The Interwebs

The shooting in Arizona has left me a little out of sorts. Random acts of senseless violence appear with some frequency in our society, but we still draw in our collective breath each time another fruit loop releases his grip on the last strand of his sanity and starts blasting away.  The violence in Tucson was tragic, to be sure. One glimmer of hope to be derived from this event appears in the overwhelming response of the ordinary people. Despite our differences, political and social, we all condemn the loss of life and grieve together.  Maybe that’s not a lot, but to me it means that we’re still cognizant of our connection to one another, in some minor way.

One of the earliest Buddhist allegories I recall learning about in some Zendo or other was that of Indra’s Net. A core teaching of Buddhism is that all phenomena are intimately connected. The mythical structure of Indra's net, symbolizes the universe and represents the idea that infinitely repeated mutual relations exist between all members of the universe. Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels, representing the unity and mutual dependence of all phenomena. Alan Watts described it as:

"… a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." --Alan Watts^[1]

Reminders of our inconnectedness seem in short supply these days. The mass media is more likely to focus on conflict, since conflict sells ad space and advertisements sell products. As a bit of an aside, the association between conflict and consumerism is something to ponder, although it is a bit beyond the scope of today’s post. It is unfortunate that tragedy seems to be the place where we most recognize our collective humanity, but it’s also the thing that seems to most draw our collective attention. Like moths to the flame, we fly into the light together, only to recognize too late that we’re burning.