The Man or the Animal: Who Am I If I Have Not Been Reborn

Let me introduce you to someone. He is the one who can do it all. The one in charge. The one with the big personality, who walks into a place and fills it, who buys the round, who has a stronger opinion than yours on any subject and a better story than yours about anything at all. The conceited fool who mistakes his pride for growth. He compares himself against everyone and always wins, because he organizes the tournament himself. He lives under the unholy trinity of catastrophe: «I'll do it tomorrow, I can do it, I'm the best.» I knew him up close — closer than I would have liked, and in the chapter on my recovery I already confessed the territory, so I won't repeat the story; what I want to do here is something else: to look at him face to face, with compassion and without fear, and to call him by his name. That is the animal. And the question of this chapter, which is perhaps the deepest in the book, is this: who am I if I have not been reborn — the man or the animal?

To think it through I need to tell you the story of a man who went to ask that very question by night. His name was Nicodemus. He was a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, «the teacher of Israel» — a man who had everything worked out in the org chart of his life, and who nonetheless went out in the dark, careful not to be seen, to seek out an itinerant carpenter because something inside him didn't add up. And he received the most disconcerting answer in the Gospel: «unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.» Nicodemus, who was erudite and literal, asked the obvious: how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb? The confusion was not clumsiness: it was a beautiful trap of language. The Greek word of the passage, anōthen, means at once «again» and «from above.» Nicodemus heard the first — repeat the birth, one's own effort all over again— and Jesus was also saying the second: a birth that comes from above, «the wind blows where it wishes.» Keep that double meaning, because at the end of the chapter we are going to need both halves.

But what almost no one preaches about Nicodemus is the thing that matters most to me: he was not reborn that night. The Gospel of John brings him back two more times, and the three scenes together sketch something other than a lightning-bolt conversion. In the first he goes by night, hidden, asking questions. In the second, some time later, he takes half a step: in the middle of the Sanhedrin, when they want to condemn without a trial, he dares a technicality — «does our law judge a man without first hearing him?» and his colleagues rain contempt on him. And in the third, after the cross, when the public disciples had fled, the man of the night appears in broad daylight carrying a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to give a condemned man a king's burial. There, and not before, we know that he was reborn. His rebirth was not an event: it was a process — night, half a step, full light. Saint Paul says it with an exact grammar that I love: the new man «is being renewed.» A gerund. And here the individual inhabits his action: he consciously decides the series of steps that must be worked, because he recognizes himself as part of the whole. This is philosophy, this is existential — not a merely energetic condition: the space is given for personal growth, and what better than to guide it consciously, instead of spending your life in struggles over everything and for everything — the car, the house, the studies, the loan— while we postpone, unconditionally, the one birth we were meant to attend to.

Now I return to the animal, because I owe it a precision that changed the chapter for me while I was thinking it. My first impulse — I dictated it that way, spelled out in full— was to say that this thought must be killed, reduced to ashes. And there are traditions for each verb: Plato proposes governing it — in the Republic he imagines the soul as a composite creature: a many-headed beast, a lion, and an inner man, and he calls justice the inner man holding the reins; depth psychology proposes integrating it, making peace with the shadow. But when I placed myself in truth before my own history, none of the three verbs was enough. Because we were born animals. It is not metaphor: we arrived as creatures of instinct and we grew by our environment, surrounded by living conditions that kept us there — and you do not stop being what you are by decree. You do not kill who you are. You do not govern who you are. You evolve it. If anything can represent time to us it is evolution, and that is what the reborn one does with his animal: he does not murder it — he would be left without force— he does not chain it — he would be left without peace— he evolves it, because consciously he is a better person. Not because you integrated yourself, not because you killed yourself: because you are better, and you are better as a result of guarding your thoughts, having good actions, and building good habits — because you inhabit your being, and with it you manage to be a true man, built with the passion for life that integrates you, with the burning desire to live and to know yourself alive, conscious and self-inhabited. Even Scripture keeps this courtesy toward the animal: the old Spanish Reina-Valera opposes the «animal body» to the «spiritual body» — where the English Bibles say «natural body»— and calls the first the sowing of the second. What is sown is not hated. It is cultivated upward. Kant said it in his dry, perfect way: evil is not in animality; the animal is not guilty. Guilty is the man who hands it the government.

