“I’m Already Doing It!”

I wasn’t expecting that answer. It was 2005, and I was calling some of the key people involved in food and agriculture across Northern Nevada. For several years, our community work had been evolving from what we called a Local Living Economy Network toward something more focused: local food.

My first call was to the owner of one of the oldest farms near Fallon, Nevada. His family had been farming there for five generations. I already knew him through our Buy Local work, and he was also a small-business counselor. If anyone understood both farming and the local economy, I thought, he would.

I asked what he thought about creating a Local Food System Network. “I’m already doing it!” he replied.

That stopped me. “Okay,” I said. “Pretend you’re an eagle flying over your network. What would you see?” He described the farmers and ranchers he knew. Then I asked about other parts of a local food system. Farmers’ markets? No. Community-supported agriculture? No. Farm-to-table restaurants? No. In fact, he was selling most of his crops outside the region.

He certainly had a network, and an important one. But it was one part of a much larger ecosystem whose other parts were largely invisible from where he stood. I asked whether he would be interested in meeting some of those other people and seeing what might happen if we connected their worlds. He said yes. That thirty-minute conversation became the first step toward what eventually became the Northern Nevada Local Food System Network.

For years I interpreted “I’m already doing it” as resistance. Only much later did I understand that he had been telling me something far more important. He really was already doing it. And so was almost everyone else, from where they stood.

The Good is Already Alive

As I became more deeply involved in community work, I found no shortage of people trying to make the world better. Farmers were producing food, small-business owners employing people, churches feeding families, nonprofits helping people through crises, environmentalists protecting watersheds, civic groups organizing neighborhoods, activists fighting injustice, and public servants trying to make systems work.

The problem was not an absence of goodness. Much of that goodness simply lived in separate worlds. Local-food people knew local-food people. Businesspeople knew businesspeople. Faith communities had their circles. Progressives organized with progressives, conservatives with conservatives.

At one of our first large food-system gatherings, nearly a hundred regional leaders came together. The director of the local food bank stood and said something that stayed with me: she had wanted something like this for ten years. She simply hadn’t had the time to do it.

She didn’t lack vision or commitment. She was busy running a food bank. I began seeing the same paradox everywhere: the more responsible people are for the good work already in front of them, the less capacity they have to see and connect with the good beyond it. The pastor has a congregation. The farmer has a farm. The entrepreneur has customers and employees. The activist has a cause.

An insight from Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s spiritual successor, later gave words to what I was beginning to see: “We do not aim at doing mere acts of kindness, but at creating a Kingdom of Kindness.”

The good is already everywhere. But we have learned to see and organize our lives in separate worlds, a pattern I came to recognize as the Culture of Separation. Even our most sincere efforts to do good remain confined within these separate worlds, disconnected from the good others are doing.

Everybody is already doing it. So who tends the space between them?

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The Separation I Carried Within

I could tell this story as though I were the enlightened connector who saw the silos everybody else had missed. But that isn’t what happened. Some of the most important boundaries I discovered were inside me.

One involved Christianity. I had developed a real antipathy toward it, shaped by what I had observed in American culture and politics and by my own assumptions and experiences. Eventually I had to acknowledge something uncomfortable: I was prejudiced.

The irony was difficult to miss.

I was trying to connect the community while placing one of its largest communities inside a category that kept it at a distance.

Looking back, I can see that my own blind spot was part of something larger. I had absorbed a cultural habit of separating the spiritual from public life. While writing this book, I spoke with someone in a county government about the virtues underlying healthy community life and local food systems. When I mentioned Love, she laughed.

Love simply didn’t sound like something that belonged in serious civic work.

I had seen this separation for years. Community, business, and government leaders often kept their deepest spiritual convictions private. I remember a leader in the network-weaving movement telling me she kept her spiritual life private because she didn’t want it to be divisive. I understood the impulse. Yet in trying to create inclusive spaces, we had quietly learned to leave one of the deepest parts of ourselves outside the room.

And I had done it too.

I considered myself open-minded. I was interested in Indigenous spirituality, Buddhism, mystical traditions, science, systems thinking, and other ways of understanding reality.

So I began engaging with Christian communities instead of treating Christianity as an abstraction. I visited churches, talked with pastors, and formed relationships with people whose beliefs and language sometimes made me uncomfortable. At lunch with an evangelical Christian friend, I noticed myself tightening as he spoke. I disagreed with some of what he was saying and wanted to correct him.

Then I noticed the loving intention beneath his words and our shared concern for the community, and I began to see the person rather than the beliefs I disagreed with. The disagreement didn’t disappear, but for a moment it stopped defining the relationship. I could see him again, not primarily as an evangelical or conservative, but as a fellow human being whose ideas differed from mine but who shared my desire to serve the community.

I began to understand that the Culture of Separation shapes what we see, often without our realizing it. It had shaped me too. The farmer could see his agricultural network but not the larger food ecosystem. I was doing something similar with people: seeing the part before the whole. I thought I was seeing them clearly, but I wasn’t.

I began to realize that the Culture of Separation had not only shaped the institutions around me.

It had shaped the way I saw the world.

Trying to Change the System From Within

I soon encountered another dimension of the same problem as an executive director in the nonprofit world. In 1997, the San Diego Food Bank recruited me to lead its 100,000-square-foot operation, with twenty employees and hundreds of organizations depending on us for food. I arrived with an ambitious mission: I wanted to help end hunger in San Diego County.

At my first team meeting, I asked, “How many of you believe we can end hunger in San Diego County?” One hand went up. Only one of twenty employees believed it was possible. We had become extraordinarily good at alleviating hunger without seriously asking what it would take to eliminate it.

We did good work, distributing enormous amounts of food through churches, shelters, and nonprofits.

I was surrounded by good people doing good things, yet funding structures, bureaucratic interests, and organizational incentives made fundamental change extraordinarily difficult. Eventually I left, drawn toward economic empowerment as a way of addressing hunger closer to its roots.

I became director of the Nevada Micro-Enterprise Initiative, helping low-income entrepreneurs gain skills, financing, and economic agency. The impact was sometimes transformative: one client who had once been homeless eventually became a caterer for events at the Governor’s residence. But another limitation soon became clear. We could help someone start a business, but without a supportive community and economic ecosystem around them, they were largely on their own.

Different nonprofit. Different strategy. Same underlying constraint: good people doing good work inside structures that limited what they could accomplish together. I kept seeing how those structures constrained the very people trying to serve their communities.

Yet the limits of institutions were only part of the puzzle. Even communities with deep relationships, shared purpose, and a spiritual foundation remain disconnected from the wider community when their coherence stops at their own boundaries.

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Islands of Coherence

Years later, in Jerusalem, I encountered another version of “I’m already doing it.” I was staying at a large retreat center created for Christian and other pilgrims and got to know the priest who directed it. We connected easily. Both of us understood our lives in terms of our individual calling, and both believed that God calls us toward love and service.

His work wasn’t narrowly Catholic. He worked with Protestants and Orthodox Christians and participated in projects serving a wider community. As I described my hope of building bridges among separated groups, he responded with those familiar words: “I’m already doing it.”

This time I couldn’t explain the response by saying someone had failed to discover the spiritual foundation of community. He was a priest. His tradition already contained the pattern I was talking about: Love God and love your neighbor, a transformation of the heart that becomes embodied in how we serve, reconcile, and build community together.

And, more importantly, in his own way, he was doing it.

The encounter forced me to refocus my question. Perhaps the issue wasn’t whether people understood service, or even whether they recognized a transcendent source of Love.

Churches, movements, nonprofits, businesses, political groups, regenerative communities, and spiritual communities can all possess deep coherence. But the identity that creates belonging also creates an invisible boundary around it. Strong communities can become remarkably coherent within themselves while struggling to recognize the good beyond their boundaries. Each sees a piece of the puzzle. None sees the whole picture.

I began seeing versions of this pattern in very different worlds, and in myself. As a progressive organizer, I had often conflated the dominance of large corporations and governments with business itself. Only after becoming a small-business owner did I see how crude that category was. Main Street businesses were not simply miniature versions of the oligarchic institutions I opposed; they were part of the fabric of their communities.

Then the symmetry became hard to miss. A national Christian organization once asked me to help create a Christian business network. In my local-economy work, some wanted a green-business network; in our local-food work, some wanted to include only organic producers. In regenerative circles, I encountered the same instinct to begin with people and businesses already committed to regeneration. The convictions differed, but the organizing logic was similar: gather those who already embody our vision of the good.

There is nothing inherently wrong with affinity. People naturally gather around shared identities, beliefs, interests, and purposes, and those relationships create tremendous good. The problem comes when the boundary of the affinity group becomes the boundary of the good we are capable of seeing. The causes changed. The boundary kept reappearing.

I wondered whether separation was not merely a problem our movements were trying to solve, but something all of us, including me, had inherited from the culture that formed us. And there was another practical reality: the priest must tend his ministry, the activist the movement, the executive the organization. This is not necessarily a moral failure; it is often simply how our world is organized.

The Relationship Precedes the Network

I began to see bridge-building as a distinct role in community life: someone has to recognize the relationships obscured by the Culture of Separation and help coherent communities discover one another without asking them to surrender what makes them distinct. Bridge-builders are not called to create the good, but to help connect it.

For me, that work became part of a larger sacred act: bringing together what has been separated. The seventh-century Orthodox Christian monk St. Maximus the Confessor saw this as part of our sacred human vocation: to unite what has been divided and ultimately gather creation into unity through Love. And I began to recognize this same impulse in a very contemporary form. There is an entire field of bridge builders, network weavers, systems thinkers, and community connectors doing remarkable work.

They build trust, connect organizations and projects, cultivate shared purpose, distribute leadership, and help networks become more collaborative and resilient. Some also recognize inner transformation and a deeper interconnection underlying the work. In many ways, they had discovered the same practical necessity I had.

But that recognition pushed my question one level deeper:

That’s when it dawned on me that the first task is not creating coherence but recognizing it. The islands do not first have to become related; they have to recognize a deeper relationship that already precedes the network.

Many networks begin with an issue, constituency, or shared theory of change. That can be enormously valuable. But a network organized around climate, food, faith, regenerative agriculture, economic justice, or any other concern can become a world of its own, with boundaries largely shaped by the issue that brought people together. It can overcome separation within its field while leaving larger boundaries among identities, ideologies, sectors, and communities intact.

Even a vast network of networks remains an island of coherence when it remains relationally separated from the larger whole. Networks are extraordinarily good at connecting people and organizations that already recognize themselves as related. The harder challenge is building relationships among people and institutions that do not yet recognize what they share. The task is not to dissolve these islands or erase what makes them distinct, but to build relationships across their boundaries.

Each network offers a legitimate window onto reality. The problem arises when we mistake the view from one window for the whole landscape. My experience kept pushing me toward a different starting point: the Christian and the Pagan are related before they agree. The conservative and progressive are related before they agree. The farmer and environmentalist are related before they discover a shared project.

Much movement building and network weaving begins with a shared issue, identity, constituency, or theory of change: gather people who resonate around that concern, strengthen relationships among them, develop cooperation, and create the coordination and structures that carry the work. That sequence can accomplish tremendous good. My experience, however, led me toward a different starting point.

We begin by recognizing that people already belong to one another in ways deeper than differences of belief, identity, sector, or ideology. From that recognition, relationship and trust can deepen; trust makes cooperation possible; cooperation makes coordination useful; and structure can emerge to serve the life already present.

The Ancient Blueprint names that prior relationship, the deeper relational order woven into creation by which life is already connected. We are not creating coherence by building the network; the network becomes one of the structures through which that relationship becomes visible and lived. That changes both whom we connect and why.

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Do We Need Another Movement?

That realization created a challenge for my own work.

Because eventually that movement, too, would become another silo, with its own brand, identity, members, funding, leaders, and boundaries.

I began to wonder whether “I’m already doing it” sometimes carried another message: people may have heard me offering yet another way to build community, competing with the many ways they were already doing it. The answer is not to persuade them to join my approach, but to become clearer about what I am actually trying to do: recognize the good people are already doing and help connect it.

That also made me wary of creating another organization. I had watched organizations gradually draw more and more attention to sustaining themselves. Projects require funding, administration, recognition, and leadership. All of that may be necessary, but it can leave less energy for building relationships beyond the organization itself. I began to release the idea that the answer was one more organization to join.

That was why, in Reno, I resisted when someone suggested that our emerging food network start a community garden.

People were puzzled. Why would anyone be against a community garden? It felt a little like opposing motherhood, apple pie, and kittens. But if we took on the garden project, soon our meetings would be about irrigation, volunteer schedules, seeds, budgets, and who forgot to lock the shed. All worthwhile things, but we would have become a community-garden organization.

Instead, I wanted to connect the people already growing gardens, operating farms, running restaurants, fighting hunger, selling food, and trying to build a healthier region. We don’t need to own the projects. We need to connect the good.

As a consequence, the food network grew. Farmers’ markets expanded. Restaurants and growers formed relationships. People who had regarded one another as competitors began acting more like colleagues. Local agriculture became more visible and valued across the region. And those community gardens we didn’t start? They appeared anyway. Dozens of projects emerged once people had begun building relationships and working together.

Go to Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

The Spiritual Source of Coherence

But connecting people still left me with a deeper question. If relationships, trust, and cooperation could not simply be engineered into existence, where did the coherence that made them possible come from?

Only much later did I understand that I had been trying to live out the deeper coherence of my earlier spiritual experiences through my community work, without realizing it.

But to understand how I came to see it, I first have to return to experiences that began long before I became a community organizer.

Long before I knew anything about networks, nonprofits, local economies, or community organizing, I had experienced something I could barely explain. Beginning when I was twelve, I had a series of non-ordinary spiritual experiences that continued for years. The first came as I lay in the liminal space before sleep. Suddenly I was immersed in an overwhelming loving Presence, awesomely beautiful, yet also frightening because I had no way to understand what was happening.

In those moments, the ordinary boundaries of life seemed to disappear. The world no longer felt divided into separate things. Nature, other people, and my own awareness seemed held within a single living and loving Presence. I felt connected to everything and, at the same time, part of something infinitely larger than myself.

I hadn’t thought my way to this understanding. I experienced a mysterious luminosity that felt more fundamental than the separateness of everyday life. I came to think of this experience of creation already held together within a deeper living and loving Presence as the Luminous Web.

Yet this Presence was anything but abstract. It was intimate and relational, as though what I was encountering somehow knew me. I felt I was touching an Ultimate Reality larger than anything I could comprehend, yet profoundly personal.

For years I followed that thread without knowing where it would lead.

Then, in 1990, during a nighttime drive through rural Baja California, the experience became unmistakably personal. As we passed small homes illuminated by kerosene lamps, my heart opened with overwhelming compassion for humanity. I experienced what I understood to be an encounter with Jesus.

My perspective shifted until I seemed to see the planet from above. Instead of city lights, I saw golden rays rising from the hearts of billions of people, converging into a great radiant Heart. It pulsed with a Love so complete that, for a moment, all boundaries disappeared.

Then the light began to flow back toward Earth, entering each person and moving from person to person, community to community, until a new web of Love and Light spread across the planet.

What I had experienced for years as the Luminous Web now had a face. Divine Love was pouring into the world through Christ. And in Jesus I began to see something else I had been searching for without knowing how to name it: the inseparability of loving God and loving one another. The transformation of our hearts and the transformation of our life together were not two different things.

I didn’t emerge from this wanting to start a new religion. I emerged with a question that would follow me for decades: if this unity and Love were real, why did human society seem so fragmented and broken?

My heart felt so open that I seemed to take in the suffering of the world itself. The distance between the Love I had just experienced and the world as it was broke my heart.

Jesus’ simple teaching, Love God and Love Others, gradually began to look less like moral advice and more like a description of reality itself. I had experienced Love moving in a pattern: received from beyond ourselves, flowing through us, and connecting us to one another.

I eventually came to call that pattern the Ancient Blueprint: a sacred relational order woven into creation, rooted in God and revealed to me through Christ.

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Love as Structure

This is what I mean by coherence: not uniformity, ideological agreement, or simply getting people to cooperate. Relationships alone do not guarantee flourishing; they can nurture or control, liberate or wound. What I had experienced pointed toward something more radical and beautiful: Love as a structure.

Gradually, I began to understand the contradiction that had broken my heart. The coherence I had experienced had not disappeared. We had learned to live as though it were not there. A Culture of Separation had formed us to see reality in fragments and dualities: spirit and matter, individual and community, religion and civic life, one organization and another, one movement and another.

Over time, I began to see the same relational pattern at work across areas of life I had once thought of as separate: faith, science, business, community, economics, and ecology.

I came to understand that relational pattern as rooted in a reality larger than ourselves, which I refer to in my work as the Transcendent. Across cultures and traditions, people have sought to understand and relate to what lies beyond the self, giving that mystery different names and expressions.

For me, Jesus Christ does not simply give that mystery a Christian name. I believe Christ reveals the ultimate Source and character of reality. I can stand fully within that conviction without requiring another person to share it before I can love them as my neighbor, learn from the good they carry, serve alongside them, or build our common life with them.

Yet others need not understand the Transcendent the same way I do. The invitation is not to merge our differences into a new spiritual synthesis, but to remain rooted in our deepest convictions while learning to recognize the good in one another and serve the life we share.

That brought the focus back to how we actually live together.

Rather than asking only how we might design better systems, I began asking how our systems and institutions might grow out of relationships already shaped by this deeper coherence.

The Ancient Blueprint was no longer merely a spiritual insight; it became the starting point for a different approach to cultural transformation. Virtues became the bridge from inner life to public life: Divine Love received inwardly and expressed in how we actually treat one another.

But even when that Love takes form within a church, movement, business, or community, it remains separated from the good taking form elsewhere. And this is where I believe many of our noblest efforts still lose the thread.

As I had already seen, the good is everywhere, but much of it remains fragmented. Faith communities, social-change efforts, regenerative movements, purpose-driven businesses, and civic and cultural initiatives each embody part of what a Culture of Connection looks like in practice.

For me, the Christian Church became one of the clearest tests of that question. Christianity already carries the teaching at the center of my own journey: Love God and Love Others, the Kingdom of Heaven, the invitation to bring Heaven to Earth. Yet churches, like every human institution, can embody profound love within their own communities while remaining separate from the larger human family.

Consider the extraordinary scale of what is already on the ground. The Catholic Church alone encompasses more than 1.4 billion people worldwide and more than 300,000 local parish and mission communities. We often speak as though social transformation requires us to build entirely new networks to reach people. Yet one of the largest place-based relational infrastructures on Earth already exists, embedded in cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods.

An island of coherence, after all, need not be small. It can be an enormous and highly developed network. What makes it an island is the boundary in relationship that keeps the people and good within it disconnected from the larger community around them.

The Catholic Church showed me just how large such an island could become. A global community of more than a billion people could embody profound coherence within itself and still remain relationally disconnected from the larger community of which it is a part.

Discovering Coherence Across Difference

On Valentine’s Day in 2006, nearly one hundred community leaders gathered in Reno, Nevada, for an experiment we called Taking Love Higher.

They came from more than twenty religious and spiritual organizations, along with nonprofits, businesses, government, social activism, and other areas of civic life. They represented different political perspectives, beliefs, and institutions. We were not trying to reconcile those differences or create a new belief system. Nor was this simply an interfaith gathering, or, to use a more contemporary term, an interspiritual one.

The question had grown out of several years of community-building in Northern Nevada. We had already catalyzed a Local Living Economy Network and a Local Food System Network. We wondered whether the same symbiotic network approach could extend into other spheres of community life, including neighborhoods, faith communities engaged in service, health, the environment, and more.

But something deeper was becoming clear. The greatest obstacle was not a shortage of organizations, programs, or good intentions. It was our inability to work together across the boundaries that separated us.

At the gathering, the participants themselves identified disunity as one of the central challenges facing the community. Rather than beginning with everything we disagreed about and trying to resolve our differences, we took a different approach.

We asked: What do we share in common? Through that question, a common ground began to emerge across our differences.

Looking back, I think we were also recovering something modern civic life had largely forgotten. Dominant secular currents in modern culture had pushed religion and spirituality into private life, marginalized them in public discourse, and in some circles treated them as superstitions humanity should have left behind.

But the space left behind did not remain empty. Materialism, consumerism, and individual self-interest increasingly shaped our common life, crowding out the deeper values and sources of meaning that people still carried within them.

This was not simply my impression. Years earlier, the Merck Family Fund’s Yearning for Balance study had found that 85 percent of Americans believed materialism, greed, and selfishness were crowding out deeper values. People wanted material security, but they did not want to lose their deeper human aspirations in the process.

Perhaps what we were experiencing in that room was part of that same yearning: a desire to recover shared meaning, Virtue, and a sense of responsibility beyond individual self-interest, without requiring us to share the same religious beliefs.

That did not mean putting religion back into the public square.

What emerged was a surprisingly broad common ground.

We understood the source and meaning of that common ground in very different ways. As a Christian, I understood its deepest Source through Jesus Christ. Others interpreted what we were experiencing through very different spiritual, religious, or secular frameworks, speaking of Spirit, a Higher Power, the sacred, nature, or simply something larger than themselves.

For building community, what mattered was not whether we believed the same thing, but whether we could recognize and embody the same relational pattern of Love in how we treated one another and built our common life together.

Our different beliefs did not have to disappear for us to recognize Love, integrity, courage, service, and respect in one another. The common ground became visible through our actions. As Jesus taught, “let your light shine before others,” so that others may see your good deeds. For me, Divine Love became visible in relationship and community through how I encountered and served others, not by requiring them to share my beliefs.

So we turned toward the qualities we would need to embody if we were actually going to build community together.

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Virtue is the Bridge Between Heaven and Earth

Through dialogue, research, and the community work that followed, we eventually identified five central Virtues: Love, Integrity, Courage, Service, and Respect, supported by roughly thirty-five related Virtues. We intentionally tested them to make sure they transcended religious language. Could people in government, business, nonprofits, civic organizations, and those who did not share a particular faith also recognize them? Again and again, the answer was yes.

People can value very different things.

They gave us a common language not for what we had to believe, but for how we wanted to live together.

I eventually came to understand Virtues as a bridge between the Transcendent and everyday life: we receive Divine Love inwardly in the vertical dimension and embody it outwardly in human character and relationship.

Virtues are not isolated qualities. They form a living constellation, interwoven and mutually reinforcing. One Virtue can balance another: courage needs prudence, confidence needs humility, justice needs mercy, and compassion needs truth. Embodying one Virtue naturally calls forth others, creating greater coherence in our character and relationships.

Years later, I encountered a striking expression of this insight in G. K. Chesterton: “The modern world is full of the old Christian Virtues gone mad. The Virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

That helped me see another dimension of the Culture of Separation: even good qualities can become distorted when we isolate them from the larger whole. Virtue is not simply a collection of admirable qualities. It is a coherent pattern of qualities ordered by Love, so that courage, integrity, service, humility, and respect strengthen and correct one another rather than operating in isolation.

And that was only the beginning.

We developed circles and other relational structures through which people could practice these commitments and carry them into the wider community.

Years later, I would call this Symbiotic Culture DNA. We had not walked into that Valentine’s Day gathering with some ready-made design. It emerged organically from our community’s collective intelligence, as people listened to one another, contributed what they were seeing, and gradually gave form to what we were discovering together.

Looking back, I can see something I did not fully understand at the time:

We do not create coherence by designing a system or even through a wonderful group process. We discover the coherence already present in the relational pattern of Love and then design structures that allow it to become visible and lived in community.

Spiritual Coherence Precedes Systems Design

Years later, I encountered a striking confirmation of this pattern from a culture very different from my own.

In the fall of 2022, after my wife and I moved back to Hawai‘i, we attended a gathering of Indigenous elders and leaders from across Oceania focused largely on food systems and breadfruit. There I met Dr. Failautusi Avegalio Jr., known as “Dr. Tusi,” a Samoan elder who had seen one of my videos about Symbiotic Networks.

He approached me and said that what I was describing reflected the Indigenous way of community he knew.

As Dr. Tusi explained it, the Polynesian approach to collaboration begins from a very different premise than much of modern organizational life: we are already connected. In the Polynesian understanding he described, all people are kin, bound to one another through a spiritual reality called “mana.”

In human relationships, that connection is expressed through faaaloalo, meaning trust and mutual respect, and alofa, meaning love. Collaboration therefore begins not by designing a structure or gathering people around a plan, but by cultivating relationship. A leader meets one-on-one with people, building trust and connection. Only then does the larger group come together, ready to collaborate.

I was stunned by the parallel.

Dr. Tusi and I had arrived at this understanding through very different cultural and spiritual paths. Yet the pattern he described was remarkably similar to what we had discovered in Reno.

That was when I began to wonder whether modern community-building had the sequence backward.

Much of contemporary social change begins with systems design. We create organizations, frameworks, programs, movements, networks, economic models, governance systems, and community-building methodologies. Then we bring people into them and hope relationship, trust, and a healthier culture will emerge.

I too had often assumed that if we could design the right networks and systems, a healthier culture would follow.

Our understandings of ultimate reality may differ profoundly. We do not need to resolve those differences before relationship, trust, and cooperation can grow. What matters socially is whether our lives become aligned with the relational pattern of Love, embodied through Virtues such as Love, integrity, courage, service, and respect, the qualities through which relationship and trust become possible.

Through a Christian lens, I would describe that movement this way: Divine Love becomes embodied in human character, expressed through Virtue, and lived in relationship—and through those relationships, begins to shape our common life.

Later, I discovered that St. Augustine described something similar. In The City of God, he wrote, “It seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love,” an idea that came to be known as ordo amoris, the ordering of love.

Augustine gave me language for something I had begun to discover through experience. The coherence of the Virtues is not accidental. They find their order in Love, which keeps them from becoming distorted in isolation.

This is what I mean when I say: Spiritual coherence precedes systems design.

This is not to say that systems design is unimportant, or that everyone must first become “spiritual,” much less adopt the same religion or worldview. It means that no system can manufacture the Love, trust, integrity, and willingness to serve one another upon which a healthy system ultimately depends.

A beautifully designed institution populated by people who do not trust one another will eventually reflect that absence of trust. A network cannot manufacture relationship merely by connecting nodes. A governance structure cannot produce integrity through procedure alone. Even a supposed “new economy” cannot legislate generosity into the human heart.

But coherence does not eliminate the need for design. It changes the role of design.

Once people embody Virtue, build relationships, discover Common Needs, and learn to cooperate, design takes on a new, important role. Systems and structures can help coordinate that cooperation, sustain it over time, and amplify what people can accomplish together.

The structure does not generate the coherence. It becomes a vessel that gives coherence form by helping people sustain relationships, coordinate their efforts, and carry what they have built together over time.

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Go to Discovery 3: The Blueprint is Already Here

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

The Lineage of the Ancient Blueprint

For much of my life, I thought I was searching for a new way to build community.

Only in retrospect did I begin to recognize the lineage I had been following. For me, it began with Jesus, whose life embodied Love, and continued through the early Christian communities that sought to give that Love social form while living within the Roman Empire.

But I first experienced the pattern personally through the encounter with Jesus I described earlier. In that vision, I experienced Divine Love received from a Transcendent reality in the vertical dimension and flowing outward through people and communities in the horizontal.

I saw that Love spreading outward until it seemed to encompass the world. But I was left with a question I did not know how to answer:

Years later, I encountered a living example that helped me begin to answer that question. It came from a direction I never expected.

That’s when Jesus sent me a Buddhist.

In the early 1990s, I discovered the work of Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, whom I came to know as Dr. Ari, and the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement he had helped build in Sri Lanka, a national network of over 5,000 communities. Over time, Ari became more than someone whose work I studied. I came to know him personally as a friend, colleague, and mentor.

What struck me most was not simply the extraordinary reach of Sarvodaya, but the seamless way Ari brought together spiritual awakening and community transformation.

Modern Western culture had taught me to separate these worlds. Spirituality belonged to churches, temples, meditation groups, or private belief. Community development belonged to nonprofits, governments, programs, and institutions. Ari made no such separation.

In Sarvodaya, awakening happened at the level of the person, families, and the village at the same time. They were not separate kinds of transformation, but dimensions of a single process.

Ari was showing me that what I had learned in the West to separate, spiritual awakening and social transformation, was actually part of the same process.

I tried to translate what I was learning about Sarvodaya into a vastly different world. In San Diego, that meant working in Logan Heights, a predominantly Black and Hispanic community of roughly 50,000 people confronting poverty, drugs, gangs, and drive-by shootings. Sri Lankan village development could not simply be imported into an American inner-city neighborhood.

The forms had to change, but I began to wonder whether the underlying pattern of embodying universal Virtues such as compassion and loving-kindness while building the concrete infrastructure of community life could remain.

Could everyday people become protagonists in transforming their community? Could relationship and service come before programs? Could communities organize around their own capacities and needs rather than waiting for institutions from outside to rescue them?

I did not yet have the language of Symbiotic Culture. I was experimenting, translating, learning, and sometimes failing. That’s when I began to see that Sarvodaya itself belonged to a much larger lineage.

Reading more deeply about Gandhi, I discovered how profoundly the Sermon on the Mount had affected him, particularly Jesus’ teaching on nonresistance to evil. But Gandhi did not see transformation simply as resistance to British rule.

Alongside nonviolent resistance was a constructive program: rebuilding village life and local economies, strengthening local self-reliance, addressing education, restoring dignity, reconciling divisions, and creating the social foundations of a new India.

It was Gandhi’s concept of Sarvodaya, meaning the welfare of all, that inspired Dr. Ari to reinterpret the idea through Buddhist teachings and Sri Lankan culture as the Awakening of All. He then put it into practice across thousands of villages.

The idea had traveled an extraordinary circle, moving from one tradition and culture into another, and now back again.

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The Pattern Across Civilizations

Decades later, while writing this book, I saw the same underlying pattern emerge in a place and tradition seemingly far removed from the worlds I had encountered before. Under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, Václav Benda and the dissidents around Charter 77 spoke of living in truth rather than allowing their lives to be absorbed into the lies of the Communist system.

What especially interested me was that this did not emerge from a single ideological community. Christian dissident networks were already creating spaces of trust and resistance. But Charter 77 reached beyond them, bringing Christians together with secular intellectuals, artists, former Communists, and others around a shared civic responsibility.

They did not have to become the same in order to act together.

As I looked across the larger lineage, I began to see a recurring pattern: people reclaiming the ability to organize their own communities, meet shared needs, and build another way of life when dominant systems no longer served the common good.

These examples did not form a simple historical chain. Their religions, cultures, and political circumstances were profoundly different. Jesus and the early Christian communities lived under the Roman Empire. Gandhi confronted the British Empire. Ari worked in a society emerging from colonial rule. Havel, Benda, and Charter 77 faced Soviet-dominated Communism.

That dynamic felt familiar from my own experience. For decades, I had watched movements and organizations doing extraordinary work while remaining separated from one another, each working on its own piece, often within its own boundaries. This was the Culture of Separation I had encountered again and again.

I began to realize that the problem I had spent decades encountering was not new. Neither was the way people responded to it.

That realization led me to look more closely at what these very different traditions and historical moments did and didn’t have in common. I wasn’t seeing the same theology. But I was recognizing the same relational pattern I had already begun to see: people rooted their lives in moral or spiritual conviction, formed relationships of service and trust, and began building another way of life from below.

Seen together, these examples helped me recognize the Ancient Blueprint at work across a two-thousand-year lineage.

Together, they were creating a Culture of Connection from the ground up.

The Spiritual Ground of Political Transformation

Looking across this lineage of the Ancient Blueprint, I found myself returning to the dissonance I had carried since childhood.

As a boy, I had experienced a reality in which life was deeply connected and held within Love. Yet I returned to a world that taught the opposite: that we are separate, that others are rivals, that power means control, and that the Sacred is irrelevant.

This was not merely an intellectual contradiction. That heartbreak stayed with me as I began to recognize how deeply separation shaped our common life.

Over time, I began to see that this contradiction was not only personal. It was built into the way our culture taught us to live. We are taught to be kind, generous, forgiving, and truthful, yet many of the systems we inhabit pull us toward competition, accumulation, domination, and self-protection.

What we cultivate within ourselves and what we absorb from the world around us does not remain personal. It takes form in the institutions, economies, communities, and relationships we build together. What appears outwardly as social, political, economic, and ecological breakdown is, at its root, a global spiritual crisis.

And beneath that crisis is a longing that has never disappeared.

We long to love and to be loved. We long to belong within families, friendships, and communities in which we are known, trusted, and cared for. We want our lives to mean something beyond consumption, achievement, and survival. Yet much of the world demands that we live contrary to these deepest desires.

That is part of the ache so many of us carry without knowing how to name it. Something within us reaches toward connection, relationship, meaning, generosity, and Love, while much of the culture teaches us to organize our lives around separation.

Eventually, that ache gives rise to a question:

For me, the answer was becoming clear. Choosing Love could not remain a private conviction. It had to take social form through the institutions, systems, and communities we create together.

Institutions do not simply organize power and resources. Over time, they embody and reinforce habits of relationship. They can cultivate generosity or self-interest, service or domination, trust or fear, humility or control.

We build institutions, but institutional culture also forms us.”

When competition replaces cooperation, dominance eclipses humility, and power outweighs compassion, the Culture of Separation becomes more than an idea. It becomes a way of life.

That’s when I realized that politics alone could never change the habits of relationship that shape how we use power. Building a better world is not primarily political. Beneath the question of who holds power lies a more basic question:

What, and Who, ultimately has our allegiance?

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Turning the World Right Side Up

That question of allegiance also changed the way I understood Jesus himself.

As a progressive activist, I had once seen Christianity largely as part of the problem, too often aligned with empire and political power. But through decades of grassroots community work, and especially through my encounters with Dr. Ari, something began to shift in me.

