One of the inescapable but sometimes unnoticed aspects of awakening is the discovery of our fundamental interconnectedness. We are not only composed of the same stuff physically, and members of the one earth’s many systems of life, we are part of what might be described in English as the web of being: Pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit. Our individuality is largely illusory – we are no more than ripples on the ocean of what is – but our indivisibility means that each affects each other, in an unbroken chain of connection.

Our coming to be at all involves each other, back through endless generations into a past long before we were human or even mammalian. Our slightest thought or longing changes things not merely for ourselves but for every other being. To see this, to realise that our practice is not merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns, changes our whole understanding of who we are and what we are about.

Joan Tollifson once wrote:

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.