# Interconnectedness and the Pursuit of Knowledge

UPL holds that nothing in existence stands alone, and that to learn is to discover how things are joined. It commits its followers to continuous learning, reflection, and the integration of diverse spiritual insights.

This learning is not only spiritual. UPL encourages everyone to study the sciences and engineering, each according to their gifts and their chances. Greater knowledge brings wisdom, and helps its followers to better understand our world and this life, and perhaps even to contribute to them. The arts belong here too. Music, painting, poetry, dance and every other art are ways of knowing as well as of making: they train attention, they carry what cannot be said plainly, and they let a person give something back. UPL believes that the growth of science, engineering and the arts, and of the technology that comes from them, is bound up with the spiritual evolution of our civilisation. Because we learn, we must continually evaluate our stance and, given the evidence, correct our collective path, and UPL holds its own teachings to the same rule.

The Buddha taught that things arise in dependence on one another, and he taught it to explain how suffering arises and how it ends. Later Buddhists drew a wider vision from it. The Huayan school of China pictured the world as the net of Indra, in which every jewel reflects every other, and in our own time Thich Nhat Hanh called this interbeing. It is from these that UPL takes its sense of a world in which nothing stands alone. A late Upanishad says that for the generous of heart the whole world is one family.

On the seeking of knowledge the traditions speak almost with one voice. Islam calls the seeking of knowledge Ilm, and the Qur'an teaches the believer to pray for an increase in it. Judaism holds the study of Torah equal to all other duties, and honours a dispute carried on for the sake of Heaven. The Buddha told the Kalamas not to rely on tradition, scripture or clever reasoning alone, but to take up what they find to be wholesome, blameless and praised by the wise. The Bhagavad Gita names knowledge as one of the paths to the divine.