The Sermon on the Mount showed what that radically different way of life looks like. It was not simply preparing people for another world. It described life under the Kingdom of Heaven in this one: the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and those who hunger for justice becoming its bearers.

Elsewhere, Jesus made the reversal even more explicit: those who would be greatest must become servants of all.

Martin Luther King Jr., reflecting on this teaching in his “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, understood Jesus not as condemning the desire for greatness, but as redirecting it. Greatness was no longer measured by standing above others, but by our capacity to love and serve them.

That reversal reached far beyond rulers or political systems. The struggle between domination and service is also present in the culture that forms all of us. Separation teaches us to see ourselves as disconnected parts competing for power, resources, security, and status.

That is why the transformation could not simply mean putting different people in control of the same system. It meant transforming the exercise of power, replacing domination with service and self-serving love with self-giving Love.

That kind of transformation goes deeper than political revolution. Revolutions overturn existing orders and replace those who rule. But when the habits of domination and separation beneath those systems remain unchanged, the same logic of domination reappears in a new form.

But seeing what that radically different culture looks like is not the same as knowing how to live it in the world as it is. That tension brings us back to the ache we named earlier. We may experience Love, compassion, and connection in prayer, worship, meditation, or community, then return to institutions and workplaces that reward competition, self-protection, and getting ahead.

It is painful to recognize Love, compassion, courage, generosity, humility, and truthfulness as intrinsic to us, while living within systems that so often reward the opposite.

For me, that ache is the part of me that still knows I am made for another way of living. I believe we are all made for a life that is more loving, connected, and abundant.

That is why a spiritual foundation matters so deeply to this work: it helps us remember the truth of who we are beneath the habits of separation. For me, that remembering is rooted in God and returns me to what I had already experienced as a child: a reality where we are already connected, already held within Love, even when the world around me says otherwise.

From that remembering, the work becomes more than imagining a better society. It is to live from the truth that we are already connected, already held within Love.

Living in Truth

I was trying to live in a way that reflected the truth that we are not separate: our lives are already bound to God, to one another, and to the living world.

If that truth is to transform our common life, it must become visible in how we relate, serve, and build together. Across very different cultures and historical moments, I had already found examples of exactly that in Gandhi, Ari and Sarvodaya, and Havel and Benda. Among them, Havel’s language of living in truth resonated deeply with me because it gave political expression to something I had been struggling with since childhood.

For me, the great lie is separation. Our global consumer culture reinforces that lie by teaching us to see ourselves primarily as individual consumers, separate from one another and disconnected from the deeper bond that holds us together.

His Catholic political thought placed human dignity, conscience, solidarity, and the God-given character of the person against the state’s attempt to absorb human life into ideological control.

Havel described such a system as totalizing because it reached into virtually every dimension of life. Our global system is not totalitarian, but it too is totalizing: economic, technological, political, and cultural forces shape how we work, consume, relate, and even understand ourselves.

Consider social media, and now AI, which increasingly shape what we see, what we believe, whom we trust, and how we relate to one another. We may think we are freely choosing what deserves our attention, while algorithms quietly make more and more of those choices for us.

Against these forces that shape how we see ourselves and one another, Havel and Benda brought me back to what I had glimpsed as a boy: we are not isolated beings. We bear an inherent dignity, and our lives are already bound to God, to one another, and to the living world.

But recognizing that truth was not enough. It had to take form in how we lived, related, and built together.

Gandhi helped build a nationwide network of village industries and local economies. Ariyaratne extended that vision across Sri Lanka through Sarvodaya. Havel and Benda helped inspire independent cultural and civic spaces outside Communist control.

What these efforts have in common is not simply the creation of alternative institutions, but the relationships, shared responsibility, and community life through which those institutions took shape.

Their circumstances, cultures, and beliefs were profoundly different. Yet beneath those differences, I could see the same pattern: they integrated spiritual formation, community life, and the social, economic, and civic structures of everyday life as one process.

Beneath that reversal was the question of allegiance: whether we would allow the systems around us to shape our lives or choose to live according to a deeper truth. That truth is that every person has dignity, that we belong to one another, and that we are responsible for how we live together.

We are already part of a preexisting sacred design held within Love.

Living from that truth, I began to see how this reversal takes shape in everyday life: inner transformation, relationships, community life, and the structures of everyday life develop together rather than being treated as separate realms.

Spiritual grounding, inner transformation, Virtue, relationship, trust, service, cooperation, and the structures that sustain common life take shape simultaneously as people live, serve, make decisions, meet shared needs, and build institutions together.

Systems and structures were therefore not simply the end point of this process. They were part of it. Whether through village economies, shared community resources, or independent cultural and civic institutions, these structures gave lasting form to how people made decisions, met needs, shared responsibility, and organized their common life. In turn, those structures shaped the people and relationships within them.

This larger pattern is what I most wanted this book to make visible. I am not proposing another method of community building, a new system, or another model. There are already thousands of these.

And the good news is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel. The pattern is already here. Our task is to recognize it and learn how to live it where we are.

Go to Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

How Our Worldviews Become a Boundary

The Ancient Blueprint is not mine.

No movement, organization, religion, political philosophy, or historical period can claim ownership of the relational order I am describing. None of us invented it. We do, however, understand and interpret that deeper order through very different worldviews. And I began to see that those worldviews also created boundaries between us.

I encountered this in unexpected ways.

While writing my previous book, people encouraged me to use the word Oneness. It sounded wonderfully inclusive to me. I even remember a woman asking how she could bring more people into a movement built around Oneness.

I had assumed Oneness was about as inclusive a word as I could use. Then a conversation with a group of Eastern Orthodox Christian men challenged that assumption. For some, Oneness suggested an undefined underlying unity of consciousness, humanity, nature, or Earth. But for people who believed in a Creator distinct from creation, that understanding conflicted with their fundamental understanding of reality.

Moving among very different spiritual and cultural communities had given me the opportunity to notice distinctions I had not recognized while remaining within my own. I was learning to move among these different worlds while remaining rooted in my own faith, listening, learning, and understanding without needing to make their worldview my own.

I encountered that boundary even more directly. I met with a woman deeply interested in building new forms of community. When I told her I was a Christian, she told me that Christianity and other traditional religions could not be part of what was emerging. In her understanding, nonduality represented the pinnacle of spiritual development, while traditional religion belonged to the past.

The irony stayed with me. A worldview centered on overcoming duality had itself created a division between those who shared that understanding and those who did not.

I could understand some of that wariness toward Christianity because I had once carried it myself. As a progressive organizer, I had come to associate traditional Western religion, especially Christianity, with hierarchy, judgment, political power, and histories of domination. Yet in many of the progressive, regenerative, and alternative-community circles I moved in, Buddhism, Indigenous spirituality, and other non-Western traditions were welcomed much more easily.

I began to recognize the bias in that distinction. Even communities seeking to transcend exclusion reproduced it by treating some spiritual traditions as sources of wisdom and others primarily as problems to overcome.

I encountered the same pattern in another conversation. Someone interested in my work told me that because I spoke openly about Jesus and identified as a Christian, our worldviews were too different for him to share my book with his community.

I didn’t object to our differences. They were real. What struck me was the assumption beneath the response: that different understandings of ultimate reality kept us from participating in the same work.

What sounded universally inclusive to me wasn’t universal after all. It actually excluded. I had already discovered how Christianity could become a boundary.

I began to see that the “religious” impulse is more primal than organized religion itself. We can leave churches and creeds behind and still form tribes around politics, spirituality, or visions of a new society, complete with our own orthodoxies, heresies, insiders, and outsiders.

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What Comes Before Agreement?

That realization took me back to something I had learned through experience in Northern Nevada. I had begun by organizing largely among people who agreed with me, sharing many of my politics, assumptions, and ideas about social change.

I was building. Christian churches, for example, were largely outside the networks I was forming. I thought I was simply gathering people around a shared vision. Without realizing it, I was deciding who was in and who was out. Only later did I begin to see what that meant: the people who belonged most easily were the people who already saw the world much as I did.

Groups organized around shared beliefs and commitments could be wonderfully coherent. But over time, I began to recognize the same pattern in very different places. The beliefs and worldviews differed, but the organizing logic was remarkably similar: agreement came first, and community formed around it.

Meanwhile, one of the efforts we were building in Northern Nevada was a region-wide network of more than sixty-five street-level neighborhood networks called Get to Know Your Neighbor. The idea was remarkably simple: help people living near one another get to know each other as neighbors. Many of those relationships grew into ongoing ways neighbors could care for, help, and support one another in everyday life.

We weren’t beginning with an issue or cause. We were beginning with relationship.

Only later did I understand the significance of that distinction. After recognizing how often I had done the opposite in my own organizing, I began seeing the pattern everywhere. I heard about two neighborhood efforts in the UK that initially sounded similar to Get to Know Your Neighbor. But one brought neighbors together around climate change and the other around conflicts with landlords.

Locally, in Reno, Nevada, a youth pastor friend told me his church would not participate unless they could use the neighborhood effort to preach the Gospel.

I began seeing the same pattern in regenerative and New Economy movements, nonreligious spiritual communities speaking of Oneness, Gaia consciousness, spiritual awakening, or higher consciousness, and political communities organized around their own visions of justice, freedom, or social change.

Different language, different visions. Yet the same pattern of agreement before belonging kept reappearing.

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Belonging Before Agreement

Affinity can never be enough.

That’s when I realized that the answer couldn’t simply be another worldview, belief system, or social vision large enough to contain all the others, a kind of “One Ring to rule them all.” Even hopeful worldviews centered on Oneness, regeneration, or planetary consciousness could become another boundary if agreement with them became the condition for belonging.

That’s how the Culture of Separation can co-opt the best intentions: a society of internally coherent but relationally disconnected worlds. Each could have its own beliefs, communities, and vision of the good, while the relationships between them remained largely untouched.

At best, we tolerate one another while remaining separate. At worst, we see one another as obstacles, threats, or even enemies.

My experience in Northern Nevada revealed another possibility. The Love I had experienced kept calling me to bring what had become separated in the community back into relationship. But I was beginning to understand that I could not simply build connections between people and groups. I also had to recognize and heal the patterns of separation I carried within myself, including my own assumptions and prejudices.

And through actual relationships, I began learning what it meant to build community with people whose beliefs, politics, cultures, and worldviews sometimes challenged my own.

The breakthrough did not come because we pretended those differences were unimportant or simply set them aside. It came because we discovered that we did not have to agree first.

Belonging can come before agreement.

The life of the community itself gave us places to begin: food, children, livelihoods, neighborhoods, and other needs we shared. It echoed Dr. Ari’s simple wisdom: discover what we share in common and start there.

Perhaps this was the distinction I had been missing. A movement can gather people around shared issues, beliefs, or visions of change. But a whole community is different. It has to learn how to belong and act together even when we disagree.

Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher and theologian, gave striking expression to this relational understanding in I and Thou: “All real living is meeting.” For Buber, genuine relationship did not require the other to become like us; the encounter itself took place between distinct persons who remained themselves.

All You Need Is Love?

Even the language of love and unity, however, can become another boundary.

I had already discovered how my own progressive worldview excluded religious people, especially Christians. Now I was beginning to see that modern nonreligious spiritual movements could do something similar. Even ideas presented as universal and inclusive could become another way of excluding others.

I saw this same pattern within many of the spiritual, community-building, and civic engagement movements I had been part of. Many believe they are moving beyond the divisions of the past by finding a more universal basis for building community. I share that longing.

I remember reading an essay by a friend who had grown up Christian, left the tradition, and now reinterprets Christ through what I would call a post-Christian worldview, drawing on ideas such as nonduality, consciousness, and interbeing. He has every right to do that.

Yet he did not seem to recognize that he was promoting a worldview of his own. In doing so, he was drawing a new boundary between himself and those who still lived within the tradition he had moved beyond.

It reminded me of an earlier conversation with someone who wanted to keep using the term post-capitalist. Again, my concern was not that the idea was wrong. It was that the language itself could draw a boundary around who felt included, leaving small-business owners outside the circle.

More broadly, ideas such as nonduality, Oneness, consciousness, emergence, or interconnectedness can appear to offer a more universal vision of reality, one that seems capable of transcending the divisions created by older traditions. But I had already seen the danger: within a Culture of Separation, even a worldview that presents itself as universal can become another boundary when treated as the shared framework everyone must enter.

This isn’t about deciding who is right and who is wrong. What is at stake is whether people with different worldviews can still belong, build, and act together. That is what a whole-community Parallel Polis requires, especially at a time when our divisions are tearing us apart. It will never be built through competing worldview silos.

I am not pretending those differences are superficial. A theistic worldview begins from a very different understanding of reality. For me as a Christian, the deepest ground of our relationship does not begin in an impersonal universal consciousness or emerge when we come together. It begins in God, who precedes both the community and creation itself.

Through my Christian faith, I understand our belonging as rooted in Divine Love, ultimately through Christ. That Love helped me overcome the boundaries created by the progressive worldview I had adopted. Decades of working across these divides taught me something important: I could remain fully rooted in that conviction without requiring another person to share it before we could belong to one another.

Nor did they have to surrender their own deepest convictions.

What became clear was that a whole community already shares a relational foundation without everyone having to explain it in the same way. Rather than beginning with the issues and worldviews that divide us, we can begin with the needs of the community that we already share and build relationship from there.

Those relationships give practical expression to something deeper. To me, Love as Structure names the relational order through which Divine Love becomes embodied in relationship, communion, and flourishing, even as people understand its Source through very different worldviews.

That became essential to my understanding of the Ancient Blueprint. It is not another universal spirituality into which all our traditions have to fit, nor an interfaith or inter-spiritual synthesis. It is a relational pattern we can learn to live in alignment with while continuing to understand ultimate reality differently.

But that also made me ask whether my own language was creating the same problem. Love as Structure cannot become one more worldview that everyone has to accept before they can belong. If it becomes only another idea we have to agree on, then I am recreating the very problem I am trying to transform.

So, is Love all we need? In a profound sense, yes, but only if Love is something we actually live.

Only Love lived can carry us across the boundaries that divide us, enabling us to belong to one another without first having to agree.

And that is how I understand St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13: even if I possess all knowledge, understand every mystery, and have faith that can move mountains, without Love, I am nothing.

And that is where the real work begins.

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Love Must Be Lived

The Luminous Web had first come to me as an experience, not an idea. But that experience did not give me a theory of social change. The question that stayed with me was what it would take to embody that Love in our relationships, families, neighborhoods, and communities.

Looking back, I could see that the same pattern I had traced through Jesus and the early Christian communities, Gandhi, Dr. Ari and Sarvodaya, and Havel and Benda’s Parallel Polis was also the pattern I had been living into through my own community work.

What had begun as an interior spiritual experience was becoming a way of living in the world.

Through the cultivation of Virtue, our inner lives can become more coherent as our relationships and communities are transformed. The spiritual and the social are not separate worlds. They are dimensions of a single process: Divine Love taking form in human character, relationship, and the life of a community.

But experience alone was not enough. I had to learn to live that Love.

Living Love requires more than good intentions. If the patterns of separation are also inside us, then something within us has to change. Love is a call to change the way we see the world, a metanoia, to use the Greek and Christian term.

That meant some heavy lifting: confronting the prejudices, assumptions, fears, and habits of separation within myself. I had already discovered some of them in my own attitudes toward Christians, conservatives, businesspeople, even Western civilization, and many others I had placed into categories.

Recognizing those patterns was one thing. Actually being transformed by Love was another.

I needed something deeper than willpower. For me, that meant a relationship with God and prayer, through which I asked God to reveal what I could not see in myself, to soften what had become hardened, and to help me love people I might otherwise judge or keep at a distance.

How Cultural Recovery Renews Common Life

Confronting the patterns within myself taught me something about our culture: the global Culture of Separation does not simply surround us; it forms us.

It shapes our assumptions, habits, and ways of seeing one another so deeply that new ideas or willpower alone are not enough to change us, much less the culture. That is why I began to understand cultural change as a process of recovery.

If the Culture of Separation has shaped how we see ourselves and one another, we cannot overcome it through our own efforts alone.

And this changes how we cultivate and build community.

Simply bringing people together to cooperate and collaborate does not necessarily overcome the assumptions, prejudices, and patterns of separation we carry within us. We bring those patterns into the communities and structures we create.

That means we cannot separate the work of changing ourselves from the work of changing our communities. If we want to build another way of life together, the inner and outer work have to unfold together. As Dr. Ari of Sarvodaya put it so simply, “We build the road, and the road builds us.”

That realization also changed how I see our work to make the world a better place than we found it. We can develop increasingly sophisticated theories, strategies, networks, movements, and visions of the future. We can gather with others who share them and create communities of remarkable internal coherence.

But as I had already seen, even when good movements, networks, communities, and initiatives develop in parallel, something can still be missing between them.

The problem is not their differences. Their differentiation can be beautiful and necessary. Christian communities, regenerative communities, ecological movements, spiritual communities, justice movements, businesses, nonprofits, and neighborhood organizations can each cultivate their particular piece of the good.

