There’s a moment that tends to arrive for anyone who watches the natural world closely enough. A bird eats an insect. A larger fish eats a smaller one. A lion takes down a deer. The deer fed on grass. The grass fed on a fallen leaf, on decomposed matter, on something that was once alive and is now soil. Nothing in the chain is cruel exactly — it’s just how the system runs. Everything depends on something else to survive, and everything eventually becomes food for something else. Plants are living things too, and even they live by consuming light, water, and the remains of what came before them.
It’s a short step from observing that cycle clearly to wondering whether it points at something larger: that everything is, in some sense, one system — one continuous exchange of energy and matter, wearing different temporary shapes. Lion, deer, grass, human. Different forms, same underlying stuff, same underlying dependency.
What’s striking is that this isn’t a new observation, and people didn’t need to borrow it from each other to arrive at it. Thinkers across very different times and places, working independently, kept landing on some version of the same intuition. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, around 500 BCE, described reality as a single, ever-changing flow he called the Logos — “from all things One, and from One all things.” Centuries later, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that there is only one underlying substance in existence, and that everything — minds, bodies, nature, what people call God — is simply an expression of that one substance, each thing like a wave on the sea rather than something cut off from it. Hegel, after him, described reality as a single whole gradually becoming aware of itself through history. None of these thinkers were in conversation with each other across the centuries that separated them. None of them needed Indian or Middle Eastern 1500 BCE philosophy to get there — they arrived at Oneness simply by thinking carefully about what’s in front of them, the same way someone today might arrive at it by watching a lion, a deer, and a field of grass.
That’s really the heart of it: Oneness isn’t anyone’s invention. It’s a conclusion that keeps presenting itself to people who look closely enough at how dependent every living thing is on every other living thing — the lion needs the deer, the deer needs the grass, the grass needs the fallen leaf, the human needs all of it and returns to all of it eventually. Different people, in different centuries, wearing different intellectual clothing, kept arriving at some version of the same place — not because one handed the idea to the next, but because the world itself, looked at honestly, seems to keep saying the same thing.
None of this resolves the harder question sitting underneath it. “Is everything connected?” (that part is observably true), but “what does it mean to be a human in the middle of that cycle, aware enough to ask the question at all”. A plant dying and feeding a deer is morally and existentially simple. A human life, in between birth and death, with the capacity to notice the cycle and ask what it’s for — that’s not just nutrient cycling, even if it’s built from, and will eventually return to, the same matter that feeds everything else.
But the lack of a final answer isn’t the same as having nothing to take away. If the lion, the deer, and the grass are all temporary forms of one continuous exchange, then the most consistent way to live inside that fact is not to treat oneself as separate from it — not as an owner standing outside the cycle, but as a participant moving through it for a while. Practically, that takes a fairly ordinary shape: hold things — possessions, status, even certainty — a little more loosely, since none of it was ever truly separate or permanent to begin with. Spend less energy resisting one’s place in the cycle and more attention on how one moves through it: what is taken, what is given back, and whether the exchange leaves things a little better than it found them. And extend the same dependency one observes in a lion or a leaf to other people — if everyone is drawing from and returning to the same pool, then how one treats others is not a separate moral question from how the system works, but a direct expression of it.
That’s not a definite answer to what a human life means. It’s closer to a posture: live as a willing participant in the exchange rather than a resistant one, pay attention to the cycle rather than pretend to stand outside it, and let the not-knowing sit alongside a quiet effort to leave the cycle, and the people in it, a little better off for one’s turn in it.
