What Will Unite Humanity? Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA, Chapter 8 Part 1
What Will Unite Humanity? Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA, Chapter 8 Part 1
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up!
You are in Chapter 8, Part 1 — “What Will Unite Humanity? Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA,” Introduction: From “Reality Crisis” To “Real” Culture of Connection and Cosmic Love and Collective Intelligence
Chapter 8 posts:
Are you trying to figure out where this is All Going? Read an overview of the Symbiotic Culture Strategy, which embodies 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 the time to sit and read! Also, find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on
Spotify and Apple!
Previously, at the end of Chapter 7, Part 3
Once again, as we built this new highway to a thriving local food economy, that road built us. Collaboration — because it involves humans — is always challenging. How do we balance and reconcile the collective eco-system with the human “ego-system”? I certainly had some ego moments!
As almost all of us were raised in a “taker” culture, most people are naturally guarded about issues of territoriality and ownership. Add to this all our past experiences around trust and control, and being a connector or catalyzer does become more of a spiritual practice.
None of what we accomplished could have been done without building
a “sacred, trusted space.”
We were building not just a symbiotic network around local food but a new culture, committed to embodying the Virtues of love, cooperation, collaboration, service, and mutual benefit — a spiritually based, network-centric, global civilization rooted in regional economies to replace the obsolete, top-down global Culture of Separation.
INTRODUCTION: From “Reality Crisis” To “Real” Culture of Connection
In establishing the Local Living Economy Network, the Conscious Community Network, and the Northern Nevada Local Food System Network, we clearly demonstrated that it’s possible to activate a positive, shared culture and unified humanity (at least in a local region of 400,000 people).
As we considered how to scale our success beyond our region, the same question I raised in the introduction emerged:
Is there some common “glue” or understanding that people could rally behind, locally and globally, to bring us together in a way never previously realized?
Given the persistent, pervasive Culture of Separation, what would unite humanity so that a Culture of Connection could emerge?
To be clear, many of the distinctions I’ve offered in the book up until now, concepts like the Ancient Blueprint found within the Transcendent … metanoia … authentic self …, and Cosmic Love weren’t part of my vocabulary at that time. I was operating from my own transcendent experience, intuitively following spiritual breadcrumbs and building symbiotic networks for mutual benefit—that kept us united, purposeful, and focused.
At the time, I don’t think I had a grasp of the immersive and persistent Culture of Separation and how it actually thwarted any quest to find deeper meaning and purpose – something that’s been called “the crisis of meaning,” or as I prefer to call it, the “reality crisis.”
So, before we explore the notion of a “unifying worldview” to build Symbiotic Kinship and Symbiotic Society — and how our Northern Nevada community went about discovering “what unites us” — I’d like to offer a larger context for this conversation, a context that wasn’t fully on the radar when we were building our networks nearly two decades ago.
While we were aware of polarization, fragmentation, and division, I hadn’t come to see our condition as I do now — that we’re in a “reality” crisis.
As a materialistic worldview has captured our global civilization, we seem to have no collective clarity on the purpose of life and what it means to be human.
And, as I’ve already said many times, in many ways, we have been collectively disconnected from enduring Transcendent principles and ancient wisdom gleaned over many millennia from multiple traditions.
Here’s what I chalk it up to:
For all of the positive developments of the Enlightenment, we in Western Civilization (and now globally) are “children of divorce.”
As I pointed out in the book's introduction, the 400-year-old “Great Divorce”—where religion got custody of the “sacred” and science got custody of the “secular”—has only accelerated the age-old Culture of Separation, with consumerism as the new “god” of what has been called the new “Secular Age.”
I speak as a scientist here, with the understanding that the purpose of science is to DESCRIBE reality — the HOW. And, in the absence of religion or any coherent sense of the sacred, science has been called upon not merely to describe reality but to give it meaning — to give us the “WHY.”
I can now say something definitively that wasn’t totally clear in 2006.
The NEW GOD has failed.
Looking beyond our technological advances to our spiritual malaise, we can conclude that making God out of science and materialism is a failed project.
Our man-made god is dead … because materialism alone cannot give us purpose or give us the answers we seek.
I think we sensed the truth of this in 2006 but didn’t have the words for it. We recognized a “spiritual vacuum” in our society, where even universally understood “objective” Virtues were being “vacuumed” out of the culture, now with no agreed-upon standard to compare our behavior or aspire to.
On the flip side, we also sensed there was something universal, deep within us, that could reunite humanity — a shared sense that we come from a common Reality, that Earth is our common home, and we are, in Reality One Family.
We knew this from our personal AND shared experiences. We also knew that cultivating this unitive power could fill that spiritual vacuum for us as individuals and as a community.
The question of finding a unifying worldview led us to convene a Conscious Community Network gathering in Reno, Nevada, on Valentine’s Day, 2006. Although I couldn’t quite articulate it at the time, I knew the issue our community was facing had something to do with the disconnection between our personal and private worldviews of religion/spirituality on one hand and our efforts to “change the world” on the other.
To find a shared Transcendent, individual, AND collective purpose, we would have to address and overcome two tendencies of modernism and postmodernism.
First, the safe and comfortable approach had been to keep religious or spiritual practice private and separate. This resonated with America’s founding principle of “freedom of religion” and well-grounded fear of having some religious authority imposed.
Secondly, because of the “siloed” nature of religious belief and practice, many social and political activists have seen religion as either a divisive force or irrelevant.
And yet—as the Ancient Blueprint has come to us through a lineage starting with Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, Gandhi, and, in modern times, Dr. Ari—there IS a universality in seeking a beloved community and unity of purpose. Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka has led the way in breaking down these artificial divisions. They addressed it head-on and made religion and spirituality the foundation of their community ecosystem and development networks.
Although Dr. Ari was himself a Buddhist, he held a vision of how religions could keep their separate identities yet work together:
“We who have been born Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, or any other faith can be very comfortable in each other’s temples, mosques, and churches, praying or meditating together to create a critical spiritual mass of consciousness, which
can overcome our greed, hatred, and illusions.”
That might have been easier for Dr. Ari, working within a religious “monoculture” to envision. How would that ideal go over in our radically diverse, pluralistic Nevada region? That was the vexing paradox and a wicked problem we sought to address in our gathering.
While the Conscious Community had a collective sense of universal Virtues, we were nonetheless separated by the existing silos of religious and secular designations.
Fortunately, we had already built the foundation, not just for collaboration but also for independence and agency. What we began to understand is that this new culture wasn’t some formula or format imposed by experts “out there” but something that emerged from the collective wisdom inside our community—as we acknowledged the shared Transcendent Ground of Being.
Part of that foundation — something that cannot be underestimated — is that Conscious Community had already created a safe and sacred community space for this kind of public conversation. The Valentine’s Day gathering we convened wasn’t an anomalous one-off. It carefully rested on a foundation of trust, cultivated through three capacity-building networks — and on Cosmic Love's invisible yet ever-present field.
As I shared in the previous chapter, there is an intentional, deliberate, sequential process where an initiator catalyzes one-on-one conversations, followed by a small group, then a larger group, and finally, a public launch. We had been through two of these and demonstrated how circles of trust—really, Cosmic Love—can expand through the nodes of the intersection of leaders, their organizations, and individual citizens.
We then looked to “codify” what we’d done into a repeatable pattern, a “fractal,” allowing us to emulate Sarvodaya Shramadana’s national network of village economies in Sri Lanka. In other words, our Valentine’s Day meeting wasn’t a stand-alone, feel-good event; it was part of a larger community initiative that already had direction and purpose.
We were “crowdsourcing” the “collective intelligence” of the local community: the insights, dreams, ideas, and connections that allowed us to build our symbiotic network. We achieved uncommon results by accessing this “common sense” commonly sensed by common people.
We began to trust ourselves and that there was an inherent, intrinsic wisdom. In spite of our “post-truth” world, we discovered universal principles, Virtues and values, common needs, and new models of network-centric governance and leadership.
We were building a parallel culture based on the Ancient Blueprint without even realizing it.
Creating our local business and food networks allowed us to see past the human “ego-system,” activating the creation of a larger community ecosystem. In emerging from our silos and network clusters to collaborate in the most practical ways to proliferate the common good, we’d shown that the national “commonwealth of local village economies” idea that emerged in India and Sri Lanka, “underdeveloped” countries could work in an “overdeveloped” country as well.
It’s important to remember that when Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka was launched more than sixty-five years ago, it provided a foundational network infrastructure in a country that didn’t have one. Here in the industrialized world, we have way too much infrastructure (many competing and siloed organizations) and a top-down system that discourages novelty and innovative change.
How did Conscious Community manage to “undergrow” that top-down infrastructure without “overthrowing” it? Put another way, how could we operate inside the Culture of Separation and not be “of” it — or having to resist it?
Three reasons.
First, while we hadn’t yet codified any shared Principles and universal Virtues, we were indeed operating from the Transcendent Ground of Being and its radiating Virtues. We demonstrated these Virtues of generosity, compassion, kindness, charity, and sharing in a disciplined and collaborative manner. We led by example, and we got results — which is why our networks grew.
Second, we used our time, energy, focused attention, and resources to build together what we wanted instead of fighting against what we didn’t want.
As Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Or, as Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine said, we weren’t utopians, but Protopians! — desiring a new Culture of Connection where we imagine AND BUILD a culture qualitatively better than it was yesterday.
We didn’t have to “fight” Walmart, the corporate chains, or any other established institution. Simply because we offered a compelling choice that came from collaborators and neighbors inside our community, people “voted” in the marketplace overwhelmingly to support local businesses and locally sourced food.
We bypassed the reactive “boycott” for the proactive “buycott.”Thirdly, we embodied a spirit of empowerment and agency, where our community got to see and benefit from the tangible fruits of collaboration. In this spirit, status and dominance hierarchies were “flattened,” and stakeholders of every variety could communicate with one another and make contributions as the best ideas rose to the top.
As we “built” the roadways to constructive collaboration and infrastructure, these new pathways built in us new understandings and new skills. There was an emerging yet unarticulated “coherence” in our community — a consistency between internal beliefs, values, and the Virtues that informed our external behavior — that was calling forth a common purpose. This was despite the wide spectrum of beliefs and perspectives held by people in our very diverse community.
Sri Lanka, in contrast, is a Buddhist country, meaning that Sarvodaya was founded upon commonly shared beliefs and a Buddhist understanding of the world. How could a constructive common understanding emerge in a pluralistic, multi-cultural society like our own so divided by culture, as well as religious and political beliefs?
At the time — twenty years ago — we were beginning to see the early signs of our “post-truth” world. If people today are now so polarized and can’t even agree on the facts, how can they possibly agree on principles, values, and Virtues?
It turns out that it’s a lot easier to agree on principles and Virtues than on facts, particularly when there is an intrinsic desire for a “beloved community” that transcends the boundaries of both religion and secular resistance to religion.
Having successfully built our symbiotic networks, we were now guided to further identify our guiding principles and Virtues on one hand and the needs in our community on the other.
Instinctively, our first two projects in Northern Nevada were focused on the nitty-gritty aspects of daily living — food and the economy. Of course, we were building upon the common understanding of all religious, spiritual, and ethical traditions. We knew the hazards of discussing religion and devolving into divisive, tangential discussions.
However, as you remember, in our first meetings, we did introduce Adam Smith and his Theory of Moral Sentiments in Chapter 6 when discussing a Virtuous Economy. As a secular figure, Smith addressed how morality and empathy were a foundation for harmonious social relations from a standpoint free of religious baggage. No one seemed to object to that, and that conversation immediately gave us common ground.
Cosmic Love and Collective Intelligence
Recognizing that the universal desire for connection has been defined as “Love,” the Conscious Community Network chose Valentine’s Day, 2006, to hold a large region-wide community meeting to explore more deeply shared principles, values, and purpose.
Instead of romantic love, however, we focused on universal Love, what first the Greeks, then the Christians and others, called “agape love.” We messaged the event as “taking our love higher.” In retrospect, what we were seeking to do was to apply “collective intelligence” to come up with universal principles and Virtues that flowed from universal love.
At the time, I had never heard of St. Maximus the Confessor, whom we introduced earlier, and would have dismissed the term “Cosmic Love” as a Haight-Ashbury pipe dream.
I’ve since come to see that Cosmic Love is both an extrinsic Transcendent reality and an immanent intrinsic sense of being, while agape could be considered loving actions that flow from Cosmic Love.
So, at least in my view, what has been celebrated as agape is not primal but derivative of an even more vast Power. Without the benefit of St. Maximus’ distinctions, the early Christians recognized agape love as a direct emanation of the Transcendent Ground of Being and the foundation for their loving community.
Regardless of which terms we used, we faced a daunting task. In seeking authentic spiritual common ground, our dilemma was:
How do we address having common principles and Virtues yet still be inclusive of all worldviews—traditional … modern …, and postmodern…?
How could we include diverse religious, spiritual, secular, and civic ethical values and come to a common understanding without imposing a “one-size-fits-all” narrative? Equally important, how could these common values emerge from the collective intelligence of our community members?
Reflecting many “wisdom traditions," we recognized love as more than romantic sentiment (Eros), or even friendship (Philia), or a bond of empathy (Storge) but the “glue” that weaves the universe and the web of life together. The fullness of “Agape Love” is described by Christians who saw it as a prime spiritual power reflecting unconditional love and Jesus’ two-fold commandment to “love God with all thy heart, soul, and mind, and love thy neighbor as thyself.”
In other words, love is not a feeling—it is both a state of being and an action verb, something to be practiced and embodied.
Love is the power that connects all things and helps everything grow and thrive. Love is unconditional, given freely with no expectation of return. Love was — and is — the radiant power that reflects luminosity and the practical wisdom of an interconnected nature. It is the way to transform our very natures, from love of self to self-giving love.
It is through embodied Love that we can transform the world's dominance hierarchies into growth hierarchies through loving service and—as we act in coherent accord—nexus agency. That is, we not only have agency as individuals, but we can amplify our impact by acting together, in a symbiotic network accord, around a common purpose.
The Conscious Community Valentine’s Day meeting was not about individual behavior alone, nor was it a philosophical discussion or even a call to traditional social or political action or change.
It was about identifying the blocks to Love inside of us, inside society, and in our local community, and then discovering ways for the community to come together and bring forth “nexus agency” — the community's collective will.
A common example of a nexus agency is the collective “swarm” behavior (murmuration) of starlings. Murmurations are vast flocks of starlings that twist, turn, dive, and swirl through the sky, forming beautiful, ever-changing patterns — where large numbers of individuals are able to coordinate unified action.
As dusk approaches, small groups of starlings from the same region gather above a shared roosting site. These groups join into a larger collective, moving in perfect harmony in a mesmerizing aerial dance, creating beautiful, constantly morphing patterns.
So, how does this apply to human “swarms”? How do we become a “we,” coordinating collective human action, while still being “Me’s” who have individual will and agency?
Consciously or unconsciously, our Reno Conscious Community group recognized that “collective intelligence” was the key to unlocking “nexus agency” — and trusting that collective intelligence was an already existing pattern from within the Ancient Blueprint.
We intrinsically knew that we were wiser in the aggregate than any one expert specialist. This “shared group intelligence” emerges from collaboration, collective efforts around a common purpose, and even through competition — which allows us to assess the strengths and weaknesses of separate endeavors.
Because no “one way” is presented as THE way, new ideas, connections, and behaviors can emerge, and the interactivity of diverse viewpoints can lead to truly new solutions not predicted by past understandings and actions.
So that was our challenge.
How can a diverse, divided community of 400,000 people
agree on “shared principles and values”?
The question we asked at that Valentine’s Day gathering nearly two decades ago seems to come up repeatedly, even today.
Over the last two years, I’ve been on numerous Zoom calls with global “changemakers,” where inevitably, someone will ask, “Are there any shared principles, Virtues, and purpose that could unite humanity?” It keeps getting addressed as a “new” question as if there is some yet-to-be-discovered modern magic bullet to save us from ourselves.
We seem to be suffering from an ongoing case of mass “forgetting”—forgetting that there is an ancient pattern, an Ancient Blueprint, with its legacy of shared principles and universal Virtues already ever-present.
It’s like we are immersed in a massive “amnesia” factory, where the Culture of Separation ensures that we forget that there ARE unifying principles, Virtues, and deep patterns that have already been discovered and employed for thousands of years.
Essentially, we have forgotten who we really are, in our essential nature.
There is also the wisdom of successful movements applying the Ancient Blueprint, such as Sarvodaya Shramadana, which itself comes from many thousand years of lineage going back to Jesus and the wisdom teachings of humanity.
I find it “interesting” — tragic, actually — that Dr. Ari’s recent passing went largely unnoticed by the American and European press or media. Was it that Sarvodaya is just too quaint or idiosyncratic?
Or could it be because humanity has become so incredibly distracted by and addicted to social media, endless drama, and low-consciousness entertainment? Or are we so stressed and distressed about our current world situation that we’re ready to “hunker in the bunker” with our “tribal” narratives and familiar forms of division?
When we are manipulated by anger and fear and devolve onto the battlefield, we forget the Ancient “playing field” and the playground rules of “Love God and love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Along those same lines, maybe our modern and postmodern deification of thinking, the mental realm, makes us dismiss prior Heart-centered traditions as obsolete or irrelevant. As change accelerates, we are told the answers lie in doubling down on some version of a techno-utopian future rather than the deep spiritual traditions of the past and present.
It's hard to imagine Dr. Ari as a “threat,” but Sarvodaya's simple, practical wisdom could have the power to break the trance of forgetting that binds us to the unworkable system we are immersed in.
In any case, as we recognized in Reno back in 2006, it is up to us to bring these principles, values, and Virtues to life and to our world. It’s up to us, individually and communally, to remember who we are — our Authentic selves and our Conscience and tune into the Voice of the Heart of Love.
That was the challenge facing our group on Valentine’s Day in 2006.
Find out how we continued to develop a Unifying Worldview, the “Glue,” to guide our continuing actions in the NEXT POST — Chapter 8, Part 2: What Will Unite Humanity? — Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA
Virtues Versus Values and the Crisis of Meaning … Valentine’s Day Meeting – Discovering What Unites Us … One Singular Purpose … Founding Principles … 5 Shared, Universal Virtues and the Transcendent Ground of Being