Title: Interconnection Deviser

Gender: Female

Age: 34

Sun Sign: Aquarius

Chinese Sign: Water Ox

Location: Virginia

Don't polish the mirror, just use it!!

Indra's Net

This metaphor evokes the net that hangs over the palace of Lord Indra, king of the gods in Indian mythology.  (It is also referred to in the Avatamsaka Sutra, another Buddhist Mahayana scripture. ) Imagine a kind of spider's web in which at each node appears a mirrored sphere – a pearl or gem – which reflects all the other mirrors and vice versa infinitely. In this way, each infinitesimal part of the universe encodes all of the universe within it in a kind of holographic fractal.  At each node of the net where threads cross there is a perfectly clear gem that reflects all the other gems in the net. As each gem reflects every other one; so are you affected by every other system in the universe. Each node or jewel, representing an individual, simply reflects the qualities of all other nodes, inferring the notion of 'not-self' or a lack of a solid and real inherent self, as seen in the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism and Buddhism in general.

The meaning is that each object in the world is not a phenomenon in and of itself.  It   involves every other object; it is everything else.  Further, “In every particle of dust, there are present Buddhas without number.”  That can be interpreted as signifying that the infinite whole of existence is permeated throughout with Buddha-nature.  As the threads of Indra's net bind the gems to the net so do our physical bodies bind our minds and other physical entities bind other systems to the universe. Through the threads we reach each other, passing information across the expanses of space.

The view of contemporary scientist, Fritjof Capra, is that the net is more than mere metaphor.   In The Tao of Physics(1975) he wrote: “… particles are dynamically composed of one another in a self-consistent way, and in that sense can be said to 'contain' one another.”  Later, in chapter 8 of The Turning Point (1982) he wrote: “The similarity of this image to the hadron bootstrap is indeed striking.  The metaphor of Indra's net may justly be called the first bootstrap model, created by the Eastern sages some 2,500 years before the beginning of particle physics.”

Indra's Net shoots holes in the assumption or imputation of a solid and fixed universe 'out there'. The capacity of one jewel to reflect the light of another jewel from the other edge of infinity is something that is difficult for the linear mind, rational mind to comprehend. The fact that all nodes are simply reflections indicates that there is no particular single source point from where it all arises. The ability to reflect the entirety of all light in the universe attests to the inherent transcendant wisdom that is at the core of all nodes, representing all sentient beings, and to the inherent Buddha Nature.

That's alot of dead words to say “We're all connected”.

The reason I'm here is the same reason we're all here. We feel the pull in our own way- the pull towards a common ground and higher purpose. That thing that gets us out of the bed in the morning thinking “I'll try again”. The twinge of recognition when you meet someone who's also trying to wake up during his or her life.  We reflect as a group the progress of the least of our friends and the mightiest.

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