, and life.
In fact, you could say that our distorted economic system is one of the biggest driving forces of inequality and the inability of life to flourish today. Capitalism is misnamed due to the extreme lack of value it places on human capital (our workers – each of us) compared to the value it places on cash capital (not to be mistaken for investment capital, because often the greatest investment of capital is made by those who spend their lives at an organization). We care more about the spare millions of a billionaire than we do our entire workforce, placing pay and benefits into the realm of expenses and return on cash investment as the crown jewel of our organizations’ existence. And the fact that our logic dictates that this is of course true and the natural order of things, reveals how far we’ve gotten from true communal and collective humanist values. We know for a fact that human beings are more productive today than ever in history but pay and the standard of living have floundered while billionaires horde their gold.
Besides our “working” relationships, coming into rebirth can shed light on and transform many of our other connections as well. Generally, we tend to operate with others from a sense of expectation, both toward ourselves and toward those we connect with. When these expectations are not met, we can be quite hard on the perpetrator, keeping a tally of all the ways they’ve disappointed us.
But revealing our true nature starts to dispel these expectations because we no longer dwell so much on the past or with a sense of expectation of the moment we’re in. Our sense of neediness with certain people is also dispelled, as the traumas of adults not caring for us as well as they could have when we were little releases its hold on our gaze and thinking. It also dispels some of the undetected and unseen hardness that we have towards people that fall into our personal negative biases, such as those of other races, those that are younger or older than us, or those that have certain gender expressions or sexual preferences. These biases are often present and also often discounted in ourselves. We can even turn hard on someone for not being exactly like someone else from our past.
All of these behaviours stem from a felt sense of being separate consciousnesses, separate beings from others. And these modes of wanting to condemn and control are the type of mental conditionings that we are called to release as we come into rebirth. As Jesus told us, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” These mental constructs keep us out of a felt sense of the heavenliness of life even today and should be washed away with the ever-flowing moment of “now,” the openness of the present moment that we all share. To “overcome” these things and to find rebirth, Christ told us simply: worry not about the morrow, love others AS yourself, release your attachments and habits of the past, and find freshness in the present, living God.
This takes an active remembrance of these types of teachings, it takes remembering “Christ” always: the living truths that call us into freshness of being. Christ truly embodied these teachings, even going so far as to say that we will sometimes leave our families to follow him and that his mother and brothers are all those that keep his teachings. He told us matter-of-factly that his teachings weren’t his “personal” teachings, but those of the Divine Parent, our Heavenly Father, known by many nouns even in the Bible alone. He said that everything he did was of the Father, and that we are called to come to know our oneness with him and with God as well. Not in death, not later, but for our own sake as soon as we can.
These teachings are surprisingly found throughout many traditions from awakened teachers. We hear the same from Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, from Padmasambhava’s Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, from modern sages like Mooji and Rupert Spira, and from Indigenous teachings across the world, among others. It is in our exclusionary type of thinking that we strive to place our own religion as the cream of the crop, and perhaps it is for us, but it won’t necessarily ever speak to others even if it is the clearest and truest teaching in the universe.
God speaks through many and she speaks through each of us, particularly as we become attuned to the naturalness of Spirit within. Many of these sages point us back to our experience, asking what is it that we truly know for certain? The one thing that practically no one would honestly debate is that we are aware. The moment we say what we are aware of something specific, however, the debate starts: is it an illusion? Is it this or that? The other thing that no one would debate, is that what we perceive within awareness is constantly changing. One day our heartfelt beliefs are questioned, the next they are lauded. Funny enough, it is the truth of awareness itself that these sages point us back to, calling us to come to know the only consistently true thing in our experience – the act of experiencing itself. This light of consciousness is then often called the light of God, our true being, just as Jesus calls us “the light of this world” and tells us to turn within {“repent”) to become “children of God.”
This means that to be reborn we must start to loosen our desirous hold on all our swirling thoughts about the past and future, about judgment and revenge, and about who we are and what we are about. We are to actively notice this conditioned thinking and feeling, and let go to become more like the wind, not knowing where we’ve come from or where we are going, just as Christ said in our reading today. You can also say that this helps us become more childlike, as Christ also expounded. And further, we’re to come to truly see for ourselves that, at least in our experience, we are more the openness of awareness that perceives our thoughts and bodies than we are these things that we only know in awareness. This is true for other beings as well, which is why we are to love others AS ourselves because they fundamentally are.
Peace is you,
Cory