Interconnectedness

All is Interconnected


When we try to pick anything out by itself,

we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

- John Muir


How can we fret and stew sub specie aeternitatis - under the calm gaze of ancient Tao? The salt of the sea is in our blood; the calcium of the rocks is in our bones; the genes of ten thousand generations of stalwart progenitors are in our cells. The sun shines and we smile. The winds rage and we bend before them. The blossoms open and we rejoice. Earth is our long home.

- Stewart W. Holmes, 1973



Omnia vivunt,

omnia inter se conexa

Everything is alive;

everything is interconnected.

- Cicero



As is the human body, so is the cosmic body.

As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.

As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.

As is the atom, so is the universe.

- The Upanishads


We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization. This would profoundly change the categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive interdependencies.

- Ludwig Von Bertalanffy




Lack of awareness of the basic unity

of organism and environment is

a serious and dangerous hallucination.

- Alan Watts




Life just seems so full of connections.

Most of the time we don't even pay attention

to the depth of life. We only see flat surfaces.

- Colin Neenan



Working in my garden or walking in the countryside, I have never come across anything in nature that is superfluous and does not fulfill a function. There seems to be no redundancy or unemployment in these natural worlds. Be it rock or plant, bird or tree, or even the bacteria within the soil, everything occupies a vital place in the dance of life.

- Michael Lindfield



At the deepest level of ecological awareness

you are talking about spiritual awareness.

Spiritual awareness is an understanding of being

imbedded in a larger whole, a cosmic whole,

of belonging to the universe.

- Fritjof Capra




A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.

- Albert Einstein




A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness

into the intricate web of life in which all things are

expressions of a single Whole.

You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit,

the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father,

but it can be known only as love.

- Joan Borysenko




There are sacred moments in life when we experience in rational and very

direct ways that separation, the boundary between ourselves and other

people and between ourselves and Nature, is illusion.

Oneness is reality.

We can experience that stasis is illusory and that reality is continual flux

and change on very subtle and also on gross levels of perception.

- Charlene Spretnak




You are only made of non-you elements.

That is, your body is composed entirely of non-body

elements - dirt, plants, decomposed bodies, stardust, etc..

Thinking about the human body in this way one may come

to understand that independent existence is a

mental construction, unverified by physical interrogation.

- Source Unknown




See deeply the beauty and interconnectedness

of all life; then think, speak and act

from what you see.

- Maggie Streincrohn Davis



It is especially important in this discussion to recognize the unity of the total process, from that first unimaginable moment of cosmic emergence through all its subsequent forms of expression until the present.

This unbreakable bond of relatedness that makes of the whole a universe becomes increasingly apparent to scientific observation, although this bond ultimately escapes scientific formulation or understanding. In virtue of this relatedness, everything is intimately present to everything else in the universe.

Nothing is completely itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal. However distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there.

The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.

- Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 1988, p. 91.




Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

- Alan Watts