A word about vocabulary, because I care about precision and here it is easy to slip. The inner jailer of this chapter I call ego: the false self, the constructed character that defends itself, compares, and takes offense — the vocabulary of the spiritual tradition, from Vedanta to our own day. Do not confuse it with the «superego» of psychoanalysis, which is almost its opposite: the inner judge of guilt and duty. They are different maps of the same jungle, and from Freud I keep only one borrowed image, with its credit: the self as a rider who must rein in the superior force of his horse. The horse is stronger. It was always stronger. A rider is not the one with the weak horse: he is the one who learned to be a rider.

And here enters the figure that had been circling me from the beginning: the sleeping dragon. First, this house's hygiene of citations, because this image circulates online dressed in a toga: it is not in Marcus Aurelius nor in any Stoic — what is verifiable and ancient is Plato's inner beast; what is Christian is the dragon of Revelation; what is modern is Jung's shadow, Tolkien's Smaug and, very exactly, the «pain-body» Eckhart Tolle describes asleep until something wakes it and it feeds on drama. That said, I confess that the version of the dragon that interests me most is not the one about keeping it sedated. It is this other one, which I discovered while dictating it: the dragon wakes when you become a man. Because the dragon was not only your rage and your vice — it was your ungoverned force, your raw potential roaring in the basement. The evolved animal is not a dead animal: it is all that fire, at last, with direction. And many times, with power comes also responsibility — I think here I am quoting Spider-Man, and in a book that has quoted Aristotle and Saint Paul I am not ashamed to quote a truth well, wherever it comes from. The greater prize must awaken awareness: to be aligned, to hold your centers in your hand, to be coherent with your ideas and with your passion for life. It is like recognizing that great effort that makes you happy. It is like knowing that closing your eyes leads you to feel the beat of your heart — and that this too makes you happy, because you are in a safe space that you created by design: with a discipline, with a task list, but above all, with calm.

The second half of anōthen remains, and it is the most delicate, so I say it slowly. Is rebirth your work or the work of above? My answer, the one this book has held since the first chapter, is that it is the work of both, and each fulfills his part of the contract. I believe it this way: God fulfills His part by handing you the divine force of letting you wake each day — the raw gift of one more day of time and space, the wind that blows where it wishes. But it is you who will have to act, who will have to be, who will have to make the decisions; and many times, the highest decision is to decide with Him. Much is said of free will: you have the freedom to choose everything that is of interest to you — but definitely not everything there is to choose is right, and the freedom to choose does not include the freedom to escape the consequences. This is not a religious book — it is a book of philosophy and of being— but I gladly run the risk of telling you that I, in particular, am a believer; I think I always have been and always will be. And in the depths of my heart, the only choice that has proved prudent for me is to choose Him. «With God, everything; without God, nothing,» went a saying of my homeland. Rebirth, then, is conscious and with divine permission: neither the grace that falls upon a sleeping man, nor the muscle that lifts on its own. Co-creation, once again — the same as in the first chapter, now applied to the most important birth.

And how does one get out, in practice, of the animal side of the line? With what, on my darkest night, I learned to call decisions of Light. They are not grand gestures: they are the series of steps that must be worked. To listen to yourself — to stop listening to the people who don't matter and start listening to yourself. To name — you already know, from saudade, what the exact word does to the fog. To decide — today, not tomorrow, because we already paid that debt together. And to repeat, because rebirth is not signed: it is practiced in the gerund, «is being renewed.» In time you realize you have been reborn not by a certificate nor by a date, but by a humble piece of evidence: you no longer let those old stories and those egos project themselves. The one who could do it all no longer answers for you. The line between the individual and the man — between the animal part of being and the higher being— is razor-thin, and the most disconcerting thing is that it remains the same person: same name, same hands, same history. One cultivates faith, love, respect, and family. The other lived comparing himself against everyone. The whole difference fits in who holds the reins this afternoon.

That is why the title's question is not answered once, nor answered by night, as Nicodemus wanted. It is answered the way he answered it: in the light, carrying the weight, when showing your face costs something. The man or the animal? Do not tell me who you will be when you are reborn — we already know what industry the «future self» works in. Tell me who governs today. Because if the answer is «the man,» even barely, even with the reins trembling, then you have already been born again — and the dragon, awake and yours, works at last for the Light.