Lesson 43: God is my Source. I cannot see apart from God.
I sometimes get my source and my channels all mixed up. Especially when I check my bank account. The middle of the month seems to be the most anxiety-producing time when I’m hoping nothing surprising shows up so the little remaining money I have will stretch to the next blessed paycheck.
I see the paycheck as my source. Coincidentally, the mortgage and car finance companies do, too. Today’s lesson reminds me that I am confused about what is what. My paycheck, as handy as it may be at keeping me fed and living indoors, is not my source – neither is the job that provides the regular pay.
God is my Source. If this job were to disappear tomorrow, something else would arise to take its place. What I needed would be provided until that happened. The in-between time may not be the lap of luxury – but all needs would be met. When I reflect the dwindling number in my bank account, I remind myself of this fact. I have never, not once, gone without my needs being met. My wants and desires? They will always be with me, but my needs? Always handled in some form or fashion.
This is what it’s like when you know God is your source. The paycheck, the job, the other streams of income are merely the channels that the Divine source uses to meet your needs (and sometimes your desires).
Source/channel confusion occurs when we see ourselves as separate from the Holy in any way, shape or form. Seeing my paycheck as my source puts me outside of my connection to the Universe. It makes me self-reliant – or more pointedly, reliant on my ego, which loves to tell me just how close to homelessness I really am each month.
When we know, without a doubt, that God is our Source, then we realize we can never see “apart” from God. We are all extension of the Holy who have forgotten who we truly are. That’s why we’re in this egoic, bodily world of separation in the first place. This lesson is another step and tool to remind us of who we truly are.
We are never apart from God, even when the ego convinces us that the gap between ourselves and the Holy is an infinite chasm never to be crossed. That chasm is an illusion, the product of our fevered, ego-driven imagination.
The truth is, there is nothing in this world that we can truly see as apart from God. Tables, pictures, world crises or other situations, they are never “apart” from God, because if God is our Source, then God infuses everything we believe we perceive in this world.
Perhaps it would be more useful to substitute the word “God” in today’s lesson with the word “Love.” The Course tells us that only Love is real – and God is Love. If we say then that “Love is my Source. I cannot see apart from Love,” then we can begin to understand that anything we perceive in this world without Love is not real. The strife and pain in the world is not Love – but it is a call for Love. The world’s suffering is a reminder to us that our holiness – our Source of Love – can heal the whole world if we become a channel for that Source to flow from freely.
Everything that is not love in this world calls for its source of Love to redeem it. Any time we are not seeing Love in this world, we are not perceiving correctly – we are not using the gift of Vision that God has given to us as Her children.
Today’s lesson is another step toward correcting our vision of the world. If we are not apart from God in any moment, then neither is anyone or any thing else we see in the world. When we look at the world through the Source of Love, we can see beyond the recalcitrant egos mucking up the world and offer Love and healing to ourselves and those around us.
Hafiz likens our bodies to “a tree and God a wind.”
“When
he moves me like this, like this,
angels bump head with each other
gathering beneath my cheeks,
holding their wine barrels, catching
the brilliant tear, pearl rain.
Love, a tree. When it moves like this.
How can our soul’s limbs not touch?”
Photo by Rakicevic Nenad from Pexels