The Web of Life

I spent most of yesterday in Superior Court listening to convicted felons asking for a pardon or to have their sentences commuted. In most of the cases both the perpetrators and the victims stood before the board and pled their cases. I saw how each person was locked up in the agony of the circumstances, whether they were behind bars or not. The whole courtroom involved in a dance of wanting to be free and everyone and everything was interconnected.

I have long been interested in how we are all interconnected. Chief Seattle said; “Man does not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” This idea is also communicated in the image of the universe described in the net of the Vedic god Indra. Indra's net is made up of multifaceted jewels and at the tip of each jewel is reflected all of the other jewels. In the Buddhist tradition the myth suggests that we are intimately connected by a net hung by a skilled craftsman. This web stretches infinitely in all directions, with pearls, glittering like stars at each point where the web is connected, reflecting one into another. When Newtonian physics gave way to quantum physics, science gave legitimacy to the interconnectedness of life. 

Philosophically, interconnectedness stands in opposition to separateness which suggests that we are isolated, sovereign, and self-contained. Since western civilization is based on rational thought, materialism, science, economics and a legal system, there is an assumption that the world is composed of discrete units. The idea of interconnectedness rattles the foundations of our whole society. But each one of us are the jewels reflecting into and off of each other, our full selves extending beyond the boundaries of our skin.

Think about a society based on a deep understanding of such interconnectedness, where individuals would be as loathe to hurting their neighbor or the ecosystem as they would be to burning down their houses. Individual behaviors and institutions for the common good that now are maintained through the questionable means of moral persuasion, guilt, and at times force would become outdated. A full understanding of our interconnectedness is just the sort of thing that this suffering planet needs for us to wake up and respect each other.