Butterfly Communities

1.1. A dream that becomes possible

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” (Victor Hugo)

The new scientific vision that perceives the planet as a living system is changing our civilization. Now it comes the time for this idea: human-scale organizations and communities, based on Nature’s organizing principles.

If we talk about “time”, let’s take a survey into history and see how human civilization has evolved: So far, human history has developed three major types of civilization:

Paleolithic-Neolithic (Beige-Magenta in Spiral Dynamics)

Antiquity-Middle Ages (Red-Blue)

Modernism-Postmodernism (Orange-Green)

Each of these three great human civilizations is based on its unique metaphysics/mythology. Each has its own lens through which it perceives the Universe, the human society and the meaning of life; each has its own type of social, religious, political and economic organization etc.

The Paleolithic and Neolithic are based on the metaphysics of the great Goddess of Life. Antiquity and the Middle Ages are based on the metaphysics of an Almighty God. Modernism and Postmodernism fundamentally perceive the Universe and human society rather as a mechanism.

Each metaphysics has built and sustained a specific civilization. Every civilization – like any living system – has a period of birth and growth and a period of degradation/collapse and death. Now, humanity is in the collapsing phase of its last civilization, based on the metaphysical understanding of the Universe and human society as mechanisms.

At the same time, we are living the birth of a new human civilization, based on a new metaphysics. What is the new metaphysics? It is the new scientific perspective that perceives the Universe as a living system. I will call this metaphysics: The Living Universe. The well-known Gaia Theory that speaks about Earth as a living system is not just a scientific theory, it is much more: a paradigm by which we perceive our living Universe as interconnected and collaborative in every aspect.

The Living Universe metaphysics has started to inform a new human civilization. As time passes, the principles that make the Universe works – revealed by the new science – are becoming the very principles that we are basing our future civilization.

Already our economic and political language is permeated by biological language: we are hearing about living buildings and living technologies – technologies that aim to mimic Nature; we are hearing about living communities and living economies.  “Think like a Mountain” – we started to hear. “Think like a Planet”!

We are aiming to change our old legal and political paradigm, that is based on an outdated metaphysics, to a new one, aligned with Nature’s living principles, that is telling us about collaboration, synergy and fairness. “Butterfly Communities” open project is aiming to bring forth new human organizations that will resemble holarchic (living) systems. 

For our alternative social space, we are aiming to change the outdated capitalist economic paradigm with a fair and ecological one, aligned with Nature’s ways to produce. This is what Butterfly Communities is about.

We are aiming to change our social paradigm, based on separation, inequity and competition with one based on collaboration, solidarity and well-being of its stakeholders. This is what Butterfly Communities is about.

For so long humans have dreamed to a fair world. Now, the time for dreaming passed: we have to build a fair world – as our only chance to survive as a civilization, as our only chance to go further.

There are already a lot of frames that try to map human social or psychological evolution. All of them are speaking about the same thing: now, humanity is facing its greatest evolutionary challenge, but has, at the same time, the greatest opportunity to evolve and go further.

Regardless of words we use  ” to evolve toward a Yellow-Turquoise civilization” (See Spiral Dynamics),  “to open “the Fourth Frontier” (Bret Weinstein), or “to cross the Second Threshold and return home” (see Hero’s Journey archetype) – we have the opportunity and responsibility to be the Life’ next step further.

A fair social world! This is an ageless dream of the human species, that now has the chance to become true!

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1.2. An open-project, an open-story

How we will build our Butterfly Communities?

How we can meet the people that resonate with our values and worldview?

I believe that we can significantly alter the probabilities to meet such people through choices we make on a daily basis. Let us talk about “shaping serendipity through open-story” (the whole article is adapted after John Hegel).

At the beginning let us address the concept of “shaping serendipity”. We will focus on a specific form of it: unexpected encounters with others who could become co-creators with us. We can increase the probability of that kind of serendipity through a wide range of choices. We could choose environments and actions that increase the likelihood of such encounters: live in a big city, travel, engage in different projects, events, festivals, initiate your own blog, your own projects, be more open to new people or ideas, etc.

Now, let us talk about the power of stories. In general, stories are self-contained: they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories are about the story-teller or about some heroes, but they are not about you, the listener.

Open-Stories are open-ended: there is no resolution yet. There is some kind of opportunity in the future and it is not clear whether it will materialize or not. The resolution of the open-story hinges on you, the listener: the resolution depends in part on the choices you will make and the actions you will take. An open-story (an open-project) is a call to action directed at the listeners, stressing the role that they can and need to play in resolving the story. Effectively framed open-stories are designed to inspire and motivate others to come together to accomplish something that none of us could fully accomplish on our own.

