What Is Interdependent
Origination?

What is interdependent origination I hear you ask?

Interdependent origination is the embodied insight that comes from full tantric awakening. Full tantric awakening comes from awakening every different aspect of experience in both your individual being and the collective experience.

This differs from sutric awakening or enlightenment, which focuses on bringing awareness to the things that are perceived through the mind. Tantric awakening includes how things feel, how things are (the physical matter) and what everything means.

This means awakening every aspect of both your physical body and the archetypal realm or karmic forces that shape our selves and Universe. There’s a lot of trauma, darkness and weirdness in those two things.

Like with awakening of the mind, in order to get to the bottom of it you have to awaken every aspect of the collective experience, not just your individual experience of it.

So with the mind this includes opening to the collective experience of perception itself – the impermanent changing nature of how things are appearing to arise by themselves in this moment.

With the archetypal realm or karmic forces, for example, this involves experiencing all aspects of this part of experience – going through the experience of allowing it all to express itself through us, not just our own inner archetypal or emotional content.

When we have gone through this process with every aspect of experience, the outcome of awakening everything is interdependent origination.

This is different to dependent origination, which is taught in old-school Buddhism and is the outcome of enlightenment or awakening the mind.

The final realisation of dependent origination is that the Universe is a simulation that our minds create. Our minds create everything, including our bodies. While this is a clever idea and an interesting and potentially liberating way of looking at the world, it is patently false. It doesn’t hold up to basic fact checking and any 5 year old could tell you that. If you believe it is true, I would like to see you hold that truth while someone punched you in the face.

A lot of buddhist meditation either hinges on this belief or on scientific materialism. If you stop taking what other people say as authority and start to investigate either of these with your own mind, you will discover that something doesn’t add up. This is what happened to me.

In order to describe interdependent origination I am going to need a word to describe the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. This is the stuff that is beyond physics (the physics doesn’t quite add up, so that can’t tell us what the fundamental building blocks are). In more spiritual contexts this has been called Buddha nature.

For the sake of neutrality, and to distinguish that this is a personal experience that has happened to me, rather than some fundamental truth, I’m going to call it Universe soup.

Experiencing Universe soup to me was like an embodied three dimensional rainbow fractal kaleidoscope that was the container for everything and was contained in everything all at once.

The first time I experienced this took an unfathomable amount of build-up to get to, and it truly scrambled my understanding of experience in a way that I will never be able to go back. This is what gave me an embodied understanding of interdependent origination.

I have since experienced aspects of it in different degrees of intensity and in more and more integrated ways. This is how experience presents itself to me – it is the model of the world that my body, heart and mind feels and trusts to be true.

Interdependent origination goes as follows:

1. I am creating it: Universe soup only arises because I exist, if I wasn’t here, this aspect of experience wouldn’t exist
2. It is creating me: I only arise because Universe soup exists, if there was no Universe soup I wouldn’t be here to experience it
3. The Universe is creating it: It is every aspect of the Universe ever that has created Universe soup
4. It is creating the Universe: Universe soup contains every aspect of the Universe

These images show each of them in action. The headfuck is that all of these are happening simultaneously.

For reasons that I can’t be bothered to explain here I have used a donut to represent the Universe.

As far as I understand it, dependent origination and old-school Buddhism, is saying that the first image is the ultimate truth. Or that if you collapse the boundary between the first and second image, then you are shown the ultimate truth of nothingness. But when you include images three and four, you can see that that would be just another experience that one aspect of the Universe (you) is experiencing at that moment. The rest of the Universe would be carrying on as normal and your experience is one part of that.

With interdependent origination, one of the key points is that there is no one single source of truth or one place that everything has arisen from. It all depends on all the other pieces of the puzzle. This inability for life to solve itself or to land anywhere ultimate or final is the reason why any of it exists.

‘It’ here could be used to describe life, consciousness, the Universe as a whole or experience.

If it was able to solve itself, it would eventually just fizzle out, like a chemistry experiment that had run its course. Or if it could land somewhere solid, it would do that and everything would stop. Or if it could come into unity, then it would become a single machine with no experiencer.

The inability for these things to happen, keeps it in the process; this is what creates life.

If this is confusing for your mind, that is the point – that the mind can’t solve it. We can only show up and open to what is present for us in this moment.

Each aspect of interdependent origination also relates differently to different aspects of time:

1. There is only this moment: I am creating it
2. Timelessness: It is creating me
3. The infinite flow of time: The Universe is creating it
4. The entirety of the past, the present and the future: It is creating the Universe

How do we connect to and awaken these different aspects of experience?

We can only connect with experience through love. Love is the force of giving and receiving that the entire Universe is built on.

The majority of awakening these different parts of experience within ourselves and as collectives is going into the darkness and connecting with it, as these are the parts that are most likely to not already be awakened/ loved/ connected.

Another way that these are enlightened or awakened is that someone can shows us a new aspect of experience that we didn’t know existed and it’s a huge relief or pleasure to discover. The more that awakening is like this, the better. It’s possible to create an environment where this happens much of the time and this is something I am deeply passionate about.

Different types of love allow us to connect to the different aspects of experience. This how we awaken each aspect:

1. I am creating it

Awakening this experience arises from opening to direct energetic and sensate experience with Compassion – the ability to feel and be present in our bodies. For example, feeling the sensation of coolness from touching metal or the sensation of warmth in the body when you feel content.

2. It is creating me

Awakening this experience arises from opening to awareness with Friendliness – the ability to open our minds to allow experience in to our hearts. For example, understanding that we aren’t the centre of the Universe through seeing the impermanent, changing nature of perception itself.

3. The Universe is creating it

Awakening this experience arises from opening to the archetypal realm with Joy – the ability to connect with the story that is unfolding. This could be getting into a flow state, or another aspect of this is realising that life will never be perfect; there is always a part of it that remains dissatisfactory as this is the part that keeps the whole thing going. Joy is the type of love or connection that can bridge that gap and allow us to embrace and connect with the imperfection of the current phase of the story we are in.

4. It is creating the Universe

Awakening this experience arises from opening to everything with Inclusion (aka Equanimity) – the conclusion of this is to see everything at once, so the process of awakening it is through increasing our ability to open to all different aspects of experience and incorporate the bits that we ignore, reject or are deluded about.

Conclusion

So that is interdependent origination.

The main conclusion is that there is no single source of truth. This means that you can’t boil everything down to some spiritual platitude and things only mean what they mean in this moment to the people that are present. In a different moment, with different beings, the connections would be different and therefore the entire experience and meaning would be different.

Ultimately, we are here to experience this weird thing called life together and go through the process, there’s no shortcut or way out of that. Anything that suggests otherwise is an inspirational quote at best and snake-oil at worst. Hope you enjoy the ride!