I always thought that true enlightenment is not possible except
through love in a relationship between a man and a woman. Isn’t this
what makes us whole again? How can one’s life be fulfilled until that
happens?
Is that true in your experience? Has this happened to you?
Not yet, but how could it be otherwise? I know that it will happen.
In other words, you are waiting for an event in time to save you. Is
this not the core error that we have been talking about? Salvation is
not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now.
What does that statement mean, “salvation is here and now”? I don’t
understand it. I don’t even know what salvation means.
Most people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of
psychological gratification because they believe that those things will
make them happy or free them from a feeling of fear or lack.
Happiness may be perceived as a heightened sense of aliveness
attained through physical pleasure, or a more secure and more
complete sense of self attained through some form of psychological
gratification. This is the search for salvation from a state of
unsatisfactoriness or insufficiency. Invariably, any satisfaction that
they obtain is short-lived, so the condition of satisfaction or fulfillment
is usually projected once again onto an imaginary point away from the
here and now. “When I obtain this or am free of that — then I will be
okay.” This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of
salvation in the future.
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be
who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy
of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a
passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it
is to “know God” — not as something outside you but as your own
innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an
inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all
that exists derives its being.
True salvation is a state of freedom — from fear, from suffering, from
a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all
wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from
compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and
future as a psychological need. Your mind is telling you that you
cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need
to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is
saying, in fact, that you need time — that you need to find, sort out,
do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you
can be free or complete. You see time as the means to salvation,
whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that
you can’t get there from where and who you are at this moment
because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is
that here and now is the only point from where you can get there.
You “get” there by realizing that you are there already. You find God
the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God. So there is
no only way to salvation: Any condition can be used, but no particular
condition is needed. However, there is only one point of access: the
Now. There can be no salvation away from this moment. You are
lonely and without a partner? Enter the Now from there. You are in a
relationship? Enter the Now from there.
There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to
salvation than it is at this moment. This may be hard to grasp for a
mind accustomed to thinking that everything worthwhile is in the
future. Nor can anything that you ever did or that was done to you in
the past prevent you from saying yes to what is and taking your
attention deeply into the Now. You cannot do this in the future. You
do it now or not at all.