The Luminous Web: Chapter 1 Part 4

Aligning Society to an Ancient Blueprint.

Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!

NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up! You are in Chapter 1, Part 4, The Luminous Web: Aligning Society to an Ancient Blueprint.

Here are all Chapter 1 posts:

• 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 — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.

Previously, at the end of Chapter 1, Part 3:

“Could our entire species now be undergoing a kind of Mass Metanoia where we are actually maturing from adolescence to adulthood that can help turn our upside-down global Culture of Separation right-side up?

Could it be that we live in a time where we are not only “children of God”
but becoming full-fledged adults of Good?

For this practical spiritual awakening to be realized, we must first become aware of and then align with the Ancient Blueprint, the “ordering principle” that has been hidden in plain sight.”

Chapter 1: The Luminous Web - Part 4
Aligning Society to an Ancient Blueprint

Fortunately, there is an antidote to the Culture of Separation that offers a framework — an ancient ordering principle to build a new Culture of Connection.

I could sense this during my transcendent experiences, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount years later that I recognized the power of what I now call an Ancient Blueprint.

While this message came to Western culture through Jesus, it isn’t based on or dependent on any religion, spiritual following, philosophy, science, or institution.

There is an Ancient Blueprint that inspires the universal impulse for a
Culture of Connection deep within us.

As I indicated in the introduction, while not a Christian — I grew up in a secular Jewish household — I have taken the core message of Jesus to heart.

His primary teaching combines two Old Testament prescriptions: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Those two commandments, practiced together, integrate and interweave the vertical and the horizontal. “Love God” is vertical and transcendent. “Love thy neighbor” is horizontal and immanent.

Love God and Love Others. This all-pervasive prescription goes right to the heart of the Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation — and the key to unlocking the power to transform our entire global Culture of Separation — starting with each of us and our communities.

This powerful, ancient, yet ever-present idea will be explored in more detail throughout the book, but for now, it's enough to be aware of its existence.

The Ancient Blueprint is not just a metaphor, story, superstition, or wishful thinking. It’s a fundamental description of Reality — I experience it as a Power above AND underneath the four physical forces of modern science, such as gravity or electromagnetism.

The Ancient Blueprint offers humanity a way out — through a radically transformed way of life and a radically different view of the nature of power — by embodying and living in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Beloved Community.

The Culture of Connection, Sarvodaya, and the symbiotic networks I describe in this book reflect how the patterning of the Ancient Blueprint of Cosmic Love can be directly translated into weaving local community networks.

And we can live this way in this present moment — and not wait for society or anyone else to change.

Later, you’ll learn that the Transcendent is expressed and embodied within us through universally agreed-upon virtues such as love, generosity, sharing, respect, kindness, compassion, self-control, trust, and charity — among many others.

These virtues help to shape and unify our character, enabling us to be of greater service to others in a natural and seamless manner, thereby unleashing a significant power that positively affects those around us - and the community.

Virtues, practiced together, are lived within us and in the community.

By regularly practicing these virtues, we gradually move beyond the tendency to experience conflicting thoughts and desires.

Over time, you'll discover a singular, unified,
harmonious voice emerging at the center of your being.

By focusing on serving our communities, we naturally extend this Goodness to the organizations we are already involved with, such as our family, neighborhood, religious institutions, charitable organizations, businesses, and local government.

Ultimately, we will find the power and agency to weave inter-organizational networks and their leaders, Connecting the Good already happening within our local community and, eventually, to the world as a whole.

When we embody the Transcendent, its Power is literally spread through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.

I will show you how to do this in your community and beyond.

If it seems like I am introducing many new terms in this opening chapter — I am!

The idea of an Ancient Blueprint –which I’ve come to appreciate through my own luminous experiences -- has been so obscured by the dominant culture that most people in post-modern society are largely unaware of it.

Each of these terms — like Logos, Ground of Being, Metanoia, the Transcendent, and Cosmic Love — offers a way to make this unfamiliar worldview more familiar.

Perhaps the reason this Ancient Blueprint feels so unfamiliar to us is our immersion in the Culture of Separation and the common, unquestioned beliefs we mistake for reality. 

Turning our upside-down world right side up will entail looking carefully at our accepted “truths” — including the Western linear view of human progress.

Anyone who has come of age in the past century is familiar with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At the bottom of this pyramid are the fundamental needs for survival — food, clothing, shelter, and safety.

Then comes love and family … worthy work … and finally, at the top of the pyramid is the well-earned self-actualization — supposedly the epitome of the so-called Human Potential movement.

That seems perfectly reasonable to the modern/postmodern secular sensibility.

Seen through the perspective of linear progress based totally on the material world, doesn’t it make sense that basic material needs be handled first before individuals have the capacity to access the so-called “higher needs” Maslow identified?

But what if Maslow’s pyramid is upside down?

What if the “actualized self” — the one I found to be a two-way portal to the Transcendent Ground of Being — is a STARTING POINT,
not the ultimate goal of growth?

