The Jeweled Net of SSDP

for my Buddhism & the Environment class
The Jeweled Net of Indra represents multiplicity and interconnectivity of existence. Things can seem separate and on different ends of a spectrum yet they are overlapping and are all middle ground. Everything can be the center. One can also envision a spider web where one intersection is an essential node for other connecting points. It’s how a circle has no beginning and no end because all points can be perpetually and simultaneously the beginning, middle or end. In Nature the Jeweled Net is described as a net of mirrors where they are all reflecting each other reflecting each other; so none are the one object yet they are all the object with slight breaks in perspectives.
Word Deconstruction
For this essay I will be deconstructing SSDP (Students for Sensible Drug Policy) as the contemporary example that is representational of the intersectionality of seemingly separate concepts. SSDP is a group that represents students, sensibility, drugs and policy. These individual words hold a lot of meaning themselves and hold even more meaning within the context of our lives.
We are all students throughout our entire existence. Students are also perpetually and simultaneously teachers whether they realize it or not. Sensible is a word that is related to the senses and in context to Buddhism can lead to the question of whether or not a being is sentient. Are plants sentient? Are animals sentient? Are all humans sentient? Ryogen’s stance is that, “Both hell and the Heavenly Palace become the Western Paradise; both sentient and insentient beings are equally put on the Buddha Path.” So, perhaps all beings are perpetually and simultaneously sentient or insentient depending on the context. Are affects considered sentient responses? If so, then when asking the question of whether or not plants are sentient one must take drugs in to consideration. The word ‘drug’ is derived from Old English “droog” meaning dried plant. If you are what you eat (and that can be your stomach or your mind) then perhaps the human-plant connection is more synergistic and symbiotic than today’s society takes notice of.
Policy can be symbolic of not only the creation of concepts but of our environment as well. When saying ‘concepts’ that is meant to embody words, their definitions and translation into objects. Environment can include the mentally projected environment, created though (culture) language and (society) law, as well as the physical bodily realm (samsara) which demonstrates the practice of these social and spiritual ideologies.
Context in Space-Time
SSDP is not only a group; it is a concept that reaches the lives of all beings. For humans it embraces both aspects within the cultural and the societal. Culturally these words and practices embody artistic creation through music, painting, dancing, and film just to name a few. They also serve as a symbol of our relationship to other plants that provide our food. It is no coincidence that intense industrial farming and monocropping have been so pervasive during the application of the war on drugs. These have been the sources of deliberate unequal distribution that have literally fed conflict in what we deem foreign countries. SSDP can be a symbol of one’s spirituality as well. Just take a more explicit example of how tribes who now have laws that protect their religious use of certain drugs (such as peyote), when in the past the only option would have been persecution. That leads me to societal impacts of SSDP.
While not separate from the cultural (as they both in turn affect each other), societal mentality about drugs and drugs users have changed significantly with the implication of new laws and therefore new stigmas. Whereas one hundred years ago it was common to see cocaine used in anesthetics and Coke, today it is taboo to use cocaine or even talk about it. Then there has been the invention of crack cocaine that ravages poor communities, not only through addiction, but also through intense incarceration rates and programs such as coerced sterilization. The problem is not the drug itself, but rather our skewed policies and stigmas that build up ever-towering walls of limitation. Instead of criminalizing drug users, we should be fostering environments that are safer and more accessible for drug use and drug rehabilitation. Drugs and humans are both well and alive, yet when there is a forced condition as to how one should live or die (or be out of sight) there seems to be more suffering and damage that happens to both human health and the health of our environment. Even if humans seem to be more logos than eco at this point in time, we all continue existing as part of the ecology of this planet.