Almost a century ago, Albert Einstein told us something very fundamental about us and the universe that we were unaware of. No, I am not talking about the General theory of relativity, though, that’s what we remember him for. Einstein had a very keen perception about the fundamental nature of our life and reality. He said “ A human being is part of the whole, called by us the “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. 

It is this sense of separateness that keeps us behind our self-erected prison walls. We are continuously struggling against the universe because of our delusion of being somehow separate and distinct from the rest.

To be fair, the sense of separateness is not entirely without benefit. It is the result of the functioning of the ego, and causes us to identify with our body and develop our individual personality. It propels us to strive, to excel and distinguish ourselves from the rest.

It is when we do not develop the balance between our distinct identity and the collective oneness, that the problems start to arise. Indeed at one extreme it is a personality disorder that we term as narcissism.

This is the delusion that Einstein is telling us about. The sense that somehow, I am distinct from the rest of the universe around me. Science has enquired into the nature of reality and so have countless seers and mystics. Both have come to the same conclusion and that is that whole of existence is made up of the same fundamental building blocks. Whether you call them the electrons, protons, photons or quarks or the 5 elements - the Pancha Bhutas as ancient Indian philosophy conjectured, every entity in the universe is built from the same building blocks.

The universe is organised into ecosystems that exist in a beautifully coordinated way. The human body too is an ecosystem. Some scientists looked a little deeper and asked the question who are you and what is this entity that you call your body. This question begs a little enquiry.  In 2016 a team of biologists led by Ron Milo from the Weizmann Institute of Science set out to review all the available literature on the microbe populations that live inside us.

They found that for a man between 20 and 30 years old, with a weight of about 70 kg and a height of 170 cm - they call him the 'reference man' - there would be about 30 trillion human cells and living among them are 39 trillion bacterial cells.

This gives us a ratio of about 1.3:1 – The microbes are a majority! And yet, most of the time, we are not at war with the microbes living inside the ecosystem we call our body. Whether it is the galaxies or the ecosystem on earth including, the 30 trillion human cells that exist along side the 39 trillion microbes in our bodies, everything is interconnected.

As the Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh said, we are all inter being.

You might say, that’s all very well. At an esoteric level, that is understood only by a small minority of realised souls, everthing is interbeing and that kind of thing.

But lets be practical. I have to survive in this world and here its me and my family. We can go a little further and extend that family a little bit. But that’s where we draw the line. We have to look out for ourselves.

When we exist with this fundamental principle that it is “us against them” we are always living in fear, looking over our shoulder and anticipating obstacles. Our ride is not smooth. When taken to the extreme, it becomes me against the universe. That we can all agree, is an unequal competition. 

So practically speaking we are in a kind of prison that restricts us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.

But even at this micro level, there is interconnectedness. For instance, what you call as your body and your mind are very closely connected. What happens to one, affects the other. What you call your mind, is connected with other minds and with an universal mind. 

Many of us have heard of the saying that a butterfly fluttered its wings in Hawaii and a tsunami occurred on the other side of the planet. It sounded very nice and wize and we thought nothing further of it until a virus mutated somewhere in Asia and thousands died all over the world.

Nothing brought home the reality of  interconnectedness as strongly and harshly as the Covid pandemic a few years ago.

Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison that we have built and then imprisoned ourselves in, by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.