The Ancient Blueprint: Building a Culture of Connection in a Broken World

How a New Operating System Can Heal Division and Renew Society

Every day, headlines remind us that our systems are breaking down — not just globally but here in America, where polarization and even political violence have become part of daily life. Many feel caught between dueling extremes, with little sense of where to turn.

And yet, beneath the noise, a different way of living already exists.

It is rooted in what I call an Ancient Blueprint, carried across wisdom traditions — from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the early Christian communities, to Mahatma Gandhi’s village awakening movement, to Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne’s Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka, to Charter 77’s Parallel Polis in Communist Czechoslovakia. This same blueprint is reflected in indigenous cultures worldwide.

At its core is Love — not as sentiment, but as the very structure of reality: the relational order in which life coheres.

Too often, this Love has been obscured, replaced by a worldview that divides rather than connects.

From Separation to Connection: A World and Worldview at a Crossroads

Events at home and abroad are a painful wake-up call to the dysfunction of our current materialist worldview — and the systems it has produced. This crisis is not only American but global, shaped by what I call the Culture of Separation, whose logic stretches back more than 2,500 years.

And yet, the Culture of Separation is not inevitable. Whenever societies come under stress, the Ancient Blueprint re-emerges as a spiritually rooted antidote.

The remedy is what I call the Culture of Connection.

We see it in neighborhood care networks, food system initiatives, resilience groups, mutual aid projects, churches and charities serving neighbors, purpose-driven businesses, service clubs, and bridge-building efforts. It already exists, hidden in plain sight — waiting to be activated, aligned, and amplified.

The pathway forward does not compete with the good that is already happening; it strengthens it, unites it, and multiplies its impact.

Connecting the Good into a Greater Coherent Whole

Billions are already engaged in this work, often without realizing they are part of a larger pattern: over 70 million nonprofits, civic groups, and faith communities anchoring billions of people worldwide — joined by nearly 68 million purpose-driven Main Street businesses that sustain livelihoods and hold neighborhoods together.

Consider just a few examples: the Catholic Church, with 1.4 billion members across 222,000 parishes and 134,000 mission stations; Rotary, Lions, and other service clubs uniting 5 million people in 100,000 local chapters; and more than 10,000 U.S. bridge-building groups working across divides.

The scale makes one thing clear: the seeds of a Culture of Connection already exist, waiting to be linked. The challenge is not to invent something new but to connect what is already alive.

Think of this as Love made operational — not just an inner conviction but a civic protocol, much like TCP/IP or HTTP made digital networks possible. Love, lived as structure, becomes the bridge across our fragmented and wounded communities.

From Local Circles to National and Global Networks

So what does this look like in practice?

Based on my forty years of lived community-building experience, it begins small: with circles of trust, meals with neighbors, shared projects that weave connection where division once stood, all of which spreads organically as radiating Love.

As these acts take root, they naturally grow into wider circles, networks, and eventually reshape local economies and civic life. And because this is happening simultaneously in villages, towns, and cities around the world, it can replace old top-down models with new network-centric structures of trust and coordination that link communities together.

This global shift can only begin locally — with one person willing to hold space for their community, so these threads of functionality and care can be woven into one whole cloth.

My book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity (released soon), lays out this pathway in practical detail — showing how communities like yours can bring Heaven to Earth, a way of living where Love and trust can become the norm.

Symbiotic Culture always follows the same developmental pathway: from intimate circles to societies, from societies to networks, from networks to a living Parallel Polis.

So what does this look like in practice? Let’s now turn to the proven pathway that makes this possible.

The Pathway of Symbiotic Culture

Symbiotic Culture is a society where mutually beneficial relationships and collaborations among diverse groups of people — from families to neighborhoods, communities, nations, and worldwide — become the norm.

It is not utopia, but protopia: a stepwise unfolding of grassroots connections that grow stronger through lived practice.

As I suggested in the previous section, local movements always begin small, through the quality of the Being of the initiators. It’s the quality of being, not the quantity of “beings” involved. Don’t worry about scaling. That will naturally happen, as you grow more “spiritually fluent” – capable of holding relational space in a diverse community.

I will share more about that quality later on in this post.

The seed of Symbiotic Culture can take root in Symbiotic Circles of 3–12 trusted friends within an already-existing community context — a church, nonprofit, business, local government, or civic and social movements and networks. From there, circles federate into Symbiotic Societies (larger networks of circles), which in turn spawn multi-sector Symbiotic Network collaborations organized around shared community needs.

These Symbiotic Networks provide a parallel functional infrastructure that will strengthen local economies and ultimately reshape civic life and politics into a new Parallel Polis, as you will see later.

At the heart of this progression is the glue — the DNA of Symbiotic Culture. It is more than a strategy; it is a way of life, beginning with each of us and rooted in every local community.

While this pathway can guide our steps, it cannot satisfy the hunger beneath them. To reach the heart of the matter, we must address the questions that never go away.

The Heart of the Matter: Building Networks That Unite Us

In conversations with changemakers worldwide, two questions keep surfacing:

First Question:

Is there anything that can unite a fragmented, conflicted, suffering humanity?

For thousands of years, political elites have relied on the tactic of “divide and rule” to the point where it’s become so ingrained that we fall for it almost every time. We have grown so accustomed to this persistent habit that groups reflexively fight one another rather than unite beyond divisions of race, religion, politics, class, or gender.

This battlefield mentality seems sadly woven into the human condition – or more accurately, human conditioning.

And yet, in spite of this seemingly all-pervasive battlefield, the answer to whether humanity can unify is still an unequivocal YES.

There is an alternative, less-celebrated history that offers countless examples of people rising above division to collaborate and cooperate. The “how” is surprisingly straightforward: through shared virtues, shared needs, and shared purpose – all of which we’ve codified in the Symbiotic Culture DNA.

While this history offers a proven, encouraging foundation — the lineage of the Ancient Blueprint — at the heart of my book is my lived experience building networks that have overcome division, even in polarized communities. These demonstrate practical, proven ways that people have chosen cooperation over conflict, often in the most challenging circumstances.

The stories and lessons I share provide a high-level guide to implementing the Symbiotic Culture strategy, enabling you to begin uniting your own community.

Second Question:

How can we make any headway in a time of global systemic breakdown with interrelated crises?

The paradox is that global problems cannot be solved globally. You must solve them locally — and work together in parallel —so that local communities can grow this new culture simultaneously worldwide, from the bottom up.

I get it — I’m proposing a sane society; I must be crazy!

In my post, Isn’t it Time We Build a Parallel Society? I highlighted how Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka has already achieved this remarkable feat on a national scale — it is a model of multi-scalar (within and between communities) network growth that emerged into a national network of 5,000 local, “micro” bioregional ecosystem networks.

Here is a 7-minute video about Sarvodaya’s 5-stage development process, which starts with inner development (personality awakening) and is seamlessly integrated into building community ecosystem networks. Symbiotic Culture is based partly on this world-renowned, sixty-five-year-old grassroots movement.

Sarvodaya – Building an Alternative Economy from the ground up

Sarvodaya has demonstrated fractal community empowerment — releasing an underlying, reproducible pattern that emerges from an Ancient Blueprint. My book will share the “secret sauce” of this Blueprint and Symbiotic Culture; actually, it isn’t secret, just hidden in plain sight beneath the noise of materialistic culture.

Symbiotic Culture reflects this new way of being, thinking, and doing — in local community building and a new way of life — a new Culture of Connection.

Instead of having to build a separate new organization as a silo, competitively, you build ecosystem networks based on shared universal principles and Virtues — unifying existing citizens, as well as local leaders and their organizations, businesses, networks, and local governments.

It’s about connecting the good in each community into an effective power for system change — reflecting what’s already happening in natural ecosystems. Think of mycelial networks beneath the forest floor: different species collaborating, exchanging nutrients, and sustaining the whole. What looks separate on the surface is deeply interconnected below. In the same way, communities can move beyond isolated silos to become part of a larger living network.

You can check out this post on how nature organizes mutual collaborations — On Cultural Symbiogenesis — for a glimpse into what may be the next step in human cultural evolution: from isolated single silos to a multi-siloed, networked civilization.

And when local communities take these steps, something larger begins to emerge — what Václav Benda once described as a Parallel Polis, explored next.

The Parallel Polis

The Symbiotic pathway naturally evolves toward what Václav Benda and Vaclav Havel called a Parallel Polis — a civic fabric built alongside failing institutions, rooted in trust, virtue, and mutual benefit. Benda and the dissidents of Charter 77 understood that under totalitarianism, the formal institutions of the state were too compromised to be reformed from within.

The task was not to wait for some outside intervention, but to build a new culture by what Havel called “living in truth” — refusing to live by lies, and instead embodying honesty, responsibility, and solidarity in everyday life.

To live in truth is to align one’s life with reality as it truly is, not as propaganda
or power dictates.

It was both a moral stance and a practical act of resistance — a way ordinary people reclaimed freedom by creating parallel structures of trust and meaning, rooted in Václav Benda’s conviction that each person bears the Image of God.

Today, we face not the jackboots of overt totalitarianism but the subtler erosion of freedom in what many have called “soft totalitarianism.” We live under dueling oligarchies — one on the Left, one on the Right — both demanding loyalty, both weaponizing fear, and both incapable of providing a coherent future. What masquerades as democracy often devolves into managed polarization. This is not liberation; it is captivity by a modern version of empire.

Unlike ideological versions on the Left or Right, a United Parallel Polis is a broader tent, accommodating multiple worldviews while bridged by a Relational Worldview that weaves the siloed threads around a common purpose and shared needs.

A relational worldview does not seek to erase difference, but to build bridges across the silos of competing—and often polarized—worldviews. Where the Culture of Separation erects walls, this way of being cultivates relationships that make cooperation and shared flourishing possible.

It offers a parallel economy, society, and politics that grow from the bottom up, grounded in daily community needs. It is not an escape hatch, but a living alternative — a society within a society, where citizens relearn the habits of trust, practice virtue, and share responsibility for the commons.

In other words, we do not need to wait for governments or corporations to do it for us.

By weaving circles, societies, and networks around food, energy, health, safety, arts, spirituality, and local economies, we lay the scaffolding of a new public square — one that can eventually host political life itself.

This is the logic: spiritual renewal → community practice → civic coherence. Read more in-depth about the Parallel Polis, a chapter excerpt from my upcoming book.

To prove it’s practical, let’s look to places where it’s already emerging.

The Ancient Blueprint in Action

Nearly twenty years ago, in Reno, Nevada, we convened community-wide meetings that included community leaders and average citizens. We used this diverse group to crowd-source shared principles, values, and virtues, and common community needs. Based on this collective wisdom, we built multiple ecosystem networks — food systems, local economy initiatives, neighborhood networks, arts collaborations, trans-faith initiatives, and more.

These experiments became the “Conscious Community Network,” “Weaver Groups,” and “Connections Gatherings.”

Our work in Reno proved that even in a polarized community, ordinary people could identify common purpose, principles, virtues, and needs and begin weaving Symbiotic Networks.

At the time, I thought of this as a local experiment; I later came to see it as part of an ancient stream of wisdom, a lineage that for me begins with Jesus Christ, whose Sermon on the Mount set forth a radically relational way of being: love God, love your neighbor, love even your enemy. Inspired by the Sermon, Gandhi carried this vision into his dream of India as a commonwealth of self-reliant communities.

Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka demonstrated the same pattern at the national scale — showing how local awakenings can federate into a commonwealth of thousands of communities.

Václav Benda and Charter 77 rearticulated it as the Parallel Polis in communist Czechoslovakia. Countless Indigenous traditions have embodied it through relational reciprocity and ecological kinship. And our work in Reno, and now Symbiotic Culture, stands humbly in continuity with this stream and lineage.

In this hopeful old/new model that reflects Sarvodaya, our Reno networks, and the Czech Parallel Polis, inner change leads to local collaboration, which develops into federating networks that create civic coherence – and ultimately parallel governance.

This Ancient Blueprint keeps reappearing whenever societies seek to recover coherence. So the unavoidable question becomes: how do we translate this timeless pattern into the regeneration of spirit and society today?

The Regeneration of Spirit and Society

The good news is that there is far more that unites us than divides us — and history shows that communities can rediscover this unity when they root themselves in shared purposes, principles, virtues, and needs.

In Reno, our test for unity was simple yet rigorous: could we find universal agreement across diverse cultures, faith traditions, and civic frames?

The answer was YES.

These shared principles, virtues, and community needs have held communities together for over 3,000 years. Through those meetings in Reno that I described earlier, we identified them and built ecosystem networks around food, the local living economy, neighborhoods, the arts, and religious/spiritual life.

Reno proved this truth at a local scale. Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka scaled it nationally, federating thousands of communities around the same shared virtues. These examples remind us that community renewal and regeneration, on a large scale, are possible.

Which brings us to today.

We face our own “All Hands On Deck” moment, where principles and virtues must be prioritized despite our conflicts and differences.

At heart, it is Love — not as ideology but as civic infrastructure. Love becomes the operating system, and Virtues its protocols.

When qualities like love, humility, integrity, generosity, and patience are practiced together, they become relational protocols that expand trust networks. This Symbiotic Culture DNA is what gets “injected” through practice and embodiment into the networks we build to meet the twelve common needs (described below) of every community. When embodied, these virtues build the bridge from inner life to public life, from family to polis.

So here’s the question facing each of us now: Do we want to be Uniters or Dividers

The regeneration of Spirit inside us is what makes possible the regeneration of our neighborhoods, economies, and commons. The effects radiate outward in everyday interactions: from self → family → neighborhood → community → through existing networks → economies → politics. But virtues alone are not enough. They must be embodied in relationships that cross silos and tribes, creating trust where division once ruled.

This brings us to Symbiotic Kinship.

Symbiotic Kinship: The Relational Fabric of a New Culture

Symbiotic Kinship means extending our sense of belonging beyond the familiar tribes and silos we usually cling to — moving past narrow identities to embrace shared aspirations and mutual benefit.

Expanded kinship means widening the circle beyond those we like or agree with, so together we can work for the common good.

Albert Einstein described the need for this shift:

“A human being … experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — an optical delusion of his consciousness … a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion.”

At its heart, Symbiotic Kinship is about uniting citizens and organizations at the grassroots in the spirit of Universal or Divine Love. It is a proven way to transform the Culture of Separation into a Culture of Connection.

Divine Love is the operating system for the Culture of Connection, as its ultimate purpose and animating power. Virtues are the protocols for making love manifest in the world. They provide the shared “rules of exchange” that make trust and collaboration possible across differences; without humility, integrity, courage, and respect, relationships can’t sustain genuine cooperation. And trusted relationships are the secure channels — the human bonds through which these virtues actually flow, allowing estranged groups to risk connecting again.

In the midst of polarization and separation, we see signs of this relational fabric emerging. In local communities, people, nonprofits, faith groups, businesses, local governments, and movements are stepping up to meet today’s crises. Again and again, I’ve found leaders and citizens who sense that a deeper level of collaborative bridge-building is now required.

These scattered efforts are not isolated sparks but part of a larger pattern. I think of them as “islands of coherence” — vibrant initiatives that reveal a new world being born.

Symbiotic Kinship recognizes these islands as kin and begins weaving them
into a greater whole.

What is uniquely transformational about Symbiotic Networks is that, instead of being another silo competing with other well-meaning projects, they provide a context, an infrastructure to amplify the kinship that is already taking form in the community's worthy work.

Put another way, these networks are a delivery system for “connecting and weaving the good.”

And these are not abstract ideals; they are embodied in real movements today. In my book, I describe how these islands of coherence are ready to be joined into a broader Parallel Polis.

Here are ten of the movement threads I see already doing the work:

• Faith-based and spiritual groups
• Charities and social change efforts
• Civic engagement and bridge builders
• Regenerative culture movements
• Faith-based creation care initiatives
• Purpose-driven small businesses
• New economy and commons movements
• Localization, bioregional, and cosmolocalization networks
• Pro-democracy and civil society movements
• Arts, culture, and creative community projects

When these islands of coherence recognize one another as kin, the weaving begins in earnest.

Symbiotic Kinship provides the cultural bond necessary, but a bond is not enough. It also requires a framework, which I call a Community Operating System, to sustain and scale the connections. Without such a framework, goodwill remains fragile — vulnerable to conflict, worn down by fatigue, and torn apart by the divisive pull of polarized politics.

The Community Operating System gives structure to relationship — shared purpose, principles, virtues, and needs — so that trust can grow, networks can expand, and cooperation can endure over time.

A New Community Operating System for a Culture of Connection

Every culture rests on an operating system—often invisible—that determines how people trust, collaborate, and respond to crises. Our current system, built on competition and control, fragments relationships and erodes trust.

What we need now is not just better programs or policies, but a deeper reboot and reset: a shared operating system that draws us back into communion with one another and with the sacred order that underlies life itself.

This section introduces the five elements of Symbiotic Culture DNA — the foundation for activating the Ancient Blueprint in local communities. Each element builds on the one before, moving from shared purpose to principles, virtues, needs, and network design.

Again, it is not a utopia, but a practical blueprint rooted in what is most universal and enduring—purpose, principles, virtues, and needs—that can be adapted by any community. When practiced together, it becomes a cultural DNA capable of scaling through networks of trust.

1. Shared Purpose: Uniting the Cosmos in Love

At the heart of Symbiotic Culture is a shared purpose: to bring together what has been separated and unite humanity in Love — reconnecting ourselves and others to meaning, to one another, and to the broader web of life.

Today, culture — accelerated by social media — has fractured us into separate realities, isolating communities and eroding trust.

If we are to heal, we must co-create a shared reality on the ground, rooted in our neighborhoods and lived in community.

A Symbiotic Culture emerges when we normalize intentional mutual benefit, from person to planetary.

2. Eight Shared Principles: A Framework for Community Regeneration

Principles are the bedrock of any enduring community. They are not rules imposed from above, but universal design patterns discovered through lived experience and wisdom traditions. They point us back to the way life itself is ordered: cooperative, regenerative, relational.

Eight shared principles can guide us across cultures and contexts. They are like the DNA of the human community, woven into the fabric of creation, and serve as a compass pointing us toward true north.

When we align with them, life coheres and trust deepens; when we ignore them, we lose our bearings and drift into fragmentation.

These principles echo the lineage of the Ancient Blueprint, carried through Jesus (Love God and Love Others), Gandhi (Commonwealth of Village Republics), Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka (New Economy), and even Thomas Jefferson’s civic imagination of America as a federation of Ward Republics.

They remind us that life is interdependent, diversity is strength, reciprocity sustains the whole, and sacredness runs through creation. Each community will express them differently, but the orientation remains the same: toward wholeness, justice, and mutual flourishing.

It’s not about belief — it’s about action. Living these out together, principles become a new way of life.

3. Five Shared Virtues: Walking Our Talk

If principles provide the ethical framework, Virtues supply the energy. They are the lived protocol — the qualities that allow trust to build and collaboration to deepen.

Symbiotic Culture lifts up what I call five Transcendent virtues as civic infrastructure: Love, Integrity, Courage, Service, and Respect.

These are not abstract ideals but daily practices — recognized across religious and civic cultures — that shape how we treat one another, resolve conflict, and create together.

When embodied in action, virtues bridge differences and generate the trust on which all healthy networks depend. They move us from lofty ideas to grounded reality. When virtues move from abstraction into daily practice — such as feeding families, supporting neighbors, and stewarding land — they evolve beyond ethics to become part of civic infrastructure. And that’s when they connect directly to the twelve common needs.

4. Twelve Community Needs: Building Around What We Hold in Common

Beyond good intentions, every community flourishes only when its members’ basic needs are met. The Symbiotic Community Operating System identifies twelve common human needs — from Food and Water, Energy, Local Living Economy, Clean & Healthy Natural Environment, Community Peace & Safety, Neighbor Helping Neighbor, Community Empowerment of those on the “Margins,” Arts & Culture, Housing, Family and Community Health & Wellness, Education and Mentoring, Religion/Spirituality in Service.

Building around shared needs unites diverse stakeholders who might otherwise remain in silos.

Farmers, artists, business owners, parents, elders, pastors, activists, local governments, and youth all find common cause when the focus is on serving the whole. In this way, needs become a foundation for parallel civic life, where communities build resilient systems of care and collaboration.

These are the everyday challenges that everyone can get behind: growing and consuming more local food, strengthening the local economy, ensuring a clean and healthy environment, supporting wellness, practicing faith and spirituality, serving those on the margins, and more. They are also areas of community life that people are already passionate about.

This is the new playing field: where competition gives way to collaboration, and silos become nodes in a shared fabric.

5. Symbiotic Infrastructure: From Circles to Societies to Trust Networks

Purpose, principles, virtues, and needs come alive fully only when linked through a new form of network infrastructure that connects all of the goodness and good works already happening in a local region.

The Symbiotic Community Operating System is not another silo, but a context—a distributed, network-centric design that connects small circles into societies and extends these societies into wider networks.

This multi-scalar, fractal growth pattern allows culture to scale without losing trust at the local level. Networks of circles and communities create resilience across sectors — economic, social, ecological, and spiritual.

In this way, Symbiotic Culture spreads not through control but through connection.

The Symbiotic Community Operating System offers a practical blueprint that any local community can adopt immediately. As each bioregion builds its ecosystem networks, these local networks connect organically and form a cohesive whole system.

When communities address needs in this way, they begin creating a larger fabric: a Network Commons — a parallel culture, society, economy, and politics.

By grounding themselves in shared purpose, principles, virtues, needs, and networks, communities can activate the Ancient Blueprint — building a culture of trust, resilience, and love from the ground up.

Putting it All Together: A New Network Commons of a Parallel Polis

Building a Network Commons requires both an interior and spiritual developmental process, as well as real-world, practical network building, which involves “multi-scalar” and “fractal” network evolution.

• Multi-scalar refers to networks of organizations that spread horizontally within a community, extending upward to national and global levels, with the necessary infrastructure to support them.

• Fractal means that there are patterns and universal structures within the Ancient Blueprint that, when embodied in one community, could simultaneously emerge in thousands of communities!

In my book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age, you will be given a proven pathway and roadmap to create small groups and start consciously weaving a truly expansive tapestry.

The focus is on building a new, parallel Culture of Connection as “scaffolding,” a new “Network Commons,” a bridge to a new culture alongside (and interdependent yet independent of) the existing Culture of Separation.

When you connect across silos, you release the hidden and protected assets available in any community.

When you connect across silos, you release the hidden and “frozen” assets available in any community.

A Network Commons represents a community-based collaborative initiative where nonprofits, religious organizations, civic entities, mutual aid and gifting groups, cooperatives, private enterprises, and public resources are intentionally interconnected, shared, and governed by an engaged community of stakeholders.

It comprises various interdependent, distributed, and symbiotic networks engaged in widespread collaboration, embodying a peer-driven production and consumption model.

It encourages local communities to produce and consume local goods, services, and knowledge, which are then linked to self-organized regional marketplaces for the mutual benefit of individuals, organizations, businesses, and the broader community.

Examples include networks that strengthen local systems for food, energy, and water, boost the local economy, and promote and advance endeavors that serve those on the margins of society, including education, housing, arts, culture, spirituality, wellness, and healthy local living environments.

The example below shows how the approach applies to building a Local Food System Network. The principles underlying Symbiotic Networks can be used to any community need or purpose, even within your existing organizational network.

But every commons begins small — with circles of trust.

Activating Symbiotic Circles and Societies

The practical on-ramp is simple: start with Symbiotic Circles (3–12 people). Think of them as the “seed” of the larger journey: circles → societies → networks → local economies → a Parallel Polis. Each step builds on the one before.

These circles gather to embody and inculcate the Symbiotic Culture DNA — shared principles, virtues, and community needs — and begin to identify what matters most in their community.

Symbiotic Circles begin in trusted spaces, such as your church, business, charity, government office, or social movement network. In other words, wherever you want
to establish this way of life.

Circles gather around shared needs, embed virtues in practice, and connect across silos.

As suggested earlier, circles are the seed form of a new culture. As they come together in a convening body, they form a Symbiotic Society. In this container, people from diverse political, religious, professional, and identity backgrounds can come together under a larger Transcendent identity.

In that space, our smaller labels fall away; like entering a cathedral, we take off our shoes and remember we stand on sacred ground together. And this vision of a sacred container is not just poetic — history shows us it can be embodied in practice.

Symbiotic Societies anchor networks across a region. They are not theoretical — this group structure draws from proven precedents, including Sarvodaya Societies in Sri Lanka and the Conscious Community Networks, Weaver Groups, and Connections Gatherings in Reno.

Much like Alcoholics Anonymous created small recovery circles of healing and accountability, Symbiotic Circles and Societies can be thought of as cultural recovery groups.

Their purpose, structure, and process are based on the proven track record of grassroots societies that helped whole nations awaken.

So, in the end, what are we really recovering?

Not nostalgia for a perfect past, but the Transcendent itself — however we each understand Him, or if you see that as an It — and the agreed-upon Virtues that flow from that Source. These virtues reconnect us to the sacred and then bind together the “nodes of intersection” (silos) within the organizational networks in which we are already embedded.

We begin with ourselves and our families, the nucleus of society, then move on to our neighbors, organizations, other networks, and communities. As circles convene into societies and societies interlink into networks, you can feel civic coherence forming — over time, this radiates outward, embodying what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community.

The recovery groups support both personal and community transition toward a new way of life: a Culture of Connection.

We don’t have to wait for outside organizations or leaders. We can start immediately — with family and neighbors, and then the organizations and networks we are already part of.

And so the question becomes: how do we carry this recovery into daily life, into families and neighborhoods, into societies and nations? To answer that, here is an overview of the elements of a relational worldview and strategy.

OVERVIEW: The Elements of a Relational Worldview and Strategy

• Shared purpose and goals
• 8 Shared principles
• 5 Shared virtues
• 12 Common community needs
• Distributed Network Commons
• Symbiotic Societies as activation groups

Remember that these six main worldview elements above are not set in stone and are likely to evolve in the future. There are reasons why these elements have been chosen—they reflect a common understanding, as they have been tested in the real world, and THEY WORK.

These are the building blocks. But the vision is larger still. So now let’s reflect on what we are building.

Rising Together: From Separation to Communion

We stand at a threshold. Separation has run its course; connection waits to be born. What begins as a meal with neighbors, a circle of trust, or a shared garden can scale into a new society and civilization where our hearts feel at home.

Together, we are building the bridge — from a Culture of Separation to a Culture of Connection, from chaos to communion, from fragmentation to symbiosis.

What is required is a return to the Source — God, the Logos, the Transcendent. Only this Eternal Presence can re-root a person, reboot a culture, regenerate a virtuous economy, and ultimately guide our politics.

Start small. Stay faithful. Weave wide. Rise together. One parallel polis at a time.

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The Ancient Blueprint: Building a Culture of Connection in a Broken World