“Prabhupada: When you become dvija, twice-born. Twice-born means you come to the point of understanding Krsna consciousness. When you take your birth from your parents, your consciousness is different. Just like the child. His consciousness is different, but when he’s grown-up, if he takes to knowledge, if he tries to understand Krsna, his consciousness is different. So when one takes to Krsna consciousness, that is the beginning of his second birth, dvija.”
Bhagavad-gita 2.46-62 — Los Angeles, December 16, 1968
“Time should not be wasted in frivolous or materialistic activities, of which there are now literally millions in modern society. One can cultivate birth in the mode of goodness by accepting the second birth of initiation from a bona fide spiritual master and learning to chant the Hare Krsna mantra.”
SB 11.13.6
“[We] in modern technological society [have] begun to be callous and disillusioned. [We have] learned to suspect what claims to be new, to doubt all the “latest” in everything. [We are] drawn instinctively to the new, and yet [we see] in it nothing but the same old sham. The specious glitter of newness, the pretended creativity of a society in which youthfulness is commercialized and the young are old before they are twenty, fills some hearts with utter despair. There seems to be no way to find any real change. “The more things change,” says a French proverb, “the more they are the same.”
“Yet in the deepest ground of our being we still hear the insistent voice which tells us: “You must be born again.”
“There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.”
Thomas Merton. Love and Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, editors. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979: 176.
