Seeking the “Holy Grail” - of Community Chapter 10 Part 5
Seeking the “Holy Grail” - of Community Chapter 10 Part 5
The Greatest Obstacle to a New Way of Living – the “De-Platforming” of God
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up!
You are in Chapter 10, Part 5, The Greatest Obstacle to a New Way of Living — The De-Platforming of God
Chapter 10 posts:
The Greatest Obstacle to a New Way of Living — The De-Platforming of God
Breakthrough to a New Creation … New Wine in New WineSkin Networks
Are you trying to figure out where this is All Going? Read Building Bridges to a New World — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.
Voice-overs are now at the top of my posts for anyone who doesn’t have the time to sit and read! Also, find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on
Spotify and Apple!
Previously, at the end of Chapter 10, Part 4
When we move beyond like-minded silos to like-hearted networks – collaboration and cooperation literally break down barriers and open hearts.
People love being part of a purposeful community, especially when the mutual benefit is apparent. Our networks worked because the culture that permeated them was in the field of giving, not taking. Once we experience self-giving love, once it becomes safe to trust in this way, it brings out the best in everyone and clears the barriers to Love. One can then see how self-giving service can return tenfold in unexpected benefits.
As you will see in Part III, we now have a way to create groups that will not only build the Virtues in ourselves (the INNER development) but also use that spiritual fuel and fire to build connectivity networks (the OUTER development) in every one of the 12 areas of community needs – an infrastructure for a truly “new way of living.”
The Greatest Obstacle to a New Way of Living — The “De-Platforming” of God
Before we discuss how to re-embody religion/spirituality into ourselves and society and use that resource as the primal power to build networks for mutual benefit, I need to address the “one million pound elephant in the living room” nobody wants to talk about.
It has to do with something my mother taught me as a child.
Never talk about politics or religion at the dinner table.
The reason is obvious.
Inside the Culture of Separation, people advocate beliefs and ideas that conflict with one another, usually with the intention of converting the other person to their point of view. So, it’s easy to understand why we avoid these topics, particularly if we seek to keep the peace and have any semblance of unity.
Here’s the paradox: my 40-year community-building experience tells me that if we want to achieve the unifying societal breakthrough we seek, we must bring the heart of religion and spirituality back into the public sphere.
That’s the challenge. Given the growing sense of impending “civilization collapse,” more and more people are seeing that technical and even organizational solutions alone are not enough. We need to get to the spiritual HEART of the matter, beyond the current cultural paradigm—that “all that matters is matter.”
This brings up an equally giant unacknowledged “rhino in the living room.” I’ve offered this pertinent fact before, and in this transformational context, it’s worth mentioning again.
More than 90% of humanity believes in a Transcendent power (the vast majority are “religious”) -- that there IS a “deeper reality” than the materialistic worldview. And yet, to “function,” to do business within the Culture of Separation, we have to compromise our “interior life” on the altar of that new God of endless “progress.”
In public life, we have to pretend that what we know in our hearts is irrelevant.
This cognitive dissonance is the MOST POWERFUL LEVERAGE point in
transforming the Culture of Separation!
This paradox—that we need a universal unifying principle yet keep ignoring the obvious—has been raised as a series of questions in recent meetings with change agents.
The first is one I brought up in the introduction to this book:
Are there any objective universal Purpose, Principles, and Virtues (dare I say Objective Truth) that human beings can agree on across culture, politics, economics, religion, and time that will allow us to Unite and work together?
The second set of questions are related.
Can the six billion+ people from different religious/spiritual communities
(in millions of groups) work together to address these challenges?
Can the networked silos of the religious/spiritual find common cause with each other and with those who either don’t identify as religious/spiritual or choose to keep
their inner spiritual life private?
Those questions are probably as old as the Tower of Babel, but answering them now holds the key to our future.
The major challenge—especially for those of us in the West—is reintegrating religion and spirituality back into societal life in a UNIFYING way, where we use our spiritual sensibilities to find common ground instead of dividing us.
So, what’s stopping us?
For one thing, in modern and postmodern society, spirituality and religion are seen as personal pursuits and are avoided in the public sphere as “divisive.” So even if the intention is to unify around a common purpose and mutual benefit, just the terms “religious” or “spiritual” put up barriers.
Is someone going to try to convert me – or denigrate my own spiritual path/beliefs?
Understandably, “changemakers” avoid this issue as a potential quagmire. I’ve spoken with many network leaders who acknowledge spirituality but are either uncomfortable with or even hostile to religion, with a particular prejudice against Christianity, which seems “out of fashion” in our secular world.
Believe me, I can relate to this. I had the same bias myself. More on that in a little bit.
On the other hand, many with a deep faith-based or spiritual perspective will usually not speak of it publicly or bring it up in their “social change” work. This was brought home to me twenty years ago when one leader of the network weaver movement said they kept their spiritual life private and didn’t speak of it in their weaving work.
The problem is Separation—compartmentalizing our reality, even among those who hold in their hearts the vision of “a more beautiful world.”
Let me get specific - I will begin with my own bias.
As a child, a teenager, and a young adult, faced with the stark contrast between the loving, unitive reality of my transcendent experiences described in Chapters 1 and 2, on the one hand, and being acculturated into the Culture of Separation, on the other, it’s understandable that I would turn against the institutions that I perceived were keeping that culture in place.
I particularly took exception to two prevailing institutions—the business world and organized religion. In the early 1980s, as a young anti-nuclear and peace activist seeking to improve the world, I didn’t even know it at the time, but I had a politically “left-wing” progressive viewpoint.
As you will read shortly, it was only when I intended to become a community “Uniter” in developing the Symbiotic Networks in Reno that I had to confront my prejudices and rise to a higher, deeper, and broader view.
Until then, I felt safe and comfortable inside my silo and my networked silos of people and organizations who believed the way I did.
So many of our current well-intentioned movements for social change, including those around climate change, economic inequality, and social justice, have emerged from the same progressive “bubble.”
“Inclusive” has come to mean “including only those who think the way we do,” so it might never occur to these groups to seek common cause with established religious
organizations.
Consider, for example, that hundreds of millions of religious people globally care for the poor and the homeless, are involved in “creation care” ministries, or overcome economic injustice in thousands of villages, towns, and cities each day!
Above and beyond the silos, for the secular, civic engagement, and social change activists, these are natural allies – for a larger purpose. This is a Symbiotic Culture.
Thankfully, my life experience expanded my view of how these different religious and spiritual viewpoints can be woven into whole-cloth movements.
My apprenticeship with Doña Catalina, described in Chapter 3—who was both Indigenous Aztec and a Christian—reaffirmed the connection between spirituality and nature AND introduced me to Jesus Christ in a way that bypassed any religious dogma.
I’m extending an invitation to include established religious traditions in “radical inclusivity,” an expanded “sacred space,” because that is REQUIRED if we are to
unite the Cosmos in Love – to bring together all that has become separate.
We don’t need a new religion or philosophy – we need a new “recognition” of the universal Purpose, Principles, and Virtues of the old ones.
I have already quoted E.F. Schumacher, the “father” of the modern regeneration movement, as saying that we needed to integrate our Western heritage:
“In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and willfully abandoned our great classical Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like ‘virtue’, ‘love’, and ‘temperance.’
The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction.”
Notice he boldly proclaims, “Christian heritage.” This quote – from the early 1970s – is not about converting anyone to Christianity but acknowledges how valuable that foundation has been for Western and world society.
So why does his statement seem so anachronistic half a century later?
I believe it relates to something I mentioned earlier -- the “De-platforming of God”
(what I refer to as the Transcendent), what I’ve described as
“Throwing the Baby Jesus out with the bathwater.”
The current scientific materialist paradigm all but proclaims, “We don’t need no steenking religion.” It holds that material science alone can solve all our problems and provide us with all the values and ethics we need for a good society.
The several hundred-year Enlightenment project, with its hope and promise that mankind could find Purpose through the rational mind, scientific inquiry, and formal organizational structures, has been found wanting without a parallel and underlying religious/spiritual inspiration.
The dominant narrative is not “anti-religion”; it’s more that religion is treated as a non-factor in addressing what seem to be “material” problems. This has left a “spiritual vacuum” at the core of our communities and society. Individual religious and spiritual groups—millions of them—are left in their siloed ways, working for betterment.
Yet, these promising threads never get woven together inside the Culture of Separation.
Because the power of religion and spirituality itself is being dismissed, diminished, and marginalized, it becomes more challenging for those working for positive change to see the value of working outside their silos.
Hardly anyone recognizes the power of a unifying narrative that includes and transcends religion, spirituality, and secular ethics.
Consequently, it’s easy for social change narratives to be captured and coopted by one political side or another. Consider how the “networked silos” of the “woke left” AND the “anti-Woke right” are on the battlefield over “identity issues,” making it almost impossible to unite around the “identical” issues we all share in common – the desire for Beloved Community and a world of intentional mutual benefit.
This begs the question, is it only left-wing religious people who want to see an end to hunger or poverty? Is it only right-wing religious people who want to see a moral renewal and reduction in crime?
Of course not!
It’s become clear to me that the absence of a sane, sacred, universal, transcendent center at the core of our society has sent those who seek change scrambling for an alternative source of authority—the political realm.
G.K. Chesterton once said that with religion's declining influence, politics can take on a quasi-religious role, with political ideologies becoming the ultimate authority and giving moral guidance.
Hence, universal virtues that can be agreed upon across the political and religious spectrum have given way to non-universal substitutes around political “identities”—codified by institutionalized “diversity” (that too often fails to include a diversity of perspectives) that end up dividing the public.
While we are seeking ways to “recover” from the Culture of Separation, many may not realize that they are looking to recover from institutionalized religion. Maybe that’s why so many involved in these movements for social change embrace the indigenous and dismiss the Christian or other traditional religions.
Again, this is understandable given the sordid history of colonizing and, for example, “Christianizing” going hand-in-hand.
We’re not calling this a Culture of Separation for nothing!
So now, along with the elephant and rhino I’ve previously mentioned, here is the hippopotamus in the living room:
As a result of the siloing of activism and the de-platforming of religion, perhaps the most powerful Power we all can access to truly “Change the World” – the power of the Transcendent itself – has been rendered powerless!
Meanwhile, as Chesterton warned, centralized governmental authority and authoritarianism would increase without that Transcendent Power.
To deepen this conversation and hopefully provide breakthroughs and understanding that will move us toward that “new way of living,” I want to share some distinctions that have only recently become clear to me.
Inside our Culture of Separation, religious and spiritual life is generally relegated to an individual pursuit focused on either personal salvation or enlightenment, separate and distinct from broader public or civic engagement. This is how religion and spirituality get “domesticated.”
If we stop and consider that Jesus, Gandhi, and Dr. Ari were spiritual rabble-rousers who “comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable,” you’ll
get a sense of what I mean.
Along these same lines, in a Culture of Separation that promotes “self-serving” attitudes and behaviors, it’s unsurprising that the punchline of much spiritual practice today tends to be “What’s in it for me?” Quite subtly, “love thy neighbor” gets subsumed by the quest for individual well-being and benefit through a myriad of “offerings” in a “religious/spiritual supermarket.”
Meditation will improve my health, and repeating certain mantras will bring prosperity. I can also use prayer to ask for what I want as if God were a magic genie or cosmic vending machine.
Contrary to many modern versions of spirituality, the goal of true religion is not happiness, personal peace, healing, wellness, financial prosperity, getting a job, mate, or house—or even being a virtuous or good person doing “good works.”
That’s why I said that religion and spirituality have gotten “watered” down in a Culture of Separation that distorts their fundamental purpose. It means “Religare” to rebind us to a Transcendent reality or God that will change us so fundamentally that we choose a radically different way of living—from a life of self-serving Love to one of self-giving Love.
It means expanding the notion of self-interest way beyond personal likes and dislikes, past being comfortable and “feeling good.”
The paradox is this: As you turn your mind away from the Culture of Separation, as happened to me when I was younger, you begin to experience a Web of Love and the Web of Life that re-connects you to yourself, others, and the earth—it draws you into all of life, including our suffering and the suffering of the world.
It's a new way of living in service to a Higher Love in the real world.
The word I introduced in Chapter 1 to describe this state of transformation is “metanoia” – a radical turning, a conversion from the “normal” life of self-serving love in a Culture of Separation to a new life of self-giving love, the foundation of a new Culture of Connection.
Metanoia is a fundamental change of mind – and heart – a lifelong process and practice.
Metanoia, and dare I say, Mass Metanoia, is what is required for those of us who hear the call to be space-holders for the new way of living that humanity is longing for.
It is a “conversion” not to some specific religion but to a higher view and more objective perception of reality so that we can serve a Higher Love and in the community to build an alternative, countercultural, parallel society where Love can flourish.
Here is the bottom line as I see it.
To be a conduit of Cosmic Love and a space-holder for Symbiotic Culture, one has to rise above “spiritual materialism” – and beyond “battlefield” positions.
The ultimate “regen” movement is the regenerated heart and mind that
enables kinship with all.
This is how we enter into the right relationship with the Transcendent and all of humanity. Instead of perpetually trying to “actualize” a “separate self,” it would be more accurate to say we realize that we are a “shared self”—with one eye on the Transcendent and the other towards our neighbor.
So, given this high bar, is there a way forward? YES, absolutely.
This book chronicles my personal and community experiences connecting ALL the dots, including religious and spiritual organizations, as part of humanity's rich tapestry. This also includes those working for civic engagement, conventional nonprofits, and Main Street businesses—a truly Regenerative approach that includes all aspects of real-world communities brought together in conscious Symbiotic Kinship.
To me, that’s the real meat of religious and spiritual practice: it is not just about practicing the Virtues, trying to “be good,” or even becoming a better person.
It is about fundamentally transforming our worldview, aligned with what I have called an Ancient Blueprint. This spiritual pattern has given rise to Living Systems that operate
in harmony at every level of being.
It’s about the ongoing work of integrating seeming opposites: personal and community, science and religion, religion/spirituality and public engagement, left brain and right brain, spirit and matter, and many others.
My entire adult life has been an ongoing unfoldment of this kind of spiritual AND community formation.
From my early days growing up a secular Jew, and then having spontaneous spiritual awakenings through my teens and after, becoming a scientist, practicing Tibetan Buddhist meditation and Jungian dream work, apprenticing with an Indigenous Aztec/Christian medicine woman in Mexico, encountering Jesus Christ in an ongoing personal relationship; discovering the Buddhist-based Sarvodaya Shramadana movement; and putting all of this together over forty years of community building as Symbiotic Culture.
So, throughout this book -- especially in Chapter 8, where I describe Symbiotic Culture DNA -- I have shown how religion and spirituality are essential if we are to become community UNITERS rather than unwitting community DIVIDERS.
We must have been ahead of the curve twenty years ago because these days, there are growing public calls for reintegrating the positive benefits of religious faith and spirituality back into society to help us solve the myriad of challenges we face. Even British evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, self-proclaimed New Atheist and author of The God Delusion, has recently declared he is a “cultural Christian!”
In Chapter 8, I showed how we successfully made religious and spiritual organizations central by focusing on what they share in common—the Universal Virtues as part of a LIVING COMMUNITY PRACTICE, NOT on any particular religious beliefs.
Celebrating and embodying these Virtues in building community networks
UNITES and does not DIVIDE.
We have another living example of successfully using religion as a foundation for societal transformation. Sri Lanka’s Sarvodaya movement has been doing this for the past sixty-five years – seamlessly integrating the INNER and the OUTER areas of life.
In fact, beloved Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy wrote one of the first popular Western books about Sarvodaya, “Dharma and Development: Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement.”
