All One, All One

"All one, all one". That is what the bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap proclaims. I love reading the manic word salad on the Dr. Bronner’s bottles, but the truth of it has only dawned on me slowly. When I am alone in Costa Rica with my cats and dogs, I know without a shadow of doubt that we are all fundamentally the same. We long to be together, to be connected. We long to sleep as closely as possible, skin to skin. Belinda the cat kisses me gently on the cheek, as does Milu, a new puppy. Everyone rests peacefully when I am peaceful. Everyone gets excited if I prepare to go out. When thunderstorms arrive, first Kandor goes and challenges the storm, barking as if to say, “Make my day!” Then we all fall asleep to the sound of the pounding rain. We are a pack, a herd, a family, whatever you want to call it, and most of the time, our inclinations coincide. I don’t like to catch and eat flies, and they don’t use the internet, but at the fundamental level, we eat, sleep, and defecate, over and over. In one end and out the other. Then we seek connection and relationships.

I’ve never understood the distinctions that people make, including biologists and psychologists, between people and “animals”. Sure, I can play chess, but I cannot open up a raw coconut with my teeth. I don’t like the taste of grass or cow manure, and my critters don’t like cinnamon. We all love pancakes! I understand that the human genome is different in some ways from other animals, as is the cockroach genome or the dengue virus genome. Yes, we have our differences. But in a larger view, I feel that when the Buddha talks about respect and protection for “all sentient beings”, there is implicit acknowledgment that the differences are small compared with our one-ness. I think it is time to abolish the word “animal” meaning a living, life form that does not use photosynthesis, but that is different and lower than our species, homo sapiens. I don’t mind distinguishing Animalia from Vegetabilia, or the 6-kingdom notion of Professor Thomas Cavalier-Smith of (bacteria, protozoa, chromista, plantae, fungi, and animalia), but it is time to put aside some notion of hierarchy. No one of these groups is better than another. Even the age of a species does not determine its worth. For example, human evolution is much slower than the evolution of parvovirus. That doesn’t make one or the other more worthwhile or interesting.

My daughter Nellie tells me that if I were put into a blender and ground up into a stew, that she could analyze all of the life forms that walk around under the name of Judith Lipton. 99% of them would not be my own genes, my singular life. My self is an illusion. I am composed of mites, bacteria, fungi, viruses, and bits and pieces of DNA in my own nuclei and mitochondria that I didn’t necessarily inherit from my parents. It reminds me of the beginning of Winnie the Pooh:

“Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders.

(“What does ‘under the name’ mean?” asked Christopher Robin.

“It means he had the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it.”

“Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t quite sure,” said Christopher Robin.)

I live under the name of Judith Lipton. But I am no longer quite sure what that means. It seems to mean that an active community walks, talks, swims, and sleeps in an aggregation with my name, but it is no more meaningful than the name of Sanders. My dogs and cats and horses are also aggregate beings, communities that I call Belinda or Kandor, but I don’t even know 10% of who they are. I found a land tortoise and took it to a rescue center yesterday. Much to my horror, the caretaker found that my poor tortoise had a large tick, sticking right to his shell. She couldn’t put him in with the other tortoises until he had been ridden of parasites, including ticks. Then she informed me that snakes, iguanas, and other reptiles also get infested with ticks! YUK! I thought I had found a tortoise, but it was really a tortoise with parasitic hitchhikers!

Being one doesn’t mean I have to like it. I don’t like the mosquitos that carry Dengue, or the tiny “no-see-ums” that torture me when I walk on the beach. I’ll kill roaches, wasps, ants, fungi, bacteria, and other living things without much guilt, because they will make me sick, but it is not from ignorance. No, it is the ancient fight for survival, and I’m the one with the can of Raid and the bottle of bleach. At times, I feel in charge. Then a thousand large black ants emerge from behind the toilet and I can see that my domination is transitory, and maybe an illusion. Respect for all sentient beings does not mean that I protect the Aedes aegypti mosquitos that carry Dengue. But I know we are related, and they are making babies and passing their genes along, as I have done. In the game of life, ultimately I will lose. I will become ashes, perhaps fertilizer. Or food for critters in the other domains of life. In the meanwhile, the reality of inter-being, interdependent co-arising is manifested every day. How lucky we are!