How to be inclusive? The answer is you can’t.
This is such a good example of why nonduality is such a brilliant teaching, because nonduality goes at a spiritual question from the negative rather than the positive.
If you try to go possitive you immediately become lost in infinite details. How to be inclusive? “I want to be inclusive” – you’ve immediately tied yourself into a circle that you can’t get out of.
For instance, how are you going to be inclusive of people who don’t want to be inclusive, right?
Instead, it’s better to go at it from the negative side, just the way nonduality does. Instead of saying “I want to be inclusive,” say, “I want to try to not exclude people. I would like to work on the steps to not exclude people.”
Now you’re honest. Now you have a way to discern. For instance, say you’re going to have a group gathering and you want to not exclude people. Are you going to not exclude serial killers? Are you going to not exclude really obnoxious people who come in and yell and scream?
When you go at it from this point of view, now you have the ability to be discerning. “I want to try to not exclude people, but serial killers aren’t invited.”
Then you can target your ideal. You can say what you really mean. Perhaps we want to make sure that we don’t exclude immigrants, or we want to make sure that we don’t exclude fundamental Christians, or we want to make sure that we don’t exclude Muslims. Now we can actually start talking about real things we can do, real steps we can take, to not exclude people.
If we say, “I want to be inclusive,” it’s just a nebulous idea that turns into chaos. Anytime I hear a group saying, “We want to be inclusive,” I’m pretty sure that I’m going to do something that’s going to get me excluded from that group, because it turns into a belief system. It turns into a way to judge other people.
Now this group can judge others, “They’re not inclusive!”
So you just excluded those people.
It’s like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. A chain reaction happens. You put yourself into a situation where you have to lie. You either have to notice that you are a hypocrite when you exclude people, or refuse to see it. And lying to yourself is the number one way to never be able to figure out who you are. When we lie to ourselves we have to start believing the lie, or else we can’t maintain it.
This is the exact same thing with nonduality. This is why nonduality doesn’t focus on the unity and the oneness of everything, even though that’s the point of the whole thing. It focuses on all the ways that we divide ourselves from unity.
With a nonduality focus you can work through all the ways you divide yourself from unity by your concepts and belief systems.
What’s a belief? What does it feel like? Get familiar with that.
You divide yourself from unity by not noticing unity. Solution: pay attention and notice more often.
It’s easier to come to reality from this point of view rather than a nebulous ‘everything’s one’ belief.
Inclusion is a great ideal. It works better to fine-tune it down to ‘let’s not exclude people as much as possible.'”