What Will Unite Humanity? Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA, Chapter 8 Part 4
Fractal Community Empowerment
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 4— “What Will Unite Humanity? Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA,” Symbiotic Culture DNA: Five Elements of a Unifying Worldview … Fractal Community Empowerment
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 8, Part 3
I am reminded of a quote of Dr. Martin Luther King’s that captures the essence of
network-centric structures:
“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
Our symbiotic networks became the living expressions of this “inescapable network of mutuality” flowing from the “interrelated structure of reality.” It’s a down-to-earth way the Transcendent can become Immanent, how we can bring Heaven to Earth. Maybe Heaven was already present, but now, it felt as if was “breaking through", by a deepening relationship with an underlying, always present reality.
It is founded in our common destiny to thrive in a community that honors individual expression in the context of common good — and uncommon goodness. This is the common ground we used then and can use now to bring the disparate sections of our human community together for a higher purpose.
Symbiotic Culture DNA: Decoding the Five Elements of a Unifying Worldview
Having proven the power of collaboration in the real world, we now had the foundational elements of a unifying worldview — what I now call Symbiotic Culture DNA.
As you probably remember from your biology classes, DNA is a double helix shape consisting of compounds called nucleotides strung together in four “letters” or strands that encode all the information it takes to “produce” a living being. The encoding is a mystery of nature, and to develop — a mouse or a human, let’s say — this information must get “decoded.”
Our human culture also has a version that operates like DNA in that it can reproduce itself—instead of physical DNA, we have what has been called “memes”—units of human cultural transmission through shared culture, symbols, and practices.
Memes are transmitted not only from brain to brain (really mind to mind), but as you will see in Symbiotic Culture, the more powerful means of transmission is Heart to Heart.
The all-pervasive Culture of Separation has no problem reproducing itself, evidenced by the seemingly endless cycle of rising and falling empires over the last three thousand years.
Here’s the good news.
The Culture of Connection — Symbiotic Culture — also has a DNA, a reproducible pattern that would lead a society and its inhabitants to thrive. Throughout history, across cultures and religions — East, West, and Indigenous — and over thousands of years, this Ancient Blueprint I’ve referred to has been available for us to create “heaven on Earth.” The early community around Jesus knew it, the early Christians knew it … Gandhi knew it … Dr. Ari knew it. I saw it manifest in San Diego, California, and Reno, Nevada.
It’s only in retrospect that I have been able to see that the Symbiotic Culture DNA consists of five elements:
1. Shared singular purpose
2. 8 Shared principles
3. 5 Universal virtues
4. 12 Common community needs
5. Distributed Network Infrastructure.
We’ve already discussed these elements earlier in this chapter. I am reiterating them here so that you recognize how they relate to one another and create a repeatable pattern that will enable Symbiotic Culture to scale and spread anywhere and everywhere.
1. Shared Purpose for Humanity – Uniting the Cosmos in Love
It may seem a bit arrogant for me to offer “a shared purpose for humanity.” So let me reiterate: This isn’t my opinion, nor am I imposing it as a “one-size-fits-all”—God forbid—religion.
What I have identified as a universal, purposeful, guiding understanding of reality is something known to the ancients for thousands of years yet obscured by the Culture of Separation and the imposition of material solutions to what really are spiritual problems.
It is the understanding that — in spite of the deification of science and materialism as our source of meaning — we come from one source, and we are one family. The fact that we have collectively and conveniently forgotten that doesn’t make it any less true.
As one Beloved Community, our purpose would be a fractal of our individual purpose — to thrive and prosper, not just as individuals but as a community.
Is this possible?
Both Sarvodaya and our Reno networks indicate that it is — when we make Symbiotic Kinship the foundation of our work. As we built the road, and the road built us, an even higher shared purpose revealed itself:
To build a Culture of Connection where intentional mutual benefit becomes the normal operating system for human society and where our Reno movement and the work of Sarvodaya would spread and scale from the individual person to family, to neighborhood, to community, nation, and world.
