Me! Me! Me!

Me, Me, Me

That’s the world we live in right now, right? I mean, we could even call it the cult of “me.” From the day we’re born, we’re taught to be self-concerned. Look out for number one, you know, survival of the fittest. We’re taught, “my toys, my thoughts, my feelings, me, me, me.” And so much of our spirituality is about creating your own reality. Like, you’re going to create your own reality? What about everybody else? Creating wealth is always a “me” thing.

Money is such a great example because if you have a lot of money, you can’t just give it away. The rules around it are so huge. I mean, you legally can’t just give it away; you have to go through all sorts of steps. But then, also, giving away money turns out to be destructive to other people. Because money is a thing, and when we’re always thinking “me, me, me,” we’re turning everybody else into an “other.” We’re not talking about our relationship between things.

Imagine a baby—you hand a baby a rattle. “Here’s your rattle. Mine.” Instead, what if we were giving messages about the relationship to the rattle? Like, who made it? Where did it come from? Making the sound with the rattle—how that goes out and interacts with everyone in the room. So, we’re taught from when we’re very, very young to be completely self-concerned, and school totally solidifies this for us. I mean, it’s just literally everybody out for themselves.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, right? We know this, we know this. But what is the cure for it? How do we step beyond it? Simple. Just know that this is a destructive thing—to always be thinking about “me.” Expand. Your brain is designed to run in a very expansive, inclusive way. Let your brain expand out of the tiny little language knowledge that we’re all addicted to. Expand it out. The second you expand, you know that you’re not in this thing by yourself. You are literally surrounded with relationships to everything. We are completely intertwined with each other.

So, just use that as a daily test. How much can you take “I,” “my,” “me” out of your thinking and your logic? Like, when you’re going to take a step and do something, think, “So what about everybody else?” This is why environmental thinking is so healthy because it’s like, “Where did this food come from? How is this water coming here? How is my interacting with the landscape making changes that affect everyone else?” That is a way more important way for us to wake up to the human responsibility of living than environmental activism. Environmental activism then comes out of this—like we notice, we start noticing how we are affecting the world, and then we start acting on it.

I was thinking this morning, what would it take to live a garbage-free life? The very first step would be to just simply start noticing your garbage, and that’s probably a way more important result than the actual recycling that happens in recycling. Just simply separating all your things and becoming really conscious of where does all this stuff come from? That starts waking you up because it just becomes so obvious—there’s so much of it, so much garbage.

And another way that garbage can be a very enlightening practice is that our societies are set up so that our garbage just comes into our house in a very convenient way and then goes out of our house in a super, super convenient way. Every week a big truck comes and just hauls it away, and you never see it again. Invisible destruction, right? All from being self-centered. All from this me, me, me place.

Even loneliness is me, me, me, right? Start really looking into how you are interacting with things, and your interaction with things will grow. Your ability to interact with other people will grow and expand. This is the next big change that’s going to happen in society. So far, we’ve had this big unconscious change into just destruction. The way we live is very destructive. We take a conscious change into how we’re living, and we’re all going to want to live in relationship with everything. The me, me, me just goes away.

And instead of “me,” don’t replace it with “another.” Don’t say, “Oh, I’m only thinking about you.” That won’t work either. Instead of “me,” just focus on the relationships between things. This is where we need to go to make life, society, and our communities completely different, thriving places for human beings and all of our relations to live.