some food for thought

bogwalrus

this is a small piece i read online from a chap named will arntz who co wrote what the bleep?


Quantum entanglement means that everything in the universe is connected.
This is, after all, what the mystics have been saying forever — we are one. And not just we are one, everything is one. Everything is connected. The picture of separateness is just a description of the world, but underlying it is connectivity, unity, oneness.


It's been a puzzle to me, this state of the world. Most of the people you meet are really fine people. They help other folks. If another trips and falls in front of them they help them up. Most people care for their families, their homes, their culture. And yet vast populations are starving, hiding from bombs, and being poisoned from the environment. Why why why?

We can blame politicians, religious leaders, fanatics all day... but in the end it all stems from the blindness to the simple truth that everything is connected. Think about it. If someone in your family was without food, you'd make sure they got some. Everyone pretty much knows there is a connection in the family. But what if that family was humanity? (It already is — but what if we acted like it.)

And not just people. This spaceship earth. Finally, the consequences of ignoring connectivity are being made manifest. Ecologically it is a mess. From the lens of nature we can see clearly how interconnection is the rule of the cosmos. Here's my favorite example: The forests of Scotland. What forests, you say? Exactly.

For some reason humans have been at war with wolves for millennium. So we systematically exterminated them. Governments have put a bounty on their heads, supposedly because they attacked people, so they killed the wolves in Scotland. Because of that, the deer multiplied out of control, the deer started eating the tender young (tasty) shoots of trees,so the trees never grew. End of the forests.

Some decades ago some people realized this and petitioned the government to bring the wolves back, but it was argued that the wolves would eat children. SO, they were not brought back. Now it turns out that over the last century there were only a handful of people attacked by wolves, yet thousands of people in Scotland have died because of hitting a deer on the road. (Now that's Karma!)

And in the U.S.? Two weeks ago I watched a National Geographic show about how introducing wolves back into Yellowstone Park has miraculously transformed the ecosystems. It said you cannot remove a "top predator" without massively changing the chain of life. The next day I got an email about how the current administration was introducing policies to fund hunters to go in (by helicopter) to rid Yellowstone of wolves. Once more substituting nature's predator by the nastiest one this planet has ever seen — us.

Once more humans think they can ignore the sublime interconnection of all things and arrogantly go in and do whatever they want for their own benefit. (The policy was supported by ranchers and developers.) And don't think for a moment its just a few folks in Washington.

I submit for your observation that 99% of the problems in the world are due to not seeing the whole, or everything as one's own self. And its not that we haven't been warned. "Do unto others as you do unto yourself". (How this translates into "onward Christian soldiers" is a mystery to me.)

The history of this planet seems to have been largely motivated (manipulated) by the idea of: them versus us. Dog eat dog. Less for you means more for me. (And more for me means a better life.) America is a shining example of that. Look at the energy we are gluttons of. We waddle through the aisles of commerce, jamming everything we can into our consumptive maw, trying to fill our lives full.

And yet. And yet... Fullness only comes from completion, or the whole, or the unity of all things. Ecology is trying to warn us to get our heads out of where ever they've been, and realize the way the Universe is wired and get in step. Those people we think of as our enemies are mostly — 99 percent - just like us. And that one percent is more often than not the spice of life.

MeditationMom

Good and evil are also connected.
One cannot exist without the other.

You may like this from the Tao:

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other;
High and Low rest upon each other;
Front and back follow one another.