Seeing God in All

An Indian teacher at the school where I teach asked me to suggest some teaching resources for a friend of his who had started teaching the same course as I was teaching in Bali. I made some suggestions and sent them in an internal email that the teacher forwarded to his friend. In turn, his friend responded with thanks and the teacher at school forwarded the email on to me. It began with the quote "if you cannot see God in all, you cannot see God at all". I'd been thinking about that idea a lot but this morning I was very busy with school matters and hadn't had time for a spiritual thought at all and I certainly wasn't expecting a little gem of wisdom to pop up at the top of an internal email. The author of the email is clearly Indian judging from his name and it was refreshing to receive a whiff of the divine amidst the mundane tasks that were occupying my morning. So many emails are generated nowadays and it's not a bad idea to embed a little spiritual wisdom within them to counteract the spell that the world casts over us, especially when we are at work.

Our daily, world-focused consciousness sees the figures in the foreground (people, animals and things) and ignores the background that they all share. Seeing God in all requires us to focus on the background instead of the foreground figures. This page from Ram Dass's "Be Here Now" expresses this idea very "graphically".