dependent arising

Interdependence is a truth of life. Look around; there is no one thing that exists wholly independent of anything else. Everything in our lives arises in context, supported and affected by external factors, conditioned reality. Every thing depends upon the right conditions to occur. We see things because of various intensities of light, sadness occurs because we experience loss, or a memory of loss, seeds grow into trees due to the sun, earth and water, and so on. What we experience is a duality of cause and effect, contrast and distinction. Every thing changes; nothing is permanent. Light becomes darkness, sometimes we're sad other times joyful, a sunny day turns cloudy. All things are in a continual state of movement growing and dying all around us each day.

Understanding that all things exist in context, not as permanent entities, is fundamental to awareness, clearly seeing the true nature of reality as it is. So in order for us to make sense of this world around us our mind assembles a structure of concepts; we label and explain everything, making distinctions, seeing separations, experiencing a world separate from ourselves. We forget that each concept, each thought arises as a result of a set of conditions. And our experience of those conditions may differ from the experience others have based on the filter we use for interpreting those conditions, i.e the emotional, physical and psychological history and habitual patterns we bring to the situation. That is the heart of dependent arising: our experience of reality is dependent on causes and conditions just as everything around us. All of this is happening in a state of ongoing movement, change, decay, impermanence and death.. Ultimately, dependent arising describes the progression that enlivens the endless cycle of re-birth whether of each moment or our lives altogether.

Understanding this process can inspire releasing habitual patterns of thinking that create suffering, to experience things "as it is" as a fluid interdependent whole. We could begin to see our thoughts and emotions as momentary, less solid, not representative of a solid truth or hard reality. This is a fundamental understanding to seeing the absolute truth of emptiness of self and other and appearance altogether.