Entry #13: The interconnectedness of everything

Everything is connected to everything else, right? We are all part of the same organism or system if you prefer. Religion teaches this. Science confirms it. Even a child understands this. It's a simple concept.

But sometimes as we grow more (misunder)educated, sophistijaded and become “experts,” we lose sight of this concept by becoming specialized and too narrow in our thinking. We also learn to deny our senses and believe (mistakenly) that facts and figures connote the only truth, when any good statistician has probably read lies, damn lies and stats.

Let's play this out to one really worrisome possible outcome. Are we eventually all going to become datapoints with identifying signatures that define who we are and help those who should find us find us in the internether? What happens when the beauty of interconnectedness is turned on its head and we are turned into bits and bytes? When we are all just one degree separated? Is it possible to be too connected?

Interconnectedness is a beautiful idea; everything is ultimately connected to everything else implies a certain amount of responsibility to one another and stewardship of the planet. Doug Adams riffed in this idea in a few of his books when Dirk Gently’s (Holistic Detective Agency) expensed his trip to the Bahamas as part of the search for the woman’s lost cat which disappeared in London, justifying it by invoking the "interconnectedness of everything." (If you haven’t read any Doug Adams, you should).

Then there’s the butterfly effect, a related popular concept - "when a butterfly flaps its wings..." The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. While the butterfly does not cause the tornado, the flap of its wings is an essential part of the initial conditions resulting in a tornado. (Wikipedia). Wings flap in China, Hurricane in New Orleans, you know? It’s all connected.

From Buddhism we also know this to be true. There's karma - the law of moral causation which says basically that nothing happens to a person that he or she does not for some reason or other deserve based on present doings or past (life) actions (for Christians and farmers it’s "you reap what you sow"). Usually, you cannot see the actual and direct reason or reasons, but it's all connected.

But like you can’t know life without death, light without darkness, good without evil, is it also true that you can’t have interconnectedness without being found?