Everything is connected. Literally.

Everything is connected. Literally.

The three seals or marks of existence are that:

1. Everything is impermanent; nothing stays the same, everything changes.

2. Everything has no-self nature; nothing is solid, everything is made up of other things.

3. Everything is marked by incompleteness; it has the quality of dissatisfaction; life is marked by suffering.

Looking at these attributes closely, some insights become clear. If everything changes, I can’t depend on my happiness to always be there, nor can I depend on my sadness and suffering to persist. And even this experience of “I-ness”—the sense of self that I point to and say, “that’s me”—that’s impermanent and subject to change. And since everything is made up of other things, and nothing is solid, then my sense of self is made up of other things too, and all these things are in turn made up of other things, and all these things-made-of-other-things are all constantly changing. So what is there that is solid that I can point to and say, this exists, that’s me? What a disorienting conclusion!

If I continue to examine these insights, it becomes clear to me that it is my insistence to relate to everything as solid and permanent that results in my sense that nothing fits quite right. I want to be rich, to be financially comfortable; yet upon reaching the benchmark I’ve set for myself, it’s not quite what I imagined. I plan a vacation to a tropical island (psh, I wish!), and yet upon getting there, it’s not what I planned; nothing happens the way I wanted it to; and even this ends and I must return home to my “normal” life.

Just focusing on no-self, once one begins to accept the validity of this proposition, and pays attention to the reality that backs up the claim, there is nothing that can be pointed to as “me” or “myself.” The other conclusion that can be drawn from this, is that there is also nothing that can be pointed to that is not myself. For if the boundaries that make up “me” are fluid, then the boundaries that make up the rest of the universe are fluid. I am what I eat, after all; and what I eat is made up of what it eats. And what-I-eat eats grass; the grass “eats” the nutrients and water in the soil, carbon dioxide in the air, and sunlight. Or I go straight to the source, and eat the plants that feed on air, soil and sunlight. So I can draw the logical conclusion that I am also the grass, the soil, the air, the water, and the sunlight.

So what is not me? How could we possibly say that we are separate from each other, from the rest of the other 7 billion human beings on this pale blue dot? Then, too, how can we possible separate ourselves from the rest of the living inhabitants of this space rock? We all share and recycle and reuse the same particles, the same elements, the same carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen that was produced in the nebula that condensed into our sun all those tens of billions of years ago. And we have the audacity to declare ourselves separate from each other?

Now, don’t get me wrong: to say “we are all one” ignores the fact that we are nonetheless 7 billion separate individual human beings, among billions and billions more sentient beings on the planet Earth. But to say that we are not all one ignores our commonality. So Zen gets around this by asserting that we are “not two.” Not one, but not two. For here I am writing this, in this moment; and there you are reading this, in that moment; we are separated by space and time and social media algorithms; yet in the act of sharing, writer and reader are already joined in communion. Everything is connected, literally.

All movements for social justice, therefore, have their justification already cut out for them. Our common birthright, our shared existence already links our welfare. “Nobody is free until everybody is free” ceases to be a clever maxim but a law of the universe. Because we are literally all connected. Everyone, everything, is stardust, is earth-dust, is moon-dust, is Jupiter-dust. In Indra’s net, each jewel making up the nodes of the net are physically linked to every other infinite jewel in the net; we are all intricately linked to each other’s existence and welfare. And therefore the main diseases of the 21st century are primarily of spiritual origin; it is what threatens to sever the links and connections between us that cause us the most problems. And racism, sexism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy: all these sever the links of connection, or are a rot on the netting that connect us. They thrive on disassociation and disharmony. They feed off of the three poisons: ignorance, hatred and greed. They exist in a world in which people believe the delusion that we are separate from each other, that our liberation is not bound up in the liberation of all other beings. And that delusion helps feed the runaway aversion that is hatred: I hate you because I think you are different from me. And in place of the connections that feed us with love and wisdom and community, they inject greed and compulsion: instead of love, I choose runaway craving and desire to fill the emptiness inside me.

So the place to start, in my opinion, is inquiry. To identify the questions, and then develop the habit, the space in our lives to “live the questions” together. How can I better live in harmony with others? How can I use the undue privileges that have been bestowed upon me since before I was born due to capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy to help others who have not received those privileges and immunities? How can I practice “not-two” living, “not-two” thinking, “not-two” being and seeing? In that way, living the questions together, we already enact the interconnectedness of reality and repair the severed netting between Indra’s jewels.

Join me. What am I? What are you? What are we?