https://youtu.be/pW3Rf9MM7AAYouTube: Signals from Antiquity 2
The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.
The Greek word pneuma can reference the wind, spirit, or breath. Wind can be heard and felt but not seen. Spirit is understood as the animating force, the vital essence, the soul of all living beings. We cannot see it, but we see evidence of its presence in everything from the blade of grass to the human being. Each breath we take, also invisible, is vital to our physical existence. From this we get that spirit is unseen but felt.
The Hebrew Bible’s book of Job connects the innate wisdom of the soul to the breath of the Almighty. “It is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.[1]
The main thing I get from this saying is that the full wisdom of God is present and working in and through me now. We do not have to know how the answer to our need will come about, we only need to know that the Father is working, and I work, and greater good is unfolding.
If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
The parable employs the symbolism of earthly things to illustrate heavenly things. The notion of a new birth is lost on the intellectually trained Nicodemus. His education does not allow him to make the connection between the symbol and the spiritual abstraction behind the symbol, a problem Jesus also encountered with his disciples:
13 And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?[2]
What I want to make clear here too is that the Jesus sect was not pushing for a mystical approach to Judaism. They were pushing for a leadership that would blossom into the Christian orthodoxy we see today. As I’ve already discussed, I do not believe the early leaders of the Jesus movement and the more formal church that followed shared the mystically-based ideology.
No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, [the Son of man].
How would this passage qualify as something a mystic would say?
The author of John or a later scribe includes the Son of man as an obvious reference to Jesus. Because the mystic would not bring attention to themselves, we shouldn’t think of this heavenly figure, he who descended from heaven, as a specific personality, but rather as a faculty of mind.
The material and spiritual realms, symbolized here by earth and heaven, are not two separate things, but two ways of expressing one thing, like steam and ice are the same water in two different states. The faculty of intuition is that which moves comfortably between these two realms. The intellect forms concepts about the spiritual domain, but only the intuition can move from the conceptual to the experiential level, or ascend into heaven.
J Douglas Bottorff 