The Turning Point We’ve Been Waiting For

Introduction to Book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age

Dear readers, I am happy to share a sneak peek of the Introduction from my upcoming book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age. I have been releasing the first three quarters of the book freely here on Substack, starting in January 2024!

I would love to get your feedback on the Introduction — you can just reply to this email. Also, please read the book’s PREFACE - LIVING BETWEEN WORLDS

Introduction: The Turning Point We’ve Been Waiting For

There’s a question echoing within the human heart today—a quiet longing beneath the chaos of politics, polarization, and planetary crisis. It's not just “Why can’t we all get along?” but something more profound:

Is there anything strong enough, true enough, to bring us together?

We’re flooded with information and good intentions, but trust erodes. We build movements for justice, systems for change, and technologies for connection, yet still drift apart. Even our most inspired efforts hit the same invisible wall: fragmentation, fatigue, and disillusionment.

But what if the problem isn’t just institutional or political? What if it’s existential, rooted in a cultural architecture that teaches us to relate to one another, the Earth, and the Divine as separate, competing parts instead of one interwoven whole?

That question has haunted me and guided my life’s work.

This book is not a memoir, a manual, or a thesis. It offers a cultural turning point—an invitation to look beyond ideological debate and remember a deeper reality we’ve forgotten: a shared foundation beneath our systems, stories, and suffering.

I call it the Ancient Blueprint. By this, I mean the sacred pattern of reality—spiritual, social, and ecological—that has guided thriving communities and cultures throughout history. It holds the key to birthing what I now call the Symbiotic Age: a new era of human flourishing rooted in mutuality, sacred design, and connection.

Love As the Structure of Reality

If this book has a single conviction, it is this: “Love God and Love Others.”

This isn’t just a metaphor, moral teaching, or call to be nice—it’s a revelation of how reality is structured.

When Jesus gave this command, he wasn’t offering personal advice or religious doctrine. He was unveiling the deep pattern within Creation.

He was revealing the nature of existence: that we live in a relational universe. Everything is connected—nothing exists in isolation. From the subatomic bonds that hold matter together to the ecosystems that sustain life and the communities that shape our humanity, reality is woven through relationships.

This Love, revealed in Jesus and made available to all, is not a vague force but a living Presence—calling us into relationship and service. This is the Kingdom of Heaven: not merely a future destination, but a present reality—made visible wherever love, justice, and mutual belonging reign. It is the divine order manifesting when we align with the sacred pattern that holds everything together.

Love is more than an ethical ideal. It is the generative power that binds the cosmos—the blueprint by which life flourishes. Whether you call it Divine Love, the Spirit, or simply the presence of God, this Love is not distant. It is alive, personal, and draws us into communion.

Received by grace, Divine Love awakens in us a desire to love in return—not just upward, but outward. Love seeks the other—healing, bridging, belonging.

This movement of Love—outward, connective, generative—doesn’t stop with individuals. It forms the scaffolding of communities, offering a tangible structure for how we live, relate, and build together.

The Lineage of Love

Not only is this structure of Love written into the cosmos, but it is also embodied in human lives and culture. It is a sacred pattern passed down not just in texts but in communities of practice, courage, and compassion.

This understanding—that Love is the very fabric of reality—runs through every page of this book.

It’s also the lineage that has informed and inspired me, from Jesus to Mahatma Gandhi to Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, and is carried forward in the community movements I’ve helped co-create—living patterns of love and service that repeat and adapt at every scale, from small circles to whole bioregional economies.

This “lineage of love” is not only moral—it’s structural. Jesus, Gandhi, and Dr. Ariyaratne were not merely good men; they left a legacy of cultural infrastructure. Each one translated Love into systems and communities that honored the dignity of every human being. They refused to confine spiritual truth to private experience or political ideology. Instead, they showed us how to build what I now call Symbiotic Networks—containers that can gather people across human-made divisions.

This is the shift from “love as sentiment” to “love as structure.” But that sacred pattern has been overshadowed and obscured by a competing cultural logic that distorts love into control and relationship into rivalry.

The Culture of Separation: The Hidden Wound

Much of the suffering we see today isn’t merely the result of bad actors or flawed systems. It’s the predictable outgrowth of something more profound and harder to see: the Culture of Separation.

This culture functions like an unseen operating system. It subtly whispers:

You are alone. The material world is all there is. Power means control. Success requires domination. The sacred is irrelevant.

And other people? They are threats, not kin.

These messages don’t need to be taught in classrooms or preached from podiums. They’re embedded in our media, institutions, economic assumptions, and unconscious habits of thought. Even our most well-meaning social change efforts often reflect this hidden worldview. It’s what turns noble intentions to bring people together into isolated silos that keep them apart. That’s why we create more programs, launch more campaigns, and publish more content—yet still feel more fragmented and powerless than ever.

Most tragically, this culture convinces us that our deep yearning for wholeness is naïve or weak.

But here’s a deeper truth: our desire for connection is not a sign of weakness—it’s evidence of a profound structure breaking through. That structure—the Ancient Blueprint—still resides within us. It doesn’t need to be invented; it needs to be remembered and reclaimed.

Cultural Recovery: Healing from the Addiction to Separation

Reclaiming this loving legacy requires a radical shift to what the 12-Step recovery movement calls “a new way of life” — from our collective addiction to separation, to a conscious practice of connection. Put another way, to recover from the wounding of the Culture of Separation, we must simultaneously recover our connection to this Ancient Blueprint.

Like healing from addiction, cultural recovery begins with the courage to see clearly and the humility to try something new. The first step is to acknowledge that we are addicted to old ways of thinking and doing: domination, division, control, and the illusion of separation. We keep reenacting the same patterns—from new systems and structures to reforming, protesting, attacking, and seizing power—hoping they’ll deliver different results.

But how’s that working for us? It isn’t. It can’t.

As you’ll see throughout this book, the second and third steps in the recovery journey require turning our lives over to a higher power. I suggest that higher power is the Transcendent, and the Ancient Blueprint is the sacred design for how that power flows through our lives and communities.

Think about it. Our crisis isn’t just political or institutional—it’s spiritual.

We’ve built political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems with good intentions. But over time, many have become disconnected from the very Source they were meant to reflect: Divine Love. When competition replaces cooperation, dominance eclipses humility, and power outweighs compassion, we lose touch with the sacred pattern of communion that was always meant to guide us.

We’ve arranged our lives into silos—tribes, factions, political parties, gangs, cartels, ideologies—trapped in loops of fear and rivalry, unable to see beyond the identities we’ve inherited and the cultural habits we’re addicted to. We talk about “thinking outside the box,” but we’re still operating within the logic of the box: domination, usury, control. We've mistaken conformity for wisdom and outsourced discernment to distant authorities.

Cultural recovery is not about tearing everything down.

It’s about building something alongside what exists—a parallel society aligned with sacred design. It’s about reweaving the Transcendent back into our civic and cultural lives.

The issue isn’t a lack of goodness. This sacred recovery is already happening. It manifests in ordinary people performing extraordinary acts daily—quietly serving, helping, and healing. That’s why so many local acts of goodness—billions of them—occur outside the spotlight of institutional power and media.

It’s that these acts remain scattered, isolated, and invisible to each other.

This book invites us to face that challenge—and offers the hope of gathering the scattered embers into a coherent flame. Throughout history, others have faced this same rupture and responded not by seizing power but by embodying Love in action.

A Living Lineage: Embodying the Ancient Blueprint

This is the path I’ve chosen to walk. It is both personal and cultural, born from deep spiritual conviction and expressed through practical action. It follows the lineage I mentioned—a living thread stretching through history, weaving through cultures, communities, and courageous lives. This lineage first revealed itself to me through Jesus, the essence of what I now call the Ancient Blueprint: a sacred architecture rooted in Divine Love.

In this realm, the last are first, the peacemakers are blessed, and the humble inherit the Earth.

This was more than symbolic—it was a declaration that another way of being is not only possible, but already alive...in those who choose to live from Love.

Jesus built not so much a religion but a countercultural movement—embodied and practiced by the early Christian ecclesia. These small, local kinship assemblies lived out the Kingdom of Heaven within the empire, forming networks of mutual benefit in the face of domination. They didn’t aim to overthrow Rome with swords. Instead, they lived a different truth, and in doing so, they seeded a parallel society.

That pattern—the Ancient Blueprint—did not disappear. It has re-emerged wherever people remembered who they were and organized around what matters most. I observed it in Gandhi’s vision of Sarvodaya, a commonwealth of self-reliant village republics.

