The Heart-Centered Way of Symbiotic Culture, Chapter 12, Part 1
From Siloed Systems to Sacred Networks
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up!
You are in Chapter 12, Part 1, The Heart-Centered Path to Symbiotic Culture: from siloed systems to sacred networks — The Story Behind the Story
Chapter 12 posts:
Living in Truth: Building a Parallel Polis Within a Spiritually Hostile Regime
The Ancient Blueprint – A Missing Piece Hiding in Plain Sight
I Write the Book, the Book Writes Me
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 time to sit and read! You can also find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on Spotify and Apple!
Previously from Chapter 11, Part 5
The good news is that the software architecture is in place to launch OneSphera as a Cosmo-local digital platform to “weave a web of mass construction” locally and spread and scale globally.
It can happen because of our unshakeable commitment to using the Symbiotic Culture DNA to bring about “fractal community empowerment.” There is also a “ripening” of our collective understanding that the Culture of Separation cannot get us through the confluence of crises we now face, as the Culture of Connection is moving closer to being “an idea whose time has come.”
Imagine OneSphera (or something like it) as a worldwide “public utility” — a gift to humanity and a living legacy – a new Internet layer.
Imagine …a thriving decentralized economy built on mutual aid and a more democratic political order as a “collateral benefit” of this local re-empowerment. Imagine the right use of technology as a bottom-up tool instead of a top-down imposition, where digital sovereignty and selfless service prevail, and the good gets multiplied for all.
Call it conscious evolution. Call it heaven on earth.
It was done through Sarvodaya, and we did it in Reno. We now have the spiritual, social, and technical infrastructure to do it worldwide.
So let’s do it!
The Story Behind the Story
A funny thing happened on the way to finishing this book -- the book you have been reading is not the one I started to write!
That’s because what I learned while finishing it fundamentally altered the
book’s foundation and focus.
Based on the feedback I’ve gotten from readers of the serialized version and conversations that broadened my perspective, I believe this uplifted reworking of the book will have a more significant impact than one that simply tells my story and offers a step-by-step how-to.
The author Henri Nouwen said this about writing: "The deeper we enter into the heart of reality, the more we discover that it is not something we can simply explain but something we must express." Writing is an expression that leads to greater understanding, revealing hidden perceptions and connections.
When I set out on this four-year writing adventure, I intended to tell the story of being inspired to “heal the brokenness of the world” and how I applied my knowledge and experience – based on the successful model of Sarvodaya – in gang-infested neighborhoods in San Diego, and middle America Reno, Nevada.
I would then share what I learned in a step-by-step guide so you, the reader, could follow in my footsteps. I even considered putting a training guide as a third section of the book.
All that has changed. When you read this chapter, I hope you will understand why.
As I suggested, the writing process changed me from the inside out. I am so grateful that I followed my intuition and inspiration to release the book, chapter by chapter, in serialized form. That enabled me to do two things.
First, I got immediate feedback from my audience, many of whom are already working “on the ground” to build networks and communities.
Instead of asking network leaders to help me with my work, I asked them how Symbiotic Culture DNA and Symbiotic Networks could help with theirs.
Their needs, questions, and insights are now part of the book.
Secondly, I had a chance to reflect more deeply on my writing and add depth and nuance. I came to recognize the true impact of the Ancient Blueprint and the universal spiritual lineage it represents. As I delved even more deeply into religious tradition, my connection to Jesus Christ was strengthened—recovering terms like “metanoia” and “Logos” – I saw what had been lost by “de-platforming God” and “throwing the Baby Jesus out with the bathwater.”
The original book emphasized building new systems and structures: Symbiotic Communities and Networks.
The book you are now reading is about nurturing the essential spiritual foundation that will allow these networks to thrive, spread, and scale.
Through this dialogue process, I discovered the “secret sauce”—the “formula” that made Sarvodaya successful—the RE—platforming of God as a Transcendent power integrated seamlessly into daily community life.
I am reminded of something that happened to my thirty-year-old son Isaac a few years ago. He was running my medical consulting business and hit a point where he felt burned out by the work, so he took a break to travel. After nearly a month in Australia, he spent his last week living in a small village in Bali. Playing “tourist,” he spent a day at a Hindu temple in that village. He expected a “touristy” experience, but instead, it left him with a profound, life-changing view of “village life.”
He told me he had never experienced a functional community where everything is connected!
He noticed that faith in God was at the center of village life, and that foundation led the people to serve their families, their village community, and the land.
Hearing this story reminded me of what has been lost by deplatforming God and letting those living waters go down the drain. Today, young people and everyone else are growing up in a postmodern wasteland, disconnected from God, themselves, their family, neighbors, their community, and the Earth. I could see why Isaac had never had an experience of “spirituality made manifest,” and it impressed upon him what our society could aspire to.
And …he had no idea how to bring that about.
In a culture where “only matter matters,” it’s understandable that many young people who want to “live long and prosper” would see environmental destruction and climate change as THE existential issues and urgently seek material solutions. And some of my readers wrote to say that they are already following a spiritual path and were impatient for me to share the “how-to” for implementing it!
That gave me pause, so I decided to try a thought experiment with some of my readers, and here is the question I have been asking:
Is it easier to teach someone primarily interested in building external structures and systems to come from their Heart, or is it easier for someone already coming from the Heart to learn how to make these Symbiotic systems?
So far, it’s been unanimous.
Everyone I spoke with agrees that teaching this approach to someone already coming from the Heart with some grounding in the Transcendent is easier. That’s because they realize you can’t put new wine (Divine Love) into old wineskins (frameworks).
Unless we establish a firm foundation in the Ancient Blueprint and Divine Love, all material efforts will fall prey to the Culture of Separation.
The Transcendent is primary – all structures and systems are derivative.
That’s why “the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart. "
As I’ve seen, those already in the Heart are more prepared to build a Symbiotic Culture than those with a brilliant structure (from the mind) they want to impose. Heart-centered “weavers” are likelier to intuit a way forward and collaborate with reality than those who wish to mold reality to fit their concept. The latter is an “anti-life” approach; life is fluid and unpredictable, like those flowing waters.
That’s why this book isn’t a static “thing” but a living process.
This distinction was borne out in an enlightening conversation with a reader who reminded me that the book's title was “Birthing the Symbiotic Age,” not “Building the Symbiotic Age.” In other words, it is a way of life, not a methodology. Regardless of how elegant the structure or how good it looks on paper, without the Heart at the center, it will be stillborn.
This book aims to “give life” to Symbiotic Culture and spread its DNA widely through every neighborhood, community, and organization (at any scale) so that each will develop the systems and structures that work in its particular on-the-ground reality.
Before I resume the story of my own personal “re-villaging” process, I want to reiterate another realization I uncovered as the writing unfolded: something hidden in plain sight, obscured by the Culture of Separation.
Billions of individuals are already practicing mutual benefit, and millions of organizations worldwide are doing their best to “Connect the Good.” These have been operating as “single-cell organisms” and can only now become a “super-organism” that can turn upside down the economic and political power pyramid.
Without realizing it, these individuals and communities have been practicing “re-villaging,” instinctively seeing that ordinary people “on the ground” are the foundation of a “from-the-ground-up” movement that will firmly establish a parallel Culture of Connection that can bring forth a worldwide network of village economies.
Our task is to interconnect the emerging “islands of coherence” and weave these
into a whole-cloth movement.
This chapter will describe my journey over the past seven years and discuss how we can apply and practice Symbiotic Culture in our lives, communities, groups, and networks.
Stay tuned to find out Chapter 12, Post 2 … Re-Villaging Begins at Home
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i look forward/forword to reading the book richard!
Teaching people how to come from the heart is very much the purpose of my book, Grow Your Own Guru, which I am also cocreating on Substack ❤️