"Imagine there's no heaven," goes a song from the last century. Imagining can be fun. It can also be threatening. When we imagine, we contemplate moving from the security of the familiar to areas we don't know. Sometimes what we find is attractive, sometimes it's scary. When what we find is something we suspect may be true, that's when the real discomfort starts. It becomes difficult to return to what we used to consider the everyday, when a seed of doubt has been sown as to whether the everyday is in fact real.

Let's imagine for a moment that everything around us -- everything we see, hear, touch, smell, taste, or think of -- is actually God. That billboard, that corpse, that plane, that creek -- all God. And let's imagine that -- although we are completely surrounded in this way by God -- we have something wrong with us, something fundamentally wrong with us, that means we can't perceive God in all these things. The thing that is wrong with us is our preconceptions about what God is. Perhaps we think God's an old man with a flowing beard; perhaps we think God's some kind of abstract idea. Regardless, we are now in an impossible situation. We can't perceive this God by which we're totally surrounded with our eyes, because we can't see. We can't perceive him with our ears, because we can't hear. We can't even think about this God, because our mind is full of what we "know" God to be.

Under these circumstances, what could we do to perceive God?

Well, we could practice Step 11 and meditate. We could sit still, shutting down as best we can our five senses and our mind, which are the things that stop us finding this "everywhere" God. We could just be.

Meditation is not about making things happen, but letting things happen. If God really is to be found everywhere we look, listen, and so on, might it not be true that if we simply sit and be, we might be able to realize that -- far from being removed from God -- we are "swimming in God" every second of our lives?