Quoting from The Power of Now p.121

I always thought that true enlightenment is not possible except through love in a relationship between a man and a woman. Isn't that 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?

In other words, you are waiting for an event in time to save you. Is this not the core error 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 complete sense of self attainment 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 unconcious 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 inseperable 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 and good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. 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.