The plant starts from a seed. Now, the seed contains very little material or energy. The plant is actually made by the environment, not by the seed, right? It’s made by the soil, the wind, the water, and the energy of the sun, right? The seed provides a pattern or information, according to modern molecular biology—which we can make a metaphor: it informs the environment to make a plant, right? Previously, the environment was not informed, so it only made more inanimate matter all over again, right? So therefore, we say the plant is generated, you see, in this process. And then it will produce more seeds and it will decay and it will fall back into the soil and so on. So that whole thing I call the generative process. Now, you can see a society works very much in that way, too. You see that any organization starts from somebody who has the idea of it—as it were, the seed of it—and this is communicated to the other people around, and they all start to make the society.
I think we are neither in the individual nor in the group, but we’re moving between them.
The individual and the socio-cultural are not necessarily in conflict. Socio-cultural doesn’t mean suppressing the individual. They may flow into each other so that we may focus on the individual or on the group. It moves back and forth.
If you say “I,”—see, usually a person feels that he ends at his skin. He’s somewhere inside the skin. But if you take a blind man who is tapping with his stick and holding it tightly, he has the feeling that he ends at the end of the stick, which is loosely connected to the room. He’s learning about the room from the end of the stick, which is him. If he holds the stick loosely, he ends at his fingertips. Anybody may think, “I’m going to move my arm,” so he thinks I’m somewhere in here, moving my arm, which is something else. Or, on the other hand, you can go outward and say, “I am identified with my country. I end at the boundaries of my country.” Or you can say, “I am the whole cosmos.” Right? These are different ways of experiencing. Or, coming inward, you could (removing more and more) finally say, “I’m a tiny little point right in the very middle.” Or else, eventually (if the point goes) you could say, “I’m nothing.”
This meaning of the word “I” is very variable according to the circumstance.
This notion that “I” has a fixed meaning is not true, you see. That “I” can mean a tremendous number of things, and at a certain moment we may say that the source of mind, of meaning, and so on, is the whole group.
