Indra’s Net

We are all connected. Even time has been shown to be much less linear than we perceive it. Quantum physics explores how parallel worlds can touch and cross, intersecting at unexpected times and places.

I laugh at the notion of man versus nature—as if humans are somehow apart from the world of animals and plants, insects, sunshine, or water. To accept such a thing is a firm step towards our own demise. No, we are not even masters of nature. We are IN nature, enmeshed like the mycelial web that feeds and passes messages between trees, deep underground. We are just facets in a much bigger, tangled web, fooling ourselves with our own hubris.

Buddhist teaching has a story that touches closer to truth—of a great net owned by the god Indra. Sometimes the net is described as being stretched far and far and father still, some say it encases Indra’s beautiful hair, holding the locks together, sparkling with the deity’s movements.

It is difficult to describe infinity to a mortal mind. I remember opening a door in a hotel once. This held a mirror, but so did the wall, and the two created reflections bouncing from one to the next. There was baffled me, then me again, smaller, forward and back, again and again—smaller and smaller, forever. Indra’s net is like this, encrusted with jewels at each intersection, which reflect and refract the sparkle of each other. Every facet is an image of another, on and on and on.

We lie when we say the writer is a lone wolf—or anyone for that matter. No one acts alone. We stand upon the shoulders of our ancestors, their DNA and stories remembered in our bodies and hearts. We stand amidst the presence of life’s experimentions across the millennia, journeying to what has become now and what is on its way to becoming tomorrow. We are just a blink in the infinitesimal.

And yet, here we are, somewhere on this net, dazzled by the jewels if we can clear the dust from our eyes enough to look at them, to stop, to wonder. So often, we just buzz past everyday magic, heads down in the grind of paying bills and meeting expectations.

Stop, listen, look. Notice the net. Notice the gems.

This is a way to speak of the cosmos, to visualize what is harder to grasp without a solid image. This is the role of myth—to make real what is difficult to understand. I can touch Indra’s net in my mind, see it glisten in the sunlight of a heavenly realm.

No one escapes this cosmic interconnectivity—not I nor you nor any being upon this earth and in our solar system and in the vastness of the Milky Way and beyond. We are part of one bigness, tangled and messy. But it’s a beautiful mess in its creative chaos, when we stop to look. There is the chickadee singing on the frosted treebranch, while further down the path the footprints of a white ermine plop-plop across the fresh fallen snow.

Perhaps the messy web is comforting in its own way, unbothered by needing to be perfectly ordered. It just is, while we make our way amidst the tangle, humming our tune and spinning our thread in the web.