Everything...

Consider a building, or a human, or a panda, or anything.. 

If we break anything down all these things to their most basic unit – it’s just a bunch of atoms. Well, we can break that down to sub-atomic particles, but let’s just consider the atom. Everything is ultimately made of atoms – just a collection of vibrating atoms. Everything – buildings, humans, animals, chairs, cheeseburgers or anything else –all made up of the same thing.

This simple truth tells us that regardless of whether or not we are connected to everything else on some plane of consciousness, we’re all connected in the physical world. We are just a bunch of atoms in an infinite pool of atoms.

How we perceive anything in the world depends on our relationship to that particular thing - living or non-living. I like my guitar because I can create music with it. That is what relates me to the guitar. I like my friends because I can talk to them, do things with them, because they’re satisfying me in some way. And I perceive them as good because we have that particular relationship.  So one should agree that our perception of others (people or objects) is based on our relationship to the other.

As humans we have a certain fondness for other humans based on the fact that we are made up of the same flesh and blood or that we belong to the same species.

Once we extend this to all our relationships, we recognize our relationship to all the others - our relationship to the world, to animals, or anything else. So then, what separates us on any level? 

Nothing.

Once we realize this, how can we not care about the earth, how can we not care about animals? How can we not care about other people in the world?

For example, we have this notion of geographical location separating us - I’m from Bangladesh, you’re from the UK, this guy’s from Egypt – somehow that makes us different. Borders are arbitrary human constructs that shouldn’t separate us or bring us together. Just one of the many things humans created to feed the discontinuous mind. The sense of patriotism we may feel towards a country should be redirected towards the earth and the universe. We’re all the same and once we realize our relationship to the others, there is nothing separating us.

We have to realize that Natural constructs are not discrete, everything is continuous, the human mind finds it useful to categorize things to remember things, organize acquired knowledge, etc. but this discreteness of things does not extend to who we are as a species or our place in the universe  (more on the continuum of species and the tyranny of the discontinuous mind– read The Salamander’s Tale by Richard Dawkins – it’s only 5 pages and amazing). On a universal scale, humans are the same as ants or any other micro or macro organism, we’re tiny and insignificant.

In our purpose to find an ultimate or higher meaning, we have separated ourselves from everything. We have all accepted that just being on top of the food chain on earth equates to universal importance and significance. We’ve even gone so far and created an economic system that’s based on the same pyramid scheme we see in the food chain and a theological idea of a god watching and judging our species specifically because we're THAT significant. But false belief has no meaning.

There is no you or me, or this dog or that guy, we’re all the same. And once we realize this we’re free to exist, free just like the atoms in space floating into infinity. Free - because we just exist in a giant pool of atoms as a smaller collection of atoms. We can just be, and we are everything we ever wanted to be or could be.

 But this doesn’t mean we stop doing everything, stop pursue of more knowledge or anything, we are free and our relationship to everything that is not us, makes us free. So we invest our energy into enriching these relationships. Our relationship to the world by being friendlier to the environment, our relationship to another person by some altruistic act, our relationship to animals by being less cruel to them. 

We are free and we should choose to be. Once we perceive things based on our true symbiotic relationships we are what we want to be or could have been or could be, we are everything and everything is us.