This evening I was spending some time with friends and family, and an offhand comment was made about the Western ignorance of Eastern concepts such as Interdependent Arising.  Here is perhaps the best relation of the concept I have ever seen, provided by Jack Kornfield in his book A Path With Heart.

"As we open and empty ourselves, we come to experience an interconnectedness, the realization that all things are joined and conditioned in an interdependent arising. Each experience and event contains all others. The teacher depends on the student; the airplane depends on the sky.

When a bell rings, is it the bell we hear, the air, the sound at our ears, or is it our brain that rings? It is all of these things. As the Taoists say, "The between is ringing.” The sound of the bell is here to be heard everywhere—in the eyes of every person we meet, in every tree and insect, in every breath we take.

Holding up a piece of paper, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh expresses it this way:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we as humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in order to be a tree. Therefore, you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you look more deeply, with the eyes of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of those who are awake, you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here, the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger's father—everything is in this sheet of paper. . . ."

It sounds impressive to be sure, but of course it's only a concept, right?  Intriguing, but of course just a philosophical construct to be examined and eventually discarded.

Think about it a bit more.

Your physical body is as indistinguishable from the environment as your awareness that lies in the instant of experience before the first thought has arisen is indistinguishable from that of any other person? Or any other living thing? Or all things? So there isn't any ownership of anything, even the thought of a self. Things just are, and when things happen we do what we do and life goes on.

Do you know what kindness is? Kindness is when you see the spark in everyone's eye is also your own.