The Luminous Web: Chapter 1 Part 1

Luminous Encounter and Growing up in a Culture of Separation

Welcome to the Symbiotic Age Book!

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

You are now in Chapter 1, Part 1, Luminous Encounter and Growing up in a Culture of Separation. Here are all the posts from Chapter 1:

• Chapter 1, Part 1 — Luminous Encounter and Growing up in a Culture of Separation

• Chapter 1, Part 2 — The Luminous Web, Cosmic Love, and the Logos

• Chapter 1, Part 3 — Activating the “Authentic Self” – and Metanoia

• Chapter 1, Part 4 — Aligning Society to an Ancient Blueprint

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

---

Preamble:

The story you are about to read is the launch point of a fifty-year journey - shared publicly for the first time.  

I feel vulnerable and excited – as I have absolutely no idea how you will receive this! 

I have reached a point of radical acceptance and surrender where it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks!  

These trying times impel me to share the sometimes raw personal experiences and the universal principles I have learned -- as they inform my life, calling, and mission -- and what this book is about.

Wanting to change society is often based on a desire to set things right and repair the world. 

My life experience tells me, though, that there has been a missing piece – a missing foundation that is crucial for success, particularly in the present age. 

It is something that is either denied or ignored by the current, dominant post-modern, materialistic worldview – even among many wanting to “change the world.”

I call it an Ancient Blueprint, a universal pattern many may be aware of, but I have deeply experienced it from the inside out.

That’s the reason why I begin with a personal story that some might consider religious or even woo-woo.  Yet I assure you I am not peddling any religion or new spiritual ideas.  Actually, the Blueprint that underlies Symbiotic Culture is “as old as the hills.”

I’m simply acknowledging that a Transcendent Ground of Being is the key ingredient, the inner Heart and foundation for the world we seek to live in.

Before we get to any nuts and bolts, such as building community networks …I believe we must see and recognize this Blueprint —

The intrinsic reality that we are also deeply
inter-connected within a web of life and a web of love.

Chapter 1: The Luminous Web: the Genesis of Symbiotic Culture. Part 1

Introduction:

Until I was twelve years old, I enjoyed what could be called a typical American childhood. Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in the 1960s and early ‘70s, I had a father who worked too much and a mother who was ambivalent about being “only a mother” and not using her advanced degree as a professional.

We lived in Alexandria, Virginia, where I did typical boy things like playing soldier in the forested Coast Guard land near my home, building tree forts, ice skating along the frozen narrow streams, and going with my dad to rock quarries looking for minerals and gemstones.

But then, at the age of twelve, something happened that would change my life and my life course forever.

I contacted a deeper reality than what we normally see on life’s surface.

It was a non-ordinary, ineffable encounter I was not prepared for, where I directly experienced what I now recognize as Ultimate Reality — in this book, I refer to it as the Transcendent or Transcendent Ground of Being.

It felt more Real than “reality,” and it was as if I broke through to the true foundation underneath or above what we think of as “normal” life. I was left awestruck and feeling connected to something larger than myself — in fact, connected to everything.

One night, I was in bed, getting ready to sleep. I was resting in the liminal space between waking and sleep, where images sometimes stream from a deeper part of ourselves and come into awareness as we drift off into sleep. This night was anything but normal.

Suddenly, I felt a deep vibration — like electricity on the lower part of my back. The vibration spread upward toward my chest and finally into my head. My whole body was now vibrating — every part felt alive.

With my eyes closed, I was illuminated and enveloped in a bright white and then golden light. Soon, purple and golden lights started flashing as if I was watching thousands of spectators at a stadium, all simultaneously taking pictures with flash bulbs.

I heard a sound, then individual notes that became a crescendo, like a symphony orchestra. The intensity of the sound became overwhelming in my head, like the loud roar of a thunderous cascade of water, as if I were mere steps away from Niagara Falls.

Then I entered and exited a tunnel filled with radiant light, seeing a thousand stars exploding simultaneously. I was awestruck!

My entire being was activated and energized during this fully immersive experience.

As I write this, I can remember the radiant light, both cool and then filled with warmth—feeling the raw power as if the Sun itself was before me, received as a blessing, as Love itself.

The joy was overwhelming and brought me to tears.

Suddenly, things shifted again into the most profound part of the experience. At some point, I plunged into darkness, like falling into an unknown land, a void no words could describe. I was no longer observing or even “experiencing”—yet, somehow, there was a knowing.

It’s hard to describe a pure knowing beyond all constructs — no sound, light, color, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, or concepts.

Words escape me. I can only say that the “uncreated luminosity” of the unformed self was hidden within. A creative seed within matter, invisible yet the source of this world — an illuminated “darkness.” Tears roll down my face at the peace, the harmony, the great silence. 

At some point, my sense of ego identity returned, but then I felt as if I was dying — like I was losing awareness. It became too much. I could finally pull myself out of this state, and after a short while, I could fall into a regular sleep.

     This luminous experience didn’t happen only once. It happened
several times a week for years.

I told no one—not my parents, family, friends, or school teachers. No one around me was aware that this was going on. Some deep knowing told me to keep these experiences to myself, not out of embarrassment or shame, but because somehow it was necessary to let this “work through me” over time.

Despite the combination of joy but also incredible fear, unfamiliarity, and unknowing in my mind, I started to sense a peaceful trust that things were as they should be. Years later, it grew into an experience of great surrender, perhaps the first time I began to have a visceral understanding of Trust.

Now, in my mid-teens, I knew what I experienced was more Real than real — an absolute knowing that there was an unseen foundation both “under and above” the physical ground.

I knew I could count on it, through thick and thin, through the vicissitudes of life — I felt pure presence.

I sensed a benevolent power guiding and protecting me, that there was an underlying order to the world, and that I was here on Earth for some greater purpose.

Later, as a young adult, I was told I probably had a “Road to Damascus” experience—like when Saul of Tarsus (Paul) was “struck by enlightening” by what Christians would call “Divine Grace” or Spirit. Someone else told me it sounded like a “Kundalini awakening” from an Eastern perspective. In either case, it was an experience often associated with deep religious practice or spiritual awakening. 

I was neither religious nor a meditator.  The experience seemed to come out of nowhere for no reason. Having my experience acknowledged and named by various spiritual traditions gave me the impression that this was a universal experience transcending time, culture, and religion.

Not that it was a common experience, just that it commonly happened across many religions, paths, and cultures over the last 3,000 years.

As I would later discover, there seems to be what I now call an Ancient Blueprint, an underlying pattern, an order, like a universal operating system, shaping these spiritual experiences, something every culture and religion, East, West, and Indigenous,
has acknowledged.

Even Christian apologist C.S. Lewis eighty years ago, while venturing outside Christian theology, described an underlying, Absolute, objectively transcendent, ordering principle — what some Eastern traditions call “The Tao.” Lewis went so far as to call The Tao “the moral grain of the universe.”

He wrote:
“The Chinese speak of … the greatest thing called The Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates … the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.

It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and super cosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.… This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike.”

As a 12-year-old, I had no idea about any of this. There was no one — parents, siblings, clergyperson, sympathetic adult — I could talk to about it. In hindsight, I realize it was better I didn’t tell anyone — I’m sure I would have been poked and probed and eventually put on medication with the thought that I had a mental illness I needed to be cured of.

It turned out not to be a mental disorder at all but an opening to an expansive connection to a vast cosmos and its deeper foundation, referred to by many as a Transcendent Ground of Being, what was called Wisdom in the Old Testament, what the Greeks and Christians called the Logos.

To me, it seemed like the very architecture of Reality.

But the experience felt more like a “Luminous Web,” whose luminosity has lighted my path ever since. I came away from this experience knowing there is a deeper, more “real” Reality than the reality of separation we experience in everyday life.

Growing Up in a Culture of Separation – Stranger in a Strange Land

In retrospect, I recognize that until that luminous experience, I—like just about every middle-class American kid I knew—was being shaped by an “invisible” field of a Culture of Separation and materialism, something so utterly immersive that it felt like the only “reality” there was.

Being shown a larger luminous view of existence “broke the trance” the culture had on me.

I now had an ongoing, tangible connection to a deeper, Transcendent ordering principle to guide me with a radically different worldview than the rest of “the world.”

Paradoxically, while I felt connected to all that is, I felt profoundly different from everyone else.

Although the phrase “Culture of Separation” didn’t come to me until much later, it was clearly what I was experiencing. Having connected to a Transcendent Ground of Being, a part of and a participant in a larger, interconnected universe of motion — I felt a disconnect from the materialistic human world as it was.

It felt like society was trying to shape me to believe what is perhaps its number one Big Lie—that everything we see (including our fellow human beings) is simply individual, competing, separate “things” — a “me vs. you” reality. 

That “only matter matters” because only the material world is “real.” 

You could say that the experience of the Transcendent was indeed “trance-ending” — ending the trance of separation.

As far as I could tell, most of my peers went along with this “consensus reality,” but because of my unique experience, I felt like an alien, a “stranger in a strange land.”

Through my later reading and deeper research, I understood that the missing piece in our modern civilization is this commonly shared sense of a Transcendent Power and a Ground of Being — with a deeper moral understanding at the foundation of our society.

When postmodernism deconstructed the grand narratives of religion AND science — they “threw the Baby Jesus out with the bathwater” AND discarded any notion that there was an underlying objective reality as well.

This has left society without any unifying, foundational Transcendent principle other than materialism and consumerism — the new “God” we are programmed to worship on the altar of global consumerism.

Today, we can see this sense of separateness reinforced by mainstream culture and intensified by social media algorithms, which fragment us into our own customized or personalized realities.

I used to think the division of society into tribes and silos was a symptom of the Culture of Separation. I now realize it is a “feature.” 

While this me vs. you reality seems to have been operative throughout recorded history, “exponential” technology like AI appears to have made it more intractable today.

We are so profoundly and invisibly entrained into a me vs. you reality — a Culture of Separation and disconnection as we default to our tribes/silos — that we fail to recognize the intrinsic reality that we are also profoundly inter-connected within a web of life and a web of love.

In the wake of my awakening, I began to view normal life experiences through the underlying, ordering perspective of that exquisite luminosity.

There was a downside to this opening, though — I experienced just as intensely the dissonance between this wonderous, beautiful, luminous Reality that lies above, beyond, beneath, and felt within me and the reality of a broken and conflicted human world, i.e., the Culture of Separation.

The dissonance I now felt drew me into my suffering and the suffering of the whole world—
it broke my heart.

I noticed a heightened empathy and compassion for others — not just for people close to me, but even those on the other side of the world. I’m sure children usually feel this way occasionally, but for me, the connection to others felt very intense and ever-present.

Sometime after my luminous experiences, I was with my entire family at a Passover Seder. Suddenly, I felt a deep compassion for the hungry around the world. I burst into tears, making quite a scene. At that point, my very pragmatic father said, “Well, Richard, when you wake up each day, what will you do about it?”

Little did he know he was unwittingly reinforcing my already established marching orders to discover the Truth about human reality, which led to daily constant prayer and meditation on this question.

With this question in my heart and mind, I became inquisitive about the world. I wanted to learn everything I could, as if I were an alien from some other planet, visiting Earth for the first time, like in the movie Starman. I started to notice I could see beneath the superficial surface appearances of the things around me.

I began to see connections between things and ideas I hadn’t seen before. I felt pushed to see deeper and deeper connections.

That’s when I first became aware that this Luminous Web is the very architecture of reality, an “ordered reality,” buried below and above the surface and hidden to everyone — and also invisibly connecting everything.

NEXT POST: Diving deeper into the primal architecture of Reality.
Chapter 1, Part 2 — The Luminous Web, Cosmic Love, and the Logos

PREVIOUS POST

NEXT POST

TABLE OF CONTENTS