Can We Be Born-Again?
~ Ron’s Memoirs and Quotations

“As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is 
our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.”
~ 

Leo Tolstoy

“God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again,
till they return to Him.”
~ Koran

“I tell you the truth,
no one can see the kingdom of God
unless he is born again.”
~ John – 3:3

“Lord Krishna said: …. The learned neither laments for the dead or the living. Certainly never at any time did I not exist, nor you, nor all these kings and certainly never shall we cease to exist in the future. Just as in the physical body of the embodied being is the process of childhood, youth and old age; similarly by the transmigration from one body to another the wise are never deluded.”
~ Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Krishna to Arjuna

“But know that by whom this entire body is pervaded, is indestructible. No one is able to cause the destruction of the imperishable soul. The embodied soul is eternal in existence, indestructible and infinite, only the material body is factually perishable….”
~ Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Krishna to Arjuna

“The soul never takes birth and never dies at any time, nor does it come into being again when the body is created. The soul is birthless, eternal, imperishable and timeless and is never destroyed when the body is destroyed. Just as a man giving up old worn out garments accepts other new apparel, in the same way the embodied soul giving up old and worn out bodies verily accepts new bodies.” “The soul is eternal, all-pervading, unmodifiable, immovable and primordial.”
~ Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Krishna to Arjuna

© Elizabeth Lyle, www.dreamingheart.com

CAN WE BE BORN-AGAIN?

We’re born –
and born-again,

And born-again,
and born-again,

Until when –

We realize
we were never ever born.

And then –
we’re never born again.

Ron’s comments and recitation of “Can We Be Born-Again?”

Dear Friends,

The foregoing “Born-Again” poetic essay explores the perennial mystery of inevitable bodily death by whimsically addressing possible afterlife, rebirth or reincarnation. The poem was written only after an extended reflective process, hereafter described.

In online spiritual memoirs – tentatively titled: “From Litigation to Meditation – and Beyond”: An ex-lawyer’s spiritual metamorphosis from Secular Hebrew; to Born-again Hindu; to Uncertain Undo – I have told how after a midlife spiritual awakening I began experiencing gradual inner transformation.

After meeting my Guruji from India, I was soon calling myself a “Born-again Hindu”, with extreme enthusiasm about encountering such a great yogi.   (See The Luckiest Day of My Life ~ Meeting My Spiritual Master )  Initially I only considered myself to be “Born-Again” psychologically – but not physically. 

Later, after much reflection, I accepted Hindu and Buddhist theories of physical rebirth or reincarnation – that all humans are repeatedly ‘born again’ in supposedly separate bodies with separate karmic destinies, until achieving the spiritual ‘goal’ of Self-realization or merger with ONE mysterious Divine Source and matrix.

Ultimately, after many amazing mystical experiences, I further accepted ancient Eastern non-duality teachings questioning the reality of any rebirth because this ever impermanent space/time duality reality is an illusory and unreal play of Cosmic consciousness – maya or samsara. Such non-dualist teachings like Advaita-Vedanta say that humans egoically and mistakenly mentally self-identify with their optical illusions of apparent separation from each other and Nature until “enlightenment” or Self-realization. Whereupon the illusion of separation and duality ends forever.

My recognition and acceptance as true Reality of spiritual non-duality was validated and corroborated when I learned of Einstein’s revolutionary discoveries about space/time that:


“Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.”

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”


“Space and time are not conditions in which we live, they are modes in which we think.”


“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”


“There is no place in this new kind of physics for the [quantum] field and matter, for the field is the only [manifest] reality.”

So I began believing that we were never truly born or reborn in space/time, which is merely “an optical illusion of consciousness.” But I realized that only very rare Buddha-like beings who non-dually merge with Cosmic consciousness need never be “Born-Again”.

However it seems apparent that the vast majority of humans remain karmically compelled to continue existing as space/time entities until overcoming all vestiges of our hallucination of separation from each other, from Nature, and from our sole Source and spirit.

Though still evolving, I have been experiencing ever growing happiness and ever less fear of death by self identifying as Eternal spirit rather than as a merely mortal physical body – more and more as Ram and less and less as Ron. So I consider Ron as a gradually disappearing ‘fundamentalist non-dualist’.

Because fear of inevitable physical death remains a major societal issue, impeding our spiritual evolution, I hope that my “rebirth” writings and story will help all of us transcend such fear, and thereby lead ever happier lives.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner