Living Between Worlds: with Audio

Preface to Birthing the Symbiotic Age

Dear readers, I am very excited to give you a sneak peek of the preface from my upcoming book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age. For many of you, it has been a journey of more than a year, as I have been sharing the first three of the four sections of the book right here on Substack.

I would love to know how you feel. Please reply directly to this email, and feel free to share this message with others.

You can listen to this by clicking above.

Many Blessings, Richard

Preface: Living Between Worlds

At the age of twelve, something happened to me that changed my life forever. As I lay in the liminal space before sleep, I was immersed in a non-ordinary, ineffable encounter I was unprepared for—an overwhelming, loving presence that I would later interpret as a glimpse of a deeper, sacred Transcendent reality beyond what we normally see. It was at once awesomely beautiful yet frightening.

I didn’t have words for it then, but I knew it was real. What began in a single instant continued to unfold over many years. I called it the Luminous Web—a radiant sense of interconnectedness, as if every leaf, bird, and heartbeat were part of a vast and loving whole.

I was no longer separate. I was part of something sacred, intelligent, and alive. Despite life’s ups and downs, I felt an absolute trust and faith in that reality.

It wasn’t an idea I read about in a book or a belief grounded in tradition. It was a direct experience that stirred something within me that never faded. At the time, I didn’t link it to any religious figure. As the years went by and my journey deepened, I realized that the same Reality I encountered as a boy was the same Love I would later find in the life and presence of Jesus Christ.

And yet, when I returned to everyday life, the world I saw seemed the opposite of that Love. The society I re-entered taught me something else entirely:

• You are alone
• Others are threats and rivals, not kin
• All that matters is matter
• Compete, consume, and control
• The Sacred is irrelevant

Our systems, even the most well-meaning ones, seemed built on fragmentation, fear, and material striving—a world designed around separation.

That contradiction broke my heart.

If life were truly one, why were we living as if we were separate, cut off, divided, estranged from one another and the sacred source that binds us?

I didn’t have the language to name it back then, but now I call it the Culture of Separation. My father, sensing my heartbreak, asked me a simple question that became my life’s compass:

“Well, son… what will you do about it?”

That question haunted me—not in a burdensome way, but in a way that awakened purpose. It set me on a path that would take decades to walk. I spent the next fifty years searching for answers.

I studied. I built. I made mistakes. I fell in love. Got married. Had children. Got divorced. Remarried. I tried to live according to what I had seen. I founded organizations, started companies, ran networks, and facilitated community movements that attempted to embody the coherence I once glimpsed as a boy. Along the way, I drew from every way of knowing I had access to—trained as a scientist, shaped by poetry, grounded in the concrete practice of community work. I welcomed wisdom from Indigenous elders, priests, Buddhist scholars, systems theorists, diverse spiritual traditions, forests, and pilot whales.

For years, I followed the thread of that early luminous experience, trusting the sense of belonging and sacred wholeness I had once touched. Everything changed in 1990, when that same Presence seemed to pursue me again—in a form I never expected.

It came while I was driving through Mexico, still grappling with how to translate that early glimpse into something practical and embodied. Out of nowhere, the veil lifted—not revealing what I was seeking, but what I had longed to see. I saw a figure on the road—Jesus Christ.

It wasn’t a metaphor or a dream, but a vision imprinted on my soul. I felt lifted upward, and suddenly I saw the planet from above. Instead of the lights of cities, I saw golden rays rising from the hearts of billions of people—streams of light converging into a great, radiant heart. It pulsed with a Love so total it dissolved all boundaries.

Only later did I recognize what I had seen: this was the heart of Jesus, not a distant ruler, but the very Love I had sensed as a child, now made visible, made personal. It was not a symbol or a belief but the living pattern of Divine Love pouring into the world.

What I had witnessed was not a new religion to be imposed but a sacred map—a Divine Design, what I later called the Ancient Blueprint—a Sacred Design embedded in reality itself.

It was a living web of connection—of people, hearts, and communities joined by Love and service—a new worldwide web of Love and Life.

This vision revealed more than Love as a feeling—it showed me Love as a structure.

The radiant heart above Earth formed a vertical thread: the connection between the Transcendent and the Immanent. It wasn’t abstract theology—it was an actual reality. I began to see how the Divine pattern could be mirrored on Earth—not just through personal devotion, but in how we live, relate, and build together.

That vertical descent of Love demanded horizontal embodiment: shaping community, economy, and belonging from the inside out. What I had seen from above, I now felt called to bring to the ground below.

The luminous, loving presence I had once glimpsed in all things stood before me in the person of Jesus. It wasn’t a different reality; it was that same sacred coherence from childhood, now embodied—not as a doctrine, but as a living pattern of Divine Love.

That vision gave me direction. If my first experience had raised the question, "How can a world so whole produce lives so fractured?"—this second experience began to offer an answer:

We are here to bring Heaven down to Earth, unite what has been separated, and reweave the world with Love.

I didn’t suddenly become a pastor, but realized I had been given a “ministry”—one I was already living.

My work in community—from apprenticing with an Indigenous/Christian medicine woman to developing local food systems, economies, and civic networks—became a form of spiritual inquiry. Could the coherence I saw at twelve become a living pattern among us? Could Divine Love form structurally in neighborhoods, economies, and everyday relationships?

Over time, I began to see the pattern. I recognized it in Jesus’ teachings, especially his radical call to Love God and Love Others—not as a poetic metaphor or a call to be a good person, but as the very structure of Reality.

I saw it in the early Christian ecclesia, and again in Mahatma Gandhi’s village movements, Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne’s Sarvodaya Shramadana network of village economies, and in the Parallel Polis movement created during the communist rule of Czechoslovakia. I saw it in Indigenous councils and recovery circles.

In each case, Love was not an ideal. It was the infrastructure.

This book is the fruit of that journey. It’s not a memoir, though it tells my story. It’s not a manual, though it offers models. It’s not a theology, though it touches the sacred.

It’s a field guide for remembering how we were meant to live.

As I wrote this book, I saw more clearly how deeply our civilization has “de-platformed” the Divine. Even those who believe in a higher power often leave it out of our civic life, governance, and design frameworks. That, too, is part of the Culture of Separation.

Here’s the more profound truth I’ve seen: Most people I meet believe in something greater. Call it God, Spirit, Divine Love, the Sacred. Surveys say nearly 90% of us believe in a higher power. Yet our society is organized as if the sacred is private and irrelevant—as if love is too soft to structure a culture, and virtue is admirable but insufficient for survival.

Family, religion, and education teach us to be kind, generous, forgiving, and truthful. And yet, to function in today’s systems, we’re often forced to compete, hoard, dominate, and wear a mask.

This split is not just a moral tension—it is the spiritual crisis of our time. Deep down, we know that we belong to a loving, relational universe, yet we live as if we are alone.

We’re taught the Virtues because they echo something we already know—they align with the deeper design of Reality. Despite knowing the truth of the Virtues, we’ve been conditioned to act otherwise: to take rather than give, to protect rather than trust, to perform rather than be.

That dissonance wears us down. Some compartmentalize, others give up and numb out. Many—especially our youth—experience ongoing anxiety or depression. Still others fight against “the system,” addressing symptoms rather than the prime cause: separation.

And still, no one escapes the ache of living out of alignment with who we truly are.

That ache is not a flaw. It’s the signal of something sacred breaking through. I have felt that ache myself since I was a young boy, standing between worlds: the “joyful cosmos” I had experienced as profoundly true, and the world I was expected to survive in.

This book is for those who feel that signal and want to respond—not with despair but with creativity, not by retreating but by participating in the birth of something new.

I believe we are being invited into a great remembering, to help bring Heaven to Earth, starting with each of us.

Not of a utopia that never was, but of an ancient truth that still lives beneath the noise: that we are made for communion. That love is the organizing design principle of reality. That the sacred is not just somewhere else. It is here, awaiting our attention, to align our lives with the grand design.

That’s how we begin to build a Culture of Connection, what I call Symbiotic Culture.

I’m not just inviting you to read a book. I invite you to walk with me on a journey of a lifetime—decades of learning what works and what doesn’t in building real communities of care.

You may hear echoes of your own story along the way, because this isn’t about me. It’s about us, and what becomes possible when we begin exactly where we are.

You’re already part of this story. And it’s time.

Let’s begin.

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BOOK INTRODUCTION