... is possible to a person who chooses to die to the old self in order that the new self - the new creation - may emerge. From his studies in the history of religions, Mircea Eliade describes, in his book Birth and Rebirth, the belief of primitive persons that a state of being cannot be changed without first being annihilated. Eliade describes the puberty rite of a primitive tribe in Australia that includes the three stages of "death, gestation, and rebirth." In this rite, the son is torn away from his mother ...
Psalm 30; Exodus 24:15-18; Mark 9:2-9 Virtually every religion has regarded mountains as sacred places. Mircea Eliade, the great religious scholar, called mountains an axis mundi, a symbolic link between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human. For those of us from the flat lands of the midwest it may not be as obvious as it should be why this is so. There is something ...
