Interwoven in Indra's Net
Dear friends,
I’ve been thinking about all the invisible ways in which we are all connected, in networks, ecosystems, food webs, relationships of exchange and in all the interweaving processes of the planet. In our every thought or action, whether eating breakfast or catching a bus or conversing with a friend, the invisible threads of our entanglement move with us, reverberating through the cosmos in some ways that we know, and in many ways we will never know.
In his book Attuned, the writer Thomas Hübl observes:
‘We belong to a living planetary system — a living, thriving cosmos — that is self-organising and self-healing. Humans are not apart from nature; we are of nature. Regardless of humanity’s current condition, we are never truly separate or even solely individual; we are members of a radical, co-evolving whole. Pearls in Indra’s net, we belong to and arise from the “great distributive lattice1,” the elegant, cosmic web of causal interdependence.’
Indra is the old Vedic storm god of rain, thunder, lightning and rivers. Above his palace in the heavens, say the Hua-yen Buddhist scriptures, there hangs a vast net which stretches out to infinity. Indra’s net illuminates the ‘perfect interfusion’ of everything in the universe. Every single node within this infinite net contains a single jewel (or pearl, or diamond). Each jewel hanging at each node both mirrors and reflects all of the other jewels, in a pattern of relational reverberation that stretches out to infinity.
The author Francis H. Cook writes2:
‘There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.’
Indra’s Net shows us how we are all instruments, or tuning forks3 if you will, reverberating with one another and our wider communities, woven into fractal patterns that shimmer and sparkle across scales of the quantum to the cosmic, held within intricate and unfathomable moving patterns through which we collectively play the symphony of life.
The metaphor of Indra’s net leapt to mind as I walked out one morning after a night of rain, wonderstruck to meet a shimmering world of tiny dewdrops. The ground was constellated in spider webs illuminated by these tiny dewdrops, each one lit up like a tiny mirror of the night sky. I don’t know how long I spent just gazing at the intricate spherical jewels dangling from the finest threads of spider silk, catching the light and revealing such exquisitely woven patterns to my eyes. Far from symmetrical, these webs shone brightly as they tunneled, funneled and spiraled their way through messy clusters of tumbling grass and bushes. I peered into the depths of these webs and had such a felt, visceral sense of their patterns echoing through the cosmos, mirroring the dazzling stars of distant spiraling galaxies.
As the sunlight burned through the fog, the water droplets sparkled brighter. Each taut string of spider silk seemed to reverberate with the tension of holding the crystal water droplets in their perfect spheres. I felt the dynamic tension of a minutely shifting balance between stillness and movement as the sun’s heat intensified. At some point, the creator of one of these webs sidled out from some crevice and planted herself imperturbably in the middle of her lattice. I marvelled at the clarity of the water droplets, their capacity to reflect the sparkling intensity of the sunlight, illuminating a larger pattern of creation to my eyes. I took note also of the clarity and presence in myself which enabled me to witness this unfolding scene so minutely. I felt deeply how the spider, the web, the grass, the water droplets, the earth, the sun, the cosmos and I are all woven together in the infinity of Indra’s net.
The metaphor of Indra’s Net serves to remind us that we are never alone in our interwoven-ness. The writer and Zen teacher Vanessa Zuisei Goddard observes:
‘When I touch a strand of the net in my own little corner of the world, the whole web trembles. This kind of knowledge confers responsibility, of course, but it also offers great comfort. The image of Indra’s Net is meant to liberate us. It’s meant to free us from the illusion that we’re singular, separate, and solitary. And the fact that we’re thoroughly interconnected means that neither my sadness nor my joy, neither my biggest failing nor my most resounding success is mine alone…
… Indra’s Net reminds us that we’re always aligned — however imperfectly — and always together. When we’re flailing, this is a truth from which we can draw strength.’
Understanding this, she writes, she learned to connect deeper to the mountain, the forest and the river, and revitalise herself through these connections. Such connections are available to us all; we only need to cultivate our awareness of them. Starting with simple practices like forest bathing and sit-spotting, or visiting an urban green space, we can all restore our sense of connection, find healing and support, and gather our energies from the web of aliveness that we belong to, all of the time. ‘Everything is here, and it all holds you, perfectly,’ Zuisei Goddard writes.
I believe we can further strengthen our awareness of and sensitivity to these deep connections through re-storying our understanding of relationship patterns across the living world. What if our lives were steeped in stories woven from a deep understanding of our embeddedness in complex planetary and ecological processes, together with the potency of myth?
In her book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, the writer Sophie Strand draws on the tenets of ‘myco, eco, mytho’ — myco, the mutually constituting, relational intelligence of fungi; eco, the rootedness of every story in a specific ecology; mytho, the composting and renewal of old narratives to tell new stories — to revitalise and re-story ancient myths so they can fertilise new intimacy with the living world.
Writing of ancient storm gods, of which Indra is one, Strand peels back the accumulated cultural layers of patriarchy and separation to re-story our understanding of these deities within the elemental and embodied processes of the land. Strand’s ancient storm gods are of water and sand, fire and wind. Indra’s net becomes intertwined with substance and with the elements: it is not just an abstract phenomenon of the sky; it is also formed from underground.
She cites research4 showing that airborne fungal spores can play a role in cloud formation and rainfall. When spores as tiny as dust particles burst forth from mushrooms, most of them are swept up on the winds. About fifty million tonnes of spores sail up into the sky and ride the wind currents each year, she says. As water condenses around these spores, they coalesce and form rain clouds.
Strand writes:
‘Researchers concluded that fungi are a key part of a feedback loop in forests and rainy regions. Fungi need damp environments in order to fruit up into reproducing mushrooms. These mushrooms release billions of spores that create clouds. These sporulated clouds, in turn, drop rain down into these environments, creating the perfect mushroom conditions. Whole tropical ecosystems are intimately coordinated by these invisible swarms of spores.
Given these facts, we can surmise that as we degrade soil and destroy underground mycelial communities, we are not only harming the ground, we are harming the sky. The source of rain isn’t always above our heads. Sometimes it comes from below our feet.’
Strand points out that Indra is also referred to in the Hindu-Jain Tamil epic Silappatikaram as the god of the pearl garland and white umbrella. She writes:
‘What if Indra’s net were a winking, glittering collection of spores, each attracting a water droplet and coalescing into a life-giving rain cloud? How fitting then that Indra should also arrive with his white umbrella — the umbrella cap of a mushroom, parachuting out to release spores, seed clouds, and quietly disrupt the idea of monotheism.’
Grounding awareness of our boundedness in Indra’s vast net through invoking such very real and embodied processes of the living Earth, we regain our natural intimacy with spiders and rain clouds, mushrooms and mountains, and even the distant stars whose dust we carry in our bones and whose patterns in the night sky map our most ancient stories. Bound up in this vast, living, dynamic web, we are reminded of our individuality as well as our inter-relatedness — those particular gifts and songs and qualities that only we can bring to the greater whole.
Each of us is a jewel in this infinite net, shining with our own radiance and also mirroring and reflecting the light of countless others from our own unique angle.
This week, I’m curious to see how it feels to live with the awareness of myself as a jewel in Indra’s Net. I wonder what subtle shifts or changes to the qualities of my thoughts and experiences this might this bring?
I invite you to try this too! Let me know what you notice!
With love,
Megan
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Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness: a journey through Buddhist practice and tribal wisdom (2004).
Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra by Francis H. Cook (1977).
Thomas Hübl uses this metaphor to describe how we attune to ourselves and others.
Hassett MO, Fischer MWF, Money NP (2015) Mushrooms as Rainmakers: How Spores Act as Nuclei for Raindrops. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0140407. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140407