Thoughts on Connections

Something strange happened to me last night. I had just laid down to sleep, and began a heart meditation, where you focus on feeling your heartbeat from within (also you can direct your pulse to anywhere in your body you want by focusing your attention there, supposedly for healing, but all I know is that it makes you feel vibrantly alive). Anyways, so the idea isn't to think but to feel, but thoughts always creep in; and I was thinking about how individual heart cells all beat on their own when seperated, yet when placed together will all beat together, in rhythm. Then I realized how the whole body is like that: every of our trillions of cells, each alive in its own right, and even the bacteria in our bodies, all work for the greater whole. No matter how disconnected, depressed, isolated, hateful or angry I feel in my abstract mind-world, no matter how shitty I treat my body ("my body" I say, as if it were something I owned, instead of something I am), no matter how hard I ride it or how terribly I punish it, every organ, every cell, loves "me" and works tirelessly for me, until the whole system collapses and I (they? we?) die. It's like family, really close family and friends that no matter how bad you hurt them, still love you and always support you and try to help you.

Now, all this came to me in a flash, not all thought out like that. Intuitive knowledge, I guess. And this is the odd part... I guess the whole idea really pleased me, because I burst out laughing there in the dark. Not just a chuckle, mind you, but full out belly laughs. This has happened before when I meditate, but never so strongly. It's hard to explain this really, because it wasn't a rational kind of thing. I just felt really at home in my body, very alive, and fully connected to the world.

But think about it. If we could deeply accept this as more than just an intellectual position, how much better would we treat our bodies? Would we poison ourselves when we know we are poisoning trillions of living beings (which are in the end "me")? Now extend your thinking. How is the relationship between the cells in one body any different from the relationship between the individuals in a community, or of communities in an ecosystem? It isn't. Ecosystems don't work when one species is trying to crush or dominate the others; they only work when they work together, in balance, even if that balance requires predator-prey relationships. When our minds try to subjugate our bodies, or we together try to subjugate nature, things never work out very well, do they?

I think we all know this deep down. I think this is a large part of the anger, depression, rage, and general anxiety we all feel in the industrial world. We're all disconnected from this biosphere, not physically, but emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Literally, our food comes from the food web, but in practice it comes from a supermarket. This is why gardening feels so good and gives old widows a reason to go on living. It's why hunters (at least the ones who do more than get drunk and shoot at deer who eat at their feeding stations) talk about how it's a great thing to just be in the woods. They're following something deeply ingrained in us: the one-on-one connection to the rest of the living world, from which we get our own life.

Because, who thinks about the living being they're eating as they sit down to, say, a chicken dinner? No one, because you'd have to think of a bird raised in a metal cage in a dim shed, with it's beak cut off so it won't peck its neighbors. I rode by a chicken shed on my bike tour, and it was eerie and horrible, the sound of thousands of chickens echoing off the metal walls. I pedaled hard to get away from it. This is why eating your own garden vegetables feels so good. You know the soil wasn't tortured to produce it, and you know that it wasn't mindlessly mass-farmed. You worked the compost, you put the seeds in with your hands, you watered and tended it, and you harvested it (again, with your hands, not machines). It can be the same way with animal products, though it's harder for most people to have livestock in their backyard than it is to have tomatos. People take this for granted or dismiss it, assuming that rationally, food is food, who cares how you get it or what went into it. That is unproductive thinking, dangerous thinking which has gotten our world into the mess it's in now.

But it doesn't have to be. We can realize that we are all connected in this world, and we can step out of the stories our minds tell us about how we're living and do something different, something better (stories about "progress" and "economic growth"). And this is what happened last night: I realized my connection to and within myself, and how it is essentially no different from my connection to the rest of the biosphere, no matter how disguised our culture makes it. Is it any wonder I was compelled to laughter?