Indra's Net

Indra's Net comes from the Avatamsaka Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism. Imagine an infinite net stretched across the cosmos. At every node hangs a jewel. Each jewel reflects every other jewel. Because each reflection contains all the other reflections, every jewel contains every other jewel infinitely and is contained by every other jewel infinitely.

The image conveys total mutual interpenetration: no part of reality exists independently, every part is constituted by its relations to every other part, and the whole is present in each.

Quantum mechanics supplies the precise word for what the image describes: Entanglement. The wave function of reality is not the sum of uncountable independent soul-wave-functions. It is a single, vast, entangled state in which every soul's possibilities are correlated with every other soul's. What I am carving toward, you are carving toward, because we are not separable.

Indra's Net is not a poetic decoration on top of physics. Indra's Net is what an entangled cosmos looks like from inside.

The Christian counterpart is the Body of Christ as Paul describes it — members of one another, each member's functioning constituted by its relations to every other, the whole animated by a single Spirit. The two images describe a single nested structure in different vocabularies.