Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
Should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

 - 18th century children’s prayer.
 
As communication between people increases, it increases the intelligence of the human collective.  This is called emergence.  For more information see James Surowiecki: The moment when social media became the news on TED.  But when we are connected to a network, not only do we affect the network, the network affects us.
 

The Circular Mill of Death

 
The ant colony is the classic metaphor for emergent behavior.  An example where the collective acts smarter than an individual in the group.  But there is a phenomenon that throws off the decentralized bottom up intelligence. Ants occasionally go astray.  If army ants get lost, they have a rule where they follow the ant in front of them.  This can result in a circular mill of death.

 In the early part of the twentieth century, the American naturalist William Beebe came upon a strange sight in the Guyana jungle.  A group of army ants was moving in a huge circle.  The circle was 1,200 feet in circumference, and it took each ant two and a half hours to complete the loop.  The ants went around and around the circle for two days until most of them dropped dead.  
     What Beebe saw was what biologists call a “circular mill.”  The mill is created when army ants find themselves separated from their colony. Once they’re lost, they obey a simple rule:  follow the ant in front of you. The result is the mill, which usually only breaks up when a few ants straggle off by chance and the others follow them away.
     …[T]he simple tools that make ants so successful are also responsible for the demise of the ants who get trapped in the circular mill. Every move an ant makes depends on what its fellow ants do, and an ant cannot act independently, which would help break the march to death.”

- James Surowiecki from “The Wisdom of Crowds”

Groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. 

- James Surowiecki

 

Religion’s Circular Mill of Death

 

Western religion is following a circular mill of death while Eastern religions get many things right.  Eastern religions just haven’t put it all together in one complete package yet.  Here are some examples of things that are right. 

 
  • meditation – Buddhism
  • energy movements – Tai Chi
  • there are positive aspects to destruction (Shiva) – Hinduism  (The Western equivalent is the Phoenix.)
  • Life is an ongoing epic battle between good and evil.  Spiritually advanced beings sometimes intervene. – Krishna in the Mahābhārata  (Kudo’s to George Lucas.  He also gets this right.  {The Force/the Darkside/the Jedi/The Sith})
 
So take the opportunity while you are here to live, experience, grow, and evolve.  What happens when you die is a choice.  The choice is yours.  Not choosing is a choice also.  What work did you do while you were here?  Did you evolve your consciousness?  Did you follow your own thoughts or did you follow the ant in front of you?

You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

- Kahlil Gibran (artist, poet, writer, philosopher, theologian and the third-bestselling poet in history after William Shakespeare and Laozi)