Serendipity is shaped by the ability to attract others, to draw people to us that we never knew existed and that we had no idea could join us in bringing forth the world we want to live in. How can we harness that ability to attract others? We need to frame an open-project that will motivate people to seek us out. That requires a project that is deeply meaningful not just to ourselves, but to others as well. It is also important to identify an opportunity that can be shared by others. It needs to be not just about something that will benefit me, but something that we can all benefit from.

It will be even more powerful if the opportunity grows as more and more people join the quest to achieve the opportunity. That way, we are not just sharing a smaller and smaller piece of a fixed pie, but the pie is growing as participation grows. This provides a powerful sense of shared interest: the more who join us, the bigger and more attractive the opportunity becomes. This can become a strong attractor. The word will spread rapidly that there is an opportunity really worth pursuing. People are likely to surface from unexpected places, seeking to learn about the opportunity and how they can participate.

Butterfly Communities is such an open project!

An open-story is a powerful call to action, because it is a transparent invitation toward collaboration from equipotent positions. So, not only are people motivated to seek us out, they are more likely to share ideas with us because there is a level of trust that invites true cooperation and true sharing.

There is a third element of open-stories that helps to enhance the potential for serendipity: they encourage new ideas. An open-project could frame an opportunity with enough specificity to be credible and inspiring, but it doesn’t develop the opportunity in such detail that there is nothing left to be said. The most inspiring open-projects are those that invite exploration of the full richness of that opportunity and co-creation of the opportunity as it emerges and evolves.

Easily, you can understand that Butterfly Communities is such an open-story: We thought of its basic principles and outlined its basic organization, but the whole development of the project, how it will really unfold, its details – all depend on you: on those who will join it with their ideas and creativity.

Open-projects also leave a large open space regarding the detailed actions required to achieve the opportunity: there is an invitation to join in crafting approaches that can have a greater impact on achieving the opportunity and learning from the experiences to date. So, open-projects represent an invitation to contribute ideas at multiple levels, both in developing a deeper understanding of the opportunity ahead and in evolving more and more effective approaches to achieve that opportunity. As a result, people are motivated to exercise imagination and creativity even before they connect with others to pursue the opportunity. When they show up, they often have ideas that they want to share because they have already been inspired to come up with those ideas. Those initial conversations can generate a lot of new insights on both sides because everyone is motivated to seek out ways to achieve even more impact.

More fundamentally, open-projects have the potential to build a deeper, long-term meaningful relationship as we join together to pursue that inspiring opportunity.

In framing an open-story that can be a true catalyst for others and in joining this kind of open-projects there is always a “First Threshold” we have to cross. It is about the real threshold we have to cross as individuals: from individualistic to cooperative ways of living. You can join an open-project only if you can cross this first threshold. All of us have to join on a “heroic journey” to address an opportunity that extends beyond our narrow self-interest and beyond our individual possibilities.

We need to acknowledge that we alone cannot achieve that opportunity and that we alone don’t have all the answers. We need to understand that only together could we fulfill that opportunity. The rewards, though, could be enormous: We could achieve an opportunity that would have been beyond our reach, if we sought to pursue it on our own. And this opportunity is likely to become even bigger, as more participants join in the quest. On the way, we could build a rich network of enduring relationships with people who share complementary values and aspirations and who are committed to work together to achieve something that is truly inspiring.

Inspired by many people, I crafted an open-project that could be meaningful for most of us. Beyond all the dysfunctions, I see a way forward and a great opportunity: to reverse the social dissolution process. Let’s enhance the mutual-consistency between us. This is what Butterfly Communities project is about.

We are called to co-create the future of human civilization. First of all, we have to imagine one. Then we have to believe it is possible to bring it forth. We can’t follow our allurements without a kind of belief. Something greater than us is calling us to evolve. Something greater than us is coming to life. It is our turn to enter the Story and become one of its heroes.

1.3. Building our Clans and Communities

The first step is always the hardest. Crossing the threshold toward more cooperative and solidary social lives is not easy. It means, first of all, an individual evolution toward higher levels of consciousness. If we manage to bring forth in our society the first brotherhoods and clans – small communities with higher levels of cooperation, mutual-consistency, inter-dependency and solidarity, we will be then able to bring forth easily the Butterfly Communities and, with them, a new political, economic and juridic paradigm, based on Nature’s principles.

Butterfly Communities project is a “manifesto” for mimicking Nature not only in farming or building technologies, but in social organization too.

Definitively, this is the next step further in the biological evolution of our species. It is not only about some exterior organizing principles or “disruptive” technologies: it is about evolving as a species toward a new level of consciousness that is conducive to cooperation, fairness, mutual-consistency between us and Nature etc. We are on the evolutionary path to embrace in our “self” the whole Planet.

In order to thrive in a VUCA world, we are evolving a new set of emotions and a symbiotic behavior, better suited for a cooperative society.

It is our opportunity and responsibility to bring forth these small circles of solidarity.

We can bring them everywhere. The political, economic and cultural settings are supporting this step forward. Fasting and praying in the old churches, spending time in Nature or spiritual retreats, traveling across the world and meeting wonderful people, attending expensive courses or reading books, praying for a better world, militating for a fair society, protesting in the street against all injustices, inventing “disruptive” technologies – all these could be only tools for a social change, but they are not the change in themselves. All these advancements could help us to open our hearts toward more cooperative life strategies.

There will be no beneficial social change if we do not imagine it in advance, choose it consciously and find creative ways to bring it to life!

The second step would be gathering the clans into all kinds of Butterfly Communities.

Let us imagine that the small clans are prokaryotic cells. As prokaryotic cells learned to collaborate, they united themselves, bringing forth eukaryotic cells. How they could integrate themselves together in bigger units? Simple: they learned how to synergize and so, they increased their chances of survival through collaboration.

In the beginning, gathering the clans in Butterfly Communities will be not a spectacular social event. Outside the mass-media interest, few brotherhoods and clans will understand they could synergize together in order to increase their chances for a larger social impact. Few artists groups (musicians, dancers, etc.) will unite with some trainers, educators and entrepreneurs. Doing so, they will increase their resources pool, the chances to thrive and the opportunities to self-express.

I envision that first Butterfly Communities will be created around some artists and educators whose first drive will be to spread a meaningful message. These artists and educators will be the step forward of our species. But in a not very distant future, when some invisible point will be tipped, we will witness a social shifting.

Europe is best suited for this cultural step forward. Here a lot of young people tend to embrace the new worldview of the Living Universe.

The process of “gathering the clans” is enhanced by all sorts of advancements: The new science and a whole range of social and economic analyses highlight the necessity of more regenerative and cooperative relations. The positive psychology, along with a whole range of spiritual movements, highlight the same. Ecological movement, Commons movement, P2P movement, Co-operative movement, Eco-village movement etc. highlight the same.

Building and gathering the clans into communities will demand from us to develop some very important new abilities (at the beginning as individuals and then as communities), especially those related to communication and correlation; flexibility; openness; lateral thinking; emotional and collective intelligence etc.

An important part of Butterfly Communities open-project will maintain its focus on offering courses and all the tools necessary for self-education and personal development. Another important part of this open project is the artistic one, which will express the new vision through songs, dances, poetry, movies, paintings etc. “The role of the art is to make the revolution irresistible”. Other important parts are related to the process of renewing the political, legal and economic paradigm.

Everybody could be part of the evolutionary process, taking just “the next right step”.

Mahatma Ghandi’s quote “Be the change you want to see in the world!” was a real light. Now it is the time to go a little further: “You and your brotherhood be the change you want to see in the world!” It is about conscious evolution.

We live in an open world. In its bifurcation points, “even the beating wing of a butterfly could influence an hurricane on the other side of the globe”!

Use the butterfly effect to express yourself and bring forth the world you want.

You and your brotherhood could be the heroes of the New Story!

Based on the emergence of the new understanding of the Universe as a living system, I envision everywhere people starting to live as small brotherhoods or communities, ready to accept the challenges of their choices and to evolve a new set of emotions, better suited to their collaborative life strategies. Some of them could choose to live together as a community in the middle of a town and to continue to work in different places. Some of them will choose to organize themselves as a co-operative and start to do something together, more meaningful for them, related to their gifts, resources, needs and aspirations.

The Butterfly Communities could start with the appearance of an educational/ artistic oriented communities. As a student, I was part of an “experimental theatre and contemporary dance” artistic group. We used to offer street performances, engaging the audience. Each artistic performance was an improvisation, building-up itself as a dialog with our public. Our rehearsals were true “organizational development” workshops, where we were learning how to express ourselves through dance and poetry and how to correlate with each other, in a stigmergic improvisation. We learned there how to express ourselves and how to intertwine together, how to weave together a story with meaning for us and for our audience, who was always invited to become an active part of our show.

Also, when I was teenager, in my country, Romania, there was a wandering tribe of artists and poets: The “Flame” Cenacle. It is still a wonder and a mystery for me how ever could be allowed in a communist country such an amazing cultural phenomenon! They used to travel all over the country, offering free performances on stadiums for tens of thousands of people, especially teenagers like me. The performance used to start afternoon and could last until the next morning, all night long. On that improvised and poor stage, an endless number of artists were singing for us about freedom, beauty, understanding between people, hope, meaning of life and love. I never felt in all my life such a strong sense of solidarity and beauty!

Always I dreamed to revive in my life such an artistic brotherhood and, along with other similar groups, to bring forth a new “Flame” Cenacle. To travel together as a brotherhood all over the world to bring hope and meaning for people, as that beautiful song was singing:

“With the wind in the willows

The birds in the sky

There’s a bright sun to warm us wherever we lie…

We have bread and fishes and a jug of red wine

To share on our journey with all of mankind.

We travel the wide world

Over land and the sea

To tell all the people

How they can be free…”

(Blackmore’s Night)

I dream of a nomadic caravan of dancers and musicians, poets and educators, inspired by the same revelation that we are part of a living Planet! We could travel and offer artistic performances, expositions, conferences, courses. A Butterfly Community could start as a nomad community of artists and trainers. This could be a powerful start for some young people and a living laboratory to deepen their friendship, to develop the new set of emotions needed for a more symbiotic human inter-relation, to deepen the skills of non-violent communication, holarchic decision making, stigmergic collaboration. This could be an open-project for thousand of young artists and trainers, entrepreneurs and social activists that could help them to self-express and support each other, to fulfill their inner-callings and give meaning to their talents and passions.

Of course, it is not about an “official” Butterfly Communities caravan, but thousands of artistic caravans, traveling like new missionaries for a better world. Millions of teenagers from all over the world could be inspired and changed forever! Beyond all the hopelessness, destruction and corruption made visible through mass-media hysteria, they will find hope and beauty! They will find a meaning and a purpose for their life. All that a teenager needs is a meaningful purpose for its life.

Step by step, some of us with political skills will engage in politics, to change the political paradigm and to birth a new global social architecture for a Butterfly Society. Others, with entrepreneurial and engineering skills, could build regenerative human habitats that will host the first Butterfly Communities.

In the upcoming years, under the ecological and social pressures, I envision that the people of Europe will support open-projects like this, as a proactive transition toward a future fairer world. I see millions of people around the world joining the cultural movement that will renew our world.

The new scientific understanding will pass beyond the scientific labs and bloom in thousands of songs and dances, poetries, and movies. The books and courses are useful, but they speak more to the brain. Music and dance could better speak to humans! Dancing and singing together on the world stadiums, feeling together as one, could change us forever! Music and dance have the power to change our emotions and decisions. They can speak to us more deeply than rational words. Music and dance are a better way to spread new ideas and change the human feelings, to enhance empathy and unity among the people.

1.4. A human-scale community

Along our history, we expended our survival circle to embrace our clans and tribes. We need a tribe to reach our basic needs. “It takes a tribe to raise a child!”

There are many species on Earth that need a pack, a flock or a clan in order to survive and raise their children. Humans are one of them. Actually, we are not biologically adapted to raise our children in nuclear families. Women need a sisterhood to help each other to raise their children. It is more healthy for them and for their children to be raised so. We are not biologically adapted to struggle alone in the “jungle of life”. We use to live in tribes almost all our history and our intrinsic morality and instincts are shaped to live in cooperation inside our tribes.

Our physical and psychological health, our happiness and fulfillment is rooted in peaceful and meaningful relations with other humans. We get sick when we lack the joy of being part of a community. The children need a childhood in order to grow happy and healthy, to be responsible in their society when they will be adults.

All the studies show clearly that in human-scale communities we are cooperative, careful, compassionate and ready to choose collaboration. This is because in human-scale social environments – where everybody knows everybody – it becomes advantageously to choose collaborative strategies.

The trend toward co-living, co-working, co-learning, co-parenting, co-operative ways of life shows one thing: we are longing to live in communities and cooperation.

In super-human-scale societies, we tend to individualistic free-rider type of strategies, because this kind of life strategies become more “successfully”. But at the same time with our “success” as free-riders, we pay a harsh toll: we lose our connection with the living reality from which we stem forth. We lose our soul, our joy and empathy. We start to depart from our own nature and physiology, becoming sick. We lose the meaning of life. We feel meaningless and disconnected. We are yearning for something else, for more peace and harmony and empathy in our society. What we can do? (How can we overcome the barriers against social collaboration?)

We are part of a living Planet and it is no meaning for us to live outside its nourishing connection. Only being a functional part of this living reality brings us meaning and joy. We can’t live too long in dissonance with our nature. 

Apparently, the concepts of “holarchy”, “P2P” or “commons” are new and they bring forth a “new” way of human cooperation. But actually, this is a very old way of human cooperation. At a tribe level, we instinctively self-organized in holarchic kind of architectures (the Neolithic village was run by a council of elders, the leaders of each clan – this is a holarchic circle). We instinctively chose commoning-kind of management and living. We instinctively correlated us and cooperated through some kind of equipotential P2P relations.

All doctors say that our physical illness and psychological dysfunctions are brought forth by the high stress levels of living individualistic in extra-large societies. It is the stress to struggle alone for your survival. We are not biologically adapted to struggle alone. We were used to live in communities, helping each other, protecting each other, not competing inside our communities. We were used to live in cooperation inside our clans and tribes. But now we find ourselves alone, struggling alone.

Our super-human scale societies broke our tribes. And then broke our clans. And now even the small nuclear family is under pressure to be dissolved.

The dissolution of human cohesion is brought forth by the organizing principles of our society itself: It sustains competition and individualism, not cooperation and solidarity. We have to stop this tendency and frame our life toward increasing our levels of correlation and collaboration with othersWe have to change our ways!

2.1. An ideal Butterfly Community

An ideal Butterfly Community is a human-scale community (150-180 persons) organized holarchically, hosted by a regenerative human-built habitat. 

Speaking about regenerative human-built habitats, we start to use a language taken from biology: living cities, urban metabolism, living buildings, living materials, etc. Inspired by biomimicry, we started to design new materials and technologies that works with Nature, not against it. The designers changed radically their perspective: they are proposing regenerative designing principles and start to build living buildings, resembling rather an ecosystem than a machine. A city, a building, any human-built environment is seen as a process, as a dynamic rather than a static system, integrated in its environment in a regenerative way. The paradigm shift from seeing the Universe as a machine to seeing it as a living system, embrace all aspects of human culture, including its technologies.

It could be a good idea that some of these future Butterfly communities would be hosted by floating structures.

The floating modules will be designed from the beginning as living structures, integrated into their oceanic environment, having their own metabolism. They will be designed to thrive not by exploiting their environment, but by fulfilling an ecological role in it.

These Butterfly floating cities have the chance to be the first regenerative habitats ever built by humans. Butterfly Communities have the chance to be the first-ever fair society created by humans after we opened the second frontier (conquer the world through military advancement).

A floating structure has many advantages. It could rise with the rising waters, so it will be not affected by the incoming rising of the ocean level. It could be moved where you need it more: from Oslo to Amsterdam, from the Baltic Sea to Mediterranean Sea. You can play with modular floating structures as with lego blocks and can reassemble them as you need, reshaping your town. The floating structures could be built as self-sufficient regarding water, food and energy.

A floating basic module could host a human-scale community in a proper manner: individual and common spaces; different spaces for different activities. There will be a space for indoor aquaponics and other farming technologies that will ensure our food independence; energy facilities that will ensure energy independence; harvesting and purifying water facilities that will ensure water independence; workshops properly suited for repairing our technologies. We will design the basic floating structure to be as much as possible self-sufficient: a regenerative human-built environment, harmoniously integrated into its environment.

The main advantage of a floating structure is that it can be designed as a module. Therefore, the floating basic module could unite with other modules bringing forth a Butterfly Village and so on.

All the technologies related to building floating structures, all the social urges to find better solutions for self-governance and ecological sustainability, create the cultural and technological condition for the next level of The Blue Revolution. The ocean gives us an unexpected chance to start from scratch a new holarchic social architecture, based on its unit: a human-scale Butterfly Community living on a floating basic module.

Having the space the ocean gives us, we can link community to community, bringing forth Villages and Cities, bringing forth for the first time in human history a holarchic social structure, best-suited for a fair and regenerative civilization. We are hearing about “disruptive” technological innovations. It is time for a political disruptive innovation!

2.2. The greatest social laboratory

We need a new legal and political paradigm. We have to incorporate into our laws the new scientific perspective, so that our laws to be consistent with the principles that sustain life on this planet. Law and science should be a convergent field.

We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intercession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.” (Charles Eisenstein)

Butterfly Communities project aims to build an artificial island (maybe somewhere in the Baltic Sea) where humanity could prototype a better human organization.

A higher level of consciousness will bring forth a different kind of order that is beyond (individual or centralized) control. It could bring forth a social order that will resemble Life.

The alternative “Butterfly Society” will resemble an ecosystem, where Butterfly-kind of communities, self-correlated in a holarchic architecture, will act rather as living entities fulfilling a role in their environment, sensing and responding, co-evolving with all the others eco-socio participants.

To prototype is a very used approach to make things. Prototyping could be used not only for innovating disruptive technologies, but for innovating disruptive laws too! It could be used to craft new disruptive political structures or disruptive social architectures.

Lets imagine how we could prototype a small island of a parallel human society – built from the beginning in tune with Nature‘s organizing principles! Let’s imagine how we, the people of European countries, could co-create a small Yellow-Turquoise Butterfly Society on a floating structure!

We already started to innovate and prototype new materials and technologies in tune with Nature, mimicking its principles. We already have the ecological awareness and technologies that could build generative floating structures that could host, in an almost self-sufficient and generative way, human-scale communities.

Mimicking Nature’s organizing principles, we successfully managed, time and time again, to unite ourselves around the most basic human shared purpose – how to fulfill our material needs and spiritual aspiration working together in regenerative and fair ways.

Self-determination in human communities can assure a fair and joyful way to live, and the regeneration of the ecosystems too.

What we still lack is a pro-commons legal paradigm and a political system to foster the proliferation of such kind of new socio-economic living entities – as Butterfly Communities aim to be.

Many of us have already evolved the awareness that the old political organization is not functional anymore. What we need is a distributed peer-to-peer governance, a commons-based economic and politic world.

The old order is crumbling down. As in old prophecies, the apparent strong giant has feet of mud. Goliat always is defeated by the young David.

I believe that the economic/political/ecological situation of Europe is a good place for humanity to start a conscious and proactive transition from the capitalist order to a pro-commons order. 

The Butterfly Communities open-project could be seen as the perfect opportunity to prototype, in safe political condition, an incipient human society built from the beginning in tune with Nature. It will be a politically autonomous small island where humanity could prototype a new law system to work in tune with Nature’s principles. This Butterfly Society island could foster a vision of a better social organization.

The Oceans are offering us a free space where the first Butterfly Communities could appear almost in “lab conditions”, where they could be structured so easily in a holarchic architecture. They could become a laboratory for experimenting and prototyping a new society. They will have the perfect conditions to prototype and find the best ways of self-governance and cooperation. An opportunity for the whole humanity to learn how to foster a proactive transition from the crumbling dysfunctional old order to a functional one.

The holarchic architecture that I am envisioning – modular floating structures that each could host a Butterfly Community, that could unite themselves in Butterfly Villages and Cities – is just a barely sketched theory. But the free space of our oceans could offer the perfect environment where the theory could match the real terrain conditions!

If we will design them from the beginning to fulfill a socio-ecological function in their Bio-regions, if we will design them as much as possible as living communities, autonomous and inter-dependent, embedded in their ecosystem and inter-connected with the whole world: they will start to resemble living entities. They will start to sense their environment and respond adequately. They will be able to learn and co-evolve and, therefore, to teach us more about how a living society could be brought forth.

2.3. Blue Revolution

Butterfly Communities could bloom everywhere: in the middle of towns or countryside, in each type of ecosystem etc. But they could appear as seasteading communities too.

The new concept of Blue Revolution opens a new horizon for human expansion: colonization of the oceans (remembering our ancestors opening the first frontier to colonize the land). At the same time it is a fantastic opportunity to build from scratch a generative human-built environment using our ecological awareness and technological advancement. More than this: it is our chance to imagine and co-create a parallel human society, based on other juridic paradigm and organizing principles, inspired by the new scientific perspective.

A global social holarchic architecture, in order to be functional, it needs a new political and legal paradigm. We could prototype one! We could bring forth islands of Yellow-Turquoise human societies – as an amazing way to prototype a new society and to foster a proactive transition toward it. Once we colonized the land. Our Planet is giving us a new chance, a new place where to begin: its oceans and seas!