“We have mentioned the struggle that exists between the carnal man and the spiritual man after the second step is attained – a struggle well known to the Christian, since the time of Christ. But at this point, the third step, comes another, a deadlier struggle, a struggle between Generation on the one side, and Regeneration on the other side. As the fierceness of any battle is measured by the strength of the opposing forces, so here a deadly conflict ensues, for marshalled in battle array, on the one side is all Creation – the whole world of generation, visible and invisible; while on the other side is all Re-Creation – the Holy Spirit, and the great body of Yahveh Elohim in the heavens, aiding man in his final great struggle to become “Yahveh Elohim.” This “step” or way, is the “Narrow Way” so often spoken of by the Christ and referred to in 2 Esdras 7:6-10:
“There is another thing: A city is builded, and set upon a broad field, and is full of all good things; the entrance thereof is narrow, and is set in a dangerous place to fall, like as if there were a fire on the right hand, and on the left a deep water: and only one path between them both, even between the fire and the water, so small that there could but one man go there at once. If this city now were given unto a man for an inheritance, if he never shall pass the danger set before it, how shall he receive this inheritance? And I said, it is so, Lord. Then said he unto me, even so also is Israel’s portion.”
The presence of the spirit-child in the organism at once causes the person to repel, to hate every act of the old generation, to stop all waste of the life fluids, and to consecrate all the life generated in the body to the developing of mind and soul powers, to the developing of the newly begotten child. He is now literally a son of God, and all that belongs to the Holy Spirit and to the state symbolized by the “Garden of Eden”, is attractive to the heavenly guest that occupies the temple – the body.
This brings us to the question of individuality, for there has entered into the organism another soul, a spirit-child, from above, entirely distinct from the individual, and there begins a struggle between the two as to which shall become the real man, which shall survive, and which shall be absorbed by the other. It is not, however, wholly a question of which shall be absorbed, because the carnal mind, or human soul, can never absorb the spiritual child, but the spiritual child can absorb and must absorb the human soul – not destroy it, but absorb it into or unite it with its own consciousness. This is a process that the human intellect is incapable of understanding only as experience has taught the individual along these lines.
It is as if the Spirit of God should come to you and say: “The way you are going will ultimate in death and you will be as if you had not been, and another spirit sent from God will enter into your body and will become the real man, one of the builders of the kingdom of God on earth. Are you willing thus to die, that your body and all that belongs to the physical desires, appetites, passions, loves, sympathies, may be absorbed and transformed by a spiritual consciousness, in order that the kingdom of God, the conditions that now exist in the heavens, may have a standing on the earth?”
When you are ready to answer this question in the affirmative, then the spiritual child that has entered the body will be given freedom of action, then will this higher intelligence begin to take control of every appetite, passion and desire, and will gradually refine them and transform them into the likeness of the Spirit. In other words, it will gradually carry the individual up out of the low state in which he is found after years of generation, labor, sorrow, and death, and bring him back into the form (“The Image”), and cause him to express the quality that was in the mind of his heavenly Father (“The Likeness of God”), the Creator of all things. He will be fitted to dwell in the Eden of God, the new heaven, and the new earth.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 