Religion and guidance

Broadly speaking, every religion preaches peace, love and unity. Religions differ in the means by which they try to realize these ends; also in their attention to secondary principles such as liberty, equality and justice. They also differ in the scale of the group they aim to include. Some wish to unify only a part of humanity, some the whole of it, and some the greater whole of the biosphere (though this remains rare).

The problem is that peace, love and unity within the group – regardless of its size – is not enough to guide the collective conduct of the group. If a loving, united group is unable or unwilling to learn what its real situation is, and to renovate its habits (including beliefs) accordingly, it could end up like the legendary herd of lemmings, rushing off the cliff in perfect loving unison. Does it matter whether a form of life now extinct was ‘saved’, entered nirvana or went to heaven? Certainly not to its future generations.

What's necessary to any well-guided system is the creative tension between individual discovery and incorporation into the higher-scale system. Neither can have any meaning without the other.

The identity of any self-organizing system – that is, any living system – is determined by the collective behavior of its membership and the differentiation of its functional parts. Every member of the corporate body has a mission to carry out, in the scale of real time at which that member's experience unfolds. The health of the whole system depends on each member's freedom and ability to carry out that mission within its defining context.

Differences

The world presents resistance to your will: in other words, you and the world exist.
The separation of self and other created the space in which you can act. Thus it also created good and evil.
The meaning (to you) of what is not you generates your guidance system, recreating you and the world together as inside and out.
Semiosis is self-organization.

On this January morning, the walls of this house make a difference of about 50 degrees (Celsius) between inner and outer space. I am burning birch (harvested last summer) to maintain this difference – the aspen i usually feed the woodstove with is not quite equal to the task. The goldfinches, nuthatches and chickadees are feeding their inner fires with nyjer and sunflower seeds. How they do it is beyond me.

Bubbles

The current credit bubble – which has hardly begun to burst – inflated because systematic inflation was a way for clever and powerful people to make money instead of providing real goods or services to others.
—Good for what? Service to whom?
Nothing permanent, that's for sure.
Mutual good or service depends on differences.
Even the web of life is a bubble, held together by surface tension.
Yes, it's bubbles all the way down.
I think the Buddhists call this ‘emptiness’ – or ‘interbeing’.
It's the source of inspiration, which Jesus calls the bubbling spring that I have tended (Gospel of Thomas 13.5)

Take a deep breath.