Symbiotic Age Book Introduction Part 2

Book Introduction Part 2

Welcome to the Symbiotic Age Book!

If you are new, please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS HERE and catch up on your reading!

You are now in Introduction Part 2. Here are all the posts from the Introduction:

• Read Book Introduction Part 1

• Read Book Introduction Part 2

• Read Book Introduction Part 3

Trying to figure out Where This is All Going? Read an overview of the Symbiotic Culture Strategy.

Previously, at the end of the Introduction, Part 1:
“The power for change has been hiding in plain sight.”

An Ancient Blueprint Bringing Heaven to Earth

The work that Dr. Ariyaratne did to integrate spiritual development with community empowerment in Sri Lanka, and the work I did creating networks to “connect the good” in San Diego and Reno, I realized is based on just such a Transcendent power, an “Ancient Blueprint,” which in my view, is articulated most clearly by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount.

Now, while I am not formally religious, I do consider myself a Jesus-Follower, as his teaching about bringing the Transcendent into the world (“Love God with all your heart and soul and mind and love thy neighbor as thyself”) through a loving, “counter-cultural” (more on this later) community resonated with my heart.

Here’s something I didn’t know, and maybe you didn’t know either. Reading the Sermon on the Mount, in part, is what sparked Mahatma Gandhi to do HIS life work. Freeing India from the British Empire and building self-reliant village economies was inspired by what he called Jesus’ “eternal Law of Love.”

And since Dr. Ari was inspired by Gandhi, and I’ve been inspired by Jesus, Gandhi, and Dr. Ari, I recognize that there is a lineage revealing an age-old pattern and roadmap that we can follow to bring forth what Jesus called “the Kingdom of Heaven” to Earth.

That said, luminous, authentic, spiritual (transcendent) experiences are not necessarily associated with any specific religion or spiritual path and are universal across all cultures, religions, and economic classes. While the experience may not be common, it is commonly experienced by humans everywhere.

I believe the most precise, most tangible articulation of the Transcendent and the Ancient Blueprint came from the 6 – 7th-century Eastern Orthodox monk, St. Maximus the Confessor — what he called “Cosmic Love,” seen as both the creative and sustaining principle above and below “Reality.”

His was a vision of an immersive Love, the actual Power underlying Reality, that we could experience directly as a “joyful cosmology.” He calls on humanity to unite all that is fragmented by actively participating in creation, “bringing the cosmos together in love.”

Many of you, like me, may resonate with that as a personal mission statement — a guiding worldview.

Given the fragmentation within our modern Secular Age into multiple belief systems and worldviews, not to mention the intractable skepticism, and even rampant nihilism in today’s global society — maybe humanity weary of fratricidal conflict could get behind such a shared vision and common ground.

This book will show how the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka and symbiotic networks in the West reflect what I call a Culture of Connection based on self-giving love rather than the existing Culture of Separation based on self-serving love.

If Sarvodaya is a living example of a Culture of Connection, why haven’t we been able to do it globally? Addressing that question is the point of this book. But let’s first have a sober assessment of the challenges.

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“We’ve met the enemy … and he is us.”

There’s no way to sugar-coat the self-evident reason our human aspirations have fallen short. All we need to do is acknowledge the hundred million human beings who died in the 20th century due to humanity’s “autoimmune disorders” — authoritarian governments and warfare.

This impulse to dominate, exploit, and extract has existed since recorded history. The boom-and-bust cycle of civilizations (described by historians Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler) — with rising and falling empires, domination hierarchies, and fragmentation based on power and control — is like a cultural mutation that served its purpose but has now become a global power trip and trap!

This dominate-or-be-dominated mentality has been held in place by the classic control tactic, “divide and rule.” Why is this important to bring up?

If we are to unify society, we’ve got to move past both idealism and despair and get real. That means acknowledging our participation in the Culture of Separation, recognizing our tendencies to “dominate or be dominated” — seeing our own shadow and where we are personally susceptible to this darkness, especially when our tribes reinforce this.

As Dr. Ari, a Buddhist, has said, “The mind is responsible for virtue AND evil” — whether we’re talking about the collective OR individual mind.

In my journey, I’ve had to face my shadow regularly, which is part of my story — part of our human story.

If you want to unify a community, you must be conscious enough of your own “shadow” and be willing to be transformed — so that you don’t try to dominate others. Today’s primary danger is the moral righteousness of movements, left or right, trying to capture political power to force others to do what they think is best.

“Symbiotic Culture isn’t about capturing power;
It’s about radically transforming the nature of power itself
from domination to loving service.”

Dealing with our shadow means illuminating the ultimate source of societal fragmentation of the modern inter-tribal and culture wars — and our role in it. The conflict lies within each of our hearts — dealing with our mixed motivations, desires, pride, shame, hurt, trauma, unforgiveness, and judgments.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the Gulag Archipelago, stated:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between
classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”

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We’ve Thrown the Baby Jesus Out with the Bathwater

There’s another reason this Ancient Blueprint has yet to get traction in our civilization.

As you will read later, the 400-year-old “great divorce” — where religion got custody of the “sacred” and science custody of the “secular” — has accelerated the Culture of Separation with consumerism as the new “God” of what has been called a new “Secular Age.”

Now, unhindered by any moral restraint or ancient wisdom, the secular faith in the human mind has deified both technology and human beings, even to the point of denying the existence of any non-physical Transcendent Ground of Being.

Even though more than 90% of humanity believes in some form of non-material existence.

Because all of this has been heralded as “progress” by the mainstream narrative, most of us fail to recognize that exponential technological advances, addiction to consumerism and social media, genetic engineering, and AI present global existential threats.

It’s true technology and capitalism have lifted humanity — increased life span, decreased global poverty, hunger, and disease, and expanded well-being, education, and opportunity. This has come at a heavy price, though, and today, rapidly progressing technology is outpacing our capacity to control it.

Some 75 years ago, General Omar Bradley, former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said something that is even more pertinent today:

“We have too many men of science and too few men of God.
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon of the Mount…
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom and power without conscience.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”

Because there is no commonly agreed-upon sense of the sacred, we have devolved back into our tribal identities and culture wars — we’re now stuck on the battlefield fighting for power and dominance for our narrow beliefs and worldviews. Without a higher principle to strive for, society will continue on the path to mutually assured destruction.

As Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who inspired the Solidarity Movement and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, once put pithily:

“When culture loses its sacred sense, it loses all sense.”

Does this situation sound familiar?  One observation might shed some light on how far civilization has devolved.

When I began doing my community work, I was shocked that there was no space for the Transcendent or anything sacred within the Culture of Separation! The Transcendent has been pushed out of the public sphere — conveniently dismissed as ignorant superstition, obsolete, or divisive. Even in public schools, by omission, we are taught that it doesn’t exist.

Also, our Secular Age doesn’t seem to nurture higher moral standards — let alone universally agreed-upon virtues — that would guide our behaviors as we do business, especially in economics, politics, religion, education, and media. There is no longer a universal standard for how we conduct ourselves!

How can that be possible, given that the Transcendent ideal was once universally accepted within East, and West, and still is in many Indigenous cultures?

Consider that around three thousand years ago, during what historians call the First Axial Age, a universal, Transcendent perspective arose in many regions of the world. Whether it’s the Old Testament prophets of Israel, The Tao from China, India’s Dharmakaya, or the Logos of the Greeks and early Christians, there was a shift towards a shared understanding of the universe and the “sacred.”

This collective ancient wisdom emerged simultaneously worldwide, guiding various cultures with a shared purpose beyond their tribes, propelling human civilization forward with a transcendent drive.

Why is this important?

We moderns and post-moderns have effectively “thrown the baby Jesus out with the bathwater”! Over the last several centuries, in the effort to deconstruct all structures and authority —religious, political, social, and even scientific authority — we’ve discarded the Transcendent. We have evacuated it from our civic culture, and hardly anyone recognizes it’s missing.

And today, without any Objective Reality of the Transcendent or a clear roadmap of the Ancient Blueprint, without a grounding in universal virtues, society cannot survive.

That’s one reason I am writing this book. I want to add my voice, sound an alarm, to “bring balance back to the force” — hopefully to foster a public dialogue on basic sanity and to introduce a new way to live through intentional mutual benefit.

I want to do my part to shepherd in a Symbiotic Age. We all have a role to play.

Consider the “battlefield” polarities that commonly divide and divert us: science vs. religion; thinking vs. feeling; spiritual vs. religious; left-wing vs. right-wing; linear and measurable vs. the intangible and intuitive; left brain vs. right brain; individual vs. the collective; my tribe vs. your tribe.

One purpose of this book — as we build a Culture of Connection — is to inspire our individual and collective capability to go beyond either-or and hold the space for both-and.

While there may be those who prefer the current political divide of the culture wars, those of you looking for a way off the battlefield and onto a new playing field, this book will share concrete strategies to do just that.

To help accelerate the emerging Symbiotic Age, I will share how the ever-present Ancient Blueprint offers a sacred, sane, and sensible center that can help us re-embed the Transcendent back into ourselves and society — while honoring the modern ideas of rational scientific inquiry and individual dignity and human freedom.

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Coming next week, in the Introduction, Part 3:
Transcendent Virtues and the Culture of Connection
Birth of a Symbiotic Age: A Global Commonwealth of Regional Economies

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