Luke 23:43 Meaning Jesus Said to Him

The answer to that turning is immediate and total: today. Not after a long penance, not in some far-off reward, but now, in the very moment the mind chooses love over fear. Paradise is not earned by suffering through to the end. It is entered the instant the choice is made, and the whole distance between condemnation and peace is crossed in a single shift toward the teacher the mind had forgotten.

The one who asked only to be remembered is told he is already home. Love is here, and the mind has only to accept it.

Paradise: the state of perfect peace, the mind's true home, entered the moment love is chosen. Today: the present instant, the only time in which the mind can ever choose and be healed.

A dying man asks only to be remembered, expecting nothing more than a place in some future kingdom. The answer he receives collapses that entire framework: not someday, but today, not a distant place, but this moment, entered fully.

Paradise is not a location reached after death. It is what is already here the instant you stop struggling against what is and rest completely in this moment, even a moment as stripped down as a cross. The dying man is told this because presence needs no time to arrive, no worthiness to earn, and no future to wait for. Wherever full acceptance of this moment happens, that is paradise, available now, not later.

Today is the word that undoes every postponement, and it means the answered state is entered now, not after death and not at some far reckoning. The thief who turns is any part of you that stops defending the outer facts and swings toward the awareness of being. He asks only to be remembered, and the reply is not someday but this very day.

Paradise is not a place reached at the end of a life. It is the fulfilled state, the wish felt as already so, occupied in the present. The two men are two directions inside one person: the one who rails at the senses and the one who turns and claims the imagined end. The turning is instant and the promise is instant with it. You do not wait to be with the thing you desire. The moment you inwardly assume it and feel yourself already there, you are there.

Paradise is not a distant reward posted somewhere in the sky. It is a state the brain enters when the rising energy floods the higher mind: ecstasy, rapture, the flash of divine wisdom that Paul called the third heaven, reachable now and reachable today. That is the whole force of the word today. The higher self, dying to the old carnal life, speaks to the part of a person still hanging in agony and promises it entry into that peak of consciousness the moment the lower mind lets go.

2 are lifted on either side of the center, the pineal and the pituitary, the 2 glands that must be raised together before the crown opens. The one who turns toward the center is drawn up with it into the same bright state.

Paradise: the peak state of consciousness, ecstasy and rapture and divine wisdom, that the awakened mind enters, not a walled garden but a height of feeling The 2 crucified beside the center: the pineal gland and the pituitary gland, the pair lifted on either side that must be raised together for the crown to open