What It REALLY Means to Be "Born Again" - The Little Prince Series

Daily Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

When the initial spark between two people—whether romantic in nature, a friendship, or the excitement of a business arrangement— wears off and the congeniality of the relationship starts to fade, nothing is going wrong.

I know it's hard to believe that nothing is going awry, especially if our attachment to the person is strong and hence our disappointment great. It can feel catastrophic.

However, all that's happening is that the protective shell of our ego, which was useful to us while growing up, is beginning to crack. Indeed the relationship's disappointment, perhaps even turmoil, is being used to crack it.

This kind of experience is what we generally refer to as a midlife crisis. We feel like we are coming apart.

As we pass through this tumultuous experience, disappointment and confusion reign. We may even wonder if we are going crazy as we perhaps quit a job, leave a relationship, or in some other way radically alter our lifestyle.

This is symbolized by the crash in the desert of the pilot who has become a friend of the Little Prince.

Together the pilot and the Little Prince will work through their parallel situations, which are mirrored in each other's experiences, as they learn to operate from theiressence—their true self—instead of from the false self of ego that developed in reaction to the usual family and society pressures of growing up.

Whenever we experience difficulties in a relationship, it's almost always some facet of this process of breaking down the protective shell of the ego that's getting underway.

The crash in the desert can be lengthy, painful, and seem almost hopeless at times.

As we undergo the loss of just about everything we have known ourselves to be, it feels like a death of sorts. And it is—the death of ego.

The reality is that nothing is going wrong. On the contrary everything is going just the way it needs to.

Jesus talked about this death as "losing our life" in order to "find it." Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, he explained, it cannot bring forth a harvest.

We are being asked to surrender to the barrenness of the desert, the seeming utter emptiness of our life, the dark void within us that feels like a bottomless pit of despair.

We are asked not to fight this condition but to embrace it, allow it to be, relax into it, and simply be with what we are experiencing.

We shall ultimately find that this isn't an emptiness we are dying into but a fullnessthat's seeking to be born in us.

We are not surrendering into a vacant, sterile wasteland. We are surrendering to the emergence of our divine essence, the image and likeness of God—our true self that has been constricted by the boa constrictor mentality of family and society since childhood, which we are now ready to receive as our own unique identity.

No longer needing to depend on anyone else for a sense of who we are, we are ready to be "born again," as it were, this time to chart our own course in life in line with our divine nature, free of the crushing burden of the expectations of family and society.

In other words we have at last reached a point at which what's true for us is on a collision course with the pressure to conform to society and other people's expectations. This is the crisis of the crash in the desert.

We are at a place where our egoic, socially constructed sense of identiy and our true being diverge so greatly that the ego must collapse.

At this juncture, to continue slavishly in our old way of conformity to other people's expectations and the false self we developed while growing up is to become sick. It's to deny our very being, which can only take us down into the depths of depression.

There is only one way forward by which we can experience the fullness of our being, and this is to plunge into the desert and there discover what we would least of all expect to find—our true, essential self, grounded in eternal Presence.