Lesson 41: God goes with me wherever I go.
Several years ago, I fell into a deep depression. It was just like others had described it to me – a deep dark hole that you felt you could never climb out of, no matter what. Nothing in the world mattered to me. I called this my, “fuck it” stage of depression.
The house catches fire? “Fuck it.”
The dog dies? “Fuck it.”
I win the lottery? “Fuck it.”
Nothing, good or bad, could shake me from my darkness. During that time, one of my most beloved cats did, in fact, die, and while I missed him, it didn’t rip me apart like I thought it would. I could not sink deeper into darkness, even with his death.
I keenly felt a sense of separation – from the person I loved the most at that time and even the animals I loved the most. Nothing in the world brought me joy, and going within myself to try to find that joy made me even more depressed.
It wasn’t until my psychologist put me on anti-depressant medication that my world changed. Not because the medication made me feel better. In fact, I felt worse. The first day I took the meds, I felt invincible. I got so much done and felt better. As the weeks wore on, though, the meds helped even less than nothing. I felt angry all the time.
I called my psychologist.
“These meds are not working. They’re making me homicidal,” I told her.
“Are you having suicidal thoughts?” she asked in her clinically concerned voice.
“No!” I emphasized. “I’m fine. Everyone else must die.”
I stopped taking the medication and thought to myself, “There’s gotta be a better way.”
There was. I had recently been reading a lot of material about the stories we tell ourselves and how those stories shape the lives we lead and the world we create. I realized I had been repeating the same sad, woe-is-me, nobody-likes-me, everybody-hates-me stories to myself every single day since the depression had set in.
As the Course has been teaching us through these lessons, our thoughts create our reality. I was, of course, skeptical of the whole, “change your thoughts, change your life” New Age slogan, but when you’re at the bottom, you try anything that seems promising.
I changed my stories. I found reasons to celebrate, even if they were small. I began to transform stories of how the world done me wrong and how lonely I felt into stories about how I was making new connections in my world – no matter how small or tentative. I found something to celebrate every day and I forced myself to stop rehearsing the stories that made me sad.
What I discovered was true, my thoughts created a whole new, happier and more loving world. It didn’t happen overnight, of course. It still took me another year to dig myself out of the pit, but if I had followed this lesson, I think the time would have been much shorter.
During that time, I truly believed God had abandoned me in this pit of despair. My old Southern Baptist training kicked in and I believed that God, the superhero, would swoop down and save me – set my feet upon the rock and help me sing a new, happier song. I didn’t realize that I had created that separation and had been maintaining it by telling myself a story about a disappointing superhero God that never quite shows up in time to save you from a fatal fall.
I kept looking outside for my cure – in doctors, pills, therapists, people or gods to rescue me. This lesson says that’s not where our salvation comes from. It comes from within, from the holiness we already possess. God goes with us wherever we go because God is within. God is the creator we live and move and have our being in – and if we can wrap our minds around that, then “the ills of the world” find no foothold in our minds.
“You can never be deprived of your perfect holiness because its Source goes with you wherever you go,” today’s lesson says. “You can never suffer because the Source of all joy goes with you wherever you go. You can never be alone because the Source of all life goes with you wherever you go. Nothing can destroy your peace of mind because God goes with you wherever you go.”
Whether you’re in the pit of despair, or on the mountaintop, the Source of our holiness is always there. If you think you’re separated from God in any moment, that’s just your ego lying to you. Your Source is always there, ever available, waiting for you to notice and grab hold of your true power as a blessed Child of God.
Any form of despair means we are misusing our imagination.
Or as Hafiz puts it:
“For me, and for the one who is One with God,
imagination does not exist
“Whatever you might be able to do in a dream,
or in a thought or fantasy,
“I could literally pull from my pocket,
or just make appear in my hand.
“What kind of world is this then
that we live in?
“It has been make-believe since the beginning
and does not know any other way to act.”
Photo by Adrien Olichon from Pexels