Quotes About Interconnectedness

weather" we've been trying to resist. The essence of the fourth noble truth is that we can use everything we do to help us to realize that we're part of the energy that creates everything.

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.

We're all in this together, all so interconnected that we can't awaken without one another. We

The essence of the fourth noble truth is that we can use everything we do to help us to realize that we're part of the energy that creates everything.

The Buddhist teachings tell us that over the course of many lifetimes all beings have been our mothers. At one time, all these

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself. When you exchange yourself for others in the practice of tonglen, it becomes increasingly uncertain what is out there and what is in

Shantideva said that since all sentient beings suffer from strong, conflicting emotions, and all sentient beings get what they don't want and can't hold on to what they do want, and all sentient beings have physical distress, why am I making such a big deal about just me? Since we're all in this together, why am I making such a big deal about myself?

We can use our lives, in other words, to wake up to the fact that we're not separate: the energy that causes us to live and be whole and awake and alive is just the energy that creates everything, and we're part of that. We can use our lives to connect with that, or we can use them to become resentful, alienated, resistant, angry, bitter. As always, it's up to us.

In joy and sorrow all are equal, Thus be guardian of all, as of yourself. —SHANTIDEVA

Even if we're alone, our yawns and farts communicate.

We all act as hinges - fortuitous links between other people. I link Sylvia to Laszlo, Lisa to Laszlo; Gordon links me to Sylvia.

people "shift the burden" of their problem to other solutions—well-intentioned, easy fixes which seem extremely efficient.

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

The earth is an indivisible whole, just as each of us is an indivisible whole.

Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes. All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary. We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them. But

most of the problems faced by humankind concerns [concerned] our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world.

They always say 'Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.' They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

That our own standing as part of an integrated universe not only allows us but, by singular divine fiat, compels--induces--us to connect, to merge, to unify--

System thinking is a discipline of seeing whole.

When we eat plants, food takes on a different quality. We take from the earth food that is ready for us and does not fight against us as we take it.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. "In a real sense, all of life is interrelated," he said. "All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects

What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself.