I am not I

I recently read a very good book about Israel. I won't go into that whole mess here, but if you are interested in what I have to say about the book, you can see my review here.

I have not been meditating as much as I would like recently. Life has become very busy.

Our bodies are entirely dependent on the health of our microbiome. There is a very good article in the New York Times about this, and about how antibiotics—those we take and perhaps those in our food—might be at least part of the cause of the obesity epidemic in the United States.

I had to fast for 12 hours Thursday night and Friday morning so I could have my blood drawn Friday morning.

I have become more and more amazed how much time, thought, and effort must go into the maintenance of a single human life.

What in the world do all these things have to do with one another? Well you might ask.

The Buddha spoke of interdependence as being the core of all his teachings. I remember when one of my teachers first introduced this topic by saying flatly, "You don't exist". I can easily challenge this statement, naturally. I can hit you in the head and then ask you why your head hurts if I don't exist. But that, of course, is not what my teacher meant. The Buddha's philosophy is unique and challenging in many ways, but this may be where it is most difficult and by far the most elegant. Because it's true: we don't exist. Not in any substantial or lasting way. And we cannot exist alone.

The odd thing is not the assertion that we do not exist as discrete beings but that we have ever thought we did. From the very start of our earliest precursors to this very day we are entirely dependent on plants to supply the atmosphere with oxygen, to take just one example. We would never have evolved as these particular beings had there not been plants. Period. We might have become some sort of nitrogen-processing organisms, but the nature of the beings we are is predicated on our ability to use oxygen and the presence of that oxygen is predicated on the existence of other beings. So, too, with every other constituent of our bodies. We are the product of stars, comets, bacteria, slime mold, flowers, and dinosaurs. The blood of emperors and slaves flows through me.

When we war with each other, when we claim territory as "ours" and not "theirs", we have entirely lost sight of our interdependence. Entirely aside from my opinion about the disposition of Palestine and the right of existence for Israel, not to mention the Russian claim to hegemony over Ukraine, when I have sufficient perspective to do so, I find myself astonished that we are still in such bellicose relation to one another. These days, it is amply evident that what will remove us from this earth is most likely either climate change or nuclear war, yet we focus on territorial disputes and health insurance. Never has it been so evident that we are interdependent than right now. If we do not take concerted and unified action to solve both of these problems, we won't last another generation.

My meditation practice is limited by the time I have available to sleep, which is impacted by the new position I have at work, which came to pass because of an injury to a co-worker. A relationship that ended years ago caused enough disruption in a girl's life that her mother, another of my co-workers, had to quit her job to spend more time with her daughter. The cruelty of a father, the coldness of a mother, rejection by a lover, failures in third grade and successes in high school—all of these influence the people who come to work where I work and limit how effectively they can work and therefore how much time I must spend there and therefore how much sleep I get and therefore how much I can meditate. Interdependence. In this context, I am interdependent with people who died before I was born and others I will never meet.

Need I say more about our microbiome (the internal microbiotic environment of our bodies, our gut in particular)? We are entirely interdependent with these billions of beasties. We would not have evolved to this state without them and would die overnight if they ceased to exist.

I take for granted how easily I am able to maintain this body's health. I also assume that my nice, healthy mind can function independent of what else goes on. Nothing like a 12-hour fast to put the lie to assumptions like these. I was irritable, could not think well, was fumbling and clumsy. It is astonishing how quickly we begin to fall apart without food. And from whence does this food come? I didn't grow it, harvest it, process it, ship it, stock it, or sell it. Literally hundreds of interlocking actions go into my breakfast. And if you consider that each being in the chain of my breakfast (cow, farmers, soil organisms, harvesters, processors, packagers, truckers, stockers, clerks, managers, executives, maintenance crews to keep all the machines and processes running, mechanics, oil rig workers, fuel processors and sellers, water engineers, research chemists, flatware and bowl manufacturers, and on and on) has its own interlocking chains of interdependence, then literally millions—billions, perhaps—of beings provide me with my breakfast, without which I am am mess before I get my blood drawn at 8:00 A.M.

But the Buddha's message, you will recall, was not one of chastisement; he was not trying to remind us where we come up short. His was and is a philosophy of freedom. He taught first of all about suffering, but only to teach the end of suffering. And the end of suffering is the end of delusion. All we must do is cease believing that which isn't so. And why not? Our believing in untruths does not make them exist—they still don't. So why not give them up?

That's the amazing thing about the Buddha's teachings: we have the choice to be entirely free today, right now, in this moment, and forever. We can choose that right now. Why do we not? Because we have so thoroughly incorporated into our consciousness the lies: that we are independent, free-standing, individual human beings with no need of anything or anyone else, nonetheless the whole of existence. We believe the lie that the problems of the world are not our problems because they are not currently on our doorsteps (they will be). We believe that the suffering of others is separate from our suffering. We believe that we deserve only good things and that when bad things happen something has gone wrong. And we believe that biggest lie of all—that we exist. But freedom awaits those of us who know that our molecules are only ours for the briefest of time, that we constantly interchange who we are with the rest of the world and they with us. We have no choice in the matter; it is who we are. But we do have the choice of whether or not we suffer.