Interconnected: Embracing Life in Our Global Society

by Ogyen Trinley Dorje

Acknowledgment of this radically different paradigm is already gaining traction in popular perception, in activist circles, and in intellectual discourse. From a world of siloed societies and independent individuals, many people have begun to recognize that we are interconnected communities and interdependent individuals. Thinkers and activists in fields as far flung as economics, earth sciences, and social justice are collectively creating a multidisciplinary account of the diverse ways that our world functions interdependently. Empirical research provides ample evidence indicating that interconnections operate in every social and natural arena. While the use of the paradigm of interdependence is still relatively new in scientific, academic, activist, and other discussions, the idea that all phenomena are interconnected has formed the basis of Buddhist thought and ethics since its outset.

His concern in this book is not primarily to define a Buddhist position on interdependence for those exploring it as a theory, but in exploring the possibilities for social and ethical transformation that interdependence opens up.

Our perceptions, ideas, interpretations, and emotions interact, shaping how we experience our connections, how we respond, and what we contribute to those connections. As such, our inner conditions have a real impact on the external world, and therefore investigation of the dynamics of interdependence at work in the world around us is incomplete without a consideration of the world within us.

The Karmapa argues that it is not sufficient to know we are interconnected. We must learn to feel connected, as the necessary basis for acting in ways that reflect our interconnectedness.

The book is divided in three sections, corresponding to the three phases that move us from intellectual to emotional awareness and from there to action — understanding that we are interconnected, feeling our connectedness, and acting in ways consistent with it.

By deepening our awareness of interconnectedness, we can create a far more harmonious and healthy society and live far more satisfying lives. For that to happen, we can’t just stop our analysis at the interdependence of the physical world. The human heart and mind — what we might call our inner world — form an integral part of these webs of interdependence.

Inside each of us is a complex constellation of perceptions, ideas, feelings, and intentions that mutually affect one another. Our inner worlds interact with outer conditions to shape the world around us. We respond to external circumstances, but we also create them. In other words, our inner worlds and the outer world are intimately connected, and that interconnection is part of interdependence as well. Recognizing the full extent of interdependence will lead to a fundamental rethinking of who we are as human beings and of our place in the world we help create. Our inner world is the pivotal domain for bringing about real change in the world that we all share. Neither social nor environmental justice is possible without significant changes in our attitudes and the intentional behavior they give rise to. The transformation of our social and material world must begin within us.

The intellectual awareness we are gaining about interdependence is an important first step. The next — and crucial — step is to gain an emotional awareness of interdependence. We need to feel our profound interconnectedness and not just know about it. We have within us numerous qualities that help sustain such an emotional engagement with our interdependence. By enhancing our unders...

Interdependence describes our deep connectedness, but it also explains why and how we are interconnected. We can start by observing that everything in life happens due to various causes and conditions coming together. Interdependence reveals the profound implications of this simple fact. It shows us that everything that exists is a condition that affects others, and is affected in turn, in a vast and complex web of causality. As part of that web, we ourselves are a condition that impacts those around us. That means if we change, so do others.

From the vantage point of interdependence, we can begin to see that our connections to others cannot be severed. Our happiness and suffering are so closely connected to the happiness and suffering of others as to be inseparable. This means that no individual is fully self-sustaining or divisible from others.

All of these things that we think of as me and mine — our bodies, our clothes, our food, and all our material possessions — come from others. So where is this I that is exclusively me? We seem to be left with nothing that is uniquely our own. Yet we still continue to say “I” when it should be evident that 99 percent of what we call I is not really I. It is what we usually consider “other.”

The aim is to be able to feel the extent to which others are extremely important and integral to you and also to gain an emotional awareness that you are never, ever really separate from them. Others are part of you, just as you are part of them. You exist in connection with others. When you see this, you can also see that your happiness and suffering depend upon others. If you think solely in terms of yourself and your own happiness, it simply does not work. There is no happiness without relying upon others. Once we deeply understand that self and others are not two entirely distinct things — that we are not really separate — many things can change. We will feel a sense of profound connection to other beings, and we will experience their contributions to who we are with gratitude and goodwill. We will see and feel that we simply must consider others’ well-being.

Viewing our place in the world in this way, we see more fully that everything required for us to come into being, all that we turn to in order to define who we are, and everything we need to survive in life is connected to other people and to resources outside of ourselves. Likewise, we are resources that others depend upon for their existence. Who and what we are is inextricably and reciprocally linked to others.