But we also need coherence between them and across the larger community they share. Coherence within the parts does not automatically create coherence between the parts. And that coherence between them cannot come simply from adopting the same worldview, strategy, or organizing model. It has to be lived.

I began to see the Ancient Blueprint operating at another scale. What I had experienced inwardly had to be lived in relationship with others, and what is true between people is also true across a whole community. Its different parts have to come into meaningful relationship with one another.

At this larger scale, the same principle holds: the pieces do not have to become the same. Their differences do not have to disappear. Their integrity can remain. But they cannot remain disconnected from one another.

And that leaves us with a much larger question: What does it look like for Divine Love to take social form?

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Go to Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

The Parallel Polis: Building Another Social Reality

When we live in alignment with the Ancient Blueprint, something remarkable can happen.

The pattern I had already begun to recognize was now clear: Divine Love becomes embodied through Virtue. Virtue shapes how we relate to one another. Relationship finds expression in service. Service strengthens community. And communities begin building the relational, economic, and civic structures through which another way of life can take form.

I had already seen the beginnings of this social reality. The good is already here. The islands of coherence are already in place.

I had encountered the Parallel Polis as one way this other social reality can take shape within and alongside the existing one.

This offered a third pathway for social change, radically distinct from the two familiar approaches I had encountered in my own life and work: The system is broken, so reform it. Or the system is broken, so leave it and build an alternative.

I came to see that, within a Culture of Separation, both pathways reproduce the very

separation they are trying to overcome: one by struggling to gain power over the existing system, the other by building an alternative apart from those who do not share its vision.

That recognition has changed how I understand the first path. I no longer believe electoral politics can bring about the change our society needs. Political victories may change laws and institutions but cannot change the relationships, values, and culture beneath them. In the realm of political parties, the struggle becomes a contest for the power to impose one group’s vision of change on everyone else. But lasting change must begin in the relationships, values, and culture of the people themselves.

But turning away from electoral politics did not make the second pathway any more viable. Building alternatives in isolation from one another is not the answer either. While writing my book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age, I encountered hundreds of movements, organizations, and leaders working to change the world for the better. Most begin with a shared vision of the change they want to bring about and naturally attract people who already agree with that vision.

Regenerative movements gather people committed to regeneration. Civic engagement efforts bring people together passionate around civic engagement. New-economy initiatives bring together people who share a particular economic vision. Christian and spiritual communities gather around their own beliefs and practices.

Movements reinforce those boundaries when they define themselves as much by what they oppose as by what they hope to create. I encountered this directly in responses to my own work. One of my Substack readers wrote to me, “Richard, I love your vision, but the West and capitalism are evil, and we need to move beyond them, not cooperate with them.”

I understood the impulse because I had once approached social change in much the same way. In the 1980s, I participated in civil disobedience in San Diego against first-strike nuclear weapons, working alongside progressive and even communist organizations while seeking to build alternatives. I’m ashamed to say that I sometimes referred dismissively to people outside our activist circles as “normies”: ordinary families raising children, going to work, attending the PTA at their neighborhood school, people who, in my eyes, simply didn’t get it.

I wanted to transform society, yet my moral self-righteousness disconnected me from the very people whose lives I claimed to care about.

Entering the Life of the Community

Eventually, I had to confront a question I could no longer avoid:

Gandhi had already shown another way: rather than simply replacing those in power or retreating into an alternative society, he sought to rebuild India from within the life of its villages. Speaking before India’s political and intellectual elite in 1916, he challenged the notion that they could bring freedom to India while remaining disconnected from its ordinary people.

He insisted that India’s salvation would come through its farmers, not its lawyers, doctors, or wealthy landlords. For Gandhi, that meant standing alongside the millions working in India’s fields, entering into the realities of their everyday lives.

Gandhi was also part of the spiritual lineage I had been tracing, one that reached back to Jesus and the deeper reality of Divine Love. His vision of social transformation had been profoundly shaped by Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, which he understood as expressing what he called the law of love.

He did not speak of that Love merely as a moral ideal, but as something woven into the underlying order of reality itself. As he put it, “Whether humanity will consciously follow the Law of Love, I do not know… The law will work just as the law of gravitation works…”

Nor did he leave that principle at the level of belief. It has to be lived. As he put it elsewhere, “And if that is the law of life, we have to work it out in daily life.”

Over time, I came to understand what that meant for my own work in communities.

I would later recognize this as the beginning of a Parallel Polis: building another way of life among the people and institutions already making up the community, alongside the existing social order.

Decades of community work had taught me what that could look like. I ran nonprofits and businesses and worked with government agencies, churches, activists, business owners, neighborhood leaders, and ordinary people. The “system” was not something abstract outside the community. It was woven into the community itself.

That raised a practical question: how could we possibly build another culture and economy without building relationships across the wider community? After all, we would still live alongside businesses, workers, nonprofits, governments, churches, and institutions that did not share our vision.

The same problem exists among movements themselves. Thousands of movements work in parallel, each building its own piece of a better world and attracting people who share its vision. But what connects them? Is their theory of change simply to keep growing until enough people join? And what about everyone else?

It was the islands-of-coherence pattern again. Without connections across movements and to the wider community, even the most promising efforts to build another social reality will remain isolated islands.

I recognized how easily I had fallen into that same trap, but I had also discovered another way.

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The Third Way: Beginning Where You Are

Looking back at my community work, I recognized that I had been practicing another way for decades, calling it different things along the way: Conscious Community, re-villaging, and the Community Ark. I had been helping another social reality take root within the community.

I was building relationships across the differences that had divided us, among businesses, nonprofits, faith communities, civic institutions, movements, and ordinary people.

People do not have to share the same worldview. They already share something more fundamental: they live in the same community, sharing its everyday life, challenges, and opportunities. They begin building a different way of living together right where they are, while remaining different from one another.

Relationship first, not agreement.

I had been practicing this approach long before I discovered that others had already described it. The Parallel Polis strategy gave me a name for what I had been building. But the underlying pattern was not new. It had taken different forms throughout history.

But I came to understand that “Parallel” did not mean separate.

We begin building this Culture of Connection within our existing communities, without following either of the two paths I had already rejected: fighting for political power or withdrawing into a separate world of people who already agreed.

This was not an entirely new approach. I had already recognized the same Ancient Blueprint that underlies this Third Way in the life of Jesus and the early Christian communities. Jesus did not organize his followers to capture Caesar and use political power to create a more moral society. Nor did he appeal to Caesar to reform the system. He began somewhere deeper.

That deeper frame transformed the lives of his followers. They began living, loving, serving, sharing, and caring for one another in a different way. Within the dominant culture of empire, they were building another way of life. And the Love they practiced did not stop at the boundaries of their own community. Centuries later, even the pagan emperor Julian would lament that Christians cared not only for their own poor but for Rome’s as well.

That example brought me back to what I had learned through my own community work: the answer was not to create another movement. Through this Third Way, we build a whole-community Parallel Polis by cultivating relationships across the movements, organizations, institutions, and people already rooted in a community. Over time, those connections could form a “whole cloth” community network.

And much of what we need to begin is already here. Billions of people around the world participate in movements, faith communities, nonprofits, businesses, regenerative projects, and civic initiatives doing extraordinary work. The good already exists on an enormous scale.

But the main challenge of the age remained: the good is not absent. It is fragmented.

Simply doing more good within that same Culture of Separation will not overcome this fragmentation. We have been doing that for millennia, expecting more good works to bring about the changes we hope to see in society. But repeating the same approach is a dead end. We cannot transform the very systems that perpetuate separation by continuing to operate separately and expecting a different result.

This is why the Third Way requires us to connect and multiply the good already present throughout our communities in a new cultural context: a Culture of Connection. Rather than waiting for the culture to change, we begin living it through our relationships, transforming the larger culture from within.

The means and the end must be the same.

From Whole Community to Commonwealth

As this Culture of Connection takes root, the Third Way begins to reveal its larger political implications. As relationships grow, people gain the capacity to make decisions, meet shared needs, and govern more of their common life together.

I was especially excited to discover that this possibility closely resembled a vision from my own American political tradition.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned what he called a “Commonwealth of Ward Republics,” a form of bottom-up federalism that would shift political power away from centralized government and back into the hands of people in their own villages, towns, and communities. What struck me was how closely Jefferson’s vision resembled Gandhi’s later vision of a Commonwealth of Village Republics, which Dr. Ari helped bring into practice through Sri Lanka’s Sarvodaya movement.

The resemblance was even more remarkable because these visions emerged in very different societies shaped by empire and its aftermath. Yet each pointed, in its own way, toward people reclaiming their capacity to govern their own communities rather than depending primarily on centralized institutions.

I recognized a similar principle in Catholic Social Teaching: subsidiarity. It holds that decisions and responsibilities should remain with people and their local communities wherever possible, with higher levels of authority supporting rather than replacing them. Here was another expression of this vision, rooted in a different spiritual and historical tradition.

These historical parallels reinforced what I had been discovering through my own community work: the foundations of a commonwealth could grow from the relationships people build within their existing communities.

Just as the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia had helped build a Parallel Polis within and alongside the Soviet-dominated Communist system, we begin building a whole-community Parallel Polis by connecting people, businesses, faith communities, civic organizations, and local institutions across our own communities.

But coming together does not mean becoming the same. A neighborhood can remain a neighborhood. A church can remain a church. A secular organization does not have to adopt my Christian language. A food network can remain a food network. Each can retain its own identity while building relationships with the others.

And that is where the Third Way begins. Each organization and community can build relationships with others around it, right where they are.

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Fractal Community Empowerment

The possibility of transformation beginning within communities everywhere matters more now than ever. The empires confronted by Jesus, Gandhi, Ari, Havel, and Benda were immense, but today the political, economic, financial, and technological systems shaping our lives extend across the entire planet.

I heard one answer from movements working for systemic change: our problems are global, so we need global movements powerful enough to change the political, economic, and social systems behind those problems. From another direction came the opposite answer: change yourself, serve the people around you, and somehow those personal and local efforts will transform global systems and structures.

These approaches no longer satisfied me because something essential was missing from both. Neither adequately explained how transformation in individuals, families, and relationships could grow throughout local communities.

More importantly, how could these local transformations give rise to new social, economic, and political structures at regional, national, and global scales?

The conventional answer to the question of how change reaches larger scales has been to build movements capable of influencing society. Most movements grow by attracting more people to their cause, network, or worldview. I had long accepted this approach, assuming that extending their reach required building larger organizations, raising more money, hiring more staff, and coordinating increasingly complex efforts.

In Reno, Nevada, however, our community-building work took a radically different approach.

Rather than bringing people into one expanding organization, we helped local food, local economy, and neighborhood networks take shape alongside one another, connecting leaders, businesses, nonprofits, and institutions already doing the work. These symbiotic “mediating” networks supported participants in building relationships, cooperating, and strengthening their collective capacity.

As those relationships multiplied, these informal, hub-centered networks grew without requiring any formal organizational structures, funding, or paid staff.

My training as a biologist helped me recognize a deeper pattern behind what I was seeing in Reno. Nature is filled with patterns nested within larger patterns, each part belonging to a larger whole. And as my relationship with God deepened, I came to recognize in creation something deeper: an underlying relational order rooted in Divine Love.

In Jesus’s simple teaching to Love God and Love Others, I recognized that same relational order: relationship to the Divine flowing into relationship with one another. But if human beings are part of creation too, how could that same deeper relational order really disappear from human society, or from within each of us? Or has the Culture of Separation simply made it harder for us to see? Nature offered another clue.

Think of a head of Romanesco broccoli. Break off a smaller branch and you see the same basic pattern. Zoom in or zoom out, and the pattern repeats. That’s a fractal.

I recognized something similar in our local food system network. It had begun one-to-one, with trust between people. Trusted relationships formed small circles, and circles connected into networks. As the network grew, these relationships began to form an increasingly interconnected structure.

I saw it happening among restaurant owners who had once viewed one another primarily as competitors. They began cooperating, sharing knowledge and resources. As farm-to-table efforts expanded, restaurants, farmers, and other businesses built a larger local marketplace where they could thrive together.

As I watched these relationships grow, I began to see how Divine Love could take social and economic form through the relationships we were building.

Structurally, we began by connecting leaders of existing food-system clusters, including farming hubs, farmers’ markets, restaurants, food banks, institutions, and food cooperatives. What began as a hub-and-spoke network evolved into a multi-hub network as leaders brought their own relationships and connections into the process. As those connections multiplied, the network became increasingly self-organizing, with relationships and cooperation extending beyond the original hub.

At the same time, we were cultivating Symbiotic Culture DNA among participating leaders through shared Virtues, principles, and needs. As new leaders joined and developed relationships, trust, respect, service, and cooperation continued to shape how people worked together, even among those who had never met. As the network expanded, the same relational pattern was taking shape within individual relationships, among hubs, and across the wider network.

At first, I understood this primarily as a different way for change to spread. I was accustomed to linear growth: one became two, two became three, three became four. Exponential growth is much faster: one becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight. But both models still assumed that change spread outward from a single starting point. Even as I recognized the same relational pattern appearing at different scales, I was still thinking within that framework.

Neither model adequately explained the full potential of the fractal pattern I was discovering.

From Attraction to Activation

That possibility required me to rethink what was the center of change. The network itself is not the source of the Love, trust, and goodwill flowing through it.

What is missing, then, is not simply doing more of the good we are already doing. We need to build relationships between these islands of coherence, connecting existing networks across the whole community. Ultimately, we need to connect communities with one another.

Through symbiotic mediating networks, we began to connect people and organizations that had previously worked separately. We were creating a relational container that allowed the Love already alive within people, groups, and organizations to flow between them, bringing them together as a larger, interconnected community.

Seeing how these connections could bring a whole community together changed how I understood the possibility of transformation reaching across the world. If the same good is already present throughout human society, then transformation does not have to depend on one movement expanding into each new community.

Like mycelium extending through a forest, this relational pattern can grow in each community through connection: people forming circles, circles connecting with other circles, each becoming part of something larger. Instead of asking people to join one movement or adopt one vision, we invite them to connect the good already present where they live. And this requires a different approach to community empowerment.

Fractal community empowerment turns the conventional logic of attraction upside down. Rather than recruiting people to join our thing, we activate the goodness and capacities already present in our communities. We show up for people, helping them connect and succeed together without joining another organization or adopting someone else’s agenda.

It requires understanding where true power comes from: Divine Love, expressed through holding space. Love gives us the spiritual fluency to move beyond our own agendas, identities, and judgments, making room for people with different perspectives to cooperate.

Rather than persuading or controlling others, we trust the Love already alive within them. The approach is simple, but not easy. It requires humility and the inner virtues to serve without controlling the outcome. Not everyone needs to do this work.

It only takes one person to begin. One person holding space in Divine Love can connect the capacities of many people and organizations, allowing them to become mutually reinforcing. In Reno, I helped foster networks around four of the twelve Common Needs, involving almost a thousand organizations, businesses, and local governments.

Imagine twelve people each fostering a network around one of those needs. No one person needs to organize or control the whole. The person holding space is simply a vehicle for Divine Love, whose power becomes active through the relationships and cooperation that emerge.

What If Change Begins Everywhere at Once?

If one person can help initiate this transformation in one community, why can’t others do the same in communities everywhere?

My experience with Sarvodaya answered that question. I had first encountered Sarvodaya in 1991, and in my visit to Sarvodaya villages in 2022, I began to understand more deeply how far this pattern could extend. I stood alongside people whose lives were rooted in immediate concerns: family, livelihood, food, health, and the needs of their community.

There, I recognized something I had not fully understood before. Like many Westerners, I had tended to think of personal and systemic transformation as two different kinds of change. Dr. Ari did not separate them in that way. He understood whole-community transformation as bringing all the dimensions of community life into harmony.

The person does not have to become an insignificant cog in the wheel for transformation to reach a global scale. Nor does the community have to become a chapter of some standardized organization.

Instead, Sarvodaya showed me how communities could remain rooted in their own lives while becoming part of something larger. It revealed another dimension of fractal growth: the development of networks across multiple scales. Within each community, people develop psychological, physical, social, economic, and political infrastructure, grounding each in the same relational pattern.

As communities connect with one another, they also develop wider networks of cooperation, economic support, and civic participation beyond any one community. Today, Sarvodaya is a network of 5,500 active community societies across Sri Lanka.

Seeing this national community network take shape turned my understanding of systemic transformation right side up.

Communities can begin where they are, tend their own roots, and become part of something larger without surrendering their local character.

If Sarvodaya could connect more than 5,000 communities across Sri Lanka, what is stopping tens of thousands of communities around the world from doing the same, each connecting the good already present within it? They do not have to become chapters of one organization, followers of one leader, adherents of one theology, or participants in a centrally controlled global movement.

Here was something fundamentally different from the linear or exponential growth I had once imagined. The same relational pattern does not have to spread outward from one center. It can take root independently in many communities at once, each expressing the same underlying pattern in its own way.

And this changed what starting locally meant. It did not mean changing the world slowly.

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Go to Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

Living Experiments With Common Life

Connecting the good was not the destination. It was where the next stage began.

