Reflections on Well-Being, Non-Self, and Inter-Being
On the importance of understanding how interconnected everything is and focusing on our well-being.
Hello, everyone - I hope that winter has been treating you well. I’ve been less active on here of late. Winter is a time for recuperating and resting and I’ve tried to take it quite seriously this year. Many of us are accustomed to joking about how difficult it is to truly feel rested, to feel rejuvenated, to feel recuperated. Even when we get eight hours of sleep, we still tend to wake up feeling groggy with our check engine light still on.
As well, I’ve started a new remote job from home and so I have to do some work to create routines that provide space to write, to play music, to be present. The more responsibilities we take on, the less we can tolerate things that hurt, frustrate, and exhaust us.
We all spend a great deal of time on things that mainly serve to harm us. Doom-scrolling and being sucked into the news is one of the most common. I used to constantly check the news, but at some point it became clear that constantly being engaged in the global news cycle left little room to address the important factors in my own life. This is not to suggest being disengaged is better1 - only that we are all very accustomed to dedicating a great deal of our time to things we have minimal direct power to change. And then we wonder why we never feel rested nor recuperated lol.
We often get sucked into the news (aka the suffering of the world) and we don’t spend time looking at the suffering within ourselves. We somehow can get lost in the idea that we could ever address the suffering of the world before we address the suffering within ourselves, when, in reality, when we cultivate well-being within ourselves we cultivate the well-being of the world around us.
For being such an individualistic society, we also tend to feel very shameful for “selfishly” focusing on our own well-being. It is American cliche that one “oughta suck it up”, “deal with it”, and “leave your feelings at the door”. It is an American reality that we are, largely, not well - mental illness, addiction, and violence permeate our culture. This is why half the commercials on TV are for mental health medications (e.g. “Hims can help”).
Without individual well-being, a world of suffering emerges around us. It is deeply important that we each create the space to focus on our well-being. Just as we make great sacrifices to ensure we are housed, fed, and clothed, it is important that we make sacrifices to prioritize our spiritual well-being. Our well-being is a fountain that fills the world around us with well-being.
This sounds good (at least it sounds good to me), but why? Why would our well-being enhance the well-being of the world around us? The last couple weeks, I have been reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s Primer on Buddhism - I have long been influenced by Buddhist ideas and Hahn has a beautiful way of connecting the principles to our daily lives.
There are two concepts that I have been meditating on this morning: non-self and inter-being. While I cannot give you clear definitions for these concepts, I can offer them as ideas for you to explore if you so desire. I deeply appreciate that Buddhism asks each of us to walk the path to wisdom for ourselves - there is nothing in this life that requires we take it on faith.
Non-self is grounded in the realization that we - me, you, everyone - is made entirely of things that are not us. I am Charlie, but I am made entirely of bits and pieces that are clearly not-Charlie. I am made of water, of elements which form cells, which form tissues and organs, and, at some point, Charlie emerges out of all of that. There are no barriers between the self and the not-self that makes the self. Where do the pieces that make me end and where do I begin?
Inter-being is grounded in the realization that we are bound to everything around us. Let us consider bees and flowers. Well, bees require flowers for pollen and flowers require bees for pollination. There were never bees without flowers and there were never flowers without bees. They inter-are - they emerged into reality simultaneously. One cannot be understood as being truly distinct from the other.2
Similarly, we might look at a tree and understand that it is made of water, of soil, and of sunshine. Without the Sun and the Earth and the water, there are no trees. Likewise, we might look at ourselves and understand that without trees, we would not be here either. The Earth has a respiratory system - trees transform carbon dioxide into oxygen and animals transform oxygen into carbon dioxide.
Just as bees and flowers are not truly distinct from one another, neither are we distinct from the rest of life on Earth. This is why I always find conversations of “leaving Earth, going to Mars” so silly - I do love sci-fi, but I think we don’t fully grasp how inter-wound we are with the Earth we live on and everything else on it.
And so, we are at once the world within us (non-self) and we are the world all-around us (inter-being). We are in a state of inter-relationship with the world around us and, therefore, when we cultivate well-being within ourselves, we cultivate well-being in the world around us. If the Earth cultivates a warm, sunny day, the plants will grow. When we cultivate suffering within ourselves, we cultivate suffering in the world around us. If the weather freezes and a great storm comes, the plants will shrivel and even die.
When we start to recognize our inter-being with the world, we start to see how our life can evolve for the better. Many of us know that there is a plastic garbage island in the Atlantic Ocean - when we recognize that our well-being is inter-twined with the well-being of the planet, we can start to see that the plastic garbage island in the Atlantic Ocean is not just the Earth’s suffering, but our own as well.
This, I think, could also help our dialog around climate change. “Climate change” is a euphemism for a certain kind of poisoning of the planet. In a literal sense, the climate of the Earth is always changing just as a river is always flowing. The real issue at hand is that when we dump plastic into the ocean, we are also dumping plastic into ourselves - which is literally true, our bodies are full of micro-plastics.
This is because we are inter-twined with the oceans. If the oceans are filled with plastic, at some point, we will become full of plastic. There is little political will to address “climate change” because we do not connect the pollution of our planet with the pollution of our own bodies. If smog is released into the air, we will breathe that smog. If toxins are dumped into the soil, we will eat those toxins. If plastic is tossed into the water, we will drink that plastic. Our well-being is in a state of inter-being with the well-being of everything here on Earth.
This is also why so many religions and philosophies talk of the importance of helping other people. When we ease the suffering of others, we ease the suffering of ourselves. When we build-up the well-being of others, we build-up the well-being of ourselves.
This is also why war can never lead to meaningful peace. War is, by its very definition, based on inflicting suffering on another group of people. Yet, if we are inter-twined with all people, then when we inflict suffering on others we also inflict suffering on ourselves. We know this is true at the individual-level - if we hurt someone else, we will suffer as well, in the forms of guilt, shame, and self-loathing. Our suffering will then lead us to hurt ourselves and others in the future.
This is how it functions at the societal-level too - pain only breeds more pain. The only way to justify war is to convince ourselves that we are distinct from the people on the “other side”. Would we be able to justify war if we understood that we are inter-twined with people on the “other side” - that their suffering is our suffering and that their well-being is our well-being? When we hurt others, we hurt our self. When we kill others, we kill our self.
The tenets of non-self and inter-being help us recognize that our well-being feeds the well-being of the world and that our suffering feeds the suffering of the world.
In our rather American mindset, we have often associated “focusing on ourselves” with ignoring the suffering of the world around us - it is why so many of us are told we are being selfish when we focus on our own self.3 But, when we start to recognize that the boundaries between the self and the not-self are not so firm, we begin to recognize that the suffering around us is also our suffering. In other words, our focus on our own well-being becomes inter-twined with our focus on the well-being of the world around us.
And so, this is all to say, cultivating well-being in our own lives is requisite for cultivating well-being in the world. If cells in our body suffer, then we suffer. Likewise, when individuals suffer, then society suffers.
I will conclude by saying that a lot of modern “self-care” feels rather vacuous. There is a lot of talk about “mindfulness” and “meditation”, yet these practices are only aspects of greater spiritual traditions. I’m not saying you must go and study Buddhism or some other spiritual system, but we clearly take pieces of such systems - such as physical yoga, meditation, mindfulness - without taking in the full system.
For example, within Buddhism, meditation is an aspect of Buddhist practice. Buddhist meditation is inter-twined with Buddhist ideas such as non-self and inter-being. Buddhism explicitly warns against cherry-picking aspects of Buddhism and removing them from the system. When we take aspects of a tradition (in this case, meditation) without taking the full tradition it is an aspect of (in this case, Buddhism), then the aspect becomes meaningless. It would be as if you told your lover you wanted to hold their hand and so you cut their hand off and it took it with you wherever you go…
And so, if “self-care” has felt difficult for you, I would encourage exploring fuller systems of well-being. Buddhism is one such system, but we can find these systems within all major religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism are all built on such rich systems of well-being too. Buddhism is nice to read about because it is more a “system” than a “religion” - there is nothing contradictory about being a Jewish Buddhist or Muslim Buddhist
If reading this has interested you in exploring these ideas more, I’d like to offer a few easy entry ways. These sources have felt like deep wells of wisdom for me and sometimes just finding the source material can be the most difficult part of the journey towards well-being:
The writings and poetry of Thich Nhat Hahn, sample titles include:
The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
No Mud, No Lotus
Lectures given by Alan Watts
The Being in the Way Podcast is a great primer
Lectures given by Ram Dass
The Be Here Now Podcast is a great primer
With gratitude,
Charlie
I can tell you that checking the news once a week will provide plenty of information for each of us to inform our political lives - to check the news every day or every hour only acts to pull us out of the present moment.
And yes, the chicken and the chicken egg inter-are. One did not come before the other so-to-speak. Without the chicken egg there is no chicken and without the chicken there is no chicken egg - they are one-and-the-same. Though, for those of you unsatisfied with this, the egg obviously came before the chicken because there were other species that hatched from eggs before the chicken…
Thankfully, this has started to shift, though modern “self-care” initiatives fall short from actually addressing our well-being and suffering.
This was very helpful to read. Thanks, Charlie