As we move through the world, we initiate long series of events, each helping cause the next. A single act impacts a much wider sphere than we generally recognize. Our actions have ripple effects beyond the direct results that we readily perceive and recognize as consequences of our actions. In Buddhism, we often use the language of karma to describe the relationship between intentional actions and their full range of results. However, it is not necessary to apply such terms to understand that due to interdependence, everything we do has an impact not only on us and on our immediate surroundings but far beyond that.

The wisdom that arises when we fully comprehend our interdependence is a force that can dismantle the walls that separate us from others. Compassion, or an altruistic outlook, can have the same effect. Wisdom and compassion can grow from the awareness that we are all absolutely equal in our wish for happiness and in our longing to be free of pain and suffering. Any being that has the capacity to feel pain merits our respect and our concern. Our recognition of this shared yearning can itself awaken a concern for the well-being of another. When we feel it fully as part our very being, then we will naturally act to alleviate the pain of others and add to their happiness. As such, our vivid awareness that all living beings are perfectly equal in terms of their shared yearning for happiness can be fundamental in reorienting us as we live our interdependence.

To fulfill our responsibilities as members of a global society, it is crucial we look beyond immediate consequences and consider the indirect implications of our conduct. For with our individual actions, we impact the lives of others and shape the world that is our common home.

We have within us already the most important resources we need for living interdependence well. We have tremendous mental flexibility that allows us to adopt new positions in relation to changing circumstances. As I will explore in the following chapters, I believe that we have the basic ability to open our hearts to others, to take their perspectives into consideration, and to share experiences and feelings. Our natural capacity for empathy is a clear sign that we are emotionally connected. If one child cries, another will cry. When people are wholeheartedly laughing, we often cannot help but join in, even if we do not know what is funny. These are all small signs that we are connected inwardly and not just outwardly. Focusing on our inner interdependence allows us see that we are all moved by the same inner drive to seek happiness and avoid suffering. This universal wish motivates life on this planet. The happiness we all seek only comes when we are working not just on external conditions but on inner ones as well.

The primary resources we need to thrive in our interdependent world are inner ones. Usually if we lack something in terms of our material conditions, we feel deprived and experience ourselves as lacking. Even when we have ample material resources, this does not guarantee a state of inner well-being, and besides, they can be taken from us at any time. But if it is possible to feel content whether we have much or little, which set of resources is more valuable: mental and emotional, or physical and material?

WE ARE LIVING in a paradoxical moment. We are technically more connected than at any other point in history, but our technological connectivity itself often leaves us feeling emotionally disconnected or isolated. Even as we hold in our hands the tools and data to trace patterns of interdependence around the globe, there is still a great distance between what we know of the world and our emotional engagement with that knowledge. We are discovering that we are far more interconnected than we had previously realized, but our way of feeling and living in the world has not caught up with our new understanding. To close that gap, we can first explore the factors that are obstacles to actually feeling more connected to the world we encounter online. Then we can look for ways to use technological connectivity more wisely so as to take advantage of the opportunities it does offer.

When we pay so much attention to the outer conditions that shape people’s lives, we end up focusing on what distinguishes us, overlooking what unites us. This can contribute to a sense of distance or separateness from others. The same sense of distance between us and them opens up in the case of people with different cultures and religious backgrounds. I am not speaking here of physical distance but emotional and mental.

Beyond any superficial circumstantial factors that differentiate us, all living beings share a much deeper common ground, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Buddhism identifies this deeper ground as the wish to be happy and the longing for freedom from suffering. This fundamental inner condition lies at the very core of our existence. Our apparent physical and circumstantial differences are relatively unimportant and shallow, compared to the more important — and much more foundational — level of reality on which we all stand.

Communications technology has great potential as a tool to bring us closer. The Internet can help us discover that others are like us, and that we are not as alone as we think. It can enable people to connect with others who suffer from similar conditions and find comfort and support in online communities. However, to fulfill the full potential such tools offer, we must use them wisely. Otherwise they can easily end up leaving us further disconnected from one another and from reality.

A hypersensitivity to differences desensitizes us to our universal shared condition. Such exaggeration of anomalies can have several harmful effects. One is, as I mentioned, that we can find it hard to identify with people whose experiences we encounter online, because we feel excessively distant and different.

