Lesson 50: I am sustained by the Love of God.
“Sustainability” is a big word in the business world these days. Corporations are seeking ways to do business without furthering or increasing their harm to the environment. Some are even seeking a “circular” economy where waste is minimized by either recycling products wholesale or by the piece, or selling off used items at lower costs instead of scraping them.
They all seek to make their businesses sustainable in some way – so they can survive economic downturns or supply chain interruptions that are currently plaguing businesses due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The ego, too, seeks sustainability. It knows that the key to its lasting power to create a “circular” economy, too, where it keeps us in a circular train of thought, doggedly pursuing the answer to questions it will not allow us to find answers to. We chase our tails, wondering if this spiritual stuff is real or if it’s all just the same crap we’ve believed and rejected throughout our lives. Circular logic is the key to the ego’s sustainability.
The only thing that sustains us, though, is Love – and not the world’s romanticized, watered-down idea of love as something that happens to us personally or is conditioned on whether or not people meet our expectations of them. The Love of God is the only thing that is real – and nothing that unreal can truly sustain any of us.
Resources in this world run low, disasters interrupt the flow of goods and services, the ego’s questions keep us in perpetual doubt about how the world works and whether or not its even worth it to believe in something beyond its power. There is nothing that truly sustains us in this world. It’s all transient, all impermanent.
The only permanent thing is Love – that peace that passes all understanding – that non-dualistic state where the ego has no power to play the devil’s advocate because there is nothing that is opposite of love. We realize our innate oneness with everyone and every creature around us – and get a glimpse of what the Realm of God is like – peaceful, joyful and calm.
Author Cynthia Bourgeault says attaining that non-dualistic state where we understand that it is Love that sustains us, is, just as the Course is trying to teach us, learning a new way of seeing in the world – through the lens of the Holy and not the ego.
“Imagine,” she writes, “that there might be a different way of structuring the field of perception, an alternative way of wiring the brain that did not depend on splitting things into inside and outside, subject and object. Instead, one would grasp the entire pattern as a whole—holographically—through a way of perceiving that is sensory and embodied. Then one would indeed experience that signature sense of oneness—not, however, because one had broken into a whole new realm of spiritual experience, but because that tedious, ‘translator’ mechanism of the binary brain has finally been superseded. You see oneness because you see from oneness.”
It is this Love that allows us to see from oneness that truly sustains us, that allows us to travel through the seeming trials of our lives certain that any outcome is working for our highest good, no matter how messy the middle may seem.
“I am sustained by the Love of God” is the phrase that pays, as far as the Course is concerned. It is “the answer to every problem that will confront you, today and tomorrow and throughout time,” today’s lesson asserts.
The way out of this duality may seem counter-intuitive – but it is only through relationships – a deep connection with one another – that we come to realize we are one. When we can see the Holy within those around us – our perception changes, and we can begin to see from oneness and know that God’s Love truly is what sustains us all.
As Hafiz writes:
Who is
really living next door to you?
To what extent do you know the answer,
and
therefore for a minute now and then
are grateful for their presence?
You have
heard about God being indivisible;
is that just a rumor?
Is there a difference between God and existence?
Still, most
live as if there is
because slowly we learn.
Some
ingredient to solving this vital equation
may be missing.
It could be
the physical touch of someone
who knows the Truth.
Yes, someone who knows the Truth and lives it.
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