Birth From Spirit Quotes

“As we said before, initiation lies at the core of any genuine
human life. And this is true for two reasons. The first is that any
genuine human life implies profound crises, ordeals, suffering, loss
and reconquest of self, "death and resurrection." The second is
that, whatever degree of fulfillment it may have brought him, at a
certain moment every man sees his life as a failure. This vision
does not arise from a moral judgment made on his past, but from
an obscure feeling that he has missed his vocation; that he has
betrayed the best that was in him. In such moments of total crisis,
only one hope seems to offer any issue-the hope of beginning
life over again. This means, in short, that the man undergoing such
a crisis dreams of new, regenerated life, fully realized and significant. This is something other and far more than the obscure
desire of every human soul to renew itself periodically, as the
cosmos is renewed. The hope and dream of these moments of
total crisis are to obtain a definitive and total renovatio, a renewal
capable of transmuting life. Such a renewal is the result of every
genuine religious conversion.”
― Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation

“The interest of initiation for an understanding of archaic mentality lies predominantly in its showing us that the true man-the
spiritual man-is not given, is not the result of a natural process.
He is "made" by the old masters, in accordance with the models
revealed by the Divine Beings and preserved in the myths. These
old masters constitute the spiritual elites of archaic societies. It is
they who know, who know the world of spirit, the truly human
world. Their function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence
to the new generations and to help them assume the responsibility
of being truly men and hence of participating in culture. But since
for archaic societies "culture" is the sum of the values received
from Supernatural Beings, the function of initiation may be reduced to this : to each new generation, it reveals a world open to
the transhuman, a world that, in our philosophical terminology, we
should call transcendental.”
― Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation