"You Are Everything . . ."

The Problem and the Solution: “It’s All About Me”

One particular teaching of the Maya that I heard again and again from different shamans was “We are all one.” God is in everything and so we are all one in God. It was a few years after I had been to the land of the Maya that this teaching came back to me in an interesting way. I was at a little café where I was talking with a friend of mine, another Reiki Master.

We discussed the spiritual understanding that we are all one and not disconnected as it appears. And we also talked about how God’s energy is in everything. We finished our talk and went to our cars. I turned on my car radio as I drove out of the parking lot and onto the street. The very first words I heard were from a song by the Stylistics, a group from the 1970s. The words I heard captured the essence of what we had discussed: “You are everything and everything is you.” It was the refrain of the song and it was repeated four times.

In the weeks to follow, this happened three more times at the precise moment that I turned on my car radio and once in the post office. I was mailing my book, 8 Steps to Love to a radio show host so she could read it before I was to be a guest on her show. Out of nowhere, I heard the Stylistics singing: “You are everything and everything is you.” It seemed that the Divine was making sure that I got the message loud and clear: we are all interconnected.

Ellen, a woman who works at a facility for assisting cancer patients, was telling me a funny story. Her boss was complaining and in her complaints she was sounding very self-centered. She was good-natured and so the staff put on her desk a sign that read, “It’s all about me!” As I heard this story, I thought to myself this is the problem of our narcissistic self-centeredness and it is the solution if we extend the definition of who this me is when we say “It’s all about me.”

When we consider that we are all one then we extend the boundaries of me to include the world. We can do this by changing the song words of the Stylistics, “You are everything and everything is you” to the following:

“I AM everything and everything is me!”

When you go to the coffee shop, the man or woman taking your order is you. As you drive along in your car, the other drivers are you even the driver who cuts you off. Consider this during the course of your day. As you look at anything, people, trees, animals, road, sidewalks, sky, clouds, sun and so forth, you can think to yourself, “It is all me!”

For in the depth of our heart, we discover that indeed we are all one. This being the case, we can begin to identify with all of humanity. If we extend our sense of me, we realize that we are the waiter at the restaurant. We are the taxi driver. We are the barking dog in our neighborhood. We are the screaming baby in the movie theater. As we see a plane overhead, we are the pilot and the passengers on that plane. We are also the blue sky and the clouds.

• Today, extend your sense of yourself. Consider how we are the world and the world is us. Me is extended beyond a cherished separate self-image to include all of life. Laboratory experiments done by quantum physicists have demonstrated that everything is "entangled" at the suatomic level of the all-pervaisve quantum field. Walt Whitman intuited this. He attempted to extend his sense of himself in his Song of Myself found in his famous volume, Leaves of Grass.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me
As good belongs to you.