A CALL TO REBIRTH

[Ms Tercy Lonan]

27. A CALL TO REBIRTH
A human life, a human birth, is a call to rebirth. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see
the Kingdom of God.” So said the great teacher of the Middle East, Jesus Christ, to Nicodemus, the
respected ruler and spiritual aspirant, when he came to question Jesus secretly one night. “How can
a man be born when he is old?” the confused Nicodemus asked. “Can he enter a second time into his
mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and
the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”
Water is a universal cleansing and purifying agent. So it means getting rid of mala
(impurity) and having chitta suddhi (purity of mind). You have to emerge as a purified being. That
is also the symbol behind baptism—a cleansing of and getting rid of all sin and emerging sinless,
spotless, pure.
Fire is also a universal purifying agent. When Sita returned from Lanka she proved her
purity by stepping into a roaring fire and emerging unscathed. Not a hair of her head or even her
garments were singed by the blaze as her spotless purity was proven.
Our fire ceremony also symbolises a thorough burning away of all dross, of all that is
impure, of all that is contrary to Divinity, and an emergence as pure Spirit. This is why it is a symbol
of the same rebirth Jesus referred to two thousand years ago.
It is a rebirth from passion to purity; and then from gross earth consciousness, physical
consciousness, material consciousness, into a state of spiritual consciousness—a rebirth through
the water and the Spirit to emerge as a new being, aware of oneself as connected with the supreme
Universal Soul, as a spiritual being beyond time and space, without birth and death, name and form,
blemish or impurity, ever pure, ever free, ever full, ever divine—to enter that knowledge, that
consciousness, that awareness.
And, thus, it is a rebirth of your very identity, a renewal of your identity, a casting away, a
dying to the old self and being born into a new identity where you know of yourself only as related
to the Eternal Being, not to this non-eternal world—to the spiritual Reality, not to this gross
material phenomenon, this passing phenomenon.
For a spiritual aspirant, there should be a daily rebirth, a daily reemerging into a new
awareness, a new higher state of purity—a leaving behind of all that is dross, gross, unspiritual,
undivine, not a part of authentic, genuine, one hundred per cent spiritual life, and emerging into a
new state of shining purity, shining spirituality, total divinity.
Again and again there should be a rebirth until you become like the Being you wish to attain.
You become like Brahman, like the pure divine Cosmic Being, as you were when you abided in
Him eternally—being in that status of oneness of God, merging yourself into that Self, partaking of
His total purity, partaking of His glorious divine nature.
Thus, each daybreak should constitute a call to rebirth for a discriminating and discerning
soul. But what about nightfall? If pondered in depth, it is an even greater call to a rebirth because
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TRUTH, NON-INJURY, PURITY
even as dawn and daybreak may be an emergence from darkness into light, from inactivity into
creative, progressive, fruitful activity, even so, when night falls, it is a turning away from the many,
the mere appearance, the carnival, and it is a reentry into the One, which is the substratum, which is
deep within. When night falls, the world disappears. You turn away from your involvement and
entanglement in this false appearance and you go into the silence of the One without a second.
It is, indeed, a refreshing rebirth into the Spirit, plunging once again into satchidananda. It
is a turning away from the many towards the One. It is a turning away from the harsh, garish tumult
and the demands of the senses and the mind into a silence where there is no longer the din of the
demanding senses upon your psyche, much less upon yourself. You return back into your original
state to emerge refreshed.
If physical death is a dying, entering into deep sleep is a temporary dying, for it is everything
that death is except that biologically there may be respiration, circulation etc. Medically you may
not be called dead, but psychically you have, at that time, entered into a temporary death. The only
difference is that at the ultimate death when you wake up you wake up into another dimension,
another plane of consciousness and being, whereas here in this recurring daily death in deep sleep
we emerge back into the original setup.
In addition, when you wake up from this temporary death called deep sleep, you wake up
into a new reality. If you stand by the bank of the Ganges, each moment you are seeing a new river.
You may think you are seeing the same river, but the water you saw a minute ago is now
downstream. You are now seeing a totally different river. Even so, every morning you are seeing a
different universe, you are in a changed world.
When you wake up in the morning, you wake up in Uttarakhand, in holy Sivananda Ashram,
in the pervading presence of Gurudev. You wake up into something very special. This emergence
should constitute for you a rebirth into sadhana. If there has been slackness in your sadhana, in this
new birth there should be no more slackness. If there is any pretence in your sadhana, there should
be no more pretence. If there has been indifference, a sort of half-heartedness in your sadhana, there
should be no more half-heartedness; you should be in dead earnest, truly serious.
Waking up should constitute a rebirth into divine life, which means a rebirth into total
truthfulness. This is the unvarying, invariable condition for the realisation of Reality—to be true to
oneself, true with the world, to be honest with oneself and honest with the world. It is a call to divine
life in all its unalloyed purity. It is a call to each one of you to truthfulness, to absolute purity in
conduct and character, to a continuous, almost godly compassion, and a reluctance to hurt or harm
anything created by God.
Therefore, may we be reborn not once, not twice, but again and again until there is no longer
any necessity or need for any such rebirth or reemergence. Then we are in a state of total Divinity.
That is what Gurudev wants each and every one of his followers and devotees to be—total
Divinities.

Keep this in your heart and may you become so. You are so! May you know that. You are so,
and may you become so, and be so. May you shine with Divinity. May you shine as beings newly
endowed with a blazing spiritual consciousness, a radiant spiritual consciousness. God bless you!