 20. Baptism (of Spirit) |
Not only can we point to historical examples of Adepts who have in one fashion or another developed this transcendental spiritual point of view, but, because all of this is about the living, actual, real Divine, it is possible that we ourselves, in present time, may enter into Communion with the spiritual Reality. On the basis of the realization that is granted through such Communion we can understand the life and teaching of other Adepts in history, like Jesus.
The true Teaching is not simply to be read about. It can be realized in the present. It is not just ancient dogma. It is a description of a process, a reality, that is eternal and therefore present and into which we may enter. Having entered into it through our persuasion, orientation, experience, we can understand what the disciples were up to in that primitive setting around Jesus—presuming, of course, that he actually existed! And we can also see the likeness of that process we have realized in other traditions and in other Adepts than Jesus. Therefore, by examining the universal tradition of spiritual transcendentalism, we can obtain a fuller historical picture of the esoteric ideal, which is different from the worldly as well as the ascetical-mystical idea. It is a total conversion of Man in his totality into a spiritual realization.
Because of Christianity's association with ascetical mysticism, it tends to belong to that tradition that always views Spirit over against matter, Spirit as an alternative to the body. In talking to Nicodemus, Jesus does not discuss the Spirit as an alternative to the flesh. Rather, he talks about Man's realizing that he is Spirit. He is not talking about inversion towards that part of you that is a "soul," but about realizing the spiritual nature of everything altogether. Everything is breathed alive by God. Everything is infused with the Divine, which is Spirit and which pervades everything. This living Person is the Condition of everything.
The initiation would have involved not merely spending time with the Adept, with an individual who was spiritually realized, but being baptized by that individual. One would be instructed, but one would also be baptized. And the transference of Spirit Power, baptism by the Spirit Power, was communicated in secret.
That baptism is fundamentally what we know as shaktipat, but it should also be viewed in much larger terms than the conventional shaktipat of the Hindu traditions. As it is described in the mystical traditions, shaktipat is generally associated with the ascetic, oriental, mystical point of view and therefore generally related to inversion and dissociation from this world, from the body, from Life-positive activity, from the transfiguration and transformation of the body, and bodily Communion with the Divine. But shaktipat as the transmission of spiritual influence, via the internal mechanism of the nervous system as well as the total transformation of the being, is certainly what was communicated by Jesus and by his disciples who became baptizers as a result of his initiating them.
The Spirit baptism was the transference of the breathed Spirit Presence. Just as it says in the Old Testament, this Presence, this Spirit, that is breathed into the being is its source, its identity, its condition. It is felt and realized bodily, psychically, altogether Realized through initiation. Once you have been converted to the Spirit and confronted by the Spirit, and once you know how to breathe and feel and commune with the Spirit, then life becomes the endless process of transformation in the Spirit. Such life is the kingdom of God, then. One enters the kingdom of God through Spirit realization, through conversion and initiation, and thereafter lives in the kingdom of God.
Thus, the baptism implied in this Christian esotericism is one of conversion, through "hearing," to realizing existence as Spirit, existence inhering in Spirit. The life that follows the water and the fire is the life in the Spirit, the life in which the Spirit is the Condition, the controller of the destiny, the transformer of your existence. Such life is different from the mortal ideal of God's coming as some man and accomplishing some great political change on Earth. It is also a different thing from inverting yourself into the immortal spark within. It is a matter of existing in the Spirit, of seeing that everything exists in the Spirit, of communing with the Spirit, worshipping God in the Spirit, living in the spiritual process, living as the Spirit itself, realizing the body-mind as a single thing existing in the Spirit and as Spirit. By thus entering into the kingdom of God—the kingdom of God being simply existence in the Condition of Spirit, the Condition of God—by entering into that spiritual realization, one enters into existence as a process of transformation in the Divine.
