Principles

Core guiding truths that give concrete form to a body's animating Spirit — deliberately not a fixed list, because Spirit and not a list is what must do the guiding.

A principle is a truth stated so it can be acted on. It sits between Values, which say what matters, and a decision, which has to be made in a particular hour with particular people: the principle is the bridge, and its job is to make the value operable without pretending the hour is simpler than it is.

The canon makes one move here that decides everything downstream: it refuses to close the list. There is no definitive set of guiding principles for life and society, because a proper way of being and doing must be guided by Spirit rather than by a fixed dogmatic articulation. Depending on how broadly each is drawn, the list could be one, a dozen, or several thousand. They are not mutually exclusive — flowing from one Spirit, they overlap and interconnect like parts of one personality — so the work of applying them is not lookup but discernment: it is the consciousness of the person present that must mediate between an all-but-infinite array of principles, situations, beings and possible actions, and bring out the one action fitted to this person, this time, this place (Discernment · Spontaneous Wise Right Action · Wisdom).

That refusal is itself a principle, and it is the one that keeps the rest from hardening into law (Do Not Concretize the Absolute · Everything Is Current Best Understanding).

The list is not closed, but it is ordered. For any person or society not to be divided against itself, it must hold one supreme unifying principle that integrates and orders every other — and in this system that one is ØNE, with everything else nested beneath it. Across a great many traditions that highest principle has been articulated as something like absolute and unconditional Love, and so the one universal principle can be stated as: love ØNE, one another, and All. Everything else the canon writes down is an unfolding of that single line (The Logic Of Love · Right Relationship · Holarchy).

Beneath the animating Spirit itself no full articulation is possible, so it is known the way any living thing is known — by what grows from it. We will know them by their fruits is the canon's own test, and it applies to principles as much as to people (Embodiment · Integrity).

Also called: guiding principles · core guiding truths Stands on: Values · Spirit · Logos · ØNE Opens onto: The Logic Of Love · Law · Ethics · Axiology · Discernment · Wisdom · Do Not Concretize the Absolute · The Constitutional Recognitions · The Three Supreme Agreements · Embodiment In play: the door, where a body says what it is animated by; and the table, whenever a decision cannot be made by rule and has to be made by judgment Sources: Principles (root page, draft, dated on its own second line — the Spirit-not-dogma argument, the one Meta Principle, the ninety-nine worked examples and the value definitions beneath them) · Values, Logos (root pages) · lionsberg.wiki: Principles Open: The root page's ninety-nine numbered principles and its long appendix of value definitions are a working draft in two registers — some lines are metaphysical claims, some are conduct rules, and a few are strategy; nothing sorts them. · The page asserts that Principles are immutable universal laws and then, a few lines later, that no fixed articulation may govern; both are held, and the tension is not resolved.