Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Discovery 2: The Coherence Is Already Here

What resonates with you? What challenges you?

Oct 20, 2026

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.

What began as a personal spiritual question would eventually lead me toward something much larger: a pattern I began to recognize across communities, cultures, and generations.

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.

I could not yet explain what it was, but over time it gave me something I had never known before: an underlying trust that I belonged to something larger than myself, that beneath everything, I was held in unconditional Love.

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.

Divine Love orders relationship toward flourishing; coherence emerges as our relationships begin to reflect that pattern. To receive that Love is to be drawn into communion with others, allowing that Love to shape how we relate, serve, and build community.

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.

The question was no longer simply whether we were connected, but what orders those relationships, allowing them to become life-giving rather than harmful.

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.

What began for me as an encounter with Divine Love had become a question of social transformation: how could that Love begin to shape the relationships, communities, and institutions around me?

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.

That shifted the question for me: not whether they were doing good, but whether they could begin to see themselves as parts of the whole community and connect the good they were already doing with the good others were carrying.

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.

The deeper question is what becomes possible when these churches and communities begin connecting the good within them to the good already present around them.

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.

We were asking a more practical question:
What could unite us as a community, and how could we begin living and working from that shared ground?

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.

At the same time, we had often sought, with good reason, to protect the public square from religious division and domination. But in doing so, we had stripped much of our shared civic language of anything that sounded spiritual or transcendent.

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.

Instead, we were recovering the transcendent dimension of human experience and bringing it back into our common life, while allowing people to understand its Source through very different worldviews.

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.

In a sense, we were remembering something we had forgotten: a community could acknowledge that people can embody Virtues, find meaning, and accept responsibilities larger than their own self-interest without requiring everyone to believe the same thing about its Source.

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

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.

But people across cultures, religions, and worldviews widely recognize Virtues such as Love, integrity, courage, service, and respect as qualities of a good human life. The Golden Rule is one of the clearest examples, appearing in different forms across many of the world’s religious and ethical traditions.

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.

Through the community experiments that followed, a recognizable pattern began to take shape: a shared purpose, common principles, Virtues, shared community needs, and a network-centric way of connecting people and organizations already serving those needs.

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.

A connection already present between people becomes visible through love and respect. Love and respect make relationship possible. Relationship builds trust. Trust enables cooperation. Cooperation facilitates coordination. And eventually structures emerge to carry what has already formed into the larger community.

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.

But my Reno experiences and my encounter with Dr. Tusi suggested another sequence:

Transcendent orientation → Virtue → relationship → trust → cooperation → coordination → systems and structures

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.

Love precedes organization. Organization cannot produce Love.

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.

Share Symbiotic Culture

Go to Discovery 3: The Blueprint is Already Here