What Will Unite Humanity? Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA, Chapter 8 Part 2
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 2 — “What Will Unite Humanity? Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA,” Virtues Versus Values … Valentine’s Day Meeting – Discovering What Unites Us … One Singular Purpose … Founding Principles … 5 Shared, Universal Virtues and the Transcendent Ground of Being
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 1
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.
Virtues Versus Values — Rediscovering a Shared Reality
As you will notice reading this chapter, we discuss Virtues, values, and principles—with a particular emphasis on “values.” You might be curious about why, given that so much of our conversation thus far has focused on Virtues, we mainly emphasized values at that Valentine’s meeting.
It had to do with my own limited understanding at the time and pressure from a few individuals who felt that the word Virtue was too closely associated with religion.
We’ll discuss that shortly, but in the meantime, let’s distinguish between Virtues and values and explain why that distinction is so important.
While it would be easy to lump the two together, values and Virtues are different—in some ways, almost polar opposites!
The short answer is that values are potentially divisive, while Virtues are unitive. Values are about personal tastes, while Virtues unify our personality and society at the same time.
Values — wealth, success, happiness, freedom, security, recognition
Virtues — honesty, courage, compassion, love, humility
Values are subjective, personal beliefs that people hold dear. Values represent what we “value,” and these can be very diverse, even conflictual. For example, some people value personal success and happiness above all else. Others value service. Even within these distinctions, there are deeper ones.
Some people’s definition of happiness and success includes serving others. Other people may not consider it. Values may also be associated with political or religious ideology. For example, some hold a woman’s right to choose as a noble value. Others believe with equal fervor that abortion should be illegal.
Can you see where “values” can feed the Culture of Separation rather than bring us together?
Given that these values are purely subjective, they fit nicely with “cultural relativism,” individualism, and the generic definition of “freedom.” How often have you heard the phrase, in America, “Go ahead. It’s a free country”? In the West, we associate “freedom” with “doing your own thing” and with having individual agency associated with a myriad of personalized values and an endless plethora of “choices.”
However, through my own transcendent experiences, I came to see “freedom” as the freedom to choose to live as if a Culture of Connection already exists, offering “higher” freedom to align with both the Cosmic and the natural order.
Consider this — how “free” are we really, growing up in a Culture of Separation that marginalizes and dismisses the Transcendent as superstitious?
In a materialistic culture, we learn that we are “free” to buy whichever brand of cereal, toothpaste, or toilet paper we desire—yet we can’t seem to free ourselves from a system of extraction, exploitation, and war. Is our freedom in this context really freedom—or just emotional and mental slavery to all of the passions and what we “value,” streaming to us 24/7 through our smartphones and other devices?
For me and many others, alignment with the natural order is the true basis of freedom. We are free to unite the Cosmos in Love and bring that which has been separate together.
In contrast to values, Virtues are objective, time-tested qualities of human character (such as Love, Patience, Humility, Self-Control, and Charity) that have been considered universally Good, True, and Beautiful — a “moral” standard of behavior we all aspire to, acknowledged over 3,000+ years, whether within Eastern, Western, or Indigenous systems of culture, religion, and secular civic philosophy.
There are hardly any values people can agree on universally. However, Virtues are universally considered “good” across human cultures.
Values are primarily about beliefs and structures of the mind and the ego.
Virtues are intentional, practiced habits of the heart, with an eye toward
serving the greater good.
Values are too often self-serving; Virtues are almost always other-serving.
Can you see where conflating values and Virtues can be problematic?
At the time Conscious Community was meeting, I instinctively wanted to use the word Virtues to describe these universal “goods,” even though “values” were more acceptable to secular sensibilities. However, there were those in the group who thought Virtues were too religious, specifically connected to the Catholic Church.
What I didn’t fully realize at that time was how many people have felt wounded by religion and religious leadership while growing up — wounded and not healed, even today.
Without being clear about the universality and true meaning of Virtues, I gave in at the time to the more secular view.
I thought calling them “values” would gain broader agreement, but I was mistaken. I now see that calling them values diminishes their power. It's just another case of “throwing the baby Jesus out with the bathwater.” I am now clear how Virtues are distinct from values, and I will never conflate them again.
Virtues are cross-cultural… cross-religious…, and cross-time, a key to building local communities and, in that regard, the last hope for humanity.
As you read the rest of this chapter, you will see the word “values” in different places. That was the language we ended up using. In many cases — particularly as we discuss qualities of character — you can substitute “Virtue.” This was the best we could do at the time!
Keep in mind that this was all taking place in the mid-2000s, a time when the “culture wars” were heating up and people were aligning around their own “truths.” In this post-truth environment, there was a sense of bewilderment, even hopelessness, about finding some objective standard, universal truth, or universal principles.
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, our civilization finds itself in the midst of a “reality crisis” intensified by social media algorithms that turn silos into echo chambers and reinforce a myriad of realities based on conflictual values and personal preferences.
Meanwhile, those ever-present, unitive Virtues hold the key to “rediscovering” a shared reality that includes and transcends the personalized worldviews and customized realities that characterize the Culture of Separation.
As we gathered that Valentine’s Day nearly two decades ago, we were about to break the trance of separation and discover for ourselves what unites us.
Valentine’s Day Meeting – Discovering What Unites Us
Our Valentine’s Day meeting directly confronted the Culture of Separation and the post-modern view of moral and cultural relativism that maintains there is no such thing as a universal anything.
Of course, the dictum that “everything is relative, and there are no absolutes” is an absolute!
For our core planning group, this was not our first go-round addressing “spiritual principles and values.” While just about everyone recognized the need, a small minority saw the entire topic as divisive. For example, a local business owner who had been CEO of a large, multinational corporation was opposed to the idea on these grounds, even though he himself held deep spiritual values. This position was understandable.
We had created and cultivated such unity and cooperation without addressing what some may see as “theological issues” — why mess with a winning formula? At the same time, I saw that holding shared Virtues (loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, empathetic joy for oneself and others) was a key reason for Sarvodaya’s success and that we would benefit from formally identifying them, if possible.
Discovering shared values is a way to address the “reality crisis” and resulting “crisis of meaning.” Whether you agree, as I do with C.S. Lewis, that there are “objective values” coming from a Transcendent reality or Logos universally—whether from East, West, or Indigenous—is irrelevant.
People were welcome whether they believed that universal values and moral sensibility came from the divine, as Socrates once said, or if they thought that values and morality are a product of the human psyche.
The point was to see if we could find a framework around Love and Service, which we all share, a framework to build a parallel culture, society, economics, and politics in which those universal interior Virtues are expressed directly in the way we live and do business.
In a Culture of Separation, we are told that we must fight each other and compete to get “on top” and ahead. We had already demonstrated the opposite to be true. Through our buy local, food, and Conscious Community networks, we proved a new “Culture of Connection” is both workable and desirable and is in alignment with a truly “Virtuous” free market approach.
So it was that on Valentine’s Day 2006 — just weeks after we launched our Local Food System Network — we held our community meeting at the McKinley Arts Center, a community center run by the City of Reno. We met in the gracious community room, a space suitable for the hundred or so leaders and connectors we invited. The group included business leaders, religious and spiritual leaders, directors of nonprofits, city officials, politicians, citizens, and activists. We also had representatives from public agencies, like the library system.
We broke our hundred or so connectors and community leaders into small groups, and we had them address the question, “What is the single most challenging problem facing Reno (and society at large) today?”
The great majority of those in the room identified the problem as fragmentation and disunity and that people were separated into “silos,” representing different and sometimes conflicting beliefs or interests. I was surprised that the people in the room didn’t list problems like hunger, poverty, crime, climate/environment, and corruption. They immediately chose to address the less visible yet more significant perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes at the root of all of those problems.
With the fundamental issue of societal fragmentation identified, we posed two other questions: What general ways can we bring the community together, and what concrete things can our community do in this regard?
We generated 150 suggestions, many of which pointed to identifying shared Virtues, values, and principles—like the Golden Rule, Love Thy Neighbor, and charity begins at home—that are “universal” and transcend religious and cultural differences. We then scheduled follow-up meetings, where we addressed two more questions: What is the most effective way to identify the shared principles and values? And, once identified, how do we present these values in a way people can remember and use?
We were fortunate to have someone participating who had been a Marine Corps chaplain and had been part of an effort to identify key values/Virtues for the different US military services. That opened an entirely new avenue for discovering values. In addition to the Marine Corps, we looked at the values set forth by other military branches, like the US Air Force, and groups as diverse as the State of Louisiana Troopers, a Jewish synagogue, the Catholic Church, and many other Christian denominations, as well as Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and “spiritual” groups. We also looked at secular and civic organizations (nonprofits, businesses, governments), including atheism.
From this wide variety of philosophies and institutions, our group brainstormed a list of about twenty principles, one hundred values, shared community needs, and how the network would be formed — which we eventually reduced to 1 purpose, 8 principles, 5 main values, and 12 shared needs.
All these principles and the Virtues that they call forth rested on one largely unspoken purpose — to bring the Ancient Blueprint to life for the benefit of each and all.
Our Highest Purpose
Although we never addressed it directly on Valentine’s Day and subsequent meetings, looking back now, our purpose was implicit in what we were doing:
To nurture a society and culture where practicing intentional mutual benefit (Symbiosis) at every scale, whether personally, within our family, neighborhood, organizations, community, nation, or the whole world, becomes the norm!
Going deeper, this was most simply and directly expressed by St. Maximus the Confessor in the 8th century as — “to unite the cosmos in love” — to bring that which has been separate together.
Throughout history, cultures and religions—East, West, Indigenous—have sensed that our destiny is a “beloved community.” The fundamental “shared purpose” that emanates from the Ancient Blueprint is to bring God or “heaven” to earth. In this unitive idea, there is a knowing that we all come from one Source that goes by many names—God, Spirit, Oneness, Cosmic Love … or as I choose to call it, the Transcendent.
We seem to share a sense that we come from a common Reality, that Earth is our common home, and that we are, in Reality, One Family.
The fragmentation that our community defined as the fundamental problem was directly related to the loss of a “sane and sacred center” and the separation of material science from the transcendent religious or spiritual perspective.
At the time, no one was really articulating the idea that the “god” of materialism had failed, although the evidence was all around us. In seeking common ground to address the fragmentation and disunity, we instinctively gravitated to the universal principles and radiant Virtues that make the Transcendent immanent.
Without acknowledging what we eventually called the “reality crisis,” together, we were shaping our reality to bring forth a Culture of Connection alongside and parallel to the Culture of Separation.
As you examine the principles and Virtues we identified, notice how they resonate with and reinforce our fundamental purpose—to create a virtuous society, culture, economy, and governance systems.
Founding Principles
Sitting atop our common purpose, we identified eight principles to help us build our mutually beneficial symbiotic network of networks. As you will read later in this chapter, the purpose, principles, Virtues, and needs we identified are part of the “Symbiotic Culture DNA” that makes what we did replicable anywhere and everywhere.
While my focus up until now has been embedding Symbiotic Culture DNA into local community networks, it can also be embedded personally in our daily lives and within any organizational community—at any scale—locally, nationally, or globally
(physically or even digitally).
The Golden Rule (2.0) is found in a majority of religious and ethical systems. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We call it 2.0 because it goes deeper than the “transactional” version. Our version acknowledges our interconnection: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you because we come from one Transcendent Source, we are One living family, and deep down, I am you and you are me. We are in this together. The Golden Rule is the Ancient Blueprint codified to human affairs.
Charity begins at Home, and Self-rule is also universal. Take care of yourself and those close to you, take responsibility for yourself and your family and then spread that to others. In a society where so much—including responsibility—gets externalized, this principle makes foundational each person’s individual, spiritual sovereignty. As mentioned earlier, both Hinduism and Buddhism (Swaraj, self-rule), as well as Catholicism (Subsidiarity), and more generally, Christianity acknowledge this principle. We discovered it for ourselves.
Acknowledge Something Bigger than Yourself. For many, this is God; for others, the Transcendent “Universe,” Higher Power, Nature, the World, Community, etc. When we experience ourselves as part of something larger, it puts the ego in its rightful place as a servant and not a dictator. In other words, the Transcendent isn’t a far-away goal sitting on top of Maslow’s hierarchy or religious practice; it’s our foundational Reality in the here and now.
Love Thy Neighbor. Not just being of service to our physical neighbor but to all those who we meet. Symbiotic networks depend on leaders and others sharing their resources and connections generously. As with Golden Rule 2.0, it puts love into action through universal intentional mutual benefit in all relations.
Think Globally, Act Locally. We can’t solve global problems directly by trying to solve them globally! The principles of Swaraj and Subsidiarity call on us to begin locally and in solidarity with others in the regions we inhabit. This is what will make Symbiotic Culture scalable and spreadable!
If fifty thousand communities around the world each built their own “node” of a symbiotic culture, and these nodes and networks were connected (socially, economically, and politically) to each other, we would have a “bubble up” rather than a “trickle down” economy. Local nodes are a fractal of the Ancient Blueprint, the underlying pattern, and can be replicated anywhere around the globe — and connected through a worldwide “commonwealth” network of “village economies.”A Community-based Local Economy. Related to charity, prosperity begins at home. Be responsible for taking care of your physical and economic needs, then work with your family members to grow economically, and then support others in the community who work to strengthen a local community culture and economic base. Not just charity, but prosperity begins at home!
Focus on What We Have in Common. Instead of inter-tribal cultural wars, we agreed to keep our focus on working on common community needs while building the world that we want. A common, functional purpose is the “secret sauce” for unifying us beyond our differences. Focus on the common community needs of any healthy community, in the same way, that the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka has been doing within their ten basic human needs approach.
Build a New Connected Organism, not a Separate, Competing Organization. The major cultural breakthrough, what I have called Cultural Symbiogenesis, is to move from a culture based on a “single silo” approach to addressing community and societal challenges and evolve into a “multi-siloed” network-centric society — where the foundational networks don’t become just another competing silo. This new “organism” is the living model to transform the Culture of Separation into the Culture of Connection.
Shared, Universal Virtues
From the master list of 100 Virtues/values, we narrowed them down to 35 values and grouped them underneath five “archetypal patterns” of value: Love, Integrity, Courage, Service, and Respect. (Note: As mentioned earlier, those “values” are truly Virtues because they represent virtuous qualities of character.)
We call these archetypal because they are valued across cultures, from indigenous to industrial, religious to secular, in rich countries and poor ones. Even countries in conflict with one another seem to share these same universal values! This should not diminish the importance of these values but accentuate them.
What if we focused on this commonality and allowed differences to temporarily fade into the background?
Could we really create unity without uniformity?
Our initial Valentine’s Day starting point—love—was too general. However, that context launched a conversation about the ways love is expressed. Plato spoke of truth, beauty, and goodness as radiant expressions of love. Our group added virtues like compassion, kindness, empathy, and curiosity that led to awareness.
Theological issues and differences become irrelevant when the purpose is embodiment and participation rather than intellectual agreement on a series of propositions. By focusing on these shared qualities, we evoked the essence of love from the group.
Because of my own experiences of luminosity and seeing this luminosity emanate through the web of nature and the web of life, I sensed a transcendent power at work. That — like my experience of Jesus Christ — is a truly subjective view. It’s not a theory to be proven or disproved – but a way of living that either creates a more abundant life for a person and for society in general, or it doesn’t.
Of course, there are other viewpoints that maintain these values evolved through trial and error in human culture without “god” or a transcendent power.
However — as I learned time and time again, working with diverse viewpoints toward a common goal — there is an unacknowledged universal attraction to the “Ground of Being” principles we uncovered through our inquiry.
In the end, how we arrive at these common values/Virtues makes little difference. The proof is in practice.
While I believe that Virtues are an objective reality, flowing from the Transcendent, God, or the divine, the fact that others may see Virtues as coming from man or nature is irrelevant.
What matters is that you practice them and embody these qualities in the community.
Regardless of how we source these principles and Virtues, they seem to be embedded in every human culture and in our universal longing to not only transcend the ego self as a “locus of control” but also a longing for a culture of connection and beloved community.
As we discovered, these are not just abstract ideals and prescriptions for individual morality and actualization. Once again, I see virtues as the most powerful “Transcendent Energies,” extrinsically and intrinsically part of the very structure of “reality” (the Ancient Blueprint) and the foundation for a symbiotic community.
Being consciously aware of and then applying these Virtuous patterns flowing from
spiritual and natural reality may very well usher in the next phase of human evolution.
It will allow us to turn the pyramid of worldly dominance hierarchies on its head, creating multiple, interlinking growth hierarchies, a functional community operating system from the bottom up that will allow us all to thrive.
Find out how we continued to develop a Unifying Worldview, the “Glue,” to guide our continuing actions in the NEXT POST — Chapter 8, Part 3: What Will Unite Humanity? — Decoding Symbiotic Culture DNA
A Constellation of Virtues – A Practical Look at The True Human Superpower … A Growth Network Based on 12 Needs … A Distributed Network Infrastructure
I have seen values described as fundamental values and instrumental values e.g. in the World Values Survey and literature. So people agree on the fundamentals but not the instrumental ways to reach them. The instrumental tend to be religio-culturally mediated. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp
I'm new here. We share common intent... I can speak to many aspects of just this in my own way. A work in progress I am, but I see myself in your format here. Kind Regards, I present Sapiedelic Studies of a Group Luminal Mind:. Sapiedelic means, to attain and acquire knowledge and wisdom, a new disciple for this ever present now. Studies in Lucidisicm, and When the LIGHT Dawns. Deep PEACE and Wholeness in the PNEUMA (breath/spirit) of NOW ( I AM ),
Richard