"Forking" helps ensure a safe and healthy future

The Open-Source practice of "Forking" is a natural, evolutionary method for managing bad actors who enter our movement or communities and gain positions of considerable control. Forking simply means that if a bad actor gets a position of authority within our organization or in a Universe eco-community, and all efforts to change their behavior have failed, others in that organization or community are encouraged to fork away from those bad actors in whatever ways they can. 

This forking away would include leaving those organizations and communities and starting new ones that do not involve that bad actor. Evolution does this in systems that are not adapting adequately to their environmental feedback.  

In more detail, this means that in any of our science, environmental, global warming, or personalized spirituality work, any dependent organizations, individuals, or facilitators, or teachers who repeatedly or seriously fail to follow the recommended standard Universe Spirit member conduct codes, ethical teacher guidelines or spiritual safeguards.

Here is how it works in practice.

Independent organizations or individuals who are part of our movement or organizational center network who repeatedly fail to follow the member conduct codes ethical guidelines or spiritual safeguards are managed in an evolutionary manner because no one owns the UniverseSpirit's Kernel and "source code" materials and --- we have no final authority or "Pope" that can demand or enforce compliance in operational matters due to our absolute belief in free will in life and spiritual choices as well as nonviolent spiritual practice matters.

This means that Universe Spirit practitioners, members, communities, and congregations who are repeatedly betrayed by an individual, group, or community's leadership are encouraged to simply "fork" off that individual, group, community, or center and create their own new community experiment, group, community or center.

The implication is only to abandon an individual group, minister, teacher, or Universe Spirit organization if all reasonable and repeated individual and community efforts to inform, correct, or teach those individuals or the center leader(s) have failed. This encouragement to naturally fork off and create a new Universe Spirit experiment, group, community, or center when the services or organizational ethics are compromised is the single most powerful part of the evolutionary, self-correcting, and self-organizing open-source mechanism for keeping the Universe Spirit movement healthy, growing, and self-policing!

After repeated corrective attempts to educate and address a serious and repeated violation of our commonly held principles and ethics, there is no longer any reason to endure individuals, communities, or organizations that redirect the Universe Spirit movement into inappropriate or unethical activities, or pursue inappropriate or unfair personal gain or influence over others.

Never be afraid to "fork off" and create a new Universe Spirit experiment whenever you have exhausted your and your group or community's best efforts to remedy the problem, and you are unable to resolve the unethical behavior in your group or community.

It is the only way we will keep the Universe Spirit movement healthy and expanding!

Never be afraid to "fork off" and create a new Universe Spirit experiment when you feel that there are advantages to the movement to form a new group or community to enhance expansion, fix a bad actor problem, improve service or conduct a new experiment in delivering Universe Spirit services that only would be possible within a new group or experiment. There is a lot to do in a short amount of time to avoid total extinction. The Universe Spirit movement can and will do much to help mitigate the worst of the consequences to come. Therefore, do everything you can to keep it safe and healthy, expand its survival, and provide thriving services as fast as possible.

About the Massive Updating and Knowledge Transfer Still Taking Place From the Old Universe Spirit Website to this New Way of the Universe Website

This description of the Way of the Universe is designed to show how the Universe Spirit nonprofit organization is evolving. We are far from done with this evolution. The Way of the Universe philosophy is a new philosophy born in the 21st century to help address 21st-century problems. It is our new name for many, but not all, of the objectives we pursued on our old UniverseSpirit.org website over the last 24 years.

This new name for what we are teaching better reflects our efforts to develop a universal, rational, and practical philosophy. This name also helps distinguish us from the many negative associations that come from appearing anything like a traditional religion, a new-age spirituality, or even from our own decades of efforts to create a universal meta-spirituality that would unite humanity.

It may take at least another 6-12 months to transfer and upgrade 24 years of work (about 1,000 pages) from our old Universe Spirit website to this new one. During this massive transfer process, every page is under review, in construction, and being updated. We need to fix broken links, add new insights, remove outdated materials that no longer align with our philosophy-based approach, update language, and revise grammar and spelling to bring our older materials up to date and align with our new Way of the Universe philosophical framing. 

Some links on this site will still point to our old website during construction until we complete the large-scale transfer. If the home page of our old site displays a random error message and you can't view the entire site, click the refresh button; the old site will appear. To return to our new website from the old one, click the Back button or the Way of the Universe link at the top of the old home page. (The disappearing old website bug is very random, and we're still working on finding the cause and fixing it.)

Please sign up for our email list here or by clicking the image below.

You will receive Universe Spirit Community news, events, and updates.

Important upgrade note: We are still migrating 25 years' worth of materials from the older Universe Spirit website (about 1,000 pages) to this new Universe Spirit website. During this upgrade process, we will eventually move all new Way of the Universe philosophy materials still on the newer Universe Spirit website to its own site.

For all important information relating to this massive Universe Spirit upgrade, click here. We strongly recommend reading this detailed explanation of the massive upgrade underway, so you also understand our strategy and the reason for any confusion that you might experience with our ongoing edits on unedited pages transfered to our new website, remaining broken links, links still going to our old website, and sometimes conflicting terminology still found on pages at the new Universe Spirit website where we have not yet completed our editing upgrades. We hope to be fully done with this massive upgrade by January 2027.