Today we begin a new special theme, “What is Salvation?” Salvation is an idea that has no meaning in truth. Awareness-life-presence is unchanged, so it does not need salvation.
At the same time, attention, which is the moving aspect of presence, has the ability to taste anything it dips into. Since it has dipped deeply into thought, emotion and appearance, it has become confused about what it is. It is like sunlight that shines through a stained glass window. It has taken on the appearance of red and green and blue. However, attention has identified with the appearance, thereby forgetting that it has no color at all.
Salvation is undoing this misidentification. The means of salvation is “failing to support” the misidentification. We do that in two ways:
- Forgiveness. Instead of believing thought, emotion and appearance, and instead of acting based on belief, we watch thought, emotion and appearance without acting from it. We abide as presence. When we are not able to do that easily, we use inquiry or another forgiveness tool to help us see through and detach from mistaken beliefs.
- Awareness-watching-awareness meditation. Instead of going out into appearance, attention is brought back to its source. When attention pays attention to presence, it sees that it is one with presence and the same as presence. It therefore remembers itself as presence and drops the confusion that it is appearance.
Father, I will but to remember You.
Have you ever heard someone say, “I don’t feel bad for him because the predicament that he finds himself in is of his own making.” Wait a minute, isn’t that true for all of us? The predicament or the appearance is that we seem to have lost our way. Salvation is the means of being saved from harm at our own hands or better said; being saved from harm or lack of peace due to misidentification.
How have we misidentified? We believe ourselves to be separate persons with separate interests. How do we rectify this misidentification? How do we heal the lack of peace that we feel?
As our new theme, “What is Salvation,” tells us, it is an undoing. Salvation or healing is “failing to support the world of dreams and malice. Thus it lets illusions go. By not supporting them, it merely lets them quietly go down to dust. And what they hid is now revealed…” We stop supporting the world of dreams and malice when we stop giving it our believing attention.
Gina Lake says in her book, “In The World, But Not Of It, “Once there is some space between thoughts and some capacity to witness thought, the illusion begins to break down, and your divine nature begins to shine through.” To awaken we stop believing and stop acting on our thoughts, emotions and appearances. We want our focus to abide with presence. This is called forgiveness.
We must make our unconscious beliefs conscious through inquiry or another forgiveness practice and disengage from our mistaken beliefs. Again, Gina Lake counsels, “The more beliefs you have that are uninvestigated and unconscious, the more identified with them you’ll be, and the more they’ll affect your emotional state, your behavior, and consequently, your life.”
When our attention is brought to its source, it pays attention to presence instead of appearances. Appearances can begin to lose their attraction and we can remember ourselves as presence. The reward is peace, contentment, gratitude, love and joy. This is called awareness-watching-awareness.
Forgiveness and awareness-watching-awareness demonstrate “Our will but to remember our Father.” We seek the fulfillment of knowing our Self. That is our true desire.
Today, we remember this again.
If you have 30-minutes for meditation today, and you would like a gentle audio to guide you, I recommend this meditation:
