I am going to try to tell you something that if you are at all serious about being reborn, you will have to understand . . .

First, there really exists such a thing as being reborn, but rebirth is a rare thing. It isn’t rare because of its difficulty. It’s rare because human beings are afraid of losing the self that must be forsaken if they’re to be reborn.

The self that must be forsaken to be reborn is the self that knows itself by everything it thinks about. It thinks about what people think about. It thinks about what people do. It thinks about why people don’t do what they do or don’t do. In short, it is the self that knows itself by everything that it is not or that it dreams itself to be like.

That self is an individual self. It is a self created from each individual reflection in which it sees itself. That self is not real. It belongs to personality. It belongs to passing time. It belongs to everything ultimately called good and evil.

There is inside of you another self. It’s not your self, and yet it’s closer to your self than anything you’ll ever know. It is your being, but it doesn’t belong to you. It is vested in a Great Being – call it what you will.

In order to be reborn, a man or woman must face the gradual disappearance of themselves from their own life — the gradual realization that it doesn’t matter a bit what any other human being on the earth does as long as they are deriving their sense of self from the judgment and consideration of that human being.

And that’s what you fear. You don’t know how much you depend upon having others around you — to either love or to condemn — to provide you with your individual sense of value and self. All of that has to go. Not “go” because it means something good is going, but “go” because it means something limited has to leave before what is unlimited can come in and take its place.