If You Can’t Love Everybody, You’ll Never Completely Love Yourself - Grasshopper

Everybody??? Yes, everybody. It's not as improbable as it appears, and it's easier than you think. The benefit is far greater than you may imagine.

Let me define love as one of the great modern day mystics, Jerry Stocking does. Jerry says love is "inclusion." I never fully grasped what he meant by that until The Grasshopper presented me with the topic of this article.

The phrase, "Spaceship Earth" was popularized by Buckminster Fuller in relation to the depletion of earth's fossil fuels. The concept for me illustrates the downside of not including everyone. If earth and all its inhabitants are enclosed in a traveling spaceship, and you bomb the part of the spaceship that you don't include, you suffer the consequences as well.

We tend to think of love as something sacred that we only feel for those closest to us. We're half right. Love is sacred. But it's meant for everyone, even those deemed farthest from us who mean us harm. And before you label me a doctrine preaching, cheek turner, let me state that it is not necessary to like everybody and their dastardly deeds.

There are plenty of people you'll never warm up to. Their list of actions goes from abominable acts to minor annoyances. These are the people we war with, or incarcerate in prisons and institutions so they don't do further harm to the community or themselves. This list also includes the people we don't invite to our backyard barbeque.

Yet, you have to love them; include them.  Let me explain.

It's a matter of reality vs. illusion. The illusion is that we, and all our loved ones, are separate entities from those we abhor or have no time for. The reality is that the worm infested apple on another branch of our tree is also a part of our tree.

We all come from and return to the same stuff. Then for the short time we are here, we pretend that we have nothing in common with certain people. Eckhart Tolle reminds us that in a certain number of years we will all have something very much in common. We will be rotting corpses.

The trick to including everybody is to recognize that it's already a reality. Everybody is already part of us because we all come from the same tree and travel in the same spaceship. The actions of these "other" people are also realities.  

Again, referring to Tolle's teachings, we are asked to make a space for their actions. If we cannot make a space for what they've done, if we cannot include it in our personal reality, we deny the obvious and we suffer. 

This is in no way about condoning the actions or not addressing them; it's about acknowledging them as a reality. Not doing so is similar to the proverbial pile of dirt under the rug that is noticed by all and acknowledged by few. When we pretend it isn't there, we leave it not included. This repeated action causes festering beneath our surface and forms a subliminal wall that seals us off into pseudo separateness. No actions of accord can come from this place.

This is not to say that peoples' actions should have no consequences. Everybody eventually pays. The time frame may not be to our liking, and it may not be us that settle the score, but the payback is inevitable. Cosmic retribution is alive and well for all of us.

Including your own foibles also pays dividends. It's called acceptance which opens the door to forgiveness. Fessing up keeps us from freezing up and staying in ice-o-lation.

When we recognize that we all come from the same source and that our human forms are temporary and flawed, we begin to appreciate that what we love in another is the spirit that animates them. It's the same spirit that animates us. The only differences between us and them are the shapes and colors of our temporal bodies and the actions of the respective egos.

The ego, which is a mind made form, is all about separation. That's what keeps it alive. That's what keeps it from loving and including. If you deny the animating spirit of another, you deny it in yourself. It's pure logic. The person is never ungodly - only their actions are.

Once we acknowledge oneness, other people begin to take on a whole new hue. We open our eyes to the sacredness of spirit and we spend less time finding ways to withhold love from ourselves and others. We enjoy a finer appreciation of spirit and are able to let more of it into our lives. We begin to make peace with ourselves and others.

Some choose to contemplate the Zen like question of "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" I request that you ponder this:  

"Neither an egg shell, or an egg yolk, nor an egg white, alone, is an egg.  They are parts of the whole - same as you and me."

All the best,
John