That first conversation with one farmer had led me into an entire web of relationships I had barely noticed before. I began meeting farmers and ranchers, restaurant owners, people running farmers’ markets and food banks, educators, consumers, foodies, and local business owners.

But the more I reflected on what was happening in Reno, the more I recognized a pattern I had first encountered more than a decade earlier. My first experiment with this relational approach had been back in 1991 in Logan Heights, an urban San Diego neighborhood struggling with drug dealing, gang violence, and poverty. Instinctively, I brought together community leaders, including a priest, a minister, and others who had never met, to address those common problems.

On two streets in the neighborhood, roughly forty drug dealers were selling openly, while the San Diego Police Department seemed largely unwilling or unable to stop it. We began by organizing local residents to march for peace through the neighborhood once a week, to literally take back their streets.

Then I brought together men from the community and religious leaders from very different backgrounds, including a Catholic priest from a Hispanic church, Black Baptist ministers, and others from outside the neighborhood. Night after night, we marched to the corner where the drug dealers were operating with a simple message: “We love you as a child of God, but we don’t love what you are doing to this community.”

Over time, the dealers left. Not only had the neighborhood reclaimed those streets, but we had activated a broader grassroots community and built new relationships among leaders, congregations, and groups that had previously been largely disconnected from one another.

One result was a thriving food co-op that became a locally owned neighborhood store, bringing healthy food into a community where fresh food had been difficult to find.

Again, there was no conversion taking place, and we weren’t gathering for the usual kind of interfaith dialogue, learning about one another’s beliefs in the hope of greater tolerance. We did not begin with our different beliefs, but with what our faiths called us to live together: Love in action. We were building relationships by working together on problems that mattered to everyone. In those streets, we were discovering how to stand together across our differences and bear witness to Love in the public square.

Later, in Reno, we developed a Local Economy Network in 2003, followed by the Local Food System Network in 2005. The settings and needs were very different, yet I kept seeing the same relational pattern take form. Relationships formed around shared Virtues and needs were becoming the foundation for new forms of cooperation.

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The Coherence of the Whole

I began to wonder: What else might this relational pattern generate?

That question expanded the way I looked at community life. I started noticing how much of our daily lives was organized around needs we all shared. People need food and water, housing, health and wellness, arts and culture, education and mentoring, livelihoods and a healthy local economy. They need safe neighborhoods, care for the natural environment, and places where faith and spirituality can find expression through service.

In communities everywhere, people are already meeting these needs through businesses, nonprofits, faith communities, civic groups, and local government agencies. Yet much of that good work remains disconnected, even when people are serving the same community.

I had already seen how strongly people could cohere around a shared way of seeing the world, whether in progressive, ecological, systems-change, spiritual, or Christian communities.

I had already seen the pattern: we gather with people who think as we do, build community around our shared beliefs, and then try to get others to join us. There can be tremendous good within these communities, but they can still become islands of coherence within a more disconnected society.

The reality is, a whole community is made of people who think very differently from one another. If coming together required others to first see the world as we did, we would simply create another island and ask everyone else to cross over to ours.

Yet my earlier experiences had also taught me that agreement is not the only thing that can connect us. Beneath our different ways of seeing the world is a relational order in which we already participate, rooted, as I understand it, in Divine Love. Now I was putting what I had learned about this deeper coherence into practice in my community work.

And if that underlying belonging was real, it had to become more than an idea. We needed to live it in how we related to one another and what we did together.

I also discovered the “secret sauce” to making the ideal real.

Food, health, the environment, the economy, shelter, livelihood, education, and the other basic needs of community life did not require us to think alike. We already shared them. They gave us common ground for working together.

As I had already come to see, we were not creating the underlying coherence by connecting the parts. We were giving social form to that deeper coherence. People were already working to meet these needs, each carrying a piece of the larger whole, often without recognizing how deeply their work was connected.

Nor had I invented the idea of organizing community around shared human needs. I had first encountered it through Sarvodaya and its ten basic needs in Sri Lankan villages. Years later, working in a very different Western urban setting, our experience led us to identify twelve Common Needs. The cultures and circumstances were different. The underlying human needs were not.

The distinction matters. Issues can easily divide us into positions, while Common Needs give us shared places to serve. Every community has to feed its people, care for its health, educate its young, provide places to live, sustain livelihoods, and nurture its cultural and spiritual life.

And as I looked across the community through this lens, I could now see the same pattern at the scale of the whole community: the good was already there, distributed throughout it.

The conventional farmer and the regenerative farmer were both part of feeding the community. The progressive and the conservative both depended upon its economy, schools, neighborhoods, and health. Churches, secular organizations, businesses, nonprofits, citizens, and government agencies were already carrying different pieces of its common life. Each contributed to the good, whether or not they shared our worldview.

The farmer who had once told me, “I’m already doing it,” was helping me see something I had not fully understood at the time. He did not have to join our movement or share our vision of a better society. He already belonged. He was already part of feeding the community. He already carried a piece of the good.

From Islands of Coherence to Whole Communities

If the good is already distributed throughout the community, then food is only one place where it can be connected. Other people are already carrying pieces of that good through neighborhoods, health, education, local business, the arts, the environment, faith communities, and other areas of shared life.

And I did not have to be the one connecting all of it. Other uniters could emerge around these different areas, each building relationships from where they already stood.

The fractal pattern I had been seeing was now taking form at another scale. One person holding space can bring together a small circle. That circle can grow into a wider network. And the same pattern can emerge around many Common Needs at once, with uniters weaving relationships around each one. No one person has to organize or control the whole.

Yet the islands-of-coherence problem could appear at this scale as well. A local food network could become highly connected within itself while remaining disconnected from the health network, the neighborhood network, faith communities, or the local economy around it.

And even when these islands connect with others that share a similar vision, they can simply form a larger island of people who already see the world in much the same way. The network may become larger and more influential while the surrounding community remains outside it.

It was only through my experience in real-world communities that I began to see this.

For years, I had assumed that if enough people joined our separate movements, eventually they would grow large enough to transform society. I could now see the contradiction more clearly. We were trying to overcome a Culture of Separation while our very strategy kept us apart from the larger community.

Without relationships extending beyond our islands and into the larger community, we’d be building alternatives alongside society but not transforming the larger whole.

The solution was already present in the way we had been building relationships. Much of our network building had grown through trusted third-party connections: one person connecting two others who might otherwise never have found each other. A trusted person could do the same between networks, introducing people from different networks who might otherwise remain disconnected, and this became the basis for creating connections across the community.

I remember one connection between someone working at the City of Reno homeless shelter and a backyard regenerative gardener. One was helping people on the margins; the other was growing local food. Through that connection, the gardener helped the shelter build a rooftop garden.

That small example revealed something larger about the community as a whole. The needs themselves were not isolated. Food was connected to health; education to children and families; local businesses to livelihoods; and faith communities to service. Housing, environment, safety, culture, and economic life were all intertwined in ways our separate networks and organizations often obscured.

The Community as a Social Ecology

I began to see the community in a radically new light: not as a collection of separate organizations and groups, but as an already interdependent social ecology. Its parts were already deeply connected, even if we failed to recognize our place within the larger whole or continued to live as though we were separate from one another.

My understanding of ecology went back to the early 1980s, while I was studying pilot whale communication for my master’s degree in biology. At that time, I began what would become a decade of spiritual experiences in the wilderness, receiving messages that I recorded in poetic form.

In one of those experiences, I wrote:

“Love isn’t sentimental, but is the glue that connects, and keeps the entire Universe whole. From the tiniest sub-atomic particles, to the flowering of plants, to the creation of life, planets, stars, galaxies, Love is there.

I now experience a calm and serenity that I have never known before this moment. The Voice of the Heart of Love nurtures me, saying, ‘Can you feel my living presence inside and all around you? Like a slow-moving stream through a thick forest on a warm day, moving continuously, always there.

This is the experience of Life. Everything is alive and in motion. The trees, animals, birds, fish, and even the rocks, mountains, the wind, the stars, the whole Universe is alive.

You are part of this Life. You are this Life.’”

What I had first experienced spiritually at age twelve, I began to recognize reflected in the natural world during the 1980s. Creation itself reflected that deeper Divine Order through the intricate relationships among living things within ecosystems. And because we ourselves are part of creation, I began to ask a more troubling question:

Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, also recognized this underlying interrelatedness of human life. For him, this was not merely a social or political observation, but a statement about the deeper structure of human life. It grew out of a Christian vision in which love of neighbor and love of God were inseparable dimensions of a complete life:

“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.”

This was not simply a moral or spiritual ideal, or a utopian fantasy. I had seen people begin living from that interdependence in real communities. What seemed idealistic in theory was visible in practice. My role was not to create that interdependence, but to help people recognize it and begin living from it.

For much of my life, however, I had participated in movements built on an inverted premise: they gathered people around a vision of a better world and then sought to spread that vision into the larger society. I had come to see this as a “conversion” model of social change. Over decades of working at the grassroots, I came to see a radically different approach.

We had already seen this different approach taking shape in our food, local economy, and other community networks. Each had grown through relationships among people from different parts of the community. These networks brought together participants who might otherwise have remained disconnected.

That was what excited me.

These were the Symbiotic Networks I had been developing in Northern Nevada: living networks of mutual support where people and organizations remained independent while helping one another flourish. Through them, Divine Love was beginning to take social form in the everyday life of the community.

Just as no single person had to hold a whole network, no single organization or movement had to hold the whole community.

And as these connections multiplied, a relational infrastructure began to form across the community, linking networks without placing any one of them at the center.

Beyond the individual Symbiotic Networks, I was beginning to see the same pattern at every scale. Relationships connected people into circles, circles grew into networks, and those networks began linking with one another across the larger community. I would eventually come to understand this as the Ancient Blueprint taking social form.

The forms were emerging, but the underlying coherence was already there. We were not trying to align everyone around a single conception of the good.

Eventually, I came to call this process of connecting the people and networks carrying the good throughout a community Connecting the Good. As these relationships grew, the separate parts of community life could begin to function as a more coherent whole.

The islands do not have to disappear. Each can remain distinct, carrying its own gifts, relationships, and ways of serving. They can become more connected without becoming alike.

The aim was not to replace these different communities and networks with a single coherent community of our own. It was to weave relationships among them so that the existing community, in all its differences, could become more coherent.

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Love is the Architecture Between Us

Bridging those islands of coherence revealed something more. Connecting the parts was only the beginning. The relationships themselves were giving rise to something new.

I saw this in our local economy network.

I remember one evening in 2003 when we covered the walls with butcher paper and asked people to name locally owned businesses they actually knew. One by one, people stood up and added names. Before long, nearly 150 businesses covered the walls. Only later did I realize that we had mapped more than businesses. We had mapped not just a local economy, but a web of relationships and trust.

And as that web widened, something else became apparent. We weren’t bringing together only businesses that already thought of themselves as green, or food producers who identified as organic or regenerative. We were starting with the community as it already existed and bringing people into relationship across those differences.

Ironically, widening the circle strengthened the more focused networks. Rather than diluting them, it gave them a larger ecosystem of relationships, customers, collaborators, and potential allies in which to grow. They could deepen their particular work without making it the boundary of the community itself.

I saw this happen with the very first farmer I had called earlier in my community-building work. When we met, he was a conventional farmer with few connections to the urban community in Reno. Over the years, as his relationships within the community grew, so did the possibilities for his farm.

With a growing market for his produce, he expanded into organic farming and became one of our strongest supporters of farm-to-table and community-supported agriculture. Years later, whenever I saw him at community events, he would still thank me for that first connection, which had helped expand both his business and his relationships with the broader community.

We had welcomed him as he was, without requiring him to embrace an organic or regenerative vision of farming as a condition for belonging. The larger food system gave us common ground where people with very different ideas about farming could begin working together.

Through the relationships that followed, strengthening the existing food system created new possibilities for everyone. Conventional and organic farmers, restaurants, consumers, and the more focused food networks could each grow without requiring the others to become like them.

Looking back on decades of work in the trenches at the grassroots, I now recognize what had been at work all along.

Some embraced Love as a religious or spiritual foundation. Others recognized that a Culture of Connection offered a better way to live and work together than the competition and fragmentation of the Culture of Separation. Even when Love wasn’t their conscious motivation, they could experience it through genuine welcome and service, building trust across those differences.

I began to see how this same approach could transform the relationships between organizations and movements. Love as Architecture was not another movement competing with them. It was a new way to connect and strengthen their work within a larger field of action.

For those already devoted to a movement or organization, I am not suggesting that you abandon your work to join something else. Your particular mission matters. But I am challenging the assumption that even our most successful movements, working in isolation, can transform the larger society.

The missing work is between us. We need an architecture that connects the threads already present in our communities, not another movement standing above the others. We don’t all have to do the same work, but some of us must take responsibility for building those bridges.

This is the Third Way I had begun to see taking shape in Reno. Rather than seeking to control and reform the existing system or building alternatives in isolation, we can connect the good already present into a new Culture of Connection within the whole community.

People, businesses, movements, and institutions were beginning to connect their efforts around the twelve Common Needs of the community.

Restaurant owners who had once regarded one another primarily as competitors began sharing what they knew, helping one another, and cooperating where competition had once defined their relationships.

At the time, I did not think of this as economic infrastructure. I thought we were simply building relationships. Only later did I see this: as Love takes form in relationships, it shapes the economic structures we build together.

Share Symbiotic Culture

Go To Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

Making Room for the Whole

Transforming a community can begin with just one person willing to hold space for the whole. They don’t need to have all the answers, only the willingness to listen, gather people, build relationships, and connect what is already alive.

As I had already learned, the people and the good they carried are already here.

And that required something of me as well: as best I could, I had to get my own ego out of the way.

Part of that meant recognizing that I hadn’t done it all myself.

I remember someone asking me, “How did you create that local food system in Northern Nevada?” My answer was simple: I didn’t. The farmers, restaurant owners, food advocates, and others who cared about our local food system were already doing the work. What I did was to help them find one another, build relationships, and begin collaborating.

The work can start very simply. Sometimes it means picking up the phone and calling one person. One relationship leads to another. But over time, I learned that connecting people was only part of the work. What brought us together mattered just as much as the kind of space we created when we came together.

I had encountered this challenge several years earlier while we were building our Local Living Economy Network. It was 2003, and the country was deeply divided over the Iraq War. People were choosing sides: pro-war or anti-war. I began wondering whether there was another place where we could meet.

I asked a different question: What do we all care about, left and right, religious and secular, activist and entrepreneur? One answer was surprisingly simple: the health of our locally owned businesses and the community they sustained.

That didn’t mean our political differences disappeared. They simply no longer defined the room. Democrats and Republicans, activists and business owners, people of faith and no faith could work together around a shared commitment to strengthening the local economy.

I began to recognize something deeper beneath those political differences. For me, it was the truth that every person is made in the image of God. We were already united before we identified ourselves as Democrats or Republicans, left or right. Those political categories had become boundaries through which we saw one another as separate, obscuring a deeper unity that already existed beneath the polarization and fragmentation of our civic and economic life, locally and globally. As I had already come to see, belonging did not have to follow agreement. Our belonging was already there.

Protecting the Space Between Us

We had found common ground on which we could act together.

But as the network grew, I discovered that common ground was not enough. We also had to protect the space we were creating together.

I remember one meeting attended by more than a hundred business and nonprofit leaders. At the end, a man stood up and invited everyone to join him outside the Reno Convention Center to protest President George W. Bush, who was campaigning for reelection.

As the facilitator, I had a choice. I could let the comment pass. But if I did, Republicans in the room might reasonably conclude that beneath our shared commitment to the local community, this was really a progressive political space after all.

Whatever my own feelings about Bush or the war, they weren’t what had brought us into the room.

Henri Nouwen, the Christian priest and spiritual writer, described the deeper meaning of hospitality in similar terms: “the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.” It echoed something I had long seen in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan: mercy crosses the boundaries that separate us, allowing the outsider to become our neighbor.

Years later, I came to think of this kind of space as a cathedral: “If we are to hold sacred space for others, we must first remove our shoes, our egos, fears, and ideological armor, before stepping into the cathedral of community.

Taking off our shoes did not mean erasing our beliefs, identities, or differences. It meant setting aside our assumptions and judgments so we could encounter one another within a larger shared space, without requiring our particular worldview to define the room.

That day, I thanked the man for his passion and for caring enough to speak up. Then I reminded everyone that we weren’t gathered to support or oppose George Bush, Democrats, or Republicans. We were there to strengthen our local economy together. I wasn’t asking him to give up his political convictions, or the Republicans in the room to surrender theirs.

That applied to me too. If I wanted to bring people together across those divisions, I couldn’t allow my own perspective to quietly become the perspective of the room. Holding this larger space required something of me as well. I had to learn when to take off my own shoes.

Making room for one another was only the beginning. Once we had created a space where people could belong without having to agree, we could begin discovering what we could accomplish together.

This brought me back to Sarvodaya, which I had first encountered years before our work in Northern Nevada. With time, I recognized how closely what was emerging in Northern Nevada echoed the pattern I had first encountered there: people coming together around shared community needs, with Love taking practical form through service.

