What is 'interbeing'?

The world is built on stories, says American writer Charles Eisenstein. Each culture has a story that answers big questions such as: What is the meaning of life? What makes a person? What is real? The dominant story of our global culture currently is the story of Separation.

The story of Separation is this: you are a separate individual among other separate individuals in a mechanistic reality you are subject to, is outside you, and has nothing to do with you. This story is present to some degrees in all fields, whether it be physics or religion.

This story urges you to dominate, control and compete with others (and nature) for security and success. You are urged to insulate yourself from nature and become its master, so that you are no longer at its impersonal whim.

The story of Separation is not working anymore. This story has been breaking down for a while, and we are now in the space between stories. We have found that solutions that have come from the story of Separation have not created the utopia we thought it would.

The emerging story is the story of Interbeing, where everything is intimately connected. It is understood that what happens to someone or something happens to everyone else. Humanity is naturally moving into the story of Interbeing, reflected in social and ecological reforms.

‘Interbeing,’ coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, is more than interconnection or interdependency, which suggests separate things having relationships. Interbeing understands that we are relationships, that our existence “depends or draws from or includes” the other’s existence.

An important aspect of the story of interbeing, which was present in every indigenous culture to some degree, is that the qualities of a conscious self, subjectivity, beingness, and sentience, are present not only in human beings, but in everything.

Everything is in a dance with itself. Each aspect of nature adds to the whole, nourishes and beautifies everything else. Every life and being is service to all of existence, and is necessary for the whole to function. We are inextricable from each other.

The basis of Interbeing is love. Love is the expansion of self to include another, like the love between parent and child. The other’s happiness is our happiness and vice versa. Here, the "expansion of self" is the approach to all of life, whether it’s a person, river, or tree.

Bottom line: The dying myth of our culture is the story of Separation, where each person or animal fights for genetic continuity against brute forces of nature. Interbeing is the new story of the world where each life is a gift to the whole and an inextricable part of the whole.