A Relational Cosmos: Lessons from an Empty Classroom
by Theodore Richards
What is the world made of?
This is the sort of question we don’t often ask; for it seems so obvious, so commonsensical. It’s made, of course, of people, places, things. Stuff. Each being or object, from planets to atoms, discrete. We might bump into one another, affect one another, even transform or love one another, but it is a collection of individual things that make the whole, the cosmos.
What’s commonly called common sense is often the product of a worldview or cosmology. To human beings, the narratives that define our world culturally are like water to the fish—a background, a context, that is scarcely even noticed. Assuming this context without having to think about it helps us get by—the fish doesn’t need to expend energy contemplating the water; humans are better able to get through their day without contemplating the nature of the Universe—but cultural assumptions can also get in the way of seeing things as they are.
And so, the notion that our world consists of things, and these things can exist independently, is a cultural assumption, rooted in the story we’ve been telling ourselves about the world and our place in it. Like the sea to the fish, it is so much a part of the basic context for our existence, we seldom even notice it. But unlike the sea, it may or may not be real. There are alternatives old and new. Moreover, there are consequences for how we choose to see our world.
Ecology
The most immediate physical context for all life is the ecosystem. Indeed, ecology suggests to us that life only exists in an ecosystem. Just as the individual organism can be said to contain multitudes—microbes, cells, bacteria, a community in itself as much as an individual—the ecosystem is a community as well. Each plays a role; none can exist without the whole.
Whereas the ecosystem is how life is brought forth in space, evolution describes how life emerges in time. Species don’t evolve alone; they co-arise in an ecological—that is to say, relational—context. The legs of the human are shaped by the African savannahs. The teeth of the lion are shaped by the skin of the antelope, whose speed is determined by the lion, whose speed, in turn, is shaped by the antelope.
It isn’t entirely accurate, therefore, to say that an animal or plant lives in an ecosystem. The line between one organism and the next is perhaps more of a human construct than a reflection of ecological reality. And the existence of an organism–even the human–without an ecological context is an absurdity.
Quantum Theory
Quantum theory describes the Universe at its most fundamental level. Physicists have learned, in complete contradiction to common sense, that at the atomic level, our world is entangled. Objects are, somehow, mysteriously, capable of sharing information beyond their capacity to communicate in space-time. The precise location of an entity emerges only when it is observed. This has confounded scientists for a century.
Scientists have found, consistently, that their observations have reinforced the validity of quantum theory, in spite of everything they’ve done to disprove it. This is because of how counterintuitive it is–it defies common sense.. And as a consequence, they’ve struggled to explain why. Various theories, such as multiple universes, have been posited. But one understanding that is perhaps even more confounding than multiple universes is that our world is fundamentally relational. An individual object is “an interaction,” writes physicist Carlo Rovelli in Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. “The world… is a dense web on interactions… It is not even clear what it would mean to say that [objects that don’t interact] ‘exist.’ The world that we know, that relates to us, what we call ‘reality,’ is a vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part.”
The assumption upon which all of modern science rests, objectivity, has undermined itself. It turns out that the distinction between observer and observed, subject and object, is illusory. What’s real is relationship.
Buddhism
Whereas ecology and quantum theory employ modern, scientific language to understand our world, Buddhist philosophy offers an ancient, spiritual perspective. But it arrives at an astonishingly similar place. Buddhist cosmology and philosophy begins with the concept of anatman, or “no Self.” This does not mean that we do not exist; rather, it is a repudiation of the older Hindu notion of the ultimate Self, or atman, something akin to the Western notion of the soul. Among the fundamental insights of Buddhism is that this permanent, changeless self is an illusion–the ultimate attachment that leads to our suffering.
Rather than a permanent soul as our ultimate identity, the Buddhist sees us as sunyata, or “empty.” It is not that we don’t exist, or that we have no identity particular to us; it is that we are radically interdependent rather than independent. This identity is neither fixed nor separate from anyone or anything else. Our identity cannot be separated from anyone or anything. We are relationship.
There is an ethical component to this worldview. Interbeing suggests that we cannot separate our fate from one another. Your pain is mine. We are, as Dr. King says, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
World as Relationship
All of this points to a radical shift in how we perceive our world. The Universe is not primarily made up of discrete things; it is primarily relational. Things exist, emerge, co-arise only in the context of relationships.
This is a profoundly difficult notion to accept or to express. Everything in industrial capitalist culture emphasizes objectified individuals. Our language is one of nouns rather than verbs. When I try to type the words “we are relationship,” my computer tries to change it to “we are in relationship.” That’s not a terrible phrase, but it points to the way that, linguistically, it is difficult to speak of a relational cosmos, one that doesn’t emphasize individuals requiring a preposition to put them “in” relationship.
There are broader consequences of relational cosmos. It isn’t merely a philosophical position. It requires an ethical transformation for the individual. But it also challenges the very notion of isolated, individual transformation. It actually requires a cultural transformation, new stories and symbols and shared values. And it requires a civilizational transformation, a reinvention of systems as well as symbols. And perhaps the most significant system in terms of establishing a worldview is a school.
The Classroom is Empty
Why, you might ask, does this matter? What are the consequences for such a radical shift in perspective? I am suggesting that, in fact, nearly everything changes when we begin to perceive our world in relational terms.
I will use the notion of the classroom as a way to understand this shift. For a classroom is not merely a room with four walls. As a context for learning, it is a symbolic space. A classroom is a microcosm, a little world in which the symbols and stories of our world are enacted. It is where the child learns the most fundamental beliefs about who we are and our place in the cosmos. We might learn, for example, that our Universe is fundamentally a collection of discrete and independent objects and beings by treating students and teachers in that space as independent and in competition with one another.
What if, like the soul–the Self, the atman–the classroom is empty? I do not mean that it is empty in that there are no children or books there. I mean this in the Buddhist sense: the classroom is a relational space. We do not enter into it as individuals who may or may not form relationships; individuals arise and evolve in the space in the context of relationships. Learning does not happen when an individual teacher deposits discrete information or skills into the individual student; it occurs in the in-between space, in relationship.
If the classroom is relational, what kind of world is it bringing forth? A relational classroom is one in which learning occurs collaboratively. Success and failure is shared. We are in this together. Restorative practices, rooted in indigenous worldviews and practices, are based on such an ethos. Where there is conflict, the solution is found not in punishment based on the binary of victim and perpetrator, but on restoring the relationship. Simply put, the empty classroom is a space in which we care for one another.
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We should be careful about thinking of any worldview as absolute or “how it really is.” The very nature of a culture is that it, like life, changes and evolves. We never quite get it right. We are always in Plato’s cave; but unlike Plato, we know that there’s only another cave beyond. The question is how a worldview helps us to take better care of one another, to fall in love with the world. While the worldview of objects perhaps served humanity in certain ways, it may be time to recognize what’s lost in such a cosmo-vision. As Carl Jung suggests, “We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos—the right moment—for a ‘metamorphosis of the gods,’ of the fundamental principles and symbols.” Now is the moment when we must learn to move from objectivity to subjectivity, from a culture of competition to a culture of care and systems of interconnection. Perhaps most importantly, we must transform the perception that our world is a collection of individuals to a web of relationships.
Theodore Richards is a writer, philosopher, educator, and the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project. The author of eight books, he has received numerous literary awards, including three Independent Publisher Awards and two Nautilus Book Awards. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters. You can find out more about him and his work at www.theodorerichards.com.