For me, it’s easy to engage the philosophy of interdependence, and mind-blowingly difficult to sit and actually perceive interdependence in real time. To perceive interdependence is to obliterate the idea of the self and the false sense that it is a being or thing that is separate from experience, and thus can evaluate it, judge it, enjoy it, feel distant from it, etc.
Because I was reading his book, and not meditating, and because thinking is easier than meditating, I came up with a thought that I wanted to share with you all. I was thinking about the fact that one of the reasons I write about ideology and structures and systems so much in this newsletter is because I want to make visible the artificial and constructed nature of ideas, ideas that are made real in the world through systems that cause pain and harm and suffering. To make these systems visible as constructions is to make them available to change.
The hopelessness you may have felt, at some point, about actually transforming white supremacy is in part about that wagon wheel recirculating, teaching you not only its content, but also its form: that it won’t budge, that it will just keep turning, keep harming, keep its devastation going.
The force and the violence of white supremacy in the real world is overwhelming and catastrophic. But it is equally catastrophic to inculcate in a culture the idea that it cannot be contested, that it will not ever leave. Because if the belief that it is timeless and unchanging takes hold, even unconsciously, the person who has that belief is less likely to engage in action for change, or to think of new ways to create a culture that does not depend on white supremacy.
It occurred to me that the meditation on interdependence could be seen as one of the most subversive ways to feel and know the constructed nature of ideologies, and the systems of violence that are its effects.
To perceive interdependence—rather than think about interdependence—is to achieve, even for a moment, the fact of oneness. It is to evade the mirage of separation upon which so much of the violence of ideologies depend. Because ideologies of domination depend on separation as the ground, the floor upon which they stand: they can only function when there is a subject and an object who is derided, evaluated, judged, found wanting. The subject is granted full personhood; the object is robbed of being.
To perceive oneness—to know oneness in the experience of being is to have one breath, one moment, that systems of violence cannot enter. It is a power that is available at all times. It is a mode of concentration, but it also a practice of self reinforcement, a way of continuing to turn toward violence, to stay with it, to better understand how it works.
