What do people mean when they say "Everything is connected"?

I don't know if this is the best stack exchange for this type of question, but I couldn't think of a better one. If there is a better one, feel free to migrate this question there. Anyway, here is my question. A lot of religious and/or spiritual people say the phrase, "Everything is connected". But what does that vague phrase actually mean? It seems to be so nebulous as to mean lots of things, and is resistant to either verification or falsification. I want to know what people mean by that phrase. Again, if there is a better stack exchange for this question, let me know, or feel free to migrate it to there.

I always find this confusion confusing. Your typical physicist would have no problem asserting that (say) Jupiter's gravitational pull affects every speck of matter in our solar system, or that the entire universe is connected by forces that originated billions of years back in time. The entire notion of a 'field' in physics implies connection across any range and in every direction. And no one really disputes that a single change in an ecosystem affects the entire ecosystem, or that a change in one part of the human body affects the entire human body. People recognize that systems are holistic, and that holistic systems change as a whole, not variously by individual parts. And yet, if the same thought is presented in any non-hard-science context, people roll their eyes and shake their heads in dismay.

Part of the problem is that self-oriented egoism is baked into our self-perceptions. We think of ourselves as unique, independent, unfettered, reasoning beings — as though we were hatched from eggs as fully-formed adults — and thus that we have no necessary or intrinsic relationship to anything other than ourselves. But — and this is karma 101 — that's clearly not true. Everything we do has an impact on others, if only in small ways, and everything others do has some small impact on us. If I'm brusque with someone it upsets them, and being upset they are brusque with someone else, which upsets them; my act flows out like ripples in a pond, diminishing over time until it fades into background noise. And that's true of the roughly eight billion people now living on the planet, and of all of their ancestors. A man in China has a fight with his wife (because of a relationship style he learned from his parents, who learned it from their parents…), so he's distracted at work and makes a mistake; a year later the product he worked on fails, badly injuring someone in Sweden, and that Swedish woman turns sour and makes everyone around her miserable…

As a spiritual teacher once said, consciousness is a field, not an isolated point. It encounters every experience around it; filters, absorbs, and transmutes it; responds with activities that become experiences for others… We have an ability to work with that, to mediate how we filter, absorb, transmute, and respond to experience, but we cannot escape from the field any more than earth could ever escape Jupiter's gravity.

I think that to know what an individual means by connected, you really have to ask them how. It can mean anything from our all being in the same universe with interactions limited by forces, relativity, and quantum... or it can mean something completely supernatural.. or just about anything else.

If they can specify what the connection is, you can evaluate it on the merits of the claim. If they can't, I recommend ignoring them.

Its a Thought-terminating cliché.

The purpose of saying it is not to express an idea but to stop anyone else from doing so, because the speaker fears that the conversation is going somewhere that the speaker doesn't want it to. People also use it to stop themselves considering ideas that they believe to be forbidden, which is why such phrases get used by religious and spiritual people.

It's definitely a statement that means a lot of things to a lot of people.

From a Christian perspective, "everything is connected" is a reasonable statement to make when we consider the idea of a God with a plan for our universe.

A great biblical example of this can be seen in the lineage of Jesus. Matthew in particular makes serious note of the fact that Jesus's lineage is a rich and interesting one that connects to many major events and people of the Old Testament.

For example, David and Bathsheba; a part in the Bible set roughly 1,000 years before Christ. In it, King David sins against God by having a man sent to war to die so as to take his wife.

From this coupling is born King Solomon, and through further generations, we ultimately arrive at Jesus.

Everything is connected; even mankind's evil actions, God works for Good. There is a grand plan, spanning across all of time, where every person and action plays a part towards a great consummation, a great end.

Thinking Graph Theory here. What is the topology of this interconnection that our reality seems to exhibit?

For a Christian, the graph is similar to a hub-and-spoke design; all things connected to a single point, God. The same would likely apply to all monotheisms.

For Hindus, things are possibly different. Indra's net is a concept that's often referred to in this context. In it, the god Indra has an infinite net, with a jewel at every vertex. Some have considered the vertices to be atmans, souls. In every jewel, every other jewel is reflected.

Other perspectives have been floated. Jung's "synchronicities" are another popular example.

This might be the crux of the whole thing. What's the point, the value, of this idea?

I personally think the value is that, if everything is connected, it potentially points towards higher forces in an observable way.

These connections can imply meaning, reasoning, and purpose. If they exist, and one can see them, they may be considered evidence for higher intellects working actively within our reality.

This would be in stark contrast to the popular modernist view of materialism, of a reality born of chance with no meaning, reasoning or purpose.

Of course, the counterargument often comes that humans simply see patterns where there are none. That we have evolved to do this for our benefit in terms of brute survival.

For those who have seen the patterns, they seem irrefutable evidence. For those who haven't, they seem impossible fancies.

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." -- St. Thomas Aquinas

There is a Buddhist koan that says, 'Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness.'

With this contemplation, one can find the sense of connectedness, even if we were to suppose two given things are not physically nor field connected. What is form without the space between? All would be one point. Without space, there is no form. They can not exist without the other. Further, it is undeniable that when you change the form, the space likewise changes in a perfect 1:1 response. A 1 to 1 response is the strongest possible connection there is, having no play or delay between the action of one and the response from the other.

This concept then stretches the mind to see that dichotomy and opposite is not two things at the end of a continuum, but are one thing that are mutually dependent upon the other.

The ramifications go beyond the purely causal relationships, such as the butterfly effect, when this is understood. It transforms one inherent judgements placed upon events, situations, and characters. The negative is necessary for positive to exist. Every part has a function that plays a role in the very being of the things. Then, you find you should suspend judgemental reactions to situations that had once seemed easy to judge as good or bad. To damn one is to damn the other. Because they are one thing, connected. Out of necessity.

There is a belongingness and a purpose for everyone. That is the meaning of the saying. That you matter, as does everything else. It says to be accepting of yourself for your worth and also accepting of others ad valuable. There is a bigger picture, religious or not, that is inevitably at play, regardless if that's so through intent or happenstance. There may still be a struggle for meaning and purpose, but it solves the search for worth and value to some degree.

We exist together in this experience. Be good. Understand others with empathy and compassion, while protecting yourself from the stuff that will bring you down. Keep your self greased up to move through life without all the connections hindering you unduly. Be responsible for your actions and your being will ripple out and maybe after you are dead, someone will talk about you and miss you.