Humans are a ball of rubber bands

Or how we are all interconnected beings

Humanity is like a giant ball of rubber bands.

That’s it — this is who we are as a species, get used to it.

As some like to say, “can’t live with em, can’t live without em” — and this is the human scenario, culture, life blood beating heart of joy and sorrow and all the rest.

Each strand is a street to the heart of another, which links to another — the wounds, the highs, the lows, the joys and all the rest meld together in an interconnected hivework of consciousness.

What can I say, being alone isn’t possible for a human.

Let alone the fact that the forces of the universe hold us to the earth, hold our atoms together, that the trees and plants make oxygen that we breath… that we eat other life to take their energy for our own.

This is a basic truth beyond humans and more generally the nature of existence (Ouroboros / non-dual shenanigans [who actually learned how to spell this right? lol]). But in this case I just wanted to connect it to we humans, as we so often due.

Backstory on the rubberband thought stream

I was reading a Wikipedia page and a certain collection of thoughts and sensations hit me, leading me to the rubberband analogy. Below is an except from my personal reflections post-event:

“Reading this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disownment) I can taste the sensation of believing every word… of seeing the outlying human-ness of it… the cultivating and following of behavioral scripts and customs…. the English language and the sentence flow of course, but refering here to the customs described in disownment.

How in the past there were different customs, and even today some may still practice these customs, and these family customs are like micro-cosms for the country/government customs they want.

I can just kinda view us humans as not singular beings at all, but more like those interconnected nets or rubber band balls:

This is a closer view of what a human being is.

We are each like a rubber band on this ball… but where is the distinction between one rubber band and the next?

Now just imagine the ball above but instead the layers are constantly shifting… and the rubber bands grow or shrink based on the connection between people.

Hive mind — that’s what I feel humanity will reach to, maybe already did reach to;

As I do feel that this “reality” we are experiencing now may be a simulation learning experience of whatever the future will be after “humanity” and those unnamable beings or entities will be reliving “the human experience” as you would view a beautiful painting in a museum.

• In this picture, the Gods or Goddesses create worlds and existences for mere pleasure — or would it be curiosity? Wanting to know more… or would it always be baser desires to want more, more, more pleasure; or would it be the higher desires to want more, more, more purity and peace?

  Greater insights.

  Anyway, the chippies call.

  But I sense the anxiety too — to feel all the potential negatives of a scene that is apparently normal; to feel all the potential positives.

  I will pray for those positives, and let the negatives pass away

  Call forward the highest, and let the lowest pass away

  Join me in a prayer to goodness and joy and freedom

  Glory be to the enlighted soul that has no name

We are a band of rubber bands, like a band playing some cool tunes.

Yup, rubber rubber rubber~!

Think of the connections you have, your friends and family, romantic intimacy — think of how you influence each of them with every action or inaction, every motion of body language, your words as kind or unkind or somewhere between; then each of them influence their circle of connections, and so on and so forth and so:

I can’t find the exact bit on it, but there’s that idea that if you just go out 4 to 6 people of who you know (e.g., a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend) then you connect the entire planet of humans — a whopping 8.1 billion-ish people.

A jump into the emotions of another’s shoes

We have all likely heard the expression: “Take a walk in someone else’s shoes” [in order to truly understand them].

I think if we all tried to understand others better from a well-intended place, then the world would be a better place.

Ultimately, I think trying to understand anyone else is impossible, as I will explain below, but that doesn’t make the effort of trying to understand meaningless or not worth while:

Why we can never understand others (let alone ourselves)

The basic concept I will be writing from is the non-dualistic understand of self, or the Buddhist concept of “Anatta” (No Soul / Self / God).

In short: there is no self, no “I” (whether lower or higher)… there is nothing at all, or at the very least there is no thing that could be ascribed as a “self” in any way.

From this view, what we are left with is that what we all experience as our “self” is just an illusion — a bundled up pattern of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, that have collectively been stored and restored over and over again in the long and short-term memory of our brains.

Are we the bits of information, the neuron or hormonal goo, that makes up these memories?

Are we the hands, the feet, the mouth, the eyes?

Are we the brain perhaps?

Maybe the micro-biome “brain”?

The sense of self, the “I” in central command?

