I Pray All Is Well With Everyone… And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion… For All Your Brothers And Sisters In Spirit. And Since The Spirit Is Eternal… And Anything Outside Of It Is Temporal; The Divine Spirit Within Each And Every One Of Us – As Our Life Stream And Our “Mighty I AM Presence” – Should Be Our Divine Guidance… In This World Of Delusion And Confusion. And If Mankind Would Only Allow That Divine Spirit Within…That Eternal Spark Of Love And Light – Our Power And Protection – To Lead Us… Not Only In Our Individual Concerns But Also In Our Worldly Affairs… Then God Knows In Heaven… That Humanity Would NOT Be… In The Degenerate State… That It Is In! Therefore… Let Us Stop Fearing The Darkness And Illusion Of This World… When The God-Given Light And Power To Triumph… Is Within All Of Us! Amen… 
Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life… 
And Y’all Be Love… 
“… Did Hermeticism, with its unusual emphasis on personal religion, foster an experience of individual regeneration such was prominent in the mystery cults in connection with their initiation ceremonies? Of this there can be no doubt. One of the most important tractates of the Corpus, the “Secret Discourse on the Mountain”, is specifically and exclusively devoted to palingenesia, and the entire process of Hermetic rebirth is there described and enacted before the reader’s imagination. The characters of the dialogue are Hermes and his son Tat. The latter begins the colloquy reminding his father that in his general discourses he has affirmed that no one could ever be saved without regeneration. Tat had longed to learn the secret of rebirth and his father had promised to share it with him when he had become a stranger to the world. This, Tat protests, he has already done, and so he does not hesitate to ask his father to fulfil the promise and communicate to him the complete tradition of rebirth.
Like the Nicodemus of the Johannine dialogue, Tat puzzles in literalistic fashion as to how a man can be born again – of what seed and from what womb he comes to rebirth. Hermes replies that spiritual wisdom conceiving in silence is the womb, true good the seed, and God himself, the author of the act. Thus, the reborn individual becomes a son of God endowed with divine powers. Tat does not understand this and asks further explanation concerning the manner of rebirth. To this demand Hermes rejoins:
“What can I say, my son? … I can tell you nothing but this; I see that by God’s mercy there has come to be in me a form which is not fashioned out of matter, and I have passed out of myself, and entered into an immortal body. I am not now the man I was; I have been born again in spirit, and the bodily shape which was mine before has been put away from me. I am no longer an object colored and tangible, a thing of special dimensions; I am now alien to all this, and to all that you perceive when you gaze with bodily eyesight. To such eyes as yours, my son, I am not now visible.”
As Tat listens to his father’s discourse, he is seized with ecstasy and seems to lose his reason. He finds himself confused and speechless and incapable of thought even. At last, he asks, with genuine anxiety, if it is impossible for him to realize this spiritual good. Without hesitation, Hermes reassures him on this point. “Heaven forbid, my son. Draw it into you and it will come; will it, and it comes to be. Stop the working of your bodily senses, and then will deity be born in you. But if you would be born again, you must cleanse yourself from the irrational torments of matter.”
The reference to material torments prompts Tat to question as to what they are. In reply, Hermes enumerates twelve evil propensities which are bound up with man’s physical nature. They are ignorance, grief, intemperance, sensuality, injustice, avarice, folly, envy, deceit, anger, rashness, and malice. In the picturesque language of Hermes, these evil propensities and many more of the same tribe, creep through the prison house of man’s body, and like torturers, torment the prisoner who is there confined. Hermes concludes: “But when God has had mercy on a man, they depart from him together, one and all; and then is reason built up in him. Such is the manner of the rebirth. And now, my son, speak not but keep solemn silence; so will the mercy come down on us from God.”
In the pause that follows, the silence is broken only by the voice of Hermes calling upon the ten “Powers of God”, virtues all to come and possess Tat, driving out the evil inclinations of the flesh; knowledge of God to replace ignorance, joy instead of sorrow, self-control in place of intemperance, continence where sensuality was, righteousness in lieu of injustice, generosity to drive avarice away, truth instead of error, and the more abstract qualities of goodness, life, and light to take the place of all the other brutish torments. The invocation of Hermes is an efficacious rite whereby his disciple is enabled to realize the desired change in immediate experience.
“No longer has there come upon us any of the torments of darkness; they have flown away with rushing wings. Thus, my son, has the spiritual being been made up in us; and by its coming to be, we have been made gods. Whoever, then, has by God’s mercy attained to this divine birth, abandons bodily sense; he knows himself to be composed of powers of God, and knowing this, is glad.”
True to the word, Tat’s first reaction to all this is ecstatic: “Father, God has made me a new being, and I perceive things now not with bodily eyesight, but by the working of the spirit.” Thus, freed from the limitations of sense, Tat feels himself completely at one with the universe. “I am in heaven”, he exclaims, “in earth, in water and in air. I am in beasts and plants. … I am present everywhere!” Then, as his ardor cools somewhat, Tat pauses to ask about his transformed being. “Tell me Father, will this body which is composed of Divine Powers ever suffer dissolution.”
