Last week I used a fairly cumbersome word, homeodynamism, to sum up the fluidly shifting, semi-chaotic tendency toward balance found throughout nature - in last week's case, in the form of the flowerbee and the Earthhuman. Flowerbee, Earthhuman, homeodynamics - all are evoking the interdependence of living systems and how the individuals within them are oriented toward the good of the whole, whether aware of that or not. I was able to credit the term flowerbee to my beloved teacher Alan Watts but could not recall where I first read of homeodynamism; it could be so very many places! I went to Wikipedia and found a brief, uncited page on homoedynamics which claims its history goes at least as far back as the 1850s in Paris. Check it out for yourself.
My favorite homeodynamic quality is this interdependence. Competition in nature enhances the talents of all species involved over time or the system ceases to exist. Lionesses and leopards would not be the powerful predators they are without the stamina and elegance of gazelles. Can we see gazelleleopards instead two mortal enemies? If predators did the unthinkable and wiped out all of their prey, they too would soon die. Prey and predator are parts of an interdependent system in homeodynamic balance over time. So are the components of Earth's atmosphere. You can find millions of examples.
I am a student of the Science of Mind, a modern philosophy based on ancient wisdom, religious insight and modern science which teaches ideas like homeodynamism. We understand humans to be individual expressions of One Infinite Intelligence - all that is, seen and unseen. Cosmospirits as I wrote last week, living out as many of our Divine gifts as we are able to believe in. And therein, in that belief or lack of it, lies the most basic human competition, between our fear and our love. Physically, perhaps, it is a competition between the old reptilian brain and our heart-mind; the heart with its millions of neuro-receptors is more often interpreting reality for the brain than the other way around, it turns out. Check out the Institute of Heart-Math for more info on that.
We are way out of homeodynamic balance in every area of life because fear has had the upper hand for many centuries - in our human relations, with the rest of the natural world, and with our own minds. We fear God, if we believe in God. We fear nature and human nature, relegating love to a few, intimate relationships which we also tend to fear.
I believe more and more of us are feeling the pressure of all those imbalances. This situation has exciting potential. We are living in pivotal times and groping toward the insights that can lead to our willingness to find and foster balance in one relation after another. That is how I understand the wildly different behavior patterns of groups of people globally. Wars abound and we have absolutist religionists in some major world faiths endorsing violence - Christian, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist, at the same time that democracy is demanded from Cairo to Madison, Wisconsin, thousands of non-profit organizations address suffering and Rumi is the best selling poet in the US. In my neighborhood, everybody recycles while shaking their heads at the profligate waste in corporate-run America. We seem awash in contradictions.
Fear might serve its normal function of spurring us on to greater self-awareness and self-care if it were not running amuck. I say, just like the wild fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic poles before they flip and restabilize (also going on now), humans are dancing toward a new homeodynamic balance between love and fear. Every day, many times a day, the opportunity arises for each of us to take a stand for love or fear, to help tip the scales the other way. Take a stand for love today and two tomorrow. Feel compassion for the driver who cuts you off in traffic or speeds. Feel compassion if you are that driver. Such a driver has just confessed to being mercilessly self-driven; that's where the behavior originates. Forgive and say a mental word claiming peace for that person's heart. He or she needs it very much. Love yourself that way too.
We are all in this together, after all.
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