How Exactly Is God in Everything I see? Summary of a Class Presentation

by Robert Perry

In yesterday’s class, I asked how can God be in everything we see without that this implying that the forms we see are real, either as God-stuff taking form or as real houses for God’s Spirit. The answer I gave was two-fold. I’ll summarize both sides here.

The first explanation is that God’s purpose is in everything. In the Course, physical forms are illusions. They are transparent empty containers, without inherent content, meaningless in themselves. What gives them meaning is the purpose that they have. We typically see forms as having an egoic purpose: “How can that thing serve my separate interests?” In truth, however, all things are there to serve God’s purpose, which is the awakening of His Son (by being used as vehicles for expressing love). That is the purpose the Holy Spirit sees in them. That is the purpose our minds can assign to them (or, as Lesson 30 says, “project” onto them). And that is the purpose that we lovingly placed in them—as a tiny “spark” of our overall intent—when we made the world.

Imagine seeing God’s holy purpose in everything you see. And not just in what you see, but also in what you hear. As Lesson 264 has us say, “You are in all the things I look upon, the sounds I hear….” Imagine experiencing yourself as literally surrounded by God’s purpose and therefore surrounded by God. After all, how can God’s purpose be separated from God Himself?

My second explanation is that God’s Son is, in a sense, in everything we see. The Course talks about “all living things” as being parts of the Sonship. This naturally includes animals, but it also includes plants—the Workbook mentions trees and flowers. It even includes inanimate things. The Text mentions a grain of sand and the Workbook mentions wind and waves.

We can understand this if we understand the relationship between ourselves and our own body. Each of us is a divine Son of God who dreams that it lives in this human body as a flawed and finite human being. We are not actually in this body, which, being unreal, could never house the eternally real. That, however, is our experience–that we are inside this thing.

Now realize that every form you see is analogous to a human body. It is a form that a part of the Sonship sees itself as living in. There is, for example, a Son of God who experiences itself living in that dog body, or in that tree, or even in that rock. Surely those Sons are more asleep, less conscious, than the Sons that live in human bodies. But the principle is the same. And if God’s Son is “in” that body, then God Himself is “in” that body, for every Son is a “host” to God.

We see this in Helen’s poem “The Little Things of God”:

Gardens are filled with the little things of God
That sing and twitter in a tiny voice,
And flash from blade to blade across the grass.
They shine with morning and they glow at night,
And through the daylight wind and hum and turn,
Wheeling among the flowers as they live
Their little lives, and then they disappear.
Yet when they enter in eternity,
They will be part of God along with me.

Lesson 156 speaks in memorable images of all things in nature treating us like royalty when we truly realize the light of God in us. The trees will shade us and spread a soft carpet before us. The flowers will fill the air with beautiful scents. The waves will bow down before us. As the light of God in us steps forward, the light in them will become more awake, and pay homage to the awakening power within us.

All of this gives specific meaning to the memorable statement in the Text:

There is no time, no place, no state where God is absent. There is nothing to be feared. (T-29.1:1-2)

 

[Please note: ACIM passages quoted in this article reference the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) Edition.]

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