Farmers, business owners, environmentalists, government officials, Christians, progressives, and conservatives can bring their differences with them. We were coming together to serve the needs the community already shared.

Only later did I understand the architecture beneath what we were doing. Shared purpose gave us common ground. Virtues shaped how we related within it. Common community needs gave us places to serve together. The pattern came alive through people gathering in small circles, building relationships, and acting together. And a network-centered structure allowed people and organizations to retain their autonomy while becoming part of something larger.

These would eventually become elements of what I called Symbiotic Culture DNA.

Yet beneath these emerging structures was something more fundamental.

We already share our humanity, inhabit communities together, and depend upon one another. Our common needs do not create that deeper coherence. They give us places where Divine Love can be made manifest.

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How Love Becomes Embodied

Much of what I had been doing was intuitive. I listened, learned from what happened, and adjusted as I went. In many ways, I lived into the work before I had language for it.

My time with Dr. Ari in Sri Lanka helped me see more clearly what had been happening beneath the work. I remember sitting with him after lunch in 2022. By then I had seen what Sarvodaya had become: thousands of village communities and millions of people participating in a movement that joined spiritual awakening with the practical work of building another social reality.

I asked Ari a question that had been on my mind for years: How could one person mobilize millions of people to build a new social reality? How had something that began with one schoolteacher and one village grown into a movement reaching an entire nation?

Ari smiled but said nothing. And somehow, in that silence, an answer began to emerge. The word that came to me was spaciousness.

There seemed to be so little in him that needed to occupy the space.

But his spaciousness was not an emptiness.

Something was present.

Love.

As I sat with what I was seeing in Ari, I began to recognize something familiar through the lens of my Christian faith. In Jesus, I had encountered a Love that is radically self-giving. Divine Love is not simply something Jesus commands us to give to others. It is something we first receive. As the First Letter of John puts it simply, “We love because he first loved us.”

As I had experienced before, Divine Love came from beyond me, entered my life as a gift and changed how I saw the person before me. As I learned to receive it, the way I approached others began to change. Instead of beginning with what I wanted from them, whether agreement, recognition, influence, conversion, or even participation in my own vision, I could begin with a desire for genuine communion.

This was the transformation taking place within me: a movement from self-serving desires toward self-giving Love.

I saw that same self-giving Love embodied in Ari. His Buddhist language and spiritual tradition were different from mine, but I could feel the same self-giving orientation in the way he lived. For Ari, inner awakening and the transformation of the community were not separate realms of life. The spiritual took practical form in how he entered a village, listened, served, related to people, and made room for others to discover their own capacity to act.

Seeing this, the question I had asked him began to look different.

Perhaps the question was not how Ari had mobilized millions of people at all. In the same way that I had not “built” the local food system, Ari had not built Sarvodaya by himself.

And now I could see how that self-giving Love worked through Ari’s humility, service, and the space he made for others. Through the relationships he cultivated, others discovered their own capacity to serve and act. As they did, that self-giving Love flowed outward far beyond any one person.

I recognized something fractal in the way this happened. The pattern took root in the lives and relationships of others. People who discovered their own capacity to serve could build relationships, gather others, and act together around the needs of their communities.

The Missing Link: Love Needs Pathways

This growth was not simply a matter of Love spreading from person to person. It found pathways through the relationships people formed with one another. As people came together around shared community needs, relationships became circles, circles connected into networks, and people began creating social and economic structures through which that Love could take practical form.

As these connections multiplied, a living relational infrastructure began to emerge: an interconnected web of relationships, circles, and networks.

This helped me understand what was missing from an idea I had encountered years earlier. I read an interview once with a prominent Western spiritual author who suggested that if enough individuals “awakened,” a new society would emerge. I wasn’t even sure what they meant by awakening. But I found that assumption dangerously misleading: that transforming enough individuals would somehow transform humanity and its institutions without the work of changing the structures themselves.

Of course, transforming individuals is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. People could become more loving while the centralized systems and institutions shaping their lives remained largely unchanged. That’s the danger of presenting a partial truth as the whole truth. It lulls people into believing that personal awakening alone will transform society. To me, that is a form of “hopium.”

But Sarvodaya had shown me the missing link: the Culture of Separation had left us on isolated islands of goodness, within systems and structures that were never designed to allow Love to flow freely between us.

This was what I had come to call a Superhighway of Love. Here was the Ancient Blueprint coming alive.

And looking at Ari, I could see where building that Superhighway began. It was not simply about bringing people together. It began with those willing to make room within themselves for Love, so they could make room for it between us.

Becoming a Uniter Instead of a Divider

But that capacity to hold space could not remain with a few people. If we hope to build communities capable of coming together across their differences, we have to learn to become uniters rather than dividers.

It isn’t easy. At times I felt as though I were standing in the eye of a hurricane. Around me were people with different beliefs, politics, interests, personalities, and histories. And the more I tried to hold space for all of them, the more that space revealed what was happening within me.

This was some of the hardest inner work I had ever done. The differences between us exposed the places in me where I was still judging, separating, or withholding Love. I began to recognize how deeply the Culture of Separation had conditioned me to judge those who did not share my worldview, making agreement a prerequisite for belonging.

For years, I had simply assumed that my own worldview was the right one, without recognizing how that assumption made less room for people who saw the world differently. The more tightly I held to my own need to be right, the less room there was for others. The more I could release those judgments, the more space there was for relationship.

I continued to see that same pattern of separation around me. As I was completing my first book, I heard many people say they would never work with Trump supporters or Christians. I heard similar refusals from people on the other side of the political divide, directed toward those whose political and religious beliefs they opposed.

Yet through my community-building work, I discovered another way.

But even this approach depended on my willingness to confront the divisions within myself.

I cannot create a Culture of Connection in the room while carrying the Culture of Separation within my own heart.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to a similar realization through his imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag. In The Gulag Archipelago, he wrote that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” His words named something I was confronting in myself.

Becoming a uniter often meant returning to prayer, opening myself to God, and remembering my intention to hold a space large enough for the people before me.

I came to think of holding space in this way as an “extended spiritual practice,” learning to live the Virtues across our differences. For those of us already rooted in a religious or spiritual practice, it means carrying that practice beyond our own spiritual communities and into the whole community. Holding space across our differences requires us to draw upon the full depth of our spiritual practice.

We don’t have to leave our faith or spiritual convictions behind, nor do others have to give up theirs. We don’t have to agree on the Source of Love to practice Love in action together.

I was beginning to understand more personally what I had already learned from Dr. Ari: as we enter into relationship and serve together, spiritual development and the transformation of our communities can become part of the same process.

One example came to be known among us as the story of the “Pastor and the Pagan.” A neo-pagan farming teacher and an evangelical Christian pastor came from very different spiritual worlds, yet in the space we had created, they discovered a shared passion for regenerative agriculture.

They did not need an interfaith dialogue or agreement about their beliefs before they could begin building a relationship. They needed a trusted space where they could encounter one another around something they both cared about.

Our Connections Gatherings were one way we cultivated that trusted space. In these small circles, we practiced the movement from Head to Heart to Hands. We reflected on the Virtues, then brought actual needs, relationships, and opportunities for service into the circle. Holding space became a spiritual and relational practice we could participate in together. As I wrote in the book, “Grace opened the space. Love built the bridge. And truth walked across it.”

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From Holding Space to People Power

But if this work was going to extend beyond me, I could not remain the only one holding the space. Others had to discover that capacity in themselves.

The fractal pattern was becoming clearer.

I had already watched this happen in our own networks.

When I began reaching out to people in our local food system, I did it one relationship at a time. I would begin with someone I trusted, listen to what they cared about, and then follow the connections that opened from there. Gradually, those one-to-one connections became a small circle held together by trust.

What began with one person holding space could become a circle of five capable of holding that same quality of space together. As that small circle reached into its own trusted relationships, something important began to happen. Five could become ten, and one circle could become two, each carrying the same relational character as the first. The network was no longer dependent on me to make every connection. Others could carry the same relational qualities into relationships of their own.

This was the fractal multiplication I was beginning to recognize: each new circle could carry the same relational pattern into relationships of its own, allowing the network to grow without depending on any one person or circle to hold the whole.

What began in a conversation with one farmer expanded into a small circle of committed leaders, then outward through their trusted relationships, until nearly a hundred regional leaders came together at our first large public gathering. Those leaders, in turn, represented organizations, businesses, institutions, and constituencies reaching more than a hundred thousand people across the region. Yet as the network grew, we did not have to lose the relational quality with which we had begun.

That relational quality grows with the network because people carried it into new relationships. This is possible through what I call the Relational Virtues: the Virtues we put into practice as we build relationships and community together. Qualities such as Shared Purpose, relational humility, empathic engagement, sacred welcome, and mutual service shape how we encounter one another, build trust, and cooperate across our differences.

I began to see how this same pattern could take root far beyond our network in Reno. As more of us learn to become uniters where we already stand, each of us can become a new point of connection.

Imagine one person becoming a uniter in a neighborhood. Another in a church. Another among farmers, business owners, activists, or civic leaders. Each begins connecting people across the boundaries around them, creating relationship where there had been separation. No one needs to control the whole. Each helps carry the relational pattern outward.

And as that capacity spreads, leadership spreads with it. People can rediscover their ability to relate, serve, cooperate, and build together without waiting for someone above them to organize their lives. As these relationships develop into networks of cooperation, people gain the collective power to accomplish what none could do alone. They can begin meeting shared needs, strengthening their local economies, and shaping the decisions that affect their common life.

What I had witnessed in Sarvodaya villages in Sri Lanka was now taking form in the very different context of Reno. People were beginning to shape more of their common local life together. This is a different kind of people power.

People power emerges within new spaces where people come together across their differences without allowing those differences to define their relationships.

The more I experienced this, the more I understood what we were holding space for. The Culture of Separation is all around us, pulling us into opposing camps of politics, religion, economics, ethnicity, and identity. These divisions can become so powerful that we lose sight of what unites us. Holding space means refusing to let those divisions determine how we see one another.

Beneath them, the coherence of the Ancient Blueprint is still there. Our shared humanity is still there. Our common needs are still there. Divine Love is still there. We were holding space for a Culture of Connection to take root within the Culture of Separation itself.

But what becomes possible when that Culture of Connection extends beyond individual networks and begins taking shape across an entire community?

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Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

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The Politics of Separation

Years later, in Sri Lanka, I found myself sitting with the president of a Sarvodaya Community Bank. Nearly half the town participated in the local Sarvodaya Society. They had spent years building relationships, serving one another, creating livelihoods, meeting community needs, and developing a parallel social reality of their own.

I asked him what seemed to me an obvious question. “Do you run candidates for local office?”

“We don’t need to,” he replied.

His answer stayed with me. I had assumed that if people wanted to change their society, eventually they would have to turn toward electoral politics. But Sarvodaya had moved in another direction. They began with people’s spiritual lives, with service, relationships, and the needs of local communities. As people learned to meet their needs, work together, and take responsibility for their communities, they developed the capacity of self-governance.

The banker’s answer reflected something I had already heard from Dr. Ari. He had long questioned the party-political system itself, which he believed fostered division, hatred, fear, and ignorance. He believed people could govern their communities by working together, sharing responsibility, and making decisions at local levels, rather than depending on competing national political parties.

After fifty years of watching American politics, I agree with Dr. Ari. I’ve watched enormous amounts of money and energy poured into political campaigns that pit Americans against one another, each side promising its own version of “change we can believe in.” Our political system doesn’t simply reflect division, hatred, fear, and ignorance. It feeds and perpetuates them.

I’ve watched Democrats and Republicans fight over who gets to run the country, each promising that everything will change if their side wins. Yet after all these decades, some observers believe America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

Divide and rule is nothing new. Five centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli described how rulers deliberately kept people divided to maintain control. In The Prince, he observed that “they nursed these disputes amongst them, so that the citizens, distracted by their differences, should not unite against them.”

Sometimes I think we’re like Charlie Brown in the old Peanuts comic strip. Lucy promises she’ll hold the football so he can kick it. He believes her, runs toward it, and at the last moment she pulls it away. He lands flat on his back. But the next time she promises things will be different, he believes her again. And he lands flat on his back again.

But why do we keep believing Lucy? Around the same time as Machiavelli, another French thinker, Étienne de La Boétie, asked an equally important question: Why do people willingly support rulers who concentrate power in the hands of a few?

In his The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, he identified several reasons.

Even religion can become entangled with political power.

And that brings me back to something I learned from Dr. Ari. If the system depends on our participation, why do we keep looking to that same system to save us?

The Third Way: People Power from Below

This is why I no longer believe that capturing political power can bring about the transformation our society needs.

The Third Way I had been discovering begins within the whole community, connecting the people and the good already present rather than dividing them into opposing camps.

Dr. Ari had shown me what this looked like in practice. His aim was not to capture political power first, but to awaken people and strengthen their capacity to shape their own communities.

As I had seen in Sarvodaya, the culture began changing before the politics did. Political power could become the fruit of that transformation rather than its starting point. In Sarvodaya, this was understood as Grama Swaraj, village self-rule.

Only later did I recognize that something similar had been happening in Northern Nevada. At the time, I had not thought of our work as political. Farmers found restaurants. Businesses shared resources and connections. Churches served beyond their walls. Neighbors helped neighbors. Networks that had once existed separately began finding one another and forming a larger web. We had not looked to government to make any of this happen.

I was beginning to see how all these discoveries fit together.

Those same networks began creating new marketplaces where people could share their gifts and meet one another’s needs.

And now I was discovering their political possibility. As these Symbiotic Networks spread across the whole community, they were becoming a source of people’s power, not through the struggle to control government, but through relationships, trust, and shared responsibility.

At the time, many political and business leaders considered small farming a relic of the past. To them, farmland was better suited for shopping centers, condos, and parking lots.

Yet within six months, our growing network was helping transform the region’s culture around local food. Farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, and farm-to-table relationships began flourishing. Without lobbying, protests, or electoral campaigns, we had helped shift the culture, and political and business leaders began following its lead.

Our experience in Northern Nevada brought me back to something I had encountered in the writings of Havel and Benda. Havel had written about independent structures emerging not from political theory, but “from below, because life compelled them to.” A Parallel Polis is not simply designed or legislated into existence. It is practiced into being.

Václav Benda gave that practice a civic and political purpose:

His words clarified what I was beginning to understand: people could develop the power to govern their common life by taking responsibility for it, without first organizing around parties, elections, or the struggle for control. They laid the foundations for self-government.

In Czechoslovakia, that practice took form through a grassroots social infrastructure linking independent spaces for education, culture, publishing, religious life, economic activity, and civic life. When the Communist system began to collapse in 1989, much of that civic capacity was already in place. Those independent networks helped give rise to Civic Forum, which quickly became a central force in the democratic transition.

Within weeks, its representatives were negotiating with the government, and Václav Havel was elected president.

While Czechoslovakia developed a Parallel Polis under Communist rule, Sarvodaya was building its own parallel social reality through village awakening and self-government. In Sri Lanka, communities built roads, livelihoods, farms, and community banks, eventually connecting millions of people across thousands of villages.

What had begun as a small experiment in village awakening had grown into a nationwide network of more than 5,500 legally independent Sarvodaya societies. Together, they were building a parallel social reality rooted in local communities, with the growing capacity to shape their own economic and political future.

Our work in Northern Nevada was nowhere near as developed as Sarvodaya, but the beginnings were there: a relational network architecture through which people across the community were forming new connections, building trust, and learning to act together.

But a harder question remained. Powerful forces are shaping today’s top-down global consumer society.

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The Power of Connecting the Good

So much political and economic power is now concentrated in enormous systems far beyond the reach of any local community: through political parties, large corporations, global finance, technology, and media. Their reach extends deep into everyday life, influencing what we pay attention to, how we see the world, what we desire, and the choices we make, often in ways that pull us away from what we actually desire and need.

Looking back at my earlier activism, I can see how deeply my own thinking was shaped by the belief that Western civilization was intrinsically bad. Within movements that viewed civilization that way, transformation naturally meant resisting it, tearing it down, or building a separate alternative to replace it.

But organizing ourselves around what we oppose separates us even further from the people whose lives are already intertwined with our own. We find others who see the world as we do and organize either to resist the larger society or to build alternatives apart from it.

The more alienated we became from the whole, the more natural it felt to find belonging among those who saw the same problems we did.

We carried this same opposition-centered approach into electoral politics, pouring enormous amounts of money and human energy into electing the right people, defeating the other side, and opposing the systems and institutions we wanted to change. Yet we were still not creating the fundamentally different society so many of us hoped for.

That brought me face to face with a contradiction: trying to create a new society while pouring so much of our energy, almost with a religious devotion, into fighting the old one. Saint Paul had written, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Taking those words seriously meant giving more of our energy to building what was good, not just resisting what was wrong.

Looking at the lineage of the Ancient Blueprint, I began to see an expansion of his teaching. We could connect the good already alive among us, transforming individual acts of goodness into a collective force capable of transforming our common life.

