Editor‘s note: The following piece is an excerpt from the introduction to “Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation,” written by Richard Flyer.
The book you are reading is different from the one I set out to write. Initially, it was about building local communities as an antidote to a divided and atomized society with its centralized global control.
It still is — but then, I realized I needed to reveal the deeper insights required to unite communities so that this work can be effective.
So, this book will answer a question I keep hearing universally, across the political spectrum, the same one Rodney King famously once asked, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
This question seems even more urgent today given the deepening divides in the wake of the COVID lockdowns, with the polarizing narratives and relentless “culture wars” around the “tribal” identities of politics, religion, race, and gender — eroding an already waning trust in society’s institutions.
The never-ending conflict has also diminished our trust in each other, even our neighbors — and many wonder if civilization can endure amidst what feels like a growing darkness.
Over the past year, I’ve been in dialogue with changemakers across the religious, business, cultural, and political spectrum. In the process, a more precise version of the question above keeps surfacing: Are there any principles, ideas, values, and common issues around which humanity could unite?
We know that after natural disasters, such as the recent horrific fire on Maui, human beings can break through, at least temporarily, to a shared reality of mutual aid and universal kinship, uniting what before had been warring tribes.
Knowing we can unite during a crisis, my life’s work has been dedicated to answering a second related question, “How can we come together and unite 24/7?”
You may be skeptical, but I have discovered there IS a way for people and whole communities to get behind a shared, unifying vision, a worldview, and put it into action as a new community “way of life.”
A worldview is like a pair of glasses through which we view and make sense of the world. We all have one, even if we don’t recognize it. It shapes our place and purpose in the universe. Formed from our deepest beliefs and values, it fuels our feelings, decisions, and every step we take. Basically, it defines who we are and how we live. It’s an anchor to what we consider real.
This book will share a unifying worldview that arises from what I call an “Ancient Blueprint.” I see this as a lineage, that in my view, goes back to Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, through Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a new society, and made real today in the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka founded by Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne — whose work will be featured throughout.
I call this Ancient Blueprint “Symbiotic Culture.” Symbiotic Culture refers to a society where mutually beneficial relationships and collaborations amongst diverse groups of people, from family to neighborhood to community, nation, and planet, become the norm. Essentially, humanity is moving into a new Symbiotic Age.
Just as many organisms in nature develop mutual partnerships (symbiosis) in times of challenge when their survival is threatened, I believe human society will come together today to deal with the great peril we face — by working together and sharing resources, knowledge, and skills for mutual benefit.
To accomplish that, a radical approach is needed to invert the power pyramid of the top-down global system — by empowering local communities from the bottom up.
I absolutely understand it’s hard to imagine achieving a consensus in a world of dueling culture war narratives, where people can’t even agree on facts. Actually, it’s even more challenging. In our postmodern age, people interpret “facts” through radically differing worldview lenses — coming from differing realities.
Without any agreed-upon “objective truth,” reality becomes malleable, fragmenting into a myriad of personal truths/worldviews grounded in individual beliefs, perceptions, and opinions. This fragmentation, seen in our ever-dividing societal groups, only intensifies social conflict.
At the helm, a dominant oligarchy exploits our tribal instincts, exacerbating divides globally, right down to local communities.
Amplified by AI, social media algorithms further steer us toward the ultimate goal — a thoroughly atomized, global consumer society.
Okay, I came out and said it. These statements may be hard to stomach and extremely upsetting — or liberating. I am not trying to persuade you but rather share the result of five decades of working to build local communities — which, I believe, is the only hope for humanity.
I’ve spent my whole life watching this unfold, never complaining about it, but instead working towards a concrete answer to our Age’s central, seemingly impossible challenge: finding a universal understanding around which humanity can unite.
For me, the foundation of this universal understanding — a unifying worldview — emerged from the direct spiritual experiences I had as a 12-year-old (and for many years after) in which I connected to a “Luminous Web” that I recognized as the Ultimate Reality beyond that which we see and feel with our senses.
At the time, I had no words to explain my “out-of-this-world” experiences, nor was there anyone I could talk to offering any helpful perspective. In sharp contrast to my encounters with Ultimate Reality that radiated Ultimate Love and connection, I returned to the other world of human conflict, fragmentation, war, economic inequality, and confusion.
I asked myself, “What’s the matter with this picture?” The contrast between the heavenly luminosity I experienced and the suffering I saw in the world broke my heart.
At the time, I felt like I was living in two separate worlds — a radiant transcendent world where all is interconnected and a fragmented world of separate individuals, tribes, and silos in conflict.
That dissonance set me on a mission that has become my life-long calling of fifty years: to heal the brokenness of the human spirit and the collective suffering in the world — by finding a way to bring Heaven to Earth.
I know you may be thinking, I’m proposing a sane world — I must be crazy! And yet, I believe I am speaking to a universal human longing deep within our hearts.
This audacious mission has led me to the inner and outer work you will read about in this book — training as a scientist; my apprenticeship with an indigenous Aztec curandera and study with other spiritual and religious teachers; the influence of Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne (Dr. Ari) and the world-renowned Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka that has been thriving for over sixty-five years; the neighborhood work I did in San Diego and subsequent work with nonprofits; being a businessman; and the symbiotic, “ecosystem” networks I launched in Reno, Nevada.
At its root, this book is about “transcendence” — through an authentic spiritual revolution of the heart.
As you will see, I alternately refer to Ultimate Reality as the Transcendent, indicating that it exists beyond material existence, and Immanent as the Ground of Being because it can be experienced here and now as the foundation for life, Nature, and human consciousness.
It’s also the foundation of what has been called “Objective Reality,” from which I believe that all positive Virtues (e.g., love, charity, compassion, generosity, etc.), universally acknowledged across religions, flow. It is likely the reason why humanity tends to aspire to the betterment of the world, for example, Plato’s representation of Love as “truth, beauty, and goodness.”
So, instead of trying to reform, fix, or tear down the systems by which society operates, I’m proposing a novel approach: transforming them by first re-connecting heart-to-heart, person-to-person, neighbor-to-neighbor, community-to-community, nations, and then ultimately, the world.
The Immersive Culture of Separation and “Spiritual Climate Change”
While writing this book, I gained clarity in identifying both the “disease” and the “cure.” Underneath society’s dysfunctions — domination, usury, extraction, polarization, nihilism, and mistrust — is what I’ve come to call “the Culture of Separation” based on materialism and self-serving agendas.
Materialism is the idea that the only thing that matters is matter — and that, ultimately, we are all separate from one another. Because of my earlier direct experiences with the Ultimate, I knew that separation was a lie. And while separation is a part of reality, we are programmed to believe it’s the ONLY truth.
This Culture of Separation is so pervasive that we mistake it for all reality, i.e., “the way things are.” Like water for fish and air for birds, we fail to recognize our complete immersion in this dualistic worldview. As you will learn later in this book, this Culture of Separation has a way of distorting, diverting, and capturing even the most loving and functional human impulses, especially social, political, and religious movements.
While some who experience what I did retreat from the world, I took the opposite path. Instead of becoming a monk, cut off from the world, I ran TOWARD the world. I was fueled by the desire to embody the Love I had received from those transcendent experiences and be that Love in the world — to bring the two worlds I have been experiencing together as one.
In the process, I learned what worked and discovered WHY it worked — and how to bring this unifying reality into the world. That’s why I’m writing this book.
I realized that every crisis we face — whether it shows up as social, political, economic, ecological, or anything else — is fundamentally a spiritual crisis rooted in the Culture of Separation, a culture antithetical to the deepest aspirations of the human heart.
We cannot run from this crisis, nor can we expect to “fix” anything “out there” without facing the truth “in here.” In other words, before we can address the myriad of global societal challenges like war, poverty, or climate change, we must first cultivate “spiritual climate change” within ourselves and then radiate that out organically into our families, neighborhoods, and local communities — building “counter-cultural” networks of Love.
So, while the foundation of this work is undoubtedly spiritual, it must be practiced in the context of a down-to-earth, face-to-face, local community. Why is that?
The paradox of our time is that we can’t solve global issues globally — we can only solve them locally.
The world system, with its top-down economic and political control, is too vast to take on directly. And, since politics AND economics are both downstream from culture, we need a “cultural change” strategy.
But, changing global culture is too formidable to take on directly, so we must break down the challenge to something more manageable — creating a positive cultural movement in each local region. This book will share a coherent strategy showing you how to make this happen.
