PROFANE AND INITIATE

The division of human beings into profanes and the initiate is age-old and perhaps the only truly adequate from man's intimate essence.

What is the difference between a profane man and an initiate in the things of the spirit?

First of all, it is important to know what is not meant by initiate or initiation. Certainly, is not the one who can unravel or solve mysterious formulas of the so-called initiatory schools; if anyone can give the solution, it is called initiate; otherwise, it is called profane.

Even Rabbi Nicodemus thought that the initiation or the entry into the Kingdom of God depended on something that we did, so much so that he went to meet the greatest of the initiate that the human race knows, to know what action to take to enter the spiritual universe. To this question, about what a man must do to become an initiate, Jesus responds by saying what man must Be to be part of the Kingdom of God. It is necessary, he says, “to be reborn in spirit”. Nicodemus, though physically alive, was spiritually dead. We could even define the state of the profane as being a man still dead, or not yet alive, a kind of unborn fetus in a state of gestation more or less advanced or delayed; it may be born one day if its evolution towards the encounter of the eternal life runs normally, but it is also possible that the end of its spiritual gestation will be an abortion due to malformation and consequent death, or the encounter of eternal death, of the disintegration of the spirit.

No one can become an initiate simply by doing this or that, for it is absurd and intrinsically contradictory to do something without first Being something or someone. “Existence precedes essence”, or to Being, according to Thomas Aquinas; that every human being is solely responsible for his actions because we choose who we are. Humans are born as “nothing” and then become who they are through their choices, actions and reactions; you cannot act or do something without first Being someone because Being is the cause of doing, and the cause is logically before the effect.

If I could become an initiate by doing certain things, or by the fact that some third party does something for me; if I, for example, could be an initiate into the Kingdom of God by some secret formula, ritual or sacramental process, magical and mysterious set of words that would automatically throw me into the spiritual world without the competent internal change of my Being - if this were possible, there would be contraband even in the Kingdom of God. The world of God would cease to be a Cosmos to become chaos.

However, the Kingdom of God is the only realm where there is no contraband or illegal entry, by some hidden secret hatch, either for money or wit or by the work and mercy of good friends and protectors.

In the Kingdom of God, one can only enter honestly and through the front door, that is, through the fact of Being someone, of being precisely what one must be on the eternal level, to enter in it; and this right of entry consists precisely in the fact that man being “reborn by the spirit”, a “new creature in Christ”.

It is necessary to comprehend the following: if it is certain that no man can enter the Kingdom of God by doing something other than evolving his true spiritual Self, his “self-realization” - on the other hand, it is also certain that man who is someone by spiritual rebirth will not fail to do something, and even exceed it; or rather, this man is the only man who can do something real and positive for the true evolution of humankind.

Initiation is a mystical process by which man begins to be someone on the level of eternal reality. This new being, this new creature in Christ, will soon be revealed as the only positive and dynamic factor in the vast drama of the ascensional evolution of humankind, which, without this positive factor, would be no more than a series of agglomerative negative factors. But at the moment, we add to this long series of negative factors filled with bleak emptiness, a positive factor, all small and great vacuities will be filled with a positive reality. And this positive reality is what redeems all the negativities of the so-called “original sin” of its emptiness.

It is exactly what happens when a man is reborn in spirit, when a profane happens to become an initiate, from negative becomes positive, from still dead to be alive. And from then on, being alive, he can do what no dead man can. What a still not alive could do (if there was anything he could do) would be, at best, non-vital acts; before he could do any vital act, he must be vitalized, enlivened by the ever-living and ever-vitalizing spirit.

To be an initiate is to be identified with God by the divine spirit, or, in Jesus' words: “Eternal life is this: that men may know you, Father, as being the only true God”; or yet, in this sentence, in which Jesus tells us that heaven, eternal life, consists of “Loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength”, that is, the new Being of the mystical man, from which the spontaneous attitude of “Loving your neighbour as yourself” will emerge, of the ethical man.

True initiation has nothing to do with mysterious formulas. It consists only of this simple and immense thing: the personal encounter with God, this stupendous cosmic revolution within the human soul, and the subsequent attunement of daily life, internal and external, with this great and decisive experience.

Some people have never had this personal encounter with God - they are the still blind, the still dead, the ignorant of spirituality. However, there are two groups in this class: those who have not yet taken the first step on this great pilgrimage - and those who have already taken the first step, and perhaps many others, at any point along the path but have not reached the ultimate goal yet. Those of the first group are the unbelievers, the agnostics, the so-called atheists, who, apart from having no experience of spiritual enlightenment, do not even believe in the existence of this light. Those of the second group are believers, pilgrims of goodwill, those who firmly admit the reality of the Light, although they have not yet opened their eyes to this integral light of Reality. If they continue to walk straight into the light, today's believers will become the sapient of tomorrow because to believe is the way to know.

Jesus was not a believer but a sapient; not only believed in God as the travellers of the nebulous faith but knew God, as did all who have reached the end of the pilgrimage and have the direct and immediate vision of the eternal Reality, and can truly say, “The Father and I are one.”

In the heavenly spheres, there are no believers or unbelievers, only the sapient of God. But there would be no sapient in heaven if there were no believers on Earth. Moreover, this science-of-God, this Theo-wisdom, is what is heaven. Man is in heaven when that heaven of intuitive knowledge of God is in man. The spiritual man takes his heaven with him wherever he goes. And as this man, consciously or unconsciously, radiates his inner heaven, all receptive souls can, in the presence of a true initiate, guess what heaven is and have an anticipated and inexplicable enjoyment.

The only way to do good to others and make them good is to be good. Any attempt that man who is not good does to make others good is blatant nonsense, hypocrisy since it is mathematical and metaphysically impossible for a man who does not possess inner goodness to contribute to others becoming good. Only man internally good is that it is an open channel through which the redeeming waters of the eternal Divinity flows freely; a man, internally evil, though externally “good”, is an obstructed channel, where the divine and purifying waters does not flow. No one can be good through me, as I cannot be good on behalf of others - because in the kingdom of God, there is no contraband and disorder.

Therefore, the initiate is a man internally good, the good man par excellence.

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When asked about what original sin is, Ramana Maharishi answered in a synthetic and rightly way: “It is the illusion of a separate personal existence”. This separatist illusion of the ego is an inheritance of all human nature, a gift from birth. At the same time, the truth of the permanent and essential union with the Infinite is the attainment of human consciousness, and this essential union can and must reveal itself in an existential union.