In other words, to unite that which has become separate —
to bring the Cosmos together in Love.
The shared community principles reinforce the unifying purpose and make it real in the world.
2. Eight Shared Community Principles
From this foundation of shared purpose, we distilled common community operating and building principles from how real communities function, following a lineage of an “Ancient Blueprint” — from Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount to Mahatma Gandhi’s “Law of Love” applied to village-based economic development to today’s Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka.
For example, the Golden Rule is a principle found in almost every culture, religion, and time. It’s straightforward and not theoretical—it is about application and embodiment.
The Golden Rule informs every interaction we have with others and is the foundation for practicing intentional mutual benefit and proliferating goodness.
Other principles—we listed them earlier in this chapter—reiterate human sovereignty and agency, acknowledge Transcendent power and our relatedness to one another, and reinforce the need to begin where we are to have a local and yet global impact.
If our shared purpose is indeed to bring heaven to earth, each of these principles is a building block that translates this purpose into the domains of awareness and action.
They are carriers of Symbiotic Culture DNA — every action that flows from these principles, empowered by the five universal Virtues, further reinforces the Culture of Connection.
3. The Five Universal Virtues
Virtues are Transcendent energies, reflecting an actual Cosmic spiritual power “underneath” the “physical laws of the universe,” such as gravity or electromagnetism, identified by science.
When embodied within us, Virtues allow humans the awesome capacity and capability to act with greater and greater levels of cooperation and collaboration—integrated and heightened in practice.
Virtues unify and organize our personality to be of greater and greater service to ourselves, our families, and our communities. As we’ve said earlier, practicing these Virtues is a tangible way to bring heaven to earth. Every virtuous act proliferates Symbiotic DNA throughout the community in an infinite positive feedback loop of Love and Service.
When the Virtues are identified, acknowledged, and practiced in a community — again, sitting atop the purpose and the principles — we make the Culture of Connection more real. This is how we create a virtuous community and economy.
As Sarvodaya has demonstrated, the road “builds us” — we are spiritually strengthened being part of a virtuous community, and we create more and more of the same, and so on. This is Symbiotic DNA in action. Goodness keeps reproducing itself!
4. 12 Common Community Needs
Symbiosis in living systems always involves the exchange of energy. As we will learn in the next chapter, our Neighbor-to-Neighbor movement simultaneously identified unmet needs and liberated “frozen” assets—untapped energy inside neighborhoods—hinting at a fractal pattern that works anywhere and everywhere.
The common community needs our Reno community identified are similar to the ten basic human needs that Sarvodaya gleaned — each represents a domain of happiness, fulfillment, and service. In contrast with the charity model, which has an inherent inequality between giver and receiver, the Symbiotic DNA is a great equalizer, so giving and receiving are natural flows.
Because Symbiotic DNA is encoded not just in the Virtues but in how we address our individual and collective needs, the notion of “intentional mutual benefit” becomes the context for every interaction and every exchange.
Consequently, giving and receiving bring joy and satisfaction, and the energy of the entire community is uplifted.
5. Distributed Network Infrastructure.
So … the Symbiotic Culture DNA gets decoded through living a shared purpose, applying universal principles, and embedding the power of Virtues in action. It gets “distributed” by identifying and fulfilling a community's needs, now spreading through newly emerging spiritual, social, economic, and political infrastructure.
The next question is, how does the Symbiotic Culture DNA spread from one person in one community to create a worldwide commonwealth of strong regional economies?
Perhaps the most transformational piece in our work in Reno was the multi-nodal networks that emerged organically out of our intention to build our buy local and local food networks. As you will see in the next section on Fractal Community Empowerment, there is a systematic approach to creating “multi-nodal” networks that can bridge silos and already-existing organizations and create new levels of cooperation and collaboration.
