Quotes about Interdependence

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

How strange is the lot of us mortals!  Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it.  But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people - first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies are bound by the ties of sympathy.

The Relativity of Perception

"The primordial purity of the ground completely transcends words, concepts, and formulations."

-Jamgon Kongtrul, Myriad Worlds, translated and edited by the International Committee of Khunkhyab Choling

The definition of emptiness as “infinite possibility” is a basic description of a very complicated term.  A subtler meaning, which might have lost on early translators, implies that whatever arises out of this infinite potential—whether it’s a thought, a word, a planet, or a table—doesn’t truly exist as a “thing” in itself, but is rather the result of numerous causes and conditions.  If any of those causes or conditions are changed or removed, a different phenomenon with arise.  Like the principles outlined in the second turning of the wheel of Dharma, quantum mechanics tends to describe experience in terms not simply of a single possible chain of events leading to a single result, but rather of probabilities of events and occurrences—which, in an odd way, is closer to the Buddhist understanding of absolute reality, in which a variety of outcomes are theoretically possible.

INTERDEPENDENCE

"Whatever depends on conditions is explained to be empty..."

--Sutra Requested by Madropa, translated by Ari Goldfield

Ego's trick is to make us lose sight of our interdependence. That kind of ego-thought gives us a perfect justification to look out only for ourselves. But that is far from the truth.  In reality we all depend on each other and we have to help each other. The husband has to help his wife, the wife has to help the husband, the mother has to help her children, and the children are supposed to help the parents too, whether they want to or not.

The Feminine element achieves "domination" dialectically by means of submission (the very opposite of domination i.e.), thus becoming the vital factor by permitting the union or yoking of the two to take place, and the Masculine element likewise achieves its self-assertion only by grace of submitting to what the Feminine alone can do:  they ascend to a new kind of life or activity "as a whole" through their passivization or subordination as subcomponents.  They are "members one of another," wholes through their interactive (con-crete or grown-together) differences.  Two forms of self-supersession take place, two dialectical ways of qualifying the one-sidedness of each principle:  for each strives to be or become "the whole" and can only do so under the terms of the other's specific identity.  Any relation in which one finite personality is merely subdued or absorbed by or reduced to another finite personality is not spiritual and is not love:  it may be infatuation, it may be cult of personality or charisma, it may be domination (for the sake of or not for the sake of exploitation), but it lacks the full dialectical dynamics of spirit.

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events---that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies---and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

Everything, including all people, exists only through relationships with other people or things. 
Nothing exists in isolation or absolute independence.
No person, or thing can arise of, for, or by its own accord.
Everything is interdependent.
~Taro Gold

Contemplation is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

One human being, one village, one city, or even one country can no longer live entirely on its own.  Competitiveness - the desire to be the first, the best, the foremost, and only one - has simply become outdated as a "value."  This desire may have been useful in the past.  The concept of evolution describes a process from dependence toward independence, ultimately resulting in interdependence.

Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others. Nor is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by concern for others. But that is not all. We find that not only do altruistic actions bring about happiness but they also lessen our experience of suffering. Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others' happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune than the one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace -- anxiety, doubt, disappointment -- these things are definitely less. In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense.

What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others' happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others' happiness.