John 3:6 Meaning That Which Is Born of the Flesh

Everything the mind brings forth carries the nature of the teacher that fathered it. What is conceived in the belief of separation can only be another form of separation, a body of thoughts as perishable as the flesh they spring from. What is conceived in the awareness of God shares the changeless nature of its Source. The mind is always giving birth, and it gives birth in the image of whichever teacher it has chosen.

This is not a judgment against the body but a clarity about lineage. Fear can generate only more fear, dressed in a thousand forms, while love extends only itself. A mind that wishes to know what it is need only look at what it produces and ask which father it has been serving.

Flesh: the offspring of the ego, every perishable thought and form conceived in the belief of separation Spirit: the offspring of God in the mind, the changeless awareness that shares the nature of its Source

Much of what a person calls themselves was simply handed over: the body, the conditioning, the reactions picked up along the way. That inherited self lives, struggles and fades. It has its own reality, though it is not the depth of a human being.

Birth of Spirit is the finding of the dimension thought never manufactured, the still consciousness at the core. That dimension is what remains when the passing form is no longer mistaken for the presence living in it. One birth gives a personality. The other gives the recognition of the awareness already here.

Two births are named, and a person lives out both. The birth of the flesh is the ordinary entrance through the body, the self produced by the senses and bound to what they report. Whatever comes from that source stays inside it, flesh answering to flesh, a life ruled entirely by appearances.

The birth of the Spirit is the second entrance, the rise of a person out of his own skull rather than out of a womb. It leaves no visible trail, because imagination moves without a track anyone can follow. A state assumed within, felt to be so, becomes a new self, and that self answers to a different order than the facts. One birth ties a person to the world he can see. The other frees him into the world he has imagined. A person is only ever as free as the birth he lives from.

Two births, and the second adds nothing to the first. Body, name, religion, opinions, the entire personality handed over by parents and society: that is the born thing, mechanical, running in old grooves, dying in the shape it was assembled in. Spirit is of another order altogether.

When watching begins and thought is seen from a small distance, something that was never manufactured comes into view. A man does not become spiritual by improving his character. He wakes to what has been watching the character all along, and that waking is the second birth, arriving as a gift rather than a reward.