Tom Chi is my personal hero. Listening to him or talking with him is like having a supernova explosion going off in your head. You cannot help but have your existing worldview blown to smithereens, replaced by a new, more expansive frame.

Tom has this to say about interconnectedness:

“Whenever I hear people mention this phrase that we are all connected, they do so in a way as if it’s something they wish they believe was true. It’s something that’s abstract, it’s esoteric, it’s a thing that’s unprovable, but they really just wish that the universe was like that.”

This talk is about how things really are connected, and not in an abstract way but in a very concrete way, through a story of the breath, a story of the heart and a story of the mind (again, not in an esoteric way but in a very scientific way). He explores the phenomenon of the trajectory of galaxies swirling and colliding, called Laniakea, which is the Hawaiian term for ‘the immeasurable heaven.’

“What if every breath that you took contributed to the possibility of countless lives after you, lives that you would never see, lives that we are all a part of today. It’s worth thinking about maybe the meaning of our lives are not even within the scope of our understanding.”

“We’re born into this life and have the ability to make this unique painting with the colours of being that are around us at that particular time, but we have the ability to make a new colour – a self-driving car, a piano, a computer – from the way you express yourself as a human being. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world with the creative process of all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the palette of being for all of society and all of humanity after us. The way that we are in our lives begins to change the way that our friends and family are able to paint in the future, how communities affect society, how society affects its relationship to the biosphere, the way the biosphere affects the physical planet and the universe itself.”

“We’ve been given this amazing gift of consciousness, and because of this we’ve been able to deeply understand our connectedness. Over time as a society, this deepens our levels consideration, expression, understanding for each other.”

It doesn’t get much bigger than this.

Watch his TED talk here.