Sarvodaya’s approach is not just spiritual but eminently practical. Their interpretation of the Ancient Blueprint—their spiritual foundation, which they call “personality awakening”—comes from practicing the Four Sublime Abodes (Compassion, Loving Kindness, Equanimity, and Empathetic Joy in Others) while building ecosystem networks.
Notice that Sarvodaya has no separation between spirituality and daily life, and I think that has something to do with a unifying religious sensibility—in this case, Buddhism—at the center of communal life. In the West, even when the spiritual impulse is present, it gets “watered down” because we are faced with many choices in the “spiritual supermarket.”
Because of that, religious and wisdom traditions thousands of years ago are on the same “buffet” as something hatched 15 minutes ago.
Watered-down versions of religion/spirituality are an “inversion” of the shared understanding of the religious and spiritual life—an ongoing lineage of 3,000 years of Western, Eastern, and Indigenous religious and spiritual traditions.
For example, many of the network leaders I’ve spoken with over the last few years while finishing this book – who haven’t had a way to address universal spiritual Virtues – imagine that building the networks and “doing good work” will allow the Virtues to emerge organically.
It's an “outside” first, then “inside” view.
In that line of thought, it becomes—if only we can build the “circular economy” or if only we promote the idea of regenerative culture; if only we encourage the “Commons,” or if only we get people to realize that they should cooperate and coordinate with each other.
That change theory says — do the outside work, and then virtuous behavior will
inevitably follow.
My experience AND thousands of years of universal religious understanding
tell me this isn’t true.
We have only to look at how utopian materialistic ideologies like Marxism have devolved into tyranny in Russia and China, for example. And then, in contrast, the remarkable success of Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka.
That Transcendent sense of unity and purpose is the foundation for this kind of work,
not simply an outcome. This inverts Maslow’s linear growth hierarchy.
Spirituality and community building around basic needs are one whole piece,
part of the same seamless dynamic.
It's not either / or—either spirituality OR practical action—but both / and. Spiritual development doesn’t happen in a vacuum but through a network that connects, proliferates, and amplifies the good. Sarvodaya’s success in this regard is proven by having built a national network of 5,000 micro-bioregional community-based ecosystem networks—a “superhighway for channeling Love” throughout society.
So, if we are intent on re-infusing the Transcendent into the public sphere, we already have two success models—and they are both based on translating the HEART of religion and spirituality as the practice of the Virtues in real-world communities.
Sarvodaya has shown us the way to follow.
To make this shift, we must address that “million-pound elephant” I referred to at the beginning of this section. Because the Culture of Separation and materialism are so all-pervasive and IMMERSIVE, we’ve been collectively unable to see the most profound paradox of all.
The most incredible resource we humans have – the unbounded power of Transcendent Love – has been relegated to an irrelevant side conversation!
Thousands of years of wisdom traditions – East, West, and Indigenous – have been set aside in favor of the primacy of the human mind and the new Lord and Savior - technological, organizational, and technical fixes.
But, every religious and wisdom tradition affirms a reality more profound than what mankind can make — a Highest Power, a Highest Goodness is the ESSENTIAL prime Power, not an after-effect.
As I’ve said earlier, religion comes from “religare” to bind.
Even as religions often devolve into dominator systems that have caused tremendous suffering, their essential purpose is to “bind” to reconnect us with the web of life and the web of love. In fact, devoid of the quality of Spirit, ALL human-made systems, religious or secular, devolve into separation, domination, and suffering.
Here’s another “frequently UNASKED question”:
Why would we consider it intelligent to throw out humanity's religious and spiritual traditions and beautiful treasury of understanding of the universal Virtues at a
the time when we need them the most?
That leads us to the last two sections of this chapter, which describe the Breakthrough for a New Creation and how Symbiotic Societies can help us in a dual recovery process—recovering FROM the Culture of Separation by recovering our connection to the Ancient Blueprint.
Find out what’s next in Chapter 10, Part 6, Breakthrough to a New Creation … New Wine in New WineSkin Networks.
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