“No man is an island,” is a familiar saying. I would go farther and say that no thing is an island. Well, islands are islands, of course, but what I mean is that everything is connected. And I don’t mean that in some new age way where everything is spiritually glued to everything else and we’re all one big glob of spiritual goo.

One of the senses that I do mean it in is physically–even with islands, especially those that are close together, which are actually just the top parts of an underwater volcanic mountain. Things in outer space that are light years away from each other and seemingly separated by a vacuum are still part of some field of energy (and I mean something like gravitational or electromagnetic energy, not spiritual energy or The Force).

I think that in a lot of cases, focus is completely given to individual things and that the connections between any of those things are completely ignored or otherwise overlooked. Also, a lot of the time when people do notice connections, they’re seeing connections that don’t make any sense or don’t exist in the real world. There are a lot of connections that only exist in our minds that are okay, but I don’t think it’s okay when you make a connection that you believe exists in the real physical world somehow but actually doesn’t. One of the most common cases of these mistaken connections is when people latch onto meaningful coincidences, like with the number 11 in the context of the September 11 attacks.

There are even times when a whole bunch of connected things are mistaken for being just one thing. But this kind of illusion is one we take for granted all the time since it’s usually not helpful to see composite things in terms of the parts that they’re made up of. It doesn’t really matter for most people, most of the time, that we’re actually made up individual cells. Or that all solid objects are made up atoms that are relatively far apart from each other.

Our very selves wouldn’t be able to exist if it wasn’t for the trillions of connections that exist and continuously form between the cells that make up our brains. Personal computers didn’t become as popular as they did when everyone started to easily connect them to each other around the world using the Internet. The World Wide Web became popular because of the hyperlinks between pages. Networks–electronic, biological, social, and otherwise–are what you get when you have connections, and networks allow for possibilities that don’t exist with individual disconnected things.

In addition to creating new connections between things and between people and between people and other things, there are already connections that have been around for a very long time, some since the very beginning. Almost all of science is about searching for these connections that nature is full of and has had for ever. The most significant advances happened when a single person, or a small group of people, discovered a connection that no one else would have thought of before. These include the connection between all the forces of nature, the connection between all of Earth’s species, and the connection between space and time. This is the very thing that I find so exciting about science–the revelation that comes with seeing these connections. Because they’re primarily physical connections, they’re real in a way that no spiritual, religious revelation can ever be.

My view of religions and nonmaterial spirituality in general, is that they’re mostly about connections that don’t actually exist. But the connections between the histories of the world’s religions and other spiritual ideas are real–ones I find interesting and ones that I wish everyone was aware of.

The world of art is based on the connections we make and find. Any kind of problem-solving depends on our ability to make connections. Creativity is, at least in part, about making connections between things that aren’t readily obvious. The connection between exceptional creativity and madness is that of the brain making more connections than what is considered normal.

Connections lie at the heart of the human condition. Almost everyone is constantly trying to make some kind of connection in order to make sense of the world, return to some state of comfort, to be united with a higher power, achieve true enlightenment, or to power an electrical appliance.

I am currently enjoying a pomegranate, as shown. The last time I remember actually having one was when I was a child. I was around 8 years old. I remember thinking that it was the most amazing fruit, what with all those tasty arils inside. I remember them as being smaller, though and I don’t remember them being tart.