What surrounds you?

What surrounds you? Whatever it is, it will exert a powerful effect on your emotional state. Think about watching those movies where the hero is in a tight spot and says, “We’re surrounded!” How do you feel at that point?

Chances are that you experience yourself as surrounded by various physical forms that are occupying physical space. There is probably furniture around you, a floor below you, a ceiling above. What else would you see as surrounding you? Yet once you see yourself surrounded by physical forms in physical space, you are automatically in a precarious spot. For who knows what those forms might do? They might malfunction. They might get damaged. More important yet, they might do something to you. Those forms we call bodies, the ones that move around and have a will of their own, have a way of doing things to you. And for that reason, you are always on guard.

Yet what if these aren’t your real surroundings? There is a lesson in the Course that says, “I am surrounded by the Love of God.” The prayer for that lesson claims that space is nothing more than “a meaningless belief.” Why? “For what surrounds Your Son and keeps him safe is Love itself.”

Just think about that for a moment. Imagine that, instead of space, you saw yourself surrounded by love. Imagine that, even while your body was surrounded by forms, you experienced yourself as living in a realm of pure love. Imagine walking through your day feeling that whatever was going on in your physical environment, your actual environment was love.

If you truly believed that, right now, you were literally surrounded by love, and that that was more real than being surrounded by physical space, how would you feel?