The Web of Life, Part 5: Existence as a Function of Relationship

My mother was a very great artist in embroidery; did absolutely fabulous work. And she could do everything with thread: sewing, knitting, embroidery, make tapestries, repair tapestries—oh, just fabulous work. So I’ve grown up in a background where thread is of enormous importance. She made a living this way, for a while. So I was always amazed at the way—say you take a ball of wool, and with knitting needles, and suddenly it turns into a sweater. Fantastic! But I found out, you see, the secret of this, which is that it will do this—it will hold together—by this combination of warp and woof. By this process where one thread goes under the other, omits the next, goes under the other, and then the next thing does the same thing, but in the opposite way.

Connect that. And they hold each other up. For example, you can put two sticks of wood, and lean them against each other, and they’ll stand up. We know the Chinese character for man (人) looks more or less like that. And although this is simply the brush form, the brush abbreviation, of what were originally the legs of a little human stick figure, there’s a story that Japanese children sometimes learn from their mothers: that the reason this is the character for man is that two sticks, leaned together as I described, will keep each other up. And the one depends on the other; it’s mutual. And so in the same way, the existence of human beings depends on our supporting each other. Without that, no one of us can exist. But that, which may seem a little trite—a little, sort of, moralistic and so on—but it is absolutely fundamental. That anything that there is, whenever we can say that something exists—existence is a function of relationship.

Motion itself is a function of relationship. For example—forgive me if some of you have heard this one before, but it’s a very important basic lesson—if there is only one object, one small ball in the middle of endless space, nobody knows whether it’s moving. Because you can’t tell whether it’s approaching anything, or whether it’s going away from anything, because there’s nothing else. So in that state of affairs, no motion exists. But if we introduce a second ball into the picture, and the two either come towards each other or go away from each other, then we can say that both of them or either of them is in motion. We can’t decide which is the one that’s doing the moving, because it could be one, it could be the other. Now we’ll put three balls into space, and we find two of them staying together and the other one going away. Now, it’s up to the two of them to decide whether the other one is going away from them or they’re going away from the other, because two is a majority in this case, and the vote, of course, always goes to the majority; the universe being, basically, a democratic organization. And so it goes.

And now, once you’ve got that, you can see that motion is a form of relationship. Or, let me put it in another way: energy is a form of relationship. If the universe is basically a play of energy, then you can say energy and relationship go together. Now, what is this saying? This is saying that being—existence itself—is relationship. Let’s look at it in several other ways.

You know the old question, “If a tree crashes in a forest and there is nobody around to hear it, is there a noise?” This question has been discussed in many futile ways, but noise—basically—is a state of affairs that requires an eardrum and an audio nervous system behind the eardrum. When the tree falls, if there is—anywhere around—and ear with the appropriate nervous system, there will be a noise. Because noise is a relationship between motion in the air and ears. If there is not any ear around, there won’t be any noise—although there will be vibration in the air. And if there is some instrument around, such as a microphone attached to a tape recorder, which is a mechanical copy of a human ear, then, according to that, there will be noise; there will be a vibration.

In the same way, let’s suppose the sun sends out light into space. Now, the space surrounding the sun will be black darkness as if there were no light in it, unless a planet happens to float by. When a planet floats by, there will be light. In the darkness. But if there isn’t anything to relate to the sun in that way, then comes no light.

Now this goes right down to the root and ground of everything. It goes down to the essence of your nerves, of your whole being: that it’s all an interdependence. And that’s why one of the basic symbols of the universe is the Chinese yin-yang symbol, which, you know, is a circle with an S-curve in the center. One side of the S is black, the other is white. So it makes, as it were, two commas, or two fishes. And the eye of the fish is the opposite color; the white fish has a black eye, the black fish has a white eye. And these things are going like this, see? Curling in on each other. Now, this thing is called a helix, and that is the fundamental form of the galaxies; the great nebulae we see out in space are doing this. Curves. And this is, basically, too, the position of sexual intercourse. This is lovemaking. And this is, you know, when you hold hands, and so on. This is it. But there are two involved, and the two are secretly one.