On Creating the World We Live In

Many years ago I found a book on a bookshelf in the office of the Utne Reader in Minneapolis. I browsed through as I waited for my appointment and was so enchanted that I ordered a copy when I got home. A SIMPLER WAY, by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers turned out to be one of those amazing books that changed the way I thought about the world.

Their major point is that Darwin’s image of a world of struggle and fight for survival is only one way to think about the activity of the world and our place in it. The authors suggest that the world is actually infinitely creative and seeks many solutions to the same problem. ‘Life is an experiment to discover what’s possible…We are here to create, not to defend.’ Instead of every creature pitted against every other creature, they point to the mutuality of an organism and its environment.

‘The environment is invented by our presence in it. We do not parachute into a sea of turbulence, to sink or swim. We and our environments become one system, each influencing the other, each co-determining the other. Geneticist R. C. Lweontin explains that environments are best thought of as sets of relationships organized by living beings. “Organisms do not experience environments. They create them.”

We are so used to living in a world of imagined objects that are competing with one another for scarce resources. But this very perspective creates the world it imagines. When we think that we are separate, we act in ways that validate and confirm that separation. As the great physicist and philosopher David Boehm once said ‘The mind creates the world and then says “I didn’t do it.” ’

The Buddha taught that the self and the world create each other. This teaching of dependent co-arising (pratityasamutpada) imagines a world of mutuality where everything creates and is created by everything else. Though we most often experience ourselves as independent actors living in an environment that we must contend with, in fact, we are constantly and actively participating in the creation of the very situation in which we find ourselves.

This is why most solutions that involve trying to get other people to change are ineffective. In fact, most of our attempts to fix things simply add to the problem or shift its location. Our very efforts to fix and change are manifestations of the same system and the same problem that we are trying to fix. The more energy we put into the struggle to change, the tighter we are held.

The bad news and the good news is that the ‘problems’ we encounter are not ‘out there.’ Though sometimes we must take action to prevent harm and to offer kindness, the root of conflict in the world is exactly us. World peace and justice and equity begins with each one of us. This is not merely a metaphor, but a powerful perspective on living a life of meaning and purpose.

Arny Mindell and Process Work talk about ‘inner work’ as a kind of ‘world work’. In Zen we say that when we sit in meditation, the whole universe sits with us. What we encounter in our experience is not just personal. The sadness, the anger, the anguish, the joy, the ease is part of the field of human experience. In opening ourselves to each moment, we allow ourselves to enact our intimate connection with every one and every thing.

From this place of opening to all that is here, we can find creative possibilities for meeting life in some new way. We can begin to stop waiting for others to change and begin to take responsibility for the quality of our lives and the quality of the world around us.

Personal Practice – Think of a problem you are currently dealing with. Notice how you frame the problem—what’s wrong and how you initially think it should be fixed. Then consider: What if your thoughts, words and actions are part of the source of this problem? What if this problem is not really a problem, but an invitation for you to live a freer and more authentic life? What if there is some important opportunity for you right in the middle of where you are currently stuck?