INTERSPIRITUAL WISDOM -- 5

+ In the Practice Circle of the E-retreat on InterSpiritual Wisdom I offered the following:

FORGIVENESS AND REPENTANCE
I think many of us Christians have long treated the idea of forgiveness as a task to accomplish rather than an inward change of mind and heart. (Romans 12:1-2 comes to mind). All of the wisdom shared this week has helped me understand more than ever that forgiveness is a state of being (a heavenly state always available in the here-and-now moment).

I have been re-reading MYTH AND RITUAL IN CHRISTIANITY by Alan Watts (THE book which made it possible for me to stay in the Christian Wisdom Tradition after I discovered and embraced the Perennial Philosophy, or mysticism). Watts writes:

" ... the redemption of captive Israel, liberation from Hades, the forgiveness of sins, release from the self-love of Lucifer, from the 'old Adam', and from the bondage of 'Egypt' and 'Babylon' is in every respect a deliverance from the past. Salvation is always the ending of the mind's fascinated identification with the dead and unchanging image of what it was. It is a complete reversal of the 'natural' order of things, a metanoia -- the Greek word for 'repentance' meaning precisely a 'turning-around-of-the-mind', so that it no longer faces into the past, the land of the shadow of death, but into the Eternal Present."

Watts states that our human personality is totally based on memory. So, our Holy Forgetting is not so much a task to be accomplished but an orientation change, a heavenly attitude, a connection with the divine which is beyond our knowing and understanding.

+ You can see all of my posts on Interspiritual wisdom here.