This gave me a different way to approach Western civilization. I no longer wanted to think in terms of reforming, destroying, or escaping from the West. I wanted to heal and transform it. Western civilization had given us extraordinary medicine, technology, knowledge, mobility, and material abundance. I wanted to preserve those gifts while recovering something our culture had weakened: our capacity to care for one another and take greater responsibility for the life we share.

This new perspective also changed how I saw the movements I had been part of. I had spent years in progressive movements working with people committed to justice, equality, peace, and human dignity. Later I encountered regenerative, spiritual, economic, and other movements seeking a different future. There was much that was good in many of them.

Yet beneath their different visions, I recognize the same organizing pattern: we see something wrong with the existing society, develop a different vision of what it can become, find others who share that vision, and begin building relationships, communities, and institutions together.

We are remarkably good at finding one another, but far less successful at building relationships with people who see the world differently. The worldviews change. The organizing pattern remains the same.

Charter 77 offers a striking contrast. The people who came together in Czechoslovakia did not share a worldview. Christians stood alongside secular intellectuals, democrats, reform Communists, artists, and people from the cultural underground. They did not first resolve their differences before acting together.

The Power of the Whole

And suddenly I thought again about the conventional farmer in Northern Nevada.

“I’m already doing it,” he had told me.

I had understood that moment as a lesson about belonging. Now I could see what that meant for the power of a whole community. He already belonged. We do not need to convert him, recruit him, or make him part of our movement. We need him as part of the whole.

Writing this book had brought me back again and again to the same discovery: the community itself was the container. Now I can see its political consequence. A movement usually begins with a part, with people who share a particular understanding of the world, and then tries to grow that part until it can transform the whole.

But what if we began with the whole? Not because everyone would agree or participate, but because the people whose lives are already intertwined are the source of the community’s collective capacity and power.

In Northern Nevada, we were beginning to put this into practice. Relationships formed. Trust grew. Symbiotic Networks emerged. New marketplaces took shape within the local economy. Resources and opportunities circulated. As people connected these networks and began coordinating their efforts, they developed the capacity to meet more of their needs, solve problems, and govern more of their common life together.

I began to see how this growing collective capacity becomes a form of political power. This changed how I saw our usual approaches to social change. When one part of society competes with others for influence and power, it reproduces the logic of a Culture of Separation.

Beginning with the whole means strengthening the relationships that already exist among us into a greater capacity for shared action.

This revealed another dimension of the problem I had spent years confronting: the enormous concentration of power in government, corporations, finance, technology, and media. I had already come to see the Everything Industrial Complex not as a conspiracy or single centralized system, but as a pattern that emerges across large institutions. They develop interests of their own, protect those interests, and seek greater power and influence.

Over time, power accumulates upward while people at the grassroots become increasingly divided from one another. This process has a long history. The ancient strategy of “divide and rule” recognized that power is easier to maintain when those below remain divided.

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A Whole-Community Parallel Polis

That relationship between division and concentrated power brought me back to Charter 77 and the idea of a Parallel Polis, where people begin building another social reality without first capturing political power.

As a community builder, I had watched a similar pattern unfold over the last forty years. What began as a broad concern for the environment became increasingly identified with one sector of society. Environmentalism gave way to sustainability, and sustainability became an established field of organizations, government programs, corporate departments, consultants, and professionals. More recently, I have watched regeneration begin moving down a similar path.

The ideas evolved, but the underlying organizing pattern remained much the same.

Politically, that pattern took the form of separate movements competing for enough influence to change the larger society. And when movements enter the institutions they hope to change, those institutions end up shaping the movements instead.

Sustainability offered a telling example: the system became much better at absorbing it than sustainability became at transforming the larger society.

Their unity gave them a source of collective power that no single constituency could have generated alone.

But Charter 77 was not the only movement to reveal this kind of power. As I was reading through one of the final drafts of this book, my wife Marta, who grew up in Communist Poland, asked me why I hadn’t included the Solidarity movement. She was right. Here was another extraordinary expression of the same pattern, one that had helped transform the country in which she grew up.

Beginning in 1980, Solidarity grew from independent workers’ organizing into a movement of nearly ten million people, bringing together workers, farmers, intellectuals, Catholics, secular democrats, and others across Polish society. Alongside their resistance to Communist rule, they began organizing important parts of their common life independently of the state, building networks of publishing, education, culture, civic life, and economic self-governance.

Farmers formed Rural Solidarity, small-business owners and craftspeople established independent associations, and workers developed councils seeking greater control over their workplaces and economic decisions.

Much of this independent civic life drew strength from the Catholic Church, whose extensive network of parishes, Catholic intellectual circles, and community relationships had already created spaces for people to gather, build trust, and sustain independent civic life. Pope John Paul II’s historic visit in 1979 helped millions of Poles recognize their collective strength.

During the years of repression, churches supported underground publishing, cultural activities, and families of imprisoned activists. One remarkable example was the Solidarity of Families initiative, launched in Lublin in 1981 by Solidarity activists inspired by Catholic social teaching. Its parish-based neighborhood groups strengthened relationships, mutual aid, and shared responsibility among families.

Despite repression, those relationships and independent institutions endured, helping lay the foundations for the democratic transformations of 1989. They had begun organizing their own workplaces, communities, civic institutions, and local economies long before gaining political power.

Charter 77 and Solidarity revealed the deeper relationship between separation and power. When movements organize around their separate visions of a better society and compete for influence, they reproduce the very separation they hope to overcome, weakening the collective power needed to transform the society we share.

The answer is not to compete more effectively for power within the existing system, but to recover the power already present in the relationships, trust, and shared responsibility of people acting together across their differences.

From Movements to the Whole Community

That realization pointed toward a more radical inversion of the usual strategies we had defaulted to: instead of asking others to join us, we can show up for them. The same inversion can shape how movements relate to one another.

• faith and spiritual communities

• charities and social-change efforts

• civic engagement and bridge-building movements

• regenerative culture and creation-care movements

• purpose-driven businesses

• New Economy and commons movements

• localization and bioregional networks

• pro-democracy and civil-society movements

• arts and cultural communities

But connecting movements is not enough. Their relationships have to take root within actual communities, around the Common Needs people already share. The farmer, the restaurant owner, the pastor, the businessperson, the neighbor, and the community organizer do not have to become the same. They only have to learn to act together where their lives already intersect. That is how relationship becomes collective power.

That is the difference between building a movement around a particular vision and building the power of a whole community. Movements can create strong communities of their own while remaining separate from the larger society they hope to transform.

A Whole-Community Parallel Polis gives that broader people power a social form. Not because everyone participates in everything or agrees about everything. They never will. But no ideological, spiritual, economic, or cultural faction represents the people as a whole.

And this is where the meaning of parallel matters: parallel does not mean separate. Independence from the dominant system and separation from one’s fellow citizens are not the same thing. A community can recover more of its own capacities while remaining part of the larger society, drawing upon what is good within it while becoming less dependent on systems that have gradually absorbed more of its common life.

Seen this way, I thought again about the Sarvodaya banker. “We don’t need to.” I understood his answer differently now. He was not telling me that politics did not matter. He was telling me that politics does not come first.

Sarvodaya showed what could come first. It began with people. With Virtue and service. With relationships. With the needs of their community. With people learning to take responsibility for one another. From those relationships grew economic and social capacity. And from that capacity grew the ability to shape their own future together.

What emerges is this: political power grows from relationships, shared responsibility, and collective capacity. Love has political consequences without politics being where the process begins.

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The Ancient Blueprint Is Already Here

And now I saw a larger Pattern running through everything I had experienced. We tend to approach social change from the opposite direction, looking first to politics, institutions, economic systems, movements, and new worldviews to create the society we desire.

But everything I had experienced pointed in another direction. The sequence I had already traced was now visible across the whole journey: Love becomes Virtue. Virtue shapes relationship. Relationship makes service, trust, cooperation, shared responsibility, and growing networks possible. From there, economic and social capacity grow, giving people greater power to shape and govern their communities together.

That sequence now revealed its political consequence.

Politically, this means we cannot allow the society we share to be shaped for us from above. We have to recover the ability to shape it together as we learn to take greater responsibility for the whole community.

Political and economic systems matter, but they are not where transformation begins. They are shaped by what lies beneath them: culture, relationship, values, habits, and ultimately our relationship with the Transcendent. That orientation is not only something I have come to believe intellectually. I have experienced it inwardly.

What I had first experienced inwardly, I could now see echoed in history.

Despite their profoundly different religions, cultures, languages, and circumstances, the people and movements that had shaped my journey arrived at remarkably similar ways in which Love takes social, economic, and political form.

C. S. Lewis had given language to this deeper order in The Abolition of Man. Drawing on traditions across civilizations, he wrote of the Tao as “the reality beyond all predicates…the Way, the Road,” “the Way in which things everlastingly emerge…into space and time,” and “the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and super-cosmic progression.”

What Lewis called the Tao gave me another way to understand what I had come to call the Ancient Blueprint: an order we did not invent, but learn to recognize and live in alignment with.

I discovered that same possibility in San Diego and Reno. As I tried to live from the reality I had encountered and let it shape how we related, served, and built community together, another kind of common life began to emerge. I came to understand that this Pattern is not confined to extraordinary people or historical movements. It is something any of us can begin to live together in the communities where we already are.

The expressions are different, but the same relational Pattern keeps appearing. It is the Ancient Blueprint I have followed throughout my journey. And I now understand that these different expressions are not isolated from one another. They are already part of a larger whole, even when the people and communities expressing them remain disconnected.

The Pattern is not something I need to create. It is already alive all around me and within and among all of us. The Love, relationships, and capacity to transform our communities are already present, woven into the lives of people who may not see how deeply we belong to one another.

Go to Discovery 10: The Whole Community is Already Here

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

The Economy We Already Share

Becoming a businessman began changing the way I thought about economic life. For years, I had looked at business largely through the eyes of a progressive activist, criticizing a world I had never really inhabited. Now I was inside it, in relationship with people I had once mostly seen through the lens of my own worldview.

I was also a husband, father, neighbor, customer, and member of a community. I was working alongside people trying to make a living, support their families, build businesses, and contribute something of value to their community.

I still saw much that needed to change.

That recognition didn’t lessen my desire for fundamental change. It changed how I understood the people who would be part of that change. For years I had tried to gather people around a shared vision of a better future and bring that vision into the larger society. Now I was discovering another path: economic transformation could begin within the relationships and shared needs of the whole community, not only among those who already shared the same economic vision.

I remember a conversation with a friend who used the term “post-capitalist” to describe a network for new culture and economy he was building. When I questioned the term, he thought I was asking him to stop using it. But that wasn’t my concern. If the term expressed the convictions of his network, I had no problem with them using it.

My concern was not the vision itself, but when sharing that vision became an unspoken condition for belonging, unintentionally excluding people who did not share it. I had experienced this firsthand at a New Economy conference in 2017.

I was sitting in a room with about twenty wonderful people imagining a different economic future. They spoke of cooperatives, the commons, and other alternatives to the dominant economy. I shared much of what they hoped to create. Yet as I listened, I began to feel as though I were in the wrong room.

Finally, I raised my hand. “I’ve been listening to your vision of the future,” I said, “and I don’t feel welcome here. I own a private corporation, and I don’t feel like there’s a place for me in the future you’re describing.”

The problem wasn’t that these people lacked a compelling vision. It was that I couldn’t see a place for someone like me within it. As I looked across other emerging economic movements, I saw the same pattern at work. Regenerative, Doughnut, cooperative, solidarity, gift, sharing, circular, post-capitalist, and other approaches were generating important ideas, experiments, and strong networks around different visions of economic life.

These movements were creating important alternatives, but the local economy included far more people, businesses, and other organizations than those participating in their networks.

A Relational Path to Economic Change

That raised a more practical question for me: how could an alternative vision transform the economy of a whole community without the whole community having to join the alternative?

Yet the attraction-and-conversion model followed precisely that logic: build an alternative, attract people into it, and hope it eventually becomes the economy of the whole.

But I began to see that this approach was only one expression of a deeper system logic.

Within the Culture of Separation, we organize our part separately from the whole, then assume that growing our part will somehow transform the whole. The particular strategy may vary, but the underlying assumption remains the same: if our part grows large enough, it will eventually take over the whole.

Real communities are not transformed by one part gradually absorbing the others. A strategy that begins with separation cannot transform a whole community simply by bringing more people into our own camp. The vision may be compelling, but it still represents only one part of the community. The larger culture and economy already exist, made up of people and relationships that may never share that vision.

That is where change has to happen.

Any real economic transformation has to grow through the relationships already present in that ecology. Otherwise, even a compelling vision risks remaining confined to those who already believe in it. I had already seen this with the farmer. We had not created a new food system by excluding conventional farmers and waiting for a regenerative one to replace them.

We began with the food system that already existed, brought the people and organizations within it into relationship, and allowed new possibilities to grow from there.

Why would the larger economy, or the society around it, be any different?

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Transforming the Logic of the Everything Industrial Complex

What I was seeing in the economy was not confined to economic life. The same underlying logic is at work across society. We organize ourselves into movements, sectors, institutions, professions, and communities around particular pieces of the good, each developing its own language, networks, measures of success, and ways of seeing.

Nonprofits compete for donors and grants. Businesses compete for customers and market share. Political organizations compete for votes and attention. Churches compete for members, influence, and even claims to the truth. Each may serve a different part of society, but the underlying logic is often the same: strengthen our part, distinguish it from the others, and compete for the resources we need to survive.

This is the larger pattern I have come to call the Everything Industrial Complex. It is not a conspiracy or a single centralized system. It is the result of the Culture of Separation taking form across our institutions and sectors, turning even the organizations and institutions we create to serve, heal, and transform society into separate and competing worlds.

And just when some readers may think I am singling out regenerative, New Economy, progressive, or other changemakers, the same critique has to be turned toward my own Christian world.

I have watched churches become deeply coherent communities while remaining disconnected from the wider social fabric around them. I have also watched the Body of Christ fragment within itself, as Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant apologists attack one another in ways that deepen polarization.

Yet such divisions stand in contrast to the Christian calling, which is not to withdraw from the world or conquer it, but to live within it as salt and yeast, bringing the Kingdom near through reconciliation, love of neighbor, and lives that make Divine Love visible. Uniting the Body of Christ does not require sameness or complete theological agreement.

And that same principle extends beyond the Church. Serving the wider community does not require everyone to share our Christian beliefs. I experienced this firsthand in Logan Heights, where Christians served alongside people who did not share our beliefs, responding together to the real needs of the community. That experience showed me what can happen when the Church enters the wider community through relationship and service rather than separation.

Yet the Church itself remains vulnerable to the same larger pattern. When it absorbs the same logic of separation, competition, branding, and power that shapes the surrounding culture, something gets reversed. Instead of transforming the world through the Love of Christ, the Church itself begins to be transformed by the world.

What I was seeing within Christianity reflected the same pattern I had encountered throughout society. Businesses, nonprofits, governments, movements, and institutions can all be shaped by the same underlying logic. The problem is not their differences, but the values and motivations that guide their actions and the ways they relate to one another.

Building that parallel social reality does not begin with fighting top-down political and economic systems. It begins with ourselves. As Divine Love becomes embodied within us, we gain the capacity to live differently with one another. Our relationships, exchanges, and service begin to reflect intentional mutual benefit rather than self-interest, power over, and control.

As those relationships take root and spread through the community, they begin to transform the larger systems in which we live.

How Love Enters Exchange

None of these worlds stands outside economic life. They all depend upon the movement of money, labor, property, gifts, attention, knowledge, and other resources between people and institutions. The economy is not simply another silo among the others. Economic life moves through the whole social fabric.

Economic life already takes many forms. People give, share, buy, sell, lend, invest, volunteer, or simply help a neighbor. They do this through many kinds of organizations and institutions, or sometimes without any organization at all.

Just as I did not want to exclude a conventional farmer because he had not yet become organic, I do not want any particular approach to become the price of admission. What matters is whether our relationships and exchanges create real value for one another and the wider community, even across our differences. We do not have to become the same in order to belong and build together.

But creating mutual value together is only part of the transformation. Love changes the spirit in which we relate to one another and participate in economic life. Divine Love, embodied within us, becomes Virtue. Virtue shapes how we relate to one another, relationships build trust, and trust opens new possibilities for how we exchange, share, produce, serve, and steward what we have.

I would later discover that Pope Benedict XVI had given a name to this within economic life: gratuitousness, the spirit of gift. He helped me see that the economy itself can be transformed from within, not by replacing every existing institution or exchange, but by bringing generosity, mutual responsibility, and the Gift of Self into the ways we participate in them.

Benedict’s teaching gave me a new way to understand something I had already witnessed in Dr. Ari and had been struggling to practice myself: the movement from self-centered love toward self-giving Love.

The question is no longer only “What can I get?” but also “What can I give?

This does not mean replacing markets with a gift economy. People can still buy and sell, compete, earn profits, build businesses, or simply give something away. Gratuitousness changes the spirit in which we participate in those exchanges. It brings the Gift of Self into economic life, so that even ordinary transactions can become opportunities to serve, build trust, create mutual benefit, and contribute to the flourishing of the community.

How Love Circulates Through Economic Life

Once I began looking at economic life this way, another question emerged: what did we actually mean by wealth?

I began to see that wealth goes beyond money and material assets. It involves not only what we possess, but the trust, generosity, and capacity to serve that grow through our relationships, as well as the kind of people we are becoming.

Then I recognized that the relationships and trust we had been building were not only social infrastructure. They were also becoming part of the community’s economic infrastructure.

Money matters, of course. Businesses need revenue. People need livelihoods. Families need homes and food. Communities need investment and productive enterprise. But money is not the only form of wealth I was seeing around me.

A retired person had decades of knowledge. A church had an unused room. A business owner had relationships and experience. A farmer had land and equipment. A young person had energy and creativity. A neighborhood had people willing to help one another. An organization had volunteers. Someone else knew exactly the person another person needed to meet.

But I was also beginning to recognize another form of wealth, less visible than the others. I eventually came to call it Spiritual Capital.

Spiritual Capital is the relational wealth that grows as self-giving Love takes form between us. It doesn’t live in banks or spreadsheets. It lives between us: in generosity offered, trust earned, commitments honored, fairness practiced, and our willingness to serve one another and seek each other’s good.

Yet even with all this wealth already present, much of it remained disconnected and unable to serve the wider community.

Here again, the challenge was not simply creating something new, but connecting what was already there: the good, the relationships, and the resources. I came to think of these as “frozen assets”: resources, skills, relationships, capital, productive capacity, and supply chains that already existed but remained underused because different parts of the community were disconnected.

As new pathways of relationship form across those separations, trust and generosity began to unlock those assets, allowing value to flow where it had previously been blocked.

Bringing people together did more than make that hidden wealth visible. Connecting previously separated people and resources unlocked wealth that was already there. But the relationships themselves also generated something new: relational wealth. As relationships deepened, existing resources became more useful, and new value emerged through the connections themselves. I started noticing the possibilities everywhere.

Someone with decades of experience could share what they knew with someone just starting out. A church room sitting empty during the week could become a place for people to gather. A farmer could find a restaurant looking for local food. A business owner could make the introduction someone else needed. A young person could find a mentor. Someone with resources could help a local enterprise get started. And sometimes what a person had to give was simply their time, their care, or their willingness to help.

Some of this value moved through money. Much of it did not.

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The Heart of the Marketplace

Seeing wealth this way changed how I understood the marketplace.

For years I had thought about economic life through a familiar divide: capitalism on one side, socialism or collectivism on the other. But the more I worked with local businesses and communities, the less that divide seemed to explain what I was seeing.

What people around me called capitalism increasingly looked like something else: a form of global corporatism in which large corporations and political institutions had become deeply intertwined, concentrating economic and political power.

People have always found ways to create, give, share, barter, buy, sell, lend, and invest. The question is not whether markets should exist, but what animates them. What relationships and values shape the way we exchange with one another? When economic life remains rooted in relationship and moral responsibility, what we have to offer can become a means of serving one another.

Yet despite their different approaches to markets and economic organization, capitalism, socialism, and communism share something fundamental: a materialist understanding of economic life and reality itself. Within this framework, human beings are understood primarily through their economic roles: as producers, consumers, workers, owners, or members of classes. The central concern becomes how material resources, production, and ownership are organized.

But the consequences of this materialist understanding go far beyond how we organize the economy. They invert the relationship between the human person and the economic system. Rather than starting with the intrinsic spiritual dignity and value of the human person, these ideologies begin with the organization of material life. Instead of asking how economic life can serve human flourishing, they seek to shape the human person through the economic and social conditions in which people live.

I saw something very different in Reno. After we had mapped nearly 150 local businesses on butcher paper, we began identifying the trusted connectors within that network. I met individually with several business owners, asking whether they wanted to help build a local living economy where we supported one another and encouraged the community to shop locally. Eventually, eight business owners and nonprofit leaders gathered around a table. We began not with economic strategy, but with personal stories.

Behind their economic roles were people with hopes, fears, dreams, and a genuine desire to contribute to their community. They were not simply owners, producers, or economic actors. They were human beings whose worth, relationships, and capacity to serve existed long before we began building an economic network.

That experience helped me recognize what was becoming a different starting point for economic life. The more I saw value arising through people’s gifts, relationships, trust, and service, the more I recognized that the economic system must serve the human person, not the other way around. Our intrinsic worth comes first.

That realization raised another question for me: where does economic value itself begin? Not from an economic system. It begins with human beings and the gifts they carry: their creativity, relationships, knowledge, labor, and capacity to serve. Our human worth is inherent, but the economic value of our gifts takes shape as we bring them into relationship and exchange. Whether those gifts become sources of mutual benefit, exploitation, or something in between depends on the relationships and values that shape how they are offered and exchanged.

From this perspective, no single form of business organization has a monopoly on the good. A family business could serve the community. So could a cooperative, a nonprofit, a corporation, a land trust, or someone simply giving time to a neighbor.

Serving the whole does not require people or organizations to give up their particular interests. It means widening the circle of who we consider part of “us,” so that pursuing our particular interests also becomes an opportunity to serve the wider community.

Building the Virtuous Economy

This was Symbiotic Kinship taking shape in economic life: expanding our circle of affiliation beyond those who think, vote, worship, or live like us, and intentionally building relationships across difference for shared purpose and mutual benefit. As that circle widens, even the way we understand ownership, exchange, and enterprise begins to change.

We can understand ownership not simply as possession, but as stewardship of what has been entrusted to us. Exchange can include reciprocity and gift. Enterprise can contribute not only to individual success but to the flourishing of the community around it. The economy remains an economy, but one rooted in relationship rather than transaction alone.

What surprised me was discovering, only later, that this relational view of economic life was closer to Adam Smith’s original understanding than the narrow caricature of self-interest I had associated with capitalism. Smith was a moral philosopher before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, and his understanding of human beings included sympathy and concern for the well-being of others.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote, “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others...”

A transaction can do more than exchange value. Shaped by Virtue, it can also generate trust, deepen relationship, and create new Spiritual Capital. As these ways of relating spread through the marketplace, they begin to form what I came to understand as a Virtuous Economy: economic life transformed from within by the character and relationships of the people participating in it.

A Virtuous Economy does not begin with designing the perfect economic system. It begins with the human heart. As we move from self-centered love toward self-giving Love, we become more capable of bringing trust, generosity, service, stewardship, and care into whatever economic forms we inhabit.

This is not simply spiritual language attached to the marketplace. Here again, the Pattern takes practical form:

As these different forms of value circulate through relationships, a larger question emerges: what happens when this occurs not only within individual networks, but across the life of an entire community?

What kind of social and political reality begins to emerge then?

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Go to Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below:

Remembering the Whole

I have spent much of my life discovering how deeply we are all connected. Yet even now, I still catch myself seeing people through my own prejudices and assumptions rather than recognizing our shared humanity and the connection we already have. That is why the Ancient Blueprint is not simply something I discovered. It is a Pattern I must continually remember and learn to live in alignment with. Every day. Every moment. Even as I write these words.

I have come to understand why.

Yet the demands of everyday life can still draw our attention away from that deeper reality.

The deeper reality, in which life is held together in Love, has never left me. It has never left us. Any of us. But remembering that reality is not the same as living from it. And that is the challenge of building a Whole-Community Parallel Polis: remaining grounded in that Love while living in a world that operates as though we are separate from one another and from the sacred.

How we understand reality shapes how we live together. When we see people primarily through their roles, identities, and interests, we build communities around those differences instead of strengthening the relationships that already connect us.

At some point, we must move beyond blaming the Culture of Separation, politicians, the West, the world, our parents, or anyone else. Are we ready to take responsibility for the world’s suffering as our own? This does not mean taking on guilt or assigning blame. It means recognizing how deeply we see ourselves and others through separation. And then choosing to live differently. We cannot heal the world while remaining captive to the very divisions we seek to overcome.

The Whole is Already Here

Once we begin to see the world through the lens of the Transcendent, we can bring that same way of seeing to our churches, movements, organizations, political communities, networks, and worldviews. We see how naturally we organize around what matters to us, gathering people who share our vision and building coherence together. Yet we begin to see beyond our individual communities and recognize that we already belong to a much larger whole.

The whole community is already here. What is fragmented are the relationships that hold it together.

That changes what belonging means and where it begins. We already belong to something so much bigger than our separate identities, beliefs, and worldviews. Our belonging transcends the limits of what our rational minds can understand or agree upon. Through this, I now understand my experience of Divine Love more deeply.

I understand more deeply now what St. Paul means when he writes of Christ, “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

We do not have to understand or name that deeper reality in exactly the same way. But we can learn to embody that deeper coherence in how we live together. Our work is to learn how to give that Love social form in the communities where we already live.

That’s why the whole community is not the destination. It is where we begin.

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The Quiet Revolution is Already Underway

That realization brings me back to the farmer who began this story. “I’m already doing it,” he told me.

At the time, I interpreted his words as resistance. I was trying to connect the pieces, while he seemed perfectly content with what he was already doing. Years later, I finally understand what I could not see then.

His words now carry a deeper meaning. He was already doing it. So was the pastor, the activist, the business owner, the regenerative practitioner, the Christian, the network weaver, the entrepreneur, the neighborhood organizer, and the person working to transform consciousness. The good I was trying to bring together was already alive in countless people, communities, movements, cultures, and traditions.

Each piece carries something real and necessary. The farmer has his farm, the pastor his church, the activist his cause, the entrepreneur her business to build. The problem is not that we carry different pieces.

The problem comes when we begin to treat our piece as the answer for everyone else. That is how even our efforts to do good reproduce the Culture of Separation: we begin to believe that our piece will transform the whole if only enough people join us.

Forty years of on-the-ground community work have brought me to a deeply personal realization: if my piece is not the whole, then I have to relate differently to the people carrying the other pieces.

That does not mean abandoning the work we are already doing to serve a higher cause. It means recognizing that our work is one vital part of a larger whole. We can do both simultaneously. We can remain deeply rooted in the traditions, convictions, relationships, and callings that give our lives meaning. The farmer can keep restoring the soil, the activist seeking justice, the artist creating, and the person of faith living deeply from their tradition.

Showing Up for the Whole Community

The inversion begins when we recognize our own work as part of a larger whole and begin working with others whose visions, priorities, and contributions may differ from our own.

Once I stop treating my piece as the whole solution, I stop seeing those who do not share my worldview primarily as people I need to change, persuade, recruit, compete with, defeat, awaken, or convert. They may be carrying gifts, knowledge, resources, and ways of seeing that the whole community needs, things I cannot see from where I stand but can learn to recognize, value, and care about.

Instead of asking, How do I get them to join “my thing”? I can begin asking: What good are they already carrying? What needs or possibilities can they see that I cannot? What might become possible when what each of us carries is brought into relationship in service to the whole community?

My encounter with the farmer gave me a deep lesson: we need one another to see the whole more clearly. I needed to see the good he was already carrying, and he needed to see how his piece connected to something larger.

Our work is not to make all those pieces the same or gather them beneath a single worldview, movement, or name. It is to recognize what is already among us and build the relationships that allow those pieces to find one another and contribute to the whole.

To do that, we have to cross the boundaries that keep us apart.

And that does not mean erasing our differences. A church can reach beyond its own walls into the wider community. A regenerative farmer can build a relationship with a conventional one. People with very different politics, beliefs, and ways of life can begin building relationships around the life they already share.

And we do not have to agree before we begin. Shared needs, such as food, children, livelihoods, health, and care for one another, give us common ground because they reach beneath the issues and positions that divide us.

Pouring New Wine Into New Wineskins

But coming together is only the beginning. Connection by itself is not enough. We carry our assumptions, prejudices, wounds, and habits of Separation into the relationships, systems, and structures we create.

That is why Love has to become something we actually live between us.

Love, Integrity, Courage, Service, and Respect are not merely good behaviors. They are ways Divine Love becomes embodied in how we live and relate to one another. And because Love takes form in how we live with one another, we do not have to wait for large institutions or systems to begin transforming the life we share.

We can begin where we are, with the people and places already around us.

And that is the beautiful simplicity of it: a few people can meet in a small circle, not to create another organization, but to deepen relationships, practice the Virtues, and ask how what each person carries might serve the larger community.

Aligning with the Ancient Blueprint does not require your organization or community to become Symbiotic Culture. A church remains a church. A business remains a business. A neighborhood group or government agency remains what it is. You can begin living the Pattern where you already belong, while others do the same within their communities.

In practice, a circle can begin within an existing church, business, neighborhood group, nonprofit, or other organization, much as an organization might host an AA group, bringing together people who already know and trust one another. It can remain rooted in that community while also becoming part of something larger.

The circle becomes a place of practice, a place to listen more deeply, live the Virtues, build trust, and learn another way of being together. As trust deepens within a circle, the Pattern can move outward. A few people can reach beyond their circle to churches, movements, businesses, neighborhoods, and other parts of the community. Those relationships can become bridges between worlds that have remained separate.

When those bridges multiply, circles form networks of relationships, what I have called symbiotic, mediating networks, that connect otherwise separated parts of the community. They are not formal organizations. Each remains rooted where it began while forming relationships with others across boundaries. Their purpose is not to promote themselves, but to help the larger community become more connected and capable of acting together.

The old wineskin is made up of the organizing frameworks that keep us enclosed within our separate worlds and disconnected from one another. The new wineskin is a relational architecture that reconnects the separated parts of the community and allows them to become part of a larger whole.

And the new wine is Divine Love flowing through those relationships and taking social form in the life of the whole community.

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When Divine Love Breaks Through

As those relationships grow, the good that was once fragmented begins to flow through the whole community. Trust, gifts, resources, opportunities, and capacities find their way across boundaries that had previously kept people disconnected.

People meet needs together, circulate resources, create new economic relationships, solve problems, and take greater responsibility for the life they share.

The form this takes differs from community to community. One place may begin with food, children, or livelihoods; another with housing, health, land, spiritual life, or some other Common Need. Some communities may speak explicitly of God and Divine Love, while others may understand what is happening through different language and traditions.

None of them need to call it Symbiotic Culture. The Ancient Blueprint is bigger than any name we give it, and its expression takes shape through the unique culture, history, needs, gifts, and relationships of each community. That has changed how I understand my own work.

I no longer see my task as creating a model or movement for others to adopt. Symbiotic Culture is simply one contemporary way of naming and giving form to that universal Pattern.

The Blueprint is universal. Its expression is local. Instead of asking people to join what we are building, we begin asking how we can support the good work they are already doing.

And showing up for them does not mean abandoning our piece of the puzzle. We bring it with us. But instead of making it the organizing center for everyone else, we bring what we carry into relationship with what others already carry. We listen for what matters to them. We serve where we can. We participate in their good rather than only asking them to participate in ours. Then something can emerge between us that none of us could create alone.

This is how Divine Love, embodied in relationships, begins taking social form, growing civic and economic capacity and self-governance without becoming a single movement.

Imagine this happening not in one place, but in tens of thousands of communities across the world: a bottom-up eruption of Divine Love taking social form in different places while carrying the same ancient Pattern.

Years before I had language for any of this, Dr. Ari had expressed a remarkably similar vision:

Sarvodaya has already demonstrated that this vision can take practical form. It built a network of more than 5,000 communities within one nation, not through a global movement or centralized system, but through a grassroots effort that developed outside the political party system.

They showed that a commonwealth of communities is not a “pie in the sky” ideal. It can grow from the ground up, each community rooted in its own place and culture while participating in something larger.

This brings me back to the vision that has stayed with me since 1990, long before I understood the Ancient Blueprint. I saw the hearts of humanity reaching upward, and the Heart of Jesus Christ pouring Love into the world, flowing from person to person and community to community. Only much later did I begin to understand what that vision means socially: people gathering where we live, building relationships across our differences, and creating the relational structures through which Divine Love enters our common life.

And that leaves me with a larger question: what might happen if this occurred everywhere, at the same time, in forms native to different people and places, until it transformed the battlefields of our world?

Such an eruption might remain unnamed. Not because nothing was happening, but because no single movement could contain it or claim it. A church might recognize the Kingdom. A regenerative farmer might see healthier soil and a stronger community. Neighbors might simply call it neighbors helping neighbors. Others might give it no spiritual name at all.

No one needs to name it, own it, or possess the whole in order to participate. No movement needs to contain it. Each part can remain fully itself while becoming more deeply related to the whole.

The good is already here.

The deeper coherence is already here.

The Blueprint is already here.

The Kingdom is already breaking through among us.

The greatest call of the Age is to give that Love social form together.

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New Book: Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Check our all the Discoveries:

Discovery 1: The Good Is Already Here

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

Discovery 3: The Blueprint Is Already Here

Discovery 4: How Love Bridges Worldviews

Discovery 5: How Divine Love Takes Social Form

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

Discovery 10: The Whole Community Is Already Here

To learn more about my first book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity click HERE, or purchase below: