Possibly first used in an early, c. 1000 BCE Atharva Veda Hindu text, the Avataṃsaka Sūtra repurposed this imagery to symbolize the Buddhist principles of emptiness and interdependent origination. The 7th Century Chinese Buddhist Huayan school developed these ideas further and "Indra's Net" became a symbol for "True Self" — the vast, interconnected web that includes all phenomenon.
Each interdependent, individual jewel or point of connection (our consciousness), in a mirror-like way reflects the totality of this vast network. All experience at these points spreads back and through Indra's Net influencing it just like all of the experiences at the other points come back and influence our "True Self."
These teachings became an important influence on Chinese Chan Buddhism, the Korean Hwaeom school, and the Japanese Shingon lineage. For hundreds of years, this concept permeated mystical traditions and taught the oneness and omnipresent sacredness of all life, the illusion of all feelings and thoughts of separateness.
Today, these ideas have entered the world of science, the multidimensional theories of modern physics, and as an insightful way of understanding how our brains function.
“Faced with chaos or conflict, the sage commander looks first to the largest reference point. No matter what ground he has been given, he always thinks bigger… he looks to the space around things.”
“at one time there grew to be the one alone out of many, and at another time it separated so that there were many out of the one”
“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.”
“You are not an isolated entity, but a unique, irreplaceable part of the cosmos... an essential piece of the puzzle of humanity, a part of a vast, intricate, and perfectly ordered human community.”
“Looking outward we see many faces; look inward and all is one head. If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.”
“Although it has many parts like arms and legs, our bodies are one whole. In a similar way, all beings with their yearnings for happiness, their joys and sorrows are like one body, different but equal.”
“Each person’s life is like a mandala – a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life.”
“The interaction of the yin and yang through different combinations of the five agents generates all things in a process of endless transformation.”
“Supreme view is beyond all duality of subject and object…
Supreme view is free from reference point.”
“Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.”
“When one displays the Buddha mudra with one’s whole body and mind, sitting upright in this samadhi even for a short time, everything in the entire dharma world becomes buddha mudra, and all space in the universe completely becomes enlightenment.”
“At this time, because earth, grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles, all things in the dharma realm in the universe in ten directions carry out buddha-work, therefore everyone receives the benefit of wind and water movement caused by this functioning, and all are imperceptibly helped by the wondrous and incomprehensible influence of buddha to actualize the enlightenment at hand.”
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
“To understand the essence, listen to the call of frogs, the billowing wind, the falling rain, all speaking the wonderful language of the essential Nature.”
“Man is a microcosm, a little world, because his is an extract from all the stars and planets, from the earth and the elements, and so he is their quintessence.”
“One night as I walked in the desert, the mountains rode on my shoulders, the sky became my heart, and the earth - my own body”
“There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”
“All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.”
“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues”
“Each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe and this interconnection of all created things to each other brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others.”
“All are but parts of one stupendous whole whose body Nature is, and God the soul.”
“He looked at his Soul with a Telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and showed to be beautiful Constellations; and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.”
“The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.”
“Without a center, without an edge… without an inside, without an outside… as far as the sky pervades, so does awareness.”
“Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch. Deal ye one with another with the utmost love and harmony, with friendliness and fellowship.”
“Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature and through her, God.”
“For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
“There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere”
“everything that exists in influenced in some way by something else... a vast network of acquaintanceship”
“Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them.”
“I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight”
“For me whatever is in the atoms and molecules is in the universe. I believe in the saying that what is in the microcosm of one’s self is reflected in the macrocosm.”
“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country as the water is the sea... the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”
“This philosophy [Lü Dongbin's] is—to a certain extent—the common property of all Chinese trends of thought. It is built on the premise that cosmos and man in the last analysis obey common laws; that man is a cosmos in miniature and is not divided from the great cosmos by any fixed limits.”
“Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
“Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant, or any stone.”
“Nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives who are linked to it. In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life.”
“Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.”
“Nothing could persuade me that 'in the image of God' applied only to man. In fact, it seemed to me that the high mountains the rivers, lakes, trees flowers, and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism”
“the Glass Bead Game... As an idea we find it already performed in earlier ages, e.g. at Pythagoras. The same eternal Idea was the basis of every movement of the mind towards the ideal goal of a Universitas Litterarum, of every Platonic Academy, of any congregation of a spiritual elite, every attempt to approximate the exact and the free sciences, every attempt to reconcile science and art and the art of science and religion.”
“This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a Universitatis Litterarum, every Platonic Academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion.”
“In each of us, the entire history of the world is reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it is indebted to an inheritance worked upon it from all sides—before it came into being—by the totality of the earth's energies.”
“You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.”
“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.”
“The harmony of the part with the whole may be the best definition of health, beauty, truth, wisdom, morality, and happiness.”
“I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process”
“We always want to alter the outer hoping thereby to change the inner…I think we miss this basic thing, which is; the world is me and I am the world.”
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
“He talks to the plants and they answer him. He listens to the voices of all those who move upon the earth, the animals. He is as one with them. From all living beings, something flows into him all the time, and something flows from him.”
“All aspects of every phenomenon are completely clear and lucid, the universe is open and unobstructed, everything mutually interpenetrating.”
“Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning, covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum.”
“No part of us is unrelated to other parts, even down to the single cell. Every cell probably knows the whole of us. There is a new consciousness implied in these premises; namely, that reality is a complex, interrelated and integral structure, including our own body-mind-emotions-spirit, as well as our relationship to others and to our environment.”
“True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected.”
“The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.”
“In truth we are not separate from each other or from the world… there is just one mysteriously palpitating aliveness.”
“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and slaughters a visible Nature without realizing that this Nature he slaughters is the invisible God he worships.”
“Our ancient experience confirms at every point that everything is linked together, everything is inseparable.”
“The air we breathe, the water we drink, the forests and oceans which sustain millions of different life forms, and the climate that governs our weather systems all transcend national boundaries.”
“The Mandala is earth and man, both the atom that composes the material essence of man, and the galaxy of which the earth is but an atom… the microcosm and the macrocosm, the largest structural processes s well as the smallest. It is the gateway between the two.”
“The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.”
“By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra's Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.”
“..don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience...”
“The essence of our life is not limited within the confines of our bodies but rather is distributed across all the people and things that we are connected to... like a vast net connecting us to all other lives on this planet”
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