I saw it again in the work of Dr. Ariyaratne, who established a network of over 5,000 villages across Sri Lanka based on shared virtues, mutual uplift, and spiritual awakening. These were not programs but living organisms—parallel societies grounded in the transcendent, embodied in the local.

Parallel Societies Across History

And I saw it in the Czech Parallel Polis: a civic resistance movement born under communist rule that refused to fight the empire on its terms. Instead, it created a culture of truth, moral coherence, and community in the shadow of oppression. Like the early Christians and the Sarvodaya villages, the Parallel Polis didn’t seek to conquer. It sought to cohere.

This lineage of the Ancient Blueprint spans from Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom to Gandhi’s Sarvodaya, Dr. Ari’s village networks, and the Czech Parallel Polis.

Together, these movements show how Divine Love can be embodied in real societies across time, culture, and context.

Though arising from different cultural and spiritual roots, each movement gave form to the same sacred architecture—a living echo of the Ancient Blueprint in action.

I recognized the same recurring pattern in these diverse communities and movements: ordinary people rediscovering their divine dignity, that they were made in the image of God, organizing around shared Virtues, and building communities of mutual benefit. Not through hierarchy, but through humble coherence. Not through ideology, but through love made visible.

That is what Symbiotic Culture seeks to become—a Culture of Connection, emerging from the grassroots—from the lived reality of local communities, where relationships, trust, and mutual care are built face-to-face, neighbor to neighbor, and the existing regional networks are connected.

It is a parallel society rooted not in dominion but in community—a quiet revolution of belonging that undergrows and then outgrows the Culture of Separation.

This is how we apply the Ancient Blueprint to bring Heaven to Earth—not all at once, not through a sweeping act of policy or power, but step by step, soul by soul, neighborhood by neighborhood, community by community.

From Principle to Practice: Translating Love into Systems of Belonging

If the Ancient Blueprint revealed a sacred pattern, the challenge was translating these Divine Design principles into grounded practice. For me, it began with a haunting question:

How do we translate “Love God and Love Others” from spiritual conviction into civic design?

Models for community change usually start with external solutions—new systems, institutions, and technologies, all of which require formal organization and funding. In places like Logan Heights and Sherman Heights in San Diego and later Reno, Nevada, we learned that true transformation must be revealed, not imposed. It has to grow organically from the people, the place, and the presence of the Divine.

We weren’t simply launching new projects—we were testing whether Divine Love could become the organizing force of civic life.

And it can.

What emerged wasn’t another nonprofit, initiative, or ideology. It was a living network ecosystem: Symbiotic Culture.

Within it, we recognized a consistent logic—there was a structure beneath the structure, a spiritual code that enabled communities to thrive across silos.

The repeatable pattern that appeared in neighborhood gatherings, local food systems, and living economy networks became what we later called Symbiotic Culture DNA — a set of living principles and protocols that could spread and scale virally in many communities simultaneously. It resembled the organic mycelium network beneath a forest—quiet, alive, and connective, linking people and efforts through trust, love, and shared purpose.

The community doesn’t need to be formally or “professionally” designed when we align with that living system. It emerges naturally, like cells organizing into a body. This is why the heart of Symbiotic Culture is not an institution. It’s a way of being that acknowledges we live in a relational universe, where everything is indeed interrelated.

From Love to Structure: Symbiotic Networks as a Civic Ecosystem

Over the years, one of the most powerful embodiments of relational design—the idea that different groups, systems, or entities are meaningfully interconnected—has taken shape in what I call Symbiotic Networks.

Symbiotic Networks serve as relational containers—spiritual and civic ecosystems—that connect personal transformation with collective life.

They are not top-down institutions or loosely structured gatherings. When aligned, they foster trust, reveal common needs, and unite people across differences, enabling lives, vocations, and worldviews to come together in mutual service.

These networks decentralize agency rather than centralize control. They don’t demand ideological conformity. They invite alignment around universal Virtues, shared values, and common community needs.

In this book, I will share examples from my community work in low-income, multicultural, gang-affected neighborhoods in San Diego, where we addressed public safety, and in Reno, Nevada, where we strengthened a local living economy, built a Local Food System Network, and established a neighbor-to-neighbor network, along with an arts, culture, and sustainability festival.

These Symbiotic Networks can take shape in any neighborhood or an entire region, and by the end of this book, you will see how it’s been done, and how you can be a “node of change” in your community.

This isn’t a lofty theory or ideal—it’s a time-tested way of organizing civic life—one node at a time.

Each node is more than a point on a map; it’s a living cell in a greater body, a local hub of trust, relationship, and purpose.

Whether it’s a neighborhood, a faith community, a main street business, a grassroots nonprofit, or a circle of friends, every node becomes a vessel of mutual care and sacred interconnection—woven into a networked ecosystem of renewal.

These lived experiments represent more than a method—they embody the cultural shift this book aims to catalyze.

A Cultural Change Movement, Not a Program

This book is not about scaling a toolkit. It’s about catalyzing a cultural movement—a shift from separation to connection, scarcity to generosity, and domination to service. It’s about revealing a possibility that has always existed: that we are already one body, interdependent, and part of a greater whole that longs to manifest in the real world.

The practical outgrowth of that vision is what I call the birth of a Symbiotic Age—a global commonwealth of regional economies rooted in trust, virtue, and local belonging.

These are not pipe dreams. The Sarvodaya Movement established an ecosystem of 5,000 village societies in Sri Lanka. In the Czech Republic, the Parallel Polis demonstrated how spiritual communities can survive and thrive under oppression. In our work, we witnessed fractured communities and cities begin to heal, not through ideology but incarnated love.

We are not starting from scratch, we are not building a utopia. We are remembering something ancient and weaving it into the fabric of our lives today.

You are already part of it, right where you are. I hope this book will help you see your role in this shift. That change begins with how we see reality, what we assume about people, power, and the nature of the world we inhabit.

The Symbiotic movement we are building requires more than new structures or systems. It calls for a deeper way of seeing—a lens that can sustain transformation beyond moments of urgency or crisis.

That lens is a worldview.

A Relational Worldview: Making Sense in a Fractured Age

Our worldviews shape everything—what we notice, how we relate, and what we believe is possible. Many of today’s political, ecological, and economic crises are interrelated. They are symptoms of a more profound spiritual crisis rooted in fragmented and competing worldviews. Yet most of us don’t realize we have a worldview because we don’t see it — we see the world through it. Like a pair of invisible lenses, it shapes how we interpret everything around us.

So, given the diversity of competing worldviews, how do we unite?

Here’s the good news.

We don’t need a single dominant worldview to replace the rest; we need a relational one capable of building bridges between them.

Let me explain.

A relational worldview does not erase difference. Instead, it offers a deeper shared language, not merely of words but of understanding and orientation. This language is rooted not in control or separation but in communion, participation, and mutual recognition. It provides a common way to perceive, relate to, and act across cultures and traditions.

This worldview is implicit in the Sermon on the Mount, Indigenous cosmologies, and the Gospel of John’s vision of the Logos—the divine pattern of wisdom and relational order woven into all creation. It is not a belief system, but a way of being—one that aligns with the reality that everything is connected and nothing exists in isolation.

That’s what I mean when I say the ideas in this book are grounded in reality, not merely idealistic or technocratic. You will learn how local communities organically develop through trusted third-party connections, person-to-person, and network-to-network. You’ll discover how this process of emergent community operates in the real world, enabling you to replicate it in your region or network.

Walking the Path Together

The title of this book—Birthing the Symbiotic Age—is not metaphorical. It’s literal. I’ve come to believe we are in the midst of a planetary passage from an age of extraction and domination to one of mutualism and service.

This isn’t something that can be engineered from the top down.

It must be birthed from within—from within families, communities, circles of care, and ordinary people aligned with something higher and more profound.

The tools I present are not meant to replace what’s already working. They are designed to amplify and magnify it by “Connecting the Good.” By ‘the Good,’ I mean the people, projects, and institutions already aligned with compassion, justice, healing, and mutual uplift—efforts like building local economies and food systems, faith-based service, neighborhood care networks, regenerative culture, mutual aid networks, civic engagement, and much more.

Connecting the Good means weaving these often-isolated efforts across organizations, faith communities, businesses, local governments, and mutual aid groups into living ecosystem networks of cooperation and shared purpose. It’s a way of transforming scattered acts of service into a coherent Power for renewal—perhaps humanity’s greatest untapped resource and superpower.

What You’ll Discover in This Book

In the pages ahead, I’ll walk you through more than forty years of community experiments, show how the Culture of Separation shaped my early life, and how encounters with mystics, communities, and crises led me back to a truth older than any ideology: that Divine Love, when received and lived, creates a new kind of society.

You’ll read stories of re-villaging neighborhoods, closing drug houses, building buy-local campaigns, and forming multi-sector networks without a single formal institution. You’ll meet people who chose to show up not because they agreed on everything, but because they were willing to love, serve, and build together.

In the final chapters, you’ll find a five-stage roadmap for forming or joining a Symbiotic Circle. You’ll also explore the Network Commons—a new collaborative, decentralized civic engagement model that empowers local groups to connect without losing their distinctiveness or autonomy.

You’ll be invited to discern your place in the lineage—from Jesus to Gandhi to Dr. Ari to the people in your community who are waiting to connect, waiting to trust again, and waiting to belong.

The Book’s Four Arcs of Transformation

This book unfolds in four arcs that mirror my development and the unfolding of transformation itself.

Formation begins with my personal story and the rediscovery of the Ancient Blueprint. It traces how I came to view Divine Love not only as a spiritual principle but as the sacred ordering system of life, and how that truth began reshaping how I perceived people, community, and culture. Readers will uncover the roots of our shared disconnection and be introduced to a sacred architecture that has quietly sustained life for millennia.

Application examines how these principles were applied in real-world experiments across neighborhoods, cities, and regional economies. From addressing gang violence to supporting local food systems and economies, as well as neighbors helping neighbors, this section presents concrete stories of how Love transforms into civic scaffolding. Readers will discover how to nurture trust-based collaboration and develop living networks of mutual support without the need to control or formalize everything.

Integration unites the spiritual and the structural. It shows how sacred design influences not just interpersonal relationships, but entire systems—economic, ecological, and institutional. You’ll learn how the logic of communion can shape everything from governance to technology, and start to see how new patterns of belonging can emerge. You will gain a framework for coordinating community efforts.

Finally, in Activation, you are invited to walk the path yourself. This final arc provides a roadmap for carrying this work into your context and community, through approaches like Symbiotic Circles and Networks, the Network Commons, and practices of relational leadership that empower collective transformation from the ground up. You’ll see yourself reflected in this movement because you are part of it.

You don’t have to go through this alone. The pattern is already established. The relationships are already developing. The wisdom is already present.

The Symbiotic Age: A Cultural Movement Rooted in Love

We’re witnessing the beginning of a new age—the Symbiotic Age—where mutual benefit, deep connection, and sacred design guide how we live and lead. Birthing the Symbiotic Age means nurturing a culture in which individuals, families, neighborhoods, and entire communities rediscover how to live in right relationship with one another, with the Earth, and with the Divine pattern of the Ancient Blueprint.

This blueprint is not abstract—it has been embodied throughout history by those who lived its truth: from Jesus and the early Christian communities, to Gandhi’s Sarvodaya movement, to Dr. Ariyaratne’s village-based awakening in Sri Lanka, to the Czech Parallel Polis.

It points toward a global commonwealth of regional economies rooted in trust, virtue, and local belonging—what I call the Virtuous Economy.

Rooted in timeless virtues—compassion, integrity, generosity, and courage, this economy reflects the sacred logic of love in motion, circulating resources to strengthen relationships, meet real needs, and regenerate the commons.

Invitation

Symbiotic Culture invites us to step into a life where love becomes the new organizing principle of society and its economy.

If you’ve sensed something essential is missing in how we live and relate…

If you’ve longed for a more beautiful, just, and sacred way to belong to this world…

These pages follow a path of reconnection to your purpose, people, and the deeper pattern that holds us all. This renewed world—this Symbiotic Age—won’t be imposed from above. It will be birthed and built by people like you.

And … you are not alone.

Across the globe, threads of reconnection are weaving into a living movement—once scattered, now coalescing into a whole-cloth emergence from the grassroots.

The Symbiotic Age is not a theory; it’s already taking form.

This book invites you to find your place in it—and join what’s already unfolding.

Let’s begin.

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BOOK PREFACE