Whether through text messages, sites like Facebook, or other forms of social media, we often reach out because we want someone to talk to and engage with. Yet we are connecting as virtual selves with virtual others, and there are many intermediate layers that we must pass through to “connect” online. When we interact with others online, we do so as an illusory electronic self, interacting with illusory electronic versions of other people.

When you are hurt, sometimes you just want someone to hug you. A flat screen cannot hold your hand and share your pain. Even if your loneliness is relieved by a text message or a smiling face on your screen, those data bytes can never fully replace the full vividness of direct contact with someone who is present with you physically and emotionally.

This age of connectivity has the danger of habituating us to an increasingly mediated, virtual form of human engagement. Real life seems to slip further and further from our grasp. I think the sadness and sense of loneliness that is so pervasive today is a sign that we have lost touch with the fullness of human contact. We come to live in a lonely world of illusions that we have created for ourselves. We can spend hours consuming one image after another, sending out one selfie after another, but actually engaging very little with others. The virtual world is absorbing and entertaining, but it is fundamentally illusory and unsatisfying. It is not real or nourishing.

Of course, we might hide behind the facades we present in direct personal encounters too, but it is much easier to construct false appearances from behind an electronic screen. When we fail to differentiate between the illusory forms of mediated connection online and more genuine forms of connection, we are in danger of losing touch with our own inner resources for living interdependence, including our own capacity to be present and to feel authentic closeness to others.

However, as powerful a resource as connectivity can be, and as great a wealth of information as it puts at our disposal, the way we use technology can make it harder for us to make the shift from intellectual to emotional engagement with the world it opens up to us. We now have access to far more information than we can reasonably process. Our response to the sheer volume of information to be found online is often to just surf along the surface of an infinite number of issues and events. We need to go deeper. Knowing more is not a substitute for feeling more.

New technologies are ostensibly introduced to address problems we face and to improve our lives. However, if we do not engage with them in deeper ways, this force that is meant to make our life better all too often can end up making our lives silly. From my point of view, far from truly enriching or nourishing us in any substantial way, our constant connectivity can easily end up trivializing our lives. Our communication of human emotion is reduced to emoticons. When our friends share their joys and pains on Facebook, rather than truly reach out to share those experiences with them, we click “Like” and might not even add a personal comment before we move on to another page. We may think communications technology is adding spice and flavor, but in the end it can detract from the meaning and purpose of our lives, making our lives lite. When I look at its place in our lives today, I often feel that technology is using us, rather than us using technology. For this reason, it is important for each of us to look carefully at our own personal use of technology or, more to the point, look at how our use of technology impacts us. We can start by asking ourselves: “What does it do to me to engage with technology in this way? How does it actually make me feel? What benefits do I expect to gain? What am I willing to give up in order to gain those benefits?” We focus so intensely on the screen in front of us that we lose our perspective and greatly exaggerate its importance as a source...

Worse, it is especially distressing to feel lonely when you apparently have so many friends. But if you are looking for a sense of closeness, what you need is to connect directly with real friends, not connect virtually with more Facebook friends. You need to extend your heart to others, not just extend your fingertips to a keyboard.

When people are urged to see themselves as autonomous and independent, loneliness is more common. Learning to live as an interdependent human being can help overcome your sense of loneliness. When you are emotionally aware of your interconnectedness, you will know you are never truly alone.

To ease loneliness we first need to find friends within ourselves. We can start by connecting with our own positive qualities, such as love and compassion. We can learn to treasure and value these inner qualities and draw our strength from them first and foremost. These qualities are our inner conditions for interdependence and are our closest and most reliable allies in negotiating the outer conditions of our interdependence.

If you know that you harbor within you kind thoughts and goodhearted feelings, that itself can be enough. If you lose heart just because no one else sees it, this is a sign you yourself do not truly appreciate the value of your positive thoughts and feelings. You need to delight in them yourself, and be heartened by their presence within you. You can actively appreciate them and feel that they make your existence meaningful. You more than anyone else have the resources to warm yourself from within.

You should not put yourself out in the cold and then resent others for leaving you there. You can warm your own heart from within. You can draw on your own inner resourcefulness. It is not realistic to expect people to see into your heart and approve what is there. In any case, it is this warm and wholesome part of yourself — this inner strength — that you need to draw forth so that friends can connect with it. It is this part of yourself that allows you to enter into warm and healthy relationships with others. It is these inner qualities that enable you to feel your connections of interdependence and flourish in them.

The impulse to connect arises naturally in human beings, as is clearly visible in us when we are children. Later, as we become adults, this ability is eroded by doubts, fears, and suspicions. For example, if there are two families living in an apartment building and each has a young child, the parents might pass each other in the lobby without exchanging a single word or even making eye contact, but the children will undoubtedly acknowledge each other when they meet. If a small child in front of the building spots another at a window on an upper floor, she may spontaneously wave, and the other child will wave back.

Learning to recognize and feel the kindness of others is a practical measure we can apply to bring our lives more in line emotionally with the intellectual understanding of interdependence. One method that I think could be effective in this regard is taught in Buddhism, but it does not require any faith in Buddhism and can be done by anyone. Called recollecting kindness, this practice entails deliberately calling to mind situations in which we recognize that we received something from others. We then consciously turn those instances over in our minds so as to intensify our awareness of others’ kindness, until we are filled with a sense of gratitude.

Gratitude is a value of interdependence. It is an inner orientation that aligns us emotionally with the outer reality of our lives. Bringing heart and mind together, gratitude is an affective state that can be produced by an awareness of interdependence. We identify interdependence at work and train ourselves to respond to that awareness with gratitude. Like other values of interdependence, gratitude can lead us from awareness to feelings and, eventually, can culminate in action. Even setting aside what it inspires you to do for others, when you cultivate gratitude, you certainly gain a great deal yourself in terms of well-being and happiness. When you feel grateful, you recognize that you are the beneficiary of others’ kindness. You feel fortunate. Gratitude just feels good, and it can be extended in all directions, since not only clothes but every single thing you use comes to you from others. At mealtime, you can feel grateful for each and every ingredient on your plate, for those who did the cooking and the planting, even for sunlight, for rainfall, and for the minerals that enrich the soil. You can train yourself in this way to feel surrounded on all sides by goodness and benefit. Everything and everyone is benefiting you. The whole world becomes your personal benefactor and is part of you. You have not only been benefited in material terms. Those whose ideas you find useful, who bring out the best in you, who challenge you to grow — they are also your personal benefa...

When we watch such videos, we marvel at animals’ abilities to act against what we assume is their self-serving or self-protective impulses. We can let ourselves be inspired by their natural display of the same inner qualities we would like to cultivate.

Yet for all the ease with which we connect and feel close to our pets and other animals, we all too often remain indifferent to the suffering of animals in general. As we smile at our pet’s antics or admire the qualities other animals display in the videos we enjoy so much, I think it would be good to reflect on our impact on the lives of animals more broadly. Many animals suffer terribly because they are put to work for our pleasure and comfort, or are raised for slaughter to satisfy our appetite for their flesh. We are able to be tender and loving toward the pet who sits at our side and yet be causing unbearable pain to the animals whose meat sits on our plate. We find this thought distasteful, and so we mentally distance ourselves by not tracing out the chains of causality and interdependence that link our bite of meat to the distress and terror of animals crowded together in narrow cages or filthy cattle yards. Our own taste for meat is a condition that makes us complicit in a chain of causal actions that results in suffering that we would never stomach if we had to watch it. That suffering is caused by us human beings and is rooted in our failure to recognize our connectedness to those beyond our immediate field of vision.

As I mentioned earlier, although the idea of being interdependent may be gaining widespread recognition only recently, we have always been interdependent. Nothing has changed in that regard. Nor is there any conflict between being an individual and being interdependent. The contradiction lies in the gap between our assumptions about how we exist as individuals and how we actually exist, namely as interdependent individuals. The only contradiction is between reality and our view of reality.

When the Buddha taught interdependence over two millennia ago, he did so precisely because he saw that people were clinging to an unexamined assumption that we are all independent and ultimately separate. The Buddha pointed to that deeply held and widespread view as the source of our deepest confusion in life and the gravest problems in society. This shows that the assumption that we are separate and autonomous has a long history and deep roots. It has also had widespread — and harmful — consequences for society and for our personal happiness.

