Updates related to Energetic Boundaries, Agreements, and Integrity

The following updates clarify energetic boundaries, agreements, and integrity. Citations are in the book.

Energetic Boundaries = Agreements + Integrity

(section added near the end of Chapter 4)

For a culture to have healthy energetic boundaries, they need to set clear agreements and each person needs to uphold them with integrity.

Let’s imagine a scenario where a group of bullies is picking on smaller kids at school, teasing them, taking their money, and sometimes hitting them.

Suppose some of these smaller kids don’t want to tolerate this abusive behavior anymore, and they talk together to decide what to do. They want to set energetic boundaries, where disrespectful behavior is not allowed towards anyone in their group. How could they do this?

First, they would set agreements. How does each child agree to respond when they see someone in their group being bullied? They have many options here — perhaps they could all walk over and stand with the kid being bullied and collectively tell the older kids to back off. Perhaps one of them could document the bullying on video so that adults could intervene. Whatever the kids decide, they must somehow agree to support each other so that collectively they don’t allow any disrespect towards anyone in the group.

The second requirement is that the kids have integrity. They have to keep their agreements. Without agreements, the kids won’t know how they can rely on each other for support. And if they don’t have integrity, and they shy away from the bullies out of fear, then the agreements are worthless. Thus the kids must hold each other to a high standard of integrity to collectively protect themselves from bullying.

Energetic Boundaries and Integrity of Service

(new section added in Chapter 28: The Three Integrities)

The United States has tens of thousands of pages of laws to carefully require or forbid certain behaviors. In unhealthy cultures that encourage selfishness and discourage deep solidarity, governments commonly go into great detail to state what behaviors are allowed and what aren’t.

Unfortunately, the laws are still often unclear or leave certain situations unaddressed. Thus the US also has _case law_, which are decisions made by judges after trials. When two people or groups sue each other, or the government prosecutes someone, the judge decides how the law works in a particular scenario, and this often becomes a legal precedent that people treat as a law. The US also has tens of thousands of pages of case law.

Thus, anyone who wants to know how to behave legally in the United States must study many tens of thousands of pages of often-confusing and contradictory legal documents. This book offers many examples where governments don’t enforce their own laws, or enforce them unfairly, so obviously having such extensive and detailed laws doesn’t ensure people can have a healthy culture together.

People of healthy cultures make agreements with each other, as Chapter 31 and 40 will explore. But as the United States and many unhealthy cultures show, it’s impossible to make agreements that cover every nuance of every situation that might arise. This is where integrity of service comes in.

When everyone in a culture has integrity of service, people can trust each other to act in service of the group even when their agreements don’t cover a particular situation. In other words, people stand together against disrespectful outsiders and help each other through hard times no matter what.

The French missionaries met the Huron and were shocked that they had no courts and prisons because the French could not imagine people serving the group without laws and the threat of punishment (reviewed in Chapter 17). In cultures where nobody rules over anybody else, this is the norm. Everyone is expected to act in service of the group, even in situations their agreements haven’t covered.

Fortunately, integrity of service is who we are as humans. It feels good to stand in solidarity with others in a culture where everyone treats everyone else decently, and healthy cultures train their children to embrace this deep form of integrity.

Chapter 4 reviewed how, in order to have healthy boundaries, a culture needs to have agreements and each person needs to uphold them with integrity. But how can a culture maintain healthy boundaries if people cannot make agreements to cover every possible problem that might arise?

When each person has integrity of service and supports the group even in unforeseen situations, everyone can relax into a deep trust knowing that whatever comes, other people in their healthy culture or subculture will not let each other down.