Here's a new song, inspired by the beautiful Buddhist teaching about Indra's Net. This is the latest offering in my "SongSparks!" series-- an imperfect performance, but I'm really happy with the song. Here's the basic story behind it:
Back several millenia, in the time of the Buddha, Indian people honored the Vedic god Indra, the Lord of the Heavens, The “head honcho” of all the gods, and he cast a net over everything in the universe. This net extended infinitely in all directions, so it was boundless and all-encompassing. At any point where the strands crossed, at each intersection of the threads, there hung a beautiful, shimmering jewel. Each jewel represents an individual soul, a separate being. Or some interpret each jewel as any distinct entity (a blade of grass, or even an atom—the smallest unit of matter). So you can imagine how many gazillions of jewels are all sparkling in this unfathomably vast net.
This great net is holographic. Each of these jewels is a perfect reflection of every other jewel in the net. Every jewel is a mirror of all the others. So the totality of creation is reflected in its completeness in each individual entity. And, because of this, whatever changes or affects any one of those jewels also affects, and is reflected in, every other jewel in this infinite network.
There is no such thing as independent existence in this model of reality. We are all inextricably linked in this great web of interconnection.
The great naturalist John Muir said:
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
What if we really lived our lives awake to this sense of being Interwoven? What if we truly understood that every thought, every action, every word we spoke, actually sent a ripple through the fabric of creation?
Mahatma Ghandi once said, "Recall the face of the poorest, most unfortunate person you have ever met, and ask whether your next act will be of any use to them."
Act as if your choice matters to another being, and to the whole of creation.
Because it does.
Comments