Monday, March 1, 2010

I am because you are


Watching winter Olympics for the past 17 days reaffirmed my belief in the principle of emptiness and interconnectedness.

Physicist David Bohm suggested that one of the key factors giving rise to the pervasive strife between peoples and nations is “a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected...where each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent”.

A realization of emptiness, of our profound interdependence with each other and the world surrounding us, decreases egotism and increases genuine concern for all life. Olympics showed us that the power of interconnectedness affirms our uniqueness on the conventional level. The pride that came with each medal for the participating nations/individuals (14 GOLD MEDALS for Canada) was showcased across the world.

As Vic Mansfield very eloquently makes connections between Tibetan Buddhism and Modern Physics in his book “If my deepest reality is of mutual dependence upon other life (forms) and my surroundings, then how can I be concerned with just me? How can I focus on the needs of merely one intersection of the innumerable dependency relations defining all persons and things? If each person is an interdependent cell in the body of humanity, how can I focus on the desires of just one and thereby harm the whole?”

Thanks to the hockey game between Canada/US (3-2), I have way more appreciation for quantum nonlocality. (I am sure this maple leaf hockey loving nation felt a wave of pride in the sudden death round.) Rather than self existing individuals we are expressions of our mutual connectedness to each other, our community, and the larger environment. It follows then that, if you suffer, I suffer. If you are happy, then I am happy.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu states, “A self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I have gifts that you do not have, so consequently I am unique – you have gifts that I do not have, so you are unique...We are made for a delicate network of interdependence”

My very existence requires your existence. There is no such thing as isolated or independent existence, whether we speak of particles or humans.

The winter games in Vancouver definitely resonated with the ancient South African principle of Ubuntu, “I am because you are”.

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