To this interrogation Hermes quickly answers: “Hush! Speak not of a thing that cannot be. It would be impious to say that. Has the eye of your spirit been blinded? The physical body which is an object of sense differs widely from that other body which is of the nature of true being. The one is dissoluble; the other is indissoluble. The one is mortal; the other is immortal. Do you not know you have become a god, and son of the One, even as I have?”
As yet, Tat’s eagerness is not fully satisfied and he asks to be taught the “Hymn of Rebirth”, which is known only to those who have experienced regeneration. With specific directions as to how the hymn is to be uttered at the time of sunset, Hermes imparts to him the secret ode. Even with this esoteric information, the eager neophyte is not completely satisfied. He must sing his own song of praise, and like Epictetus he will not be restrained from doing so. This, then, is Tat’s own song of regeneration:
“O thou first author of the work by which the rebirth has been wrought in me. To thee, O God, do I, Tat, bring offerings of speech. O God, thou art the father; O Lord, thou art the spirit. From me accept such praises as thou willest. For by thy will, it is that all is accomplished for me.”
… There were two important consequences that were believed to proceed from this spiritual rebirth. One related to the present, and the other, chiefly to the future. One was a matter of morals, and the other was a metaphysical affair.
In the first place, Hermetic rebirth meant the moral purification of the individual. He was reborn ethically as well as essentially. In the account of Tat’s regeneration, this was represented as the conquest of a horde of vices by an all but equal number of virtues. Elsewhere, the same process was figured more positively as seeds of good, sown by God, coming to great and fair fruitage in “virtue, self-control, and piety.” In the moral life of the regenerate, the spirit was given a notable role to play, as the physician of the soul. Hermes said to Tat:
“As a good physician inflicts pain on the body, burning or cutting it, when disease has taken possession of it, even so the spirit inflicts pain on the soul, ridding it of pleasure from which spring all the soul’s diseases, and godlessness is a great disease of the soul; for the beliefs of the godless bring in their train all kinds of evils and nothing that is good. Clearly then, spirit, inasmuch as it counteracts this disease, confers good on the soul, just as the physician confers health on the body.”
According to the Hermetic view, those who had no share in this divine endowment centered all their thoughts on the pleasures of the body and its appetites, in the belief that for its sake, men came into being. They became wicked and depraved, envious and covetous, murderous and impious. To them an avenging demon was always present, ever adding torment to insatiable desire. But to the holy and good, the pure and merciful who lived piously, the spirit was ever present to help them win the Father’s love by their upright lives. The disciple of Hermes said of his nous as the disciple of Paul would have said of his pneuma, “a man can escape from wickedness if he has the spirit in him.”
On its metaphysical side, Hermetic rebirth involved nothing less than deification. “This is the good; this is the consummation for those who have got gnosis – they enter into God”, was the last word of the Shepherd of Men to his prophet before giving him his commission. Hermeticism emphatically maintained that it was perfectly possible for man, even while residing in the human body, to become deified. With this exalted thought of possibilities within human reach, the Hermetic thinker was almost inclined to respect man more highly than the gods.
While none of the gods left their heavenly spheres to come down to earth, man, without leaving earth, could ascend to heaven and make himself divine – such was the power of his ecstasy. “We must not shrink from saying”, Hermes concluded, “that a man on earth is a mortal god, and that a god in heaven is an immortal man.” So far as the future was concerned, divinization meant immortality also.
When the transformation of man’s essence was complete by the process of regeneration, then he had a body that death could not touch or harm. “The natural body can be dissolved, the spiritual body cannot be”, was as much a conviction of Hermes as of Paul, and the disciple of the former confidently expected that when he should depart from his earthly body, he would “be brought into the troop of the gods and the souls that have attained bliss.”
Altogether the rebirth experience of Trismegistic religion was a well-ordered process with clearly defined steps. There were certain preliminary items for which the leaders of the Hermetic movement were responsible – the Prophet’s call to repentance and the Father’s personal words of instruction. There were other items of psychological self-preparation for which the seeker and he alone was responsible – a profound distrust of sense-perception, a rigorous control of physical appetites, and a willingness to wait in quiet, silent meditation for the inflow of divine grace.
The rebirth experience itself was in inward ecstasy characterized by all but complete disregard of external sensations, with heed given only to the weighty words of the Father. There was mental confusion followed by a sense of exaltation, chaos ending in clarification, and not infrequently, a vision experience described as a wonderful light.
The interpretation of it all was that man, in this supreme moment of ecstasy, was endowed with spirit, a deific light-substance, and equipped with gnosis, a divinely given mental illumination absolutely essential to salvation. As a result of this rebirth, the individual felt himself possessed of such divine power that he could live an upright moral life, and could face the future assured of immortality – a deified mortal while yet on earth.”
Pagan Regeneration, by Harold R. Willoughby, 1929
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 