With every fiber of my being I believe what the Great American Poet, Walt Whitman said in his Song of Myself: “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” and what the cosmologist Brian Swimme said in his Book The Universe is a Green Dragon, “There is no such thing as a disconnected thing.” We are beset by the tragic consequences of the illusion that the neighbor is not the self—a fact against which Jesus resists in his teaching to love the neighbor as the self (Mark 12:31). The living bodhisattva, Thich Nhat Hanh,has also said that “we are here to awaken to the illusion of our separateness.” In fact, the entire materialistic consumerism-model of living is a homage to the deadly ideology that the truth of this wisdom we have just encountered in poetry, scientific cosmology, the Christian scriptures and from a leader in Buddhism, is a homage to the perversion that this wisdom is false. We are told every day that only human beings are real, valuable and worthwhile—and that the only real worth or value possible for anything other than a human being is its instrumental value—what it might mean in how it can be used (up) by a person.
This deadly ideology of objectifying everything else has crept into even the way we treat other human beings. We make them a means to an end, a cog in a machine that creates the consumer products (I will not call them goods when they are made by human enslavement and the devastation of ecosystems) we use and throw away. My contributions to the State of Formation site will endeavor (in part) to focus on our interconnectedness, our continuity with this planet, and all life, and will emphasize the need for our imaginations, our hearts to be re-enchanted with the world, our identity as human beings, our social-connectedness and our place in the cosmos. Of course, I see the same truth of radical interdependent co-arising (i.e. the Buddha’s teaching of pratitya-samutpada) among the world’s religions: here too there is no such thing as a disconnected thing.
When we let the truth of our profound togetherness seep into the marrow of our selves, we will become the beings we are meant to become, in the manner expressed by the Father of Western monasticism, St. Benedict, who said that “our hearts [will be] overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”
And so I say, “Let’s become a new creation together.“
I rather like this article, In Defense of Consumerism, by Llewellyn Rockwell Jr: http://mises.org/daily/2178
The phrase with which he ends might spark interesting ideas or indignant rage, depending on your perspective: “To live at all requires that we buy and sell. To be against commerce is to attack life itself.”