The Divine Birth – 09.16.10

Student Question: I would like to hear more about what is meant by the divine birth in the heart.

The divine birth is an archetype. One can remember the story of the birth of Christ, the Immaculate Conception, or the birth of the Buddha from his mother’s side, symbolic of the birth into divine love at the heart chakra. “It is our birthright to experience the divine birth,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “but most of us turn down the opportunity for that because we’re so attached to the ego. It’s as if the larva, the caterpillar, refuses to become the butterfly because it’s still too attached to munching those leaves and growing fat and crawling on the earth, and it doesn’t know the joy of flying as the butterfly. . . . But the divine birth, once it happens, once we are willing to dissolve the ego shell so that the birth can happen, is, initially, a birth of love, a birth of openness to the world again, a birth of wonderment, of aliveness.” It is a birth that brings the light into a world of darkness that can be shared with all. “Because the birth is not an individual birth; it’s not the birth of another level of ego. It is the birth of God, the infinite, the Universal Self, that moves through a particular organism but is not identified with it. And so it is the birth, again, of the realization that we are all one, and we are all co-creating this dream together and that we have all arranged to arrive at this moment.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.