Perhaps where we differ is that I believe that salvation is not a ‘one time for all’ thing but an ongoing choice that we must continually make? In that there are whole levels of salvation, healing, deliverance that Jesus can make available to us, and a process that we must go through.

But even here I believe the Christian saints and mystics would back me up – people like St Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, John Bunyan, all describe a long-term, life-long process of exploration and ‘opening up’ to the Spirit, in terms like pilgrimage, journey, refurbishment of a castle. To them, ‘salvation’ was not something that happened once in their lifetime but continued and required their participation all through their lives.

Yes, but consider that the corruption has already happened, long before any of us were born – that’s what ‘original sin’ means, none of us are born completely innocent of the sorrow of the world – because none of us are isolated, separate beings. Our bodies share the atoms and forces of this world, our minds share the ideas of this world, our souls share the one soul which is Adam, humanity. To be ‘innocent’ at birth would be to be utterly alone, and even that would be impossible because the nature of God is loving communion, so even then that kind of ‘innocence’ would be an absence and mockery of the true nature of God.

The process of ‘salvation’ is exactly what I am talking about when I talk about ‘transformation of consciousness’ – I believe that salvation, repentance, forgiveness, grace, insight, healing are all the same thing, the one Miracle, seen from different angles. And I believe that ultimately Teshuvah and Metanoia are more powerful than the evil which appears to rule our minds and our world – because evil is nothing more than a misperception of the true nature of God, and all it takes is our choice to let God replace our misunderstandings with the truth. But we must learn how to make that choice, and learn to do it again and again, every moment of our lives, and that’s what’s hard.

Not easy at all. It takes every moment of all our lifetime – it’s what we’re here on Earth for. If it were a trivial thing, we would have already done it and the world would have been saved. But it *is* being done, little by little, piece by piece, in all the small moments and relationships of our lives.

I’m not talking just about contemplative practice (though I feel that’s a part of it), but about social interaction.

I think of it like breathing out and breathing in. We need times and spaces of relative ‘separation’ and quiet, so we can approach God free from our preconceptions; but we also need to then come back to the everyday world and let ourselves be transformed by that also. We can’t just withdraw entirely from the world and expect that to be enough. There is no such thing as ‘absolute’ separation between an individual and the rest of the world.

Life is not a quarantine situation – we can’t ‘save ourselves’ by isolation, selecting just the ‘pure’ and ‘faithful’ and taking them off to a secret place. This is what cults and political parties have attempted, time and again, and every time the corruption comes with them, because it’s *inside* us – our souls are literally and really *shared*, at a deep unconscious level, with everyone in the world around us. We are all members of the one body; we are all part of the same bread.

Mind you, I say this as someone who is a bit of a hermit and whose major life struggle is how to connect with people, so I have a long way to go in this regard.

“If you drop some black ink into clean water, the water will get polluted. It just does not work the other way around. The water does not eliminate the ink.”

And yet Jesus described the Kingdom of Heaven in exactly opposite terms: as leaven which transforms bread. And if you think about it, saying that evil permanently corrupts good is saying that there is a greater force than God. Is there? I don’t think so.