As I will show in the next two chapters, these multi-nodal networks can address any of the shared needs on the list and others that emerge. They are the ultimate delivery system for Symbiotic Culture DNA, a beneficial self-reproducing “virus” that can take hold anywhere—provided we follow a proven five-step action plan.
Fractal Community Empowerment – A Practical Way to Do the Impossible
I’ve spent much of the past fifty years seeking to answer one vexing question: How can the actions of one human being, in concert with others holding the same purpose, bring about a global transformation of structures and systems— from the Culture of Separation to the Culture of Connection?
How do we move – in this individualistic society – from asking what one individual can do to what a community and communities can do together?
How do we go above and beyond random acts of kindness – which by themselves build no infrastructure – to build a Kingdom of Kindness, where Symbiotic Culture DNA flows freely and reproduces itself as readily and rapidly as the Culture of Separation does?
In many ways, I am calling forth the impossible.
Certainly, what I am proposing is impossible within the traditional rules and formal organizational structures found in the siloed reality of the Culture of Separation. At the end of Section 1, I shared my own real-world experiences running nonprofit organizations and coming up against what I euphemistically called the “everything industrial complex.”
After many decades of on-the-ground experience, I’ve concluded that there is no way to “fix” our existing system—not through traditional social, political, economic, or religious movements, as generally understood.
And yet, I also realize that this “impossibility” of a breakthrough is completely necessary for the survival of our civilization and, quite possibly, our species. The problems we face are global, complex, entangled, and interconnected. The one-problem-at-a-time silo approach is unworkable, as is thinking that money, bureaucracy, and well-intentioned top-down solutions can get us through what we are coming to recognize as a “reality crisis.”
We’ve already identified the elements of the Symbiotic Culture DNA that will naturally reproduce the Culture of Connection. While building our Reno networks and learning from Sarvodaya's successes, we came up with what we call Fractal Community Empowerment to spread and scale Symbiotic Culture instantly and simultaneously locally and consequently globally.
Fractal community empowerment implies the simultaneous awakening of thousands of local communities and millions of organizations globally, nurturing the foundation for what could be called a “planetary superorganism” that will realize the
next phase of human cultural evolution, Cultural Symbiogenesis.
Consider the audacious intention of activating 50,000 communities globally to build Symbiotic Networks to connect the good and practice intentional mutual benefit. After all, Sarvodaya has already activated 5,000 communities that are achieving this in only one country!
Were we to attempt this in the “normal” way, step by step, in a linear fashion and within a formal ego-based and siloed organizational approach—or, even if we could somehow grow geometrically, even with the exponential growth of traditional networks, if we are still operating within the Culture of Separation, we could never achieve a breakthrough — as it would take generations — if ever.
Our current crises do not permit us the luxury of that time frame. Hence, fractal community empowerment means infusing the Symbiotic Culture DNA’s reproducible pattern in communities everywhere instantly and simultaneously.
As we will learn in Part III of this book, anyone acting as a “space-holder” for intentional mutual benefit can begin to practice this wherever they are, in whichever communities they find themselves. They need not be community organizers, leaders, or influencers—just individuals embodying Symbiotic Culture DNA and radiating this outward person to person, organization to organization, and community to community at any scale.
Any individual anywhere can “own” the purpose of “uniting the cosmos in love,” consciously bringing together that which is separate and letting their daily actions radiate from that purpose. Anyone can practice the principles and bring the virtues to whatever communities they are a part of—including their own family.
After all, a family is a mini-community where individual preferences and desires must balance common needs and collective well-being through Love, and that practical “calling” can naturally expand to every other community they are already a part of.
Anyone reading this book who sees the power of the Ancient Blueprint and seeks to manifest it in the world can “inject” this Symbiotic Culture DNA into their neighborhoods, churches or religious institutions, schools, workplaces, and even larger corporations and governments.
We don’t need to wait until we are ready to organize our micro-region—in fact, even though many of us may not be wired to do that work, each of us can be a living ambassador of Symbiotic Culture.
I’ve said it earlier, and it bears repeating.
Symbiotic Culture is not a “technique” but a new way of life. While I am certainly teaching you techniques in this book, if you see it as only a technique, you will not release the true power inherent in the process, and paradoxically, you won’t be able to release the power inherent in each of us or our communities.
It’s an approach rooted in an Ancient Blueprint, a Cosmic pattern for building a Culture of Connection, a new creation — in parallel with and in stark contrast to the Culture of Separation.
Anyone can bring Symbiotic Culture DNA to any community they are part of – even large organizations and multi-national corporations – through five simple steps:
1. Know your purpose.
2. Embody the principles.
3. Practice the Virtues.
4. Identify community needs.
5. Bring silos together to address those needs.
Gandhi – who witnessed the destructive chain reaction caused by the physical power of nuclear weapons before he died – envisioned a countervailing spiritual power, a constructive moral “chain reaction” coming from the deeper foundations within the human heart that spreads and scales from individual to individual, community to community, to bring forth what Dr. Ari called “a critical mass of spiritual consciousness.”
The Ancient Blueprint, brought to life through the Symbiotic Culture DNA, releases human beings' infinite potential for goodness and infuses it into every community they are part of.
The next stage of evolution seems to nurture new, coherent containers for this consciousness to spread into community life—the concrete spiritual, social, economic, and political infrastructure, released and proliferated through ever-expanding network nodes of intersection within and between those already making a difference.
Hundreds, thousands, millions of people and their organizations can bring this heightened consciousness to their daily lives and in the most mundane of human interactions—with the grocery store cashier, bank teller, or homeless individual on the street, to families, neighborhoods, organizations, and local and global communities. This is how Symbiotic DNA takes hold.
This is fractal community empowerment that implants these loving seeds everywhere and allows them to take hold, grow, flourish, and shine in stark contrast to the prevalent Culture of Separation. This will, in turn, lead to networks and structures that will reinforce the Culture of Connection.
This is how we accomplish the impossible.
I can’t emphasize the importance of the individual as the spark for fractal empowerment. Practicing Virtues is the “decoding” and the reproduction of a “pattern” that is universal in human culture. Every society, for example, recognizes and appreciates kindness and generosity.
The more consciously they are practiced, the more they can spread to the larger community, and the more the community at large comes to “resemble” these Virtues. They literally “organize and unify” the personality, not just of the individual but the community itself!
As we will see as we explore the other networks that we developed in Reno, these emanated from an “organized and unified” community ground of being that extended the Ancient Blueprint first one-on-one, then to small circles of trust, then to a larger group of like-minded collaborators, and finally to a larger distributed network.
Every phase recreated the fractal of loving Virtues.
That’s how we reached and impacted all of Northern Nevada, how Sarvodaya created its network of village economies, and how anyone reading this book and motivated to do so can become the seed wherever they are.
We began this chapter with the question, what will unite humanity?
I believe we have an answer—we are united by our common need to survive and thrive and our common longing, even if only dimly recognized, for Beloved Community. As our Reno group clarified our purpose, uncovered the principles, and identified our Virtues, we came up with the foundation of a new but age-old story—Symbiotic Culture.
We now have an Ancient Blueprint to guide us—to spread the DNA of this culture fractally. If we choose to accept it, we also have a mission—each of us—to proliferate intentional mutual benefit and be a channel for Cosmic Love. We co-create that Kingdom of Kindness, that Culture of Connection, by living it now in whatever communities
or situations we find ourselves in.
In the next chapter, we will see how the simple commandment, “Love thy Neighbor,” can help “re-village” communities and, by extension, the whole planet, and make the dreams and visions of Jesus, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. Ari and many of you our new reality – in this very moment.
Find out how we continued to apply Fractal Community Empowerment to neighborhood networks NEXT in Chapter 9, Part 1, Re-Villaging Community: Start With Loving Your Neighbor.
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I like this revillage term. SO are there any places called Villages in Nevada? How do we bring back the term village with what it encompasses?