This is a concept I will talk about again from my own experience, but for now I just wanted to give food for thought.

This is about the Buddhist notion of interdependent arising. Thich Nat Hanh has a well-known teaching about this he calls “interbeing”:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be.

“If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. Without sunshine, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. The logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.” (From Peace is in Every Step.)

If all phenomena arise together in a mutually interdependent web of cause and effect, then we are not Super Source after all. You may be, as Werner said, “God in your universe,” and so am I. But who’s creating my reality when I share it with countless sentient beings who are likewise God in our shared universe?

From this standpoint, reality is seen as a co-creation of everyone, everything, everywhere, since beginningless time, interdependently co-creating the Great Mystery in which we all find ourselves.