Dear hosepipe, you've spoken several times about the donkey/rider metaphor - that the body is the donkey and the person is the rider. You've also mentioned the stark difference between the person looking into the mirror and the physical body looking back at him. With those concepts in mind I'd like to revisit MHGinTN's mention of being born again as a kind of "phase shift."
Indeed, one of my favorite geometric physicists, P.S. Wesson, posits that physical death itself may be a phase change:
We review the idea, due to Einstein, Eddington, Hoyle and Ballard, that time is a subjective label, whose primary purpose is to order events, perhaps in a higher-dimensional universe. In this approach, all moments in time exist simultaneously, but they are ordered to create the illusion of an unfolding experience by some physical mechanism. This, in the language of relativity, may be connected to a hypersurface in a world that extends beyond spacetime. Death in such a scenario may be merely a phase change.Time as an Illusion
Being 'born again' is very much like that, like dying while yet alive or being alive but in a different phase to this world. Things are just things, our perspective changes, and we are different to observers still "in" phase with the physical world. We're here but not here.
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. - Colossians 3:3 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. - Galatians 2:20
Just as Jesus promised:
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. - John 3:7-8
We are truly His because of that rebirth:
But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. - Romans 8:9
God's Name is I AM.