From Jonathan Haidt’s studies into the intuitive mind, from the beginning humans are creatures that use a mixture of logic and emotion — but I think a more appropiate approximation is that we are creatures of inuition, and this can sometimes lean more heavily into logic and sometimes more heavily into emotion; but as for computer logic, the normal and usual human state of cognition is pretty far removed from this (and so, someone not exposed to other ideas or learning may be more likely to be more emotional; but perhaps it has something more to do with one’s personality than one’s education… or perhaps a mixture of both? The nature-nurture debate).

Regardless, if you (or whatever the observing consciousness or aware entity that seems to be standing behind “you”) observe and meditate on your thoughts and your being, you will likely see that you don’t exist anywhere; fragments of data that are strung together to make a fully running video… when the video was actually just numerous pictures strung together at 60 frames per second.

So its not to say the sense of self or “I” isn’t useful — I think egos are an incredibly useful psychic technology. But just as a computer operating system would be treated as a technology and not obsessed over (like we often do with our egos), if we can treat our egos as we would an operating system or other comparable technology… and so could upgrade it, analyze it, look at it without such tight-gripped fear or anxiety we could improve much better; and as I’ll connect back to the main thread, this hightened awareness should allow us to better empathize with others as then we can “plug and play” with other ego constructs and view them as though they were us.

Back to the plot: how the non-dual anatta perspective makes empathy easier

When you see through the illusion of self, it can cause many things to happen; the old quote from a Buddhist dude goes like:

Before enlightenment, trees are trees, rivers are rivers, mountains are mountains.

After enlightenment, trees are no longer trees, rivers are no longer rivers, mountains are no longer mountains.

After integrating enlightenment (rigpa), trees are once again trees, rivers are once again rivers, mountains are once again mountains.

The key is the post-integration continuative state.

It is on-going, not a one-stop shop deal.

The experience is like being able to see things from any perspective, but also still prefering things as one did before the enlightenment experience… so you could like chocolate before enlightenment, then after enlightenment you have a full reset on everything (so that your body feels alien, chocolate is an alien object, eating is weird, what is this physical realm of existence?) and then post-integration everything is as mundane as before but also contains within it the re-captured spark of divine mystery and love.

It is from this perspective, where everything and anything and everyone has a divine spark of mystery in them connected by love — that when you open yourself and no longer cling to the self or ego; then you can identity with literally anyone completely if you so choose. We will still have our biases built up in our ego, and perhaps there are some beings you don’t want to fully understand (e.g., serial killers).

Regardless, by lowering our own threshold for self-grippage, we allow ourselves to more easily empathize with others, with animals, with the land, with inanimate objects (which the consciousness of inanimate objects or planetary movements is so fascinating, but I’ll share in another post or writing).

And as a rubber band society, the more rubber bands we get on board being good and conscious boys and girls means the better everything should be… because in truer virtue, we will need less laws, less bloat, help each other out and help in more genuine ways (rather than seeking gain, do it in humble honor of our mutually shared divinity), and overall this should ease our passage into the ever increasingly turbulent future of technological disruptions.

To this end I want to devote my life to creating and co-creating system(s) that will allow as many human beings as possible to break free from dukkha:

Little different than the original Buddha’s aim… but I think we can use all of the accumulated human history, learning and current technology to make this aim more achievable and at a more massive scale.

I don’t believe in forcing anything though, so ultimately this will have to be grassroots — and perhaps it will be a proseltyzing thing, but I never liked those kinds of things as they tend to degenerate into dogma wank-fests by power hungry individuals or groups or forces.

In conclusion: as humans we exist as individual rubber bands that are all connected into a rubber band ball

The heading says it all, so no need to say it again.

Think, feel, ponder, Be — and do it genuinely.

You’ll stumble at first, and every one still stumbles even after practicing for a while.

I stumble every day and I’m thankful I don’t stumble every moment, haha.

The key is for faith to become belief to become knowing to become non-knowing.

Something like that anyway: good luck and thanks for all the fish! 🐟

Also, consider starting your own writing and sharing your insights with the world — as more noise is being generated by bots and less-than-savory forces, all good forces should unite to resonate brighter and clearer to radiate away all darkness: