Please consider the following articulation of an unfolding vision and if you feel so moved contact me at the email on top of this message or call me at my number at the end. My purpose here is to invite you into a group conversation that leads soon to collaborative action. Feel free to invite others in.

At a recent collaborative sustainability conference I gained some new and inspiring perspectives and certain visions have become more integrated and better articulated for me. In particular I perceived that the social awakening ideas that have been unfolding to me, or something like them, are necessary for the success of all the other visions I heard shared. All paths to sustainability seem dependent on finding ways to catalyze and nurture a collective awakening of our conscious capacity to be transformed. For if we do not change our attitudes and ways of living that are destroying our relationships, societies, and the natural ecosystems upon which we all depend, we face a bleak future.

My own experience and research over many years have combined to suggest some practical ideas forward. I ask your help in refining, developing, or changing these ideas, of integrating them with others, or for your own ideas based on your own complementary perspectives and experiences. And if you feel so moved, let's build together on what we all collectively now have and learn as we go!

The changes we need to make must be on a monumental scale if we want to avert wholesale suffering and death as our way of life expands more and more beyond the capacity of the social and ecological systems that sustain us. This will require a global collective awakening from the unconscious cultural conditioning we have been subjected to since birth. Since we are fundamentally social creatures and actually learn and develop socially rather than as isolated individuals, the question I ask is this: how can we create a healthy and compelling new social context that will catalyze the necessary awakening and facilitate our living together in a happy and sustainable manner?

The root cause of our predicament may be that our contemporary social systems tend to condition us to grow up into unconsciously selfish and individualistic adults. The core organizing principle for our society has become nothing more than crude financial self-interest. Our dominant measure of value is money. And it is commonly believed now, at least by those who possess a comfortable quantity of cold cash, that everyone is naturally and unalterably selfish and that if everyone is encouraged to seek only his or her own personal gain, somehow a mysterious “invisible hand” will provide the best for all. I need not refute that pervasive ideology for you who I am sending this to, but just confirm that while this system provides a huge material benefit to the very few, it is gained via the exploitation and suffering of the many. Many of our contemporaries may not always see that because so many of them belong to the few.

What if we chose a different, more beneficent organizing principle, one that is more in line with our deep true natures? Would Love perhaps be too much to suggest? Did not someone named Jesus embark upon such a project two millennia ago? Is that project not still alive, at least in name?         

In reality, if we look dispassionately and without ideology at human living patterns throughout time and space, it can be seen that only to the degree that we cooperate have we ever had any kind of security, comfort, or prosperity. Cooperation has always been necessary to survive in our weak, slow human bodies. We are fundamentally cooperative beings. It is just that under the conditions that have prevailed and accelerated since the agricultural revolution some people are able to successfully manipulate for themselves progressively larger shares of the fruits of that cooperation. And our core western belief systems since the so called “enlightenment” have become progressively more mechanistic and individualistic.

So the question is, how can we foster the consciousness and cooperation necessary for general happiness and prosperity without allowing the manipulation of the system for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many?

Innumerable ways to do this are well-established, even if not so generally known. The problem is not how to do it, but the lack of consciousness that it needs to be done, the will to do it, and the awareness that life will be much better for each and every one of us when we do. The reason we do not have such consciousness, will, and awareness is that we are programmed or acculturated otherwise. The engines of such programming and acculturation are vast and firmly controlled by those who feel that they benefit from the status quo and who therefore believe what they want to believe, which is that this system is the best for all. They control the global financial system, worldwide corporations, national governments, major media, and educational systems, not to mention some of the most politically active religious movements. We might make some small inroads in these institutions, but the status quo is built into their fundamental structures.

What can we do to counter such a vast power as this, especially after the Citizen's United case put the last nail in the coffin of representative democracy in our land? For the time being at least. (I know there are flickers of hope, such as that Whitman could not buy the election in California, but the major political trends are not so encouraging. The Browns and Kuciniches are few and far between, and what can we really expect from a few against so many?)

The strategy I propose here is to reach people not through institutional intermediaries, but directly, person-to-person, in small groups. People are naturally social and most are not commonly getting their deep social needs adequately met. They may think they are, but when they find a more rewarding way, they will know it and won't go back. That is my postulate and I see no other realistic way that has not been tried and thus far failed.   

What if we can fashion new social contexts in which people will naturally awaken from their culturally induced selfishness to their native cooperative sociability? A knowledge of the patterns that have worked in the past or are working now to knit people together in solidarity and bring out their noble instincts ought to provide us valuable clues. I won't go into all the different sources I have researched, seen, or experienced, but will simply suggest some specific patterns I have drawn out from them that seem practical to me and should have the power to facilitate fundamental transformation.

The basic unit of the social network I envision is the fellowship circle. Human beings naturally belong in small bands. The beleaguered nuclear family and the corrupt large institutions that form our current primary social structures are too isolated and limited on the one hand and too vast and impersonal on the other to support people's true social, spiritual, and psychological health. Large corporations are now breaking their organizational structures down into small work teams to take advantage of this human fact, but in the service of corporate profit and power rather than human welfare and happiness.

Imagine the formation of small groups of six to eight people who meet weekly for mutual support and to collaboratively explore the models we use to understand and pattern our lives. Various loosely structured formats can be used in order to provide a nurturing and stimulating social experience. Whether they are conscious of it or not, people long for such fellowship. This is what they seek at least a facsimile of in TV comedies and dramas, social networking sites, churches, political affiliations, clubs of various kinds, and of course bars and other traditional drinking establishments, a la “Cheers.”

It is just that these often meet a need without serving much of a deeper function. Or if they do serve a deeper function it is often in ways that divide groups from one another and enslave them to rigid belief systems that serve some powerful hierarchical institution. Instead, we need consciously created relationships that not only meet people's basic emotional needs, but also nurture their deeper collective cognitive and spiritual growth. Is this not how Christianity got its start before it was co-opted and corrupted by the Empire? Did not Jesus, according to the sparse records we have, teach us to love one another and even love our “enemies?”

I am not sure exactly how to organize and format such groups, but am confident that some of the people I am sharing this with will have experience with proven ways that we may build upon and integrate together. Some of the objectives would be to provide a thoroughly enjoyable and even positively addictive experience by meeting people's needs for love and camaraderie; to support people in exploring their unexamined assumptions and beliefs; to help them to investigate, create, and try out alternative models for apprehending reality; and to facilitate the development of healthier and more sustainable patterns for living together in this world.

I am imagining a format that may include some sort of quiet time wherein we can rise above some of the emotional reactivity we may be carrying with us; a check-in where we may surface important issues we have been dealing with; an idea or story that will stimulate worthwhile dialogue in which we can develop our various native cognitive abilities that were quashed by an education that emphasized the memorization of abstracted “facts” at the expense of thinking critically and creatively; exercises and games to develop the critical communication and relationship skills that most of us did not learn growing up, the lack of which impede our ability to cooperate and collaborate effectively with one another; a chance to support one another on specific issues or endeavors; and time to work on the bigger issues we need to address together as a people. In short, let's develop a system in which people will set aside a regular time and place to evolve together into more conscious and mature human beings, living in a more loving and sustainable manner. And of course, let’s do that ourselves, right where we are.

As I write this, I realize that a once a week meeting is not enough, but that we should actually be living in this manner with one another all the time. But we have to start somewhere and a weekly meeting is more than hardly any of us have right now. It may become the catalyst that enables us to begin to live in such a way with each other throughout the rest of our week and create a life wherein such needs are met in the course of everyday activities. We can learn and develop perspectives and skills that we bring into our everyday lives, such that we will begin to change the world one loving thought, feeling, and act at a time. We can develop new habits of the heart that will reflect the world we long for and make it real. We can create a context in which our hearts and minds will awaken together.

It occurs to me that this process may be jump-started with weekend workshops or intensives in which some consciousness is awakened and new perspectives and skills are initially learned. Then in the weekly meetings they can continue to be developed and the fruits may begin to unfold. I can conceive perhaps a monthly schedule wherein a different main process is explored each week in a cycle that iteratively builds upon itself month by month.

I am imagining a robust network of such groups that will share among each other the perspectives and skills they learn and will collaborate with one another on larger visions and endeavors. There will be a facilitative core that helps organize and guide the network according to the principles and directions that emerge from within the network. Again, I don't know how to do this, but there are people reading this who will have much more experience and ideas along these lines than I will. From out of these circles and the more comprehensive wholes that form from them, the network can evolve various kinds of more universal social and economic patterns. Some such models might include the following:

Village Fairs: Weekly community gatherings where local people may interconnect, exchange, and celebrate together.

Town Halls or Community Centers: Full time centers for learning, exchange, social interaction, and civic dialogue.

Town Squares or Commons: Outdoor places with space for markets, meeting places, community gatherings, social intercourse, community gardens, demonstration gardens, and any other collectively beneficial activities.

Ecovillages: Small urban, suburban, or rural settlements where people meet their social, economic, material, and spiritual needs locally, cooperatively, and sustainably.

Living Economy: An economic system that supports wholesome rather than destructive environmental, human, and transcendent ways of life.

Inclusive Power: As the now dominant system disintegrates and collapses of its own contradictions, this resilient and robust network of human hearts may one day arise from the ashes and form a resilient collective power that takes us to a new level of evolution. Indeed, I see that emerging even now.           

The fruits of such a social network will be innumerable. We will not only nurture our deep human endowments without harming each other and the environment, but also collectively create the world we have dreamed of. These small fellowship circles will form the social cocoon in which we may transfigure from the furry little earthbound caterpillars we have been to awaken as the beautiful unfettered butterflies we always contained the matrix for deep inside.

-Brad Smith

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