Indra's Pearls

 Guess what?  We are all connected!  A hundred years from now, our children will study our recent preoccupation with divisions of ethnicity, race, religion, and national citizenship, and say, “What were they thinking?”

Quantum physics has already proved that we are all connected.  Just as butterfly wings create a small disturbance in the wind off the West Coast of Africa that results in a Caribbean hurricane, human actions anywhere can create human consequences everywhere, especially when you consider the grouchy used car salesman in New Jersey. 

Global warming shows that we are all connected by one world ecosystem.  Pollution in the northern hemisphere is killing babies in the southern hemisphere.  Alaskan bark beetles, thriving from 20 warm summers, have chewed up four million acres of spruce trees.  Floods, draughts, and hurricanes have increased in frequency and intensity.  Fresh water is decreasing, causing an increase in malaria.  Polar bears are becoming skinny.

All the major religions of the world have as a central truth that we are all connected.  The Hindu goddess, Indra, wraps her hair around an infinite number of pearls. Each pearl reflects, and is reflected by all the other pearls, each connected to, reflecting, and composed of, all the others. We are all little threads of life wrapped around the stars in a vast web of existence--little innumerable nodes circling the universe and running into each other in the supermarket.

Do we want to leave the last tracks of naked feet on an earth vacated by perpetual warfare, famine and disease?  Do we want to leave our children and grandchildren a brambly, grassless, yellow earth wobbling around a yellow sun? Do we want our legacy to be dry river beds filled with the dusty remains of dead soldiers, and Manhattan condos with nothing left but the roaches?

After human extinction, perhaps a distant traveler from beyond the Milky Way will lay down new footprints of some sort on the vacant earth, and say, “What were they thinking?” 

Today, all fields of human knowledge are moving in the direction of “wholes” rather than “parts.”  Our social systems thinking is well behind the best of science and religion.  We need to stop thinking about people by placing them in  categories; we need to look at the larger social system when making decisions; we need to stop expecting people to change in a social vacuum-- we need to take care of ourselves, but also take care of others, especially mother-in-laws.

We are not all alone; we are all connected.