However autonomous we may feel ourselves to be, we could not even begin our lives without two specific people who therefore are not entirely distinct from or “other” to us. Once born, we eat food from others, learn from others, and are clothed and cared for all our lives by others. Just a few steps of analysis show us how dependent we are upon many, many others for our basic existence. Who we are as individuals emerges as a result of those diverse causes and conditions. We can give a separate name to that result and use that name to identify ourselves throughout life, but that does not mean we are utterly separate or separable from those causes and conditions. It is completely valid to bear a name that distinguishes us, but we invest a reality in that name that goes far beyond its function. We slowly come to believe that what our name points to is wholly separable from everything else. This message is communicated to us in many ways — and we repeat it to ourselves — “You are unique in the world. You are special. There is no one else like you.” It is true we are unique, but to the extent that this discourse heightens our sense of ourselves as absolutely distinct and unrelated to others, this perception itself becomes a main condition for our selfishness. This feeling of standing apart from all else is an illusion. It was constructed by a process of labeling and projecting. If we examine it, we can see that we exaggerate aspects of who we are and label ourselves based on the...

However, just because our sense of ourselves as utterly separate is erroneous does not imply that no I exists. Of course you do. But you exist connected to and dependent upon many other factors. You are an interdependent individual. Our clinging to exaggerated concepts of a self-sufficient and autonomous self blinds us to a basic reality that we need to take into account. Why? Because it structures everything we do and are. The unique person we become over the course of our lives is based on the ongoing interplay of interdependent causes and conditions. If we cling to our individuality without appreciating how that individuality is supported by interdependence, we live in a kind of willful blindness. This harms us, and it can also lead to us harming others. For sure, it limits the positive ways we could shape others through our connections to them. If we hold to the theory that we are entirely independent agents, and can pursue our individualistic aims without considering the context of interdependence, we will be looking at the world with skewed vision.

If we are successful in internalizing our awareness of interdependence and allowing it to become deeply felt, we can shift our self-perception so as to actually experience the intimate connections that link us constantly to others and to the planet. We will be able to move beyond knowing that we are dependent upon other people and the natural world to feeling an active sense of love and concern for them.

This is why by changing the conditions in our lives — beginning with our inner conditions — we can change our lives. Because they are interconnected, we can change our inner world and our outer circumstances. We just need to identify correctly the conditions that we can and must change; then we change them. In this way, the greater our attentiveness to the workings of interdependence, the more opportunities we have to take charge of our own lives. This is a true form of self-reliance — self-reliance that does not deny the role of other people or external circumstances but rather wisely takes them into consideration.

It is important that we gain a clear understanding of how, at whatever level we choose to look, from the universe at large down to the molecular level, everything that interacts serves as a condition affecting the rest of each system. This is just as true for the workings of our mind and heart as it is for physical systems.

Once we have torn down the walls our egocentrism has built up around us — once we are free — there are no more walls. From the perspective of interdependence, our view is so broad that it can take in the entire world. When we take in the whole world, we finally encompass the whole range of our connections, for we are connected ultimately to the whole world. It is important we make our awareness of our connections as expansive as we can, because as we have seen, we are not only affecting others or impacted by them through immediate and direct interactions. Through long chains of causal connections, what we do personally in our own home or neighborhood helps serve as a condition contributing to the happiness or suffering of others in far corners of the globe, and vice versa. On a larger scale, the actions taken by whatever nation we are a citizen of might either be helping others thousands of miles away, or they might be harming them.

Cultivating humility as part of our efforts to live interdependence can be enhanced by a heartfelt awareness that we are always in a state of development. Because everything arises based upon the coming together of continually shifting conditions, however much or little of a certain positive quality we have, further growth is always possible. Moreover, our positive qualities can be developed without limit. As long as we are human, we can continually keep discovering new potentials.

Reducing our pride does not imply losing confidence — in fact, far from it. There is an important difference between confidence and pride. With pride, we look down on others. We need them to be less for ourselves to be more. Confidence is a virtuous form of pride. You feel able to do good things. In Buddhism, we call confidence antidotal pride. It may look like pride, but confidence serves as an antidote to help us get rid of our limitations. Both humility and confidence are qualities that allow us to grow beyond our limitations while allowing us to live our interdependence well. Humility can help us to recognize our responsibilities to others; with confidence we feel able to act to fulfill them.

We often get the message that we only really matter if we are unique and special in some way. This quest for a sense of unique individuality places great pressure on us and makes it easy for us to feel that we are not measuring up to others. The need to stand out would diminish if we better appreciated the value of what we are and have. This is where a third quality that has great value for us as interdependent individuals comes in: contentment. Contentment implies being able to enjoy what you have and what you are, to truly savor and make full use of it.