All things belong.
That’s a very interesting stance to take, because if all things belong, then you belong. The way you are. Suddenly we’re not in conflict with things around us, and we’re in relation with it.
“God don’t create no junk.”
Apply that to our lives and everything changes. Make a big mistake? Oops. Oh, well. What can you do after you’ve made a mistake, right?
But, hey, God don’t create no junk. Maybe God made me the way I am.
Maybe God made you the way you are. This is our true nature, the trueness of our being… stepping into yourself is literally stepping beyond all the criticisms and just seeing. Being—the simple, simple, simple life force of yourself.
There’s no mistake in that. Your actual being definitely belongs.
Your mistakes? Maybe not so much.
Hopefully we can learn from those and get over them a little bit. I mean, it is kind of nice to improve some, isn’t it?
But all things belong.
That gives us a totally different relationship with what’s around us. We live in a fairly stressful world these days.
The human world is stressful. We can learn to be within these structures in a positive way. We have to first be aware of ourselves. And the only way you can be aware of yourself is if you think that you belong.
Locate Yourself
You can’t be aware of yourself without being aware of where you are. And where you are definitely belongs.
It might be full of lots of garbage and weird things, but humans are the ones that created this complication. We’re also the ones that can turn it into a more beautiful way of interacting with the world. Each of us can only do that in little, tiny, tiny ways.
Belong in your world
I like to think that the most positive thing any of us could do is pick up garbage as we’re walking around. You pick up a little piece of garbage, and you find a trash can, and you put it in. If everybody did that, there’d be no garbage, right?
You’re belonging where you are by being a simple garbage picker upper. Another thing that you can always do is smile at people. Sometimes that’s all it takes to just literally change someone’s day.
Sometimes you’re in a situation where direct eye contact doesn’t really work. It’s not accepted. But you still belong there, right?
You can smile without actually having to connect with people. You can be a smiling presence. That is a really, really good way to interact with your world.
And you wouldn’t be doing that if you didn’t think that you belonged. You might not really belong in your social circle very well. You might not feel like you belong in your family well. But you belong in existence itself.
Your Work is Your Path
Your work is your path because there’s nothing in life that’s actually separate from anything else. Whatever we do for work—even washing the dishes, right?—is something that we’re contributing to the whole. It’s an action; it’s the way we stay involved with everything that we’re doing.
So often, the spiritual path—and non-duality in particular—seems to be about escaping life, getting away from the reality of who we are. But escaping is actually the problem. It’s not the solution.
We have been taught since we were very young that we’re not good enough, that there’s something about us that’s intrinsically wrong—and this is what we’re trying to get over. Doing nothing actually enhances that. The more you try to escape from life, the more you’re escaping from your relationships.
In Native wisdom, they would say you’re acting as if you have no relations. The more we try to avoid our work, the more we’re acting as if we have no relations. Maybe you have a job that you’re not completely satisfied with. It doesn’t feel like it’s really contributing toward the whole of humanity, or it’s not making you happy. Do it the best you can, all the same, because everything that happens leads into something else.
Start seeing life as a series of timelines. You go through all these various different things as time moves along, and everyone you meet has come through their own timeline. It’s also a series of place-lines, because we’re always moving, moving, moving. Our work is where these things meet together.
The more we can be real in our work, the more we can be real in our everyday life.