I was encouraged a while back when I heard an indigenous elder assert the same view — that Maslow got it upside down.

The connection to “all there is” to the Transcendent is a given in many indigenous cultures. Every action radiates from that understanding — how we relate to our families, neighbors, local community, and the living earth that our community inhabits.

We have a lot to learn from First Nations people. Their model of human motivation is based on a community approach to attain overall well-being rather than every person being on their own and for themselves.

In many cultures, including the Blackfeet Nation in North America, self-actualization is closely linked with the actualization of the community, in contrast to Maslow's linear hierarchical framework, which sees the apex of human development as the realization of a distinct, separate self.

This book will highlight the sixty-five-year-old Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, a world-renowned Buddhist-inspired initiative — as they embody and integrate the Ancient Blueprint into everyday life, echoing and confirming the perspectives of First Nations.

Sri Lanka – a “developing country” the West would perceive as materially bereft, with
many Sri Lankans at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy -- actually have immediate
access to the self-actualization that Westerners seek but too rarely find!

Sarvodaya community building STARTS with what Dr. Ariyaratne calls “personality awakening” — practicing the highest virtues of compassion, sharing, and love.

These Transcendent virtues are the foundation for building a community that satisfies a local community’s needs TOGETHER — a spiritual movement.

In contrast, Maslow’s approach and the Western human potential and social movements are designed to “fit in” to a Culture of Separation — because there is no acknowledgment, let alone awareness, of the foundational nature of the Transcendent.

So many well-intentioned organizations seek to deal with bottom-line issues like “feed the hungry” — but all too rarely address the spiritual hunger and the crisis of meaning at the root of the Culture of Separation and many of society’s problems.

Sarvodaya and Symbiotic Culture recognize the challenge beyond feeding the hungry — transforming society from self-serving to self-giving love.

Spirituality itself, within Western civilization, needs a major “reboot” —
not just for our survival but so that we can thrive and flourish.

Sarvodaya has already achieved this reboot — and points the way to something truly novel and transformational, seamlessly connecting the inner with the outer — the person AND community. 

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, as these principles and understanding will guide us directly toward a Symbiotic Culture that raises all boats at the same time. 

If we want to safely navigate humanity’s rite of passage, perhaps
turning Maslow’s pyramid on its head will help us turn the
current global pyramid of economic and political power on its head as well.

When we get things in proper order, actualization is not the endpoint but the beginning point of genuine “symbiotic” service to the world.

That begins with our own “inversion” — or is it conversion? — where we turn our minds from conforming to the Culture of Separation, breaking through the veil of human-made illusion, and connecting instead to our authentic selves, the portal to this universal Transcendent Ground of Being.

Then, by returning to the world with Transcendent virtues that “re-inhabit” us with a new mind and heart, we gain greater capacity and strength to unite the community wherever we live to create a new society based on these universal principles and virtues.

As you may remember, Sarvodaya has a slogan that reflects this:

That’s why I am writing this book — to support those seeking a fundamental societal and cultural breakthrough — who recognize that age-old wisdom AND practical methods of whole system change are necessary.

Again, I am offering these insights in retrospect. It took me years — five decades — to integrate the awareness that came through me so unexpectedly.

I turned to poetry during my twenties and early thirties to express what could not be conveyed in ordinary language.

In my early twenties, I wrote a poem expressing humanity’s universal unity, a pattern from the Ancient Blueprint, which would become a beacon for me over the next fifty years. I am sharing only a part of it here.

WHO AM l?

Who am I bound to the group, clan, or tribe to which I belong?

I am American, Chinese, Russian — underneath, there is no country
I am black, brown, white — underneath, there is no color
I am Liberal and Conservative — underneath, there is no party politics.
I am Jewish, Christian, Buddhist — underneath, we honor the Transcendent. 

We each have our own universe of things important to us, and yet,
I need you, and you need me, we strive for similar goals.
We are brothers and sisters of Earth.

We are all different and yet the same, all part of a larger system,
a small planet called Earth, the mother who gives us life,
still part of an even Greater Mystery.

It is a wonderful paradox, autonomy and dependence the necessary unity, with all the participants free from impunity.

The human world appears to be made up of many differentiated forms and tribes, and we identify with them, forgetting that underneath, we come from One Source; we are really One Humanity and One Family.

Are you ready to build a world that nurtures this diversity yet still unites people through the heart fellowship of Love and Service?

Yes, you may feel this universal dream and soul longing, calling us into a deeper relationship with the Creator of all — and this sweet harmony, ringing throughout creation, the mirror calling us into a relationship with each other.

WHO AM l? I AM YOU.

The next step in applying this universal understanding to the human condition is about seeing and interacting with another web that reflects the Luminous Web — the Web of Nature.

NEXT POST: Stay Tuned!

Chapter 2: Nature’s Web: Genesis of Symbiotic Culture
Part 1

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