Bernie Sanders & How We All Are Connected

Indra’s Net

Rob and I watched some of the CNN democratic town hall this evening. These town halls are fascinating because it’s just one candidate at a time answering questions from the moderator – and the audience.

At the tail end of Sanders’s stint, the moderator asked him about his religious – spiritual beliefs. Sanders is Jewish and rarely mentions anything about his faith or his views on religion. It’s a major difference from the Republican candidates, who fall all over themselves to quote the Bible and mention god and faith and all the other stuff you expect to hear from candidates trying to win over the religious right. And it’s different from Clinton, who periodically tosses in references to her “faith.”

So when Sanders was asked to explain his spiritual beliefs, he pointed out that all major religions – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism –emphasize do unto others what you would have them do unto you. “In other words, we’re all into this together. What affects you, affects me.”

Stunned, I looked at Rob and exclaimed, “Indra’s net!

Sanders then went on to say that we can’t ignore a person who’s starving by telling ourselves it’s someone else’s problem and that we have to focus on making our next 5 million. We can’t ignore climate change that will destroy the planet because we’re all in this together.

As author Stephen Mitchell explained in The Enlightened Mind, “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.”

In an earlier town hall on CNN on February 3, Anderson Cooper asked Sanders this same question. Here’s his response, which was pretty much the same thing he said tonight in South Carolina:

I can’t recall any other presidential candidate ever talking about his or her spiritual/religious beliefs in quite this way. It’s something most of us probably sense at one time or another – the Butterfly Effect? Chaos theory? David Bohm’s implicate order? But regardless of what we call it, the notion of interconnectedness speaks to something profound within all of us. And I was blown away to hear Sanders say it.