[MD] Indra's Net

[MarshaV]

Greetings,

Watching this Stanford youtube course on Human Behavioral Biology, I cannot help but be awed by the expanding net of complexity that is being presented which leads me to imagine Indra's Net.

---
Indra's Net is a core metaphor of HuaYen.

Stephen Mitchell, in his book The Enlightened Mind, wrote:

"The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel."

(It's also interesting to note that contemporary physicists are in general agreement that this ancient metaphor is indeed a good description for the universe.)

As one of the West's preeminent philosophers defined human interaction:
The [people] are the primary units of the actual community, and the community is composed of the units. But each unit has in its nature a reference to every other member of the community, so that each other member of the community, so that each unit is a microcosm representing in itself the entire all-inclusive universe.
--Lecture: Body and Spirit, 1926, Alfred North Whitehead 



http://www.heartspace.org/misc/IndraNet.html 

--- 

 
Human Behavioral Biology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA