In God Makes the Rivers to Flow; An Anthology of the World’s Sacred Poetry & Prose, Eknath Easwaran includes a selection from Sri Sarada Devi entitled “The Whole World Is Your Own.”  I’ve written the following poem-like reflections inspired by this selection.

The Myth of Other

No one is a stranger, my child;

the whole world is your own.

—Sri Sarada Devi

We have been conditioned to believe there is an other—

another race, another nationality, another sex, another religion,

another age, another sexual preference, another class, another political party—

it seems natural to categorize others as different from us,

and it is tempting to believe we are somehow better than them,

we after all believe the right thing, we belong.

It’s an awakening to realize that not only is everybody your neighbor,

everybody is an extension of yourself,

and every fault you find with everybody else is,

on some level, within you.

It’s normal to judge, resent, blame, criticize.

It’s also a form of suffering.

The truth is only love.

Not only does God love everybody equally,

God manifests as everybody equally.

The differences that we see in behavior

are only different levels of awareness of this fact.

We are one with God.

We don’t have the consciousness of God,

but we have the potential for that consciousness.

There are levels of consciousness.

One is not necessarily better than the other,

it’s just that the higher one’s consciousness is,

the less one suffers and the less one causes suffering.

We all awaken at our own time, at our own pace,

over the course of many lifetimes.

No one’s journey is superior to any other.

It is just a journey.

There is no judgment in God.

Those things that we condemn as evil and wrong,

God understands.

God has compassion on the criminal and the victim.

God sees the true self beneath its distressing disguise.

God sees us only in our divinity.

We are perfect in God’s eyes.

God perceives our suffering as us and beyond us.

God promises to guide us toward healing,

to use our suffering for good.

There is an order to the universe, that underlies everything.

The chaos we see is an illusion.

Beneath it all is only perfection.

The world is our home.

Abundance is ours, because

God creates abundantly,

and we are a part of everything that is.

God gave us the world to be in.

Everything we see belongs to us.