Recently I went out camping, and one thing I kept thinking of is "your pee carries something of yourself with it, so what happens with that something when you pee outdoors"? Of course, here "pee" is a stand-in for any human activity, as we can't help but leave traces of ourselves wherever we go. But for the sake of scatological humor, let's go with "pee" as the case in point for the rest of this post.

If you stop to think about it, your pee will carry your DNA, or energy, or whatever you want to call it-a piece of your "individuality"1 with it (I'll call it DNA for simplicity's sake). This DNA and the other items in your urination will eventually decompose and, in so doing, feed countless microorganisms. Those, in turn, will produce food for plants, which, in turn, will feed countless other beings, and the cycle continues.

Now let me propose a fun thought experiment: suppose that your pee has a sort of coloring to it. Not a color that we can see, but a "marker" all the same. Let's call it Blue. Let's also say that everything your pee gets into will also be colored Blue. Now, everything that consumes a Blue thing will itself become Blue.

You can easily see that after some time, EVERYTHING in the environment where you urinated will be Blue. Things that arrive at that location from elsewhere will most likely also become Blue and take that "viral color" somewhere else. In so doing, the whole ecosystem becomes, in fact, Blue.

It's almost like a gas, no? This "viral behavior of the color Blue" will make it dissipate throughout the whole ecosystem until it fills all available space.

Of course, pee (or colors) doesn't really work that way. But it's an interesting thought experiment all the same :) it shows that everywhere you go, you leave a part of yourself that eventually becomes a part of everything. But there's also the stronger implication that WE ALL leave stuff around, and we're all as much "others" as we are ourselves. Green, Red, Purple, Blue, countless shades in between. Everything colors everything.

This is very reminiscent of the Buddhist concept of "interdependence" (or, as Thich Nhat Hanh likes to call it, "interbeing").

[...] looking into a flower, you can see that the flower is made of many elements that we can call non-flower elements. When you touch the flower, you touch the cloud. You cannot remove the cloud from the flower, because if you could remove the cloud from the flower, the flower would collapse right away. [...] Cloud is a non-flower element. And the sunshine… you can touch the sunshine here. If you send back the element "sunshine", the flower will vanish. And sunshine is another non-flower element. And earth, and gardener… if you continue, you will see a multitude of non-flower elements in the flower. In fact, a flower is made only of non-flower elements. It does not have a separate self.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

And that's exactly what the thought experiment reveals: everything is made up of everything else, and everything else is required to make a single element, so that single element really has no separate substance that can be said to be individual to it.

I really love the metaphor that Thich Nhat Hanh uses here-the chain of dependencies. One could very well extend this ad infinitum2, starting from anywhere3 and going toward anything one can think of. The sea IS the cloud, the cloud IS the rain, the rain IS the tree, the tree IS the paper I'm writing on. Everything is connected.

...

We tend to think of people (and often even animals and plants and anything we deem an "entity") as their own atomic entities. In some sense, that's true, because we do have a sort of internal microcosm of our own, but it's not entirely correct to assume we're totally separate. Even though "your mind is your mind", everything you see/read/consume affects your internal mind state, and, in turn, your mind state affects what you say and do, which, again, in turn, affects others' mind state, and so on and on.

It could be that your reading of this post will lodge an idea in your mind and spark a thought or actions years from now.

It's all connected. Quite literally.

Actually, a better way to say it would be: "it all is".

Footnotes

  1. As far as anything can be said to be individual. ↩

  2. Sort of like https://www.thewikigame.com/ but with "things". ↩

  3. Actually, one might now raise the question of how we can even determine what IS an "object". Like, if everything is everything, then how can I say that "the flower" is a thing? Maybe not something to explore in a footnote. Probably has to do with how our minds form useful concepts, but in the "reality out there", there's no such thing as a separate entity called "a flower". ↩