Man’s Becoming
The New Birth
Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; this man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.”
Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born, can he?”
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
”That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
”Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’
”The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
-John 3:1-8
All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolators of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections–even refutations. Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being. Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has being.
With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed–they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. “Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.
-Twilight of the Idols 3:1-2, F.N.
“I shall be who I shall be” -Exodus 3:14
If God is hesitant to say that He Is then we should be as well. It seems much more appropriate to posit that man is such a thing as a thing which is coming to be. Existing as a transition into being. We are not yet. We have begun to become. Our true birth comes after our passage into non-being, that is to say, actual genuine true being. The experience of change and time should make this obvious, however man has a deep seeded drive to permanence, perhaps a faulty perception of the true telos in the infinite. We exist as the image and likeness. A fleeting shadow of being. As if to think that coming to be would occur like a snappy bang, so to speak. To think of the nature of being in black and white, when all the faculties of perception operate otherwise — reason included — folly. The — gravity, of the situation, so immense that only through distorted lenses would we pridefully assert that yes we are and that we possess a specific type of being so and that we came to be in an instant. It seems that the transition to the form of the infinite, of which our hinted capacities of action in this transitory state have alluded to, is rightlyfully so a process of such grand nature that it must occur in this fashion. Bringing with it the growing pains of such a disjointed nature of being. It is simple to look at a child and see that yes, higher levels of being, true love or hatred of a free-will (encaged as it will be until the great birth), simply do not yet exist. The nature of the human person is one of a grand evolutionary transition on the level of being itself. But alas, to glimpse the situation, such hope and stregnth that renews the soul is immeasurable. The telos of man is Being itself. Truly the over-man — to glimspse such realizations is to taste redemption, to experience the transcendant, the only sensation — to use a most wretched word for lack of better, perhaps the ever redundant experience —. which truly bring a moments peace to the becoming soul.
To the woman He said,
“I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you.”
Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you;
In toil you will eat of it
All the days of your life.
“Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
And you will eat the plants of the field;
By the sweat of your face
You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.”
Now the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.
-Genesis 3:16-20
We must be born again, that is to say, we must be born. To think that the pangs of childbirth is a condemnation placed on the physical process a women undergoes, to suffer with due unfairness to the condemnation of tilling the soil. No, these condemnations are a spiritual, bah the english languages fails again, understanding of the sufferings which come along with the process of becoming which man is to endure in the state in which he now finds himself. Man is not meant to be brought into existence via a single action, a pow or bam or hmm 1 rib and waloo! — even let there be and it was good — nevermind a single action of Man himself, what a foolish idea a being bringing himself into being, never mind the single brush stroke — or should I say Woman? —. Why the second account of creation? To explain to man the nature of his coming into being itself, not merely man’s placement of coming to be — ala le former account. Man and women are both made in the same fashion. The condemnations of one are condemnations of both. Both come to be in the same fashion of coming into being. There is no gender on the cross, the gateway to being.
post script: Read the post previous to this to fully make sense of this post.