There is still one more level to drill down to — each person. What CAN one person do? We must realize that underneath our culture, we’re embedded in many local social networks that may affect us more than we are affecting them.
At the bottom, where we live, we choose what we give our attention to every day and what we “worship.” That is why this is a spiritual crisis, not in an abstract sense. It’s a spiritual crisis because we live in a culture whose “attention economy” is designed to convert us into obedient, isolated consumers.
The way to start a local culture change movement is to embody the new culture right where we live — and it begins by “re-inhabiting” ourselves with a new awareness. We decide to take absolute responsibility for ourselves and our families to build a flourishing community despite what’s happening in society.
Practically, we do this by channeling our newfound consciousness into our core identities within the communities where we live. By starting at the grassroots level, we lay the foundation for transforming and revitalizing culture through our local connections – within families, neighborhoods, and schools to non-profits, main street businesses/workplaces, religious institutions, spiritual circles, local governance, and the natural environment we inhabit.
Another reason to go local is that the spiritual aspect is best embodied locally. The actual test of spiritual maturity is walking our talk in real-world interactions and trusted relationships, what used to be called a “face-to-face” community — rather than taking the safe, easy, but divisive and toxic path of online posturing.
Finally, another thing about going local is that when something DOES work locally, it can spread “fractally” and emerge anywhere and everywhere — simultaneously. This book will discuss how that is possible.
The “secret” to building community networks for cultural change is based on a little-acknowledged aspect of community building — each of us has direct access to a Transcendent power that can transform us, amplifying our ability and capacity to be a Uniter instead of a Divider.
Flowing from this Transcendent Ground of Being are Virtues that first “unify” our personality — bringing order, focus, and higher purpose. This internal coherence naturally leads to a more abundant life as we re-orient our entire being from self-serving to self-giving Love.
Accessing this power gives us the capacity to unify our local communities across any warring tribes or silos — building trust, connecting, and weaving the good right where we live — the basis for building a new Culture of Connection. And, we don’t have to wait for outside “experts” in social activism, community building, or even established networkers to start.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said:
“Everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by Love. And you can be that servant.”
This work comes straight from the most profound aspects of your heart — if your heart longs for a new creation and community and you want to open yourself to a deep Trust and a transforming power.
Henri J.M. Nouwen said, “The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.”
And that power for change has been hiding in plain sight.
That was an excerpt from the introduction to “Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation.” The entire book will be serialized (for free) on Richard’s Substack. Find out what happens next by Subscribing to get Birthing the Symbiotic Age right to your email box.
About the Book
The world is on the brink — not just of a breakdown, but of a breakthrough. An exciting new book offers practical proof.
Embedded in the many crises we face as a civilization is the seed of opportunity. As obsolete structures collapse, a parallel culture is emerging. We call it Symbiotic Culture — thriving interconnected networks of intentional mutual benefit where millions of people are learning to empower themselves and bring their communities together.
And it’s already been done and is being done!
In his new book, “Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation,” Richard Flyer explains that this is no pie-in-the-sky ideal but a feet-on-the-ground real deal. It’s based on more than 40 years of successful practical application in environments as diverse as Sri Lanka, a developing country, and “overdeveloped” western cities like Reno, Nevada.
Richard shows how to implement a grassroots “Symbiotic Society” framework that grounds individuals and communities in the intrinsic principles, values, and virtues that unite us around shared community needs.
The book addresses the spiritual crisis underlying the “culture of separation” and offers a pathway for “spiritual climate change” that creates a “culture of connection.”
“Birthing the Symbiotic Age” provides an autobiographical and historical roadmap that outlines how we can emerge from our fragmented and conflicted social networks/silos and create sustainable, interconnected ecosystem networks consisting of local leaders, organizations, businesses, and local government — in parallel to our already established systems.
It’s not fighting, reforming, or replacing the current system. It’s about activating and connecting the healthy and functional forces inside the system to emerge above and beyond their silos to cooperate and collaborate to “connect the good” in their community — a new Network Commons. It’s an organic, whole-system approach that builds interwoven ecosystem networks of parallel culture, society, economy, and politics.
“Birthing the Symbiotic Age” outlines all the components each individual and community needs to implement and build their own Symbiotic Culture and networks. The outcome is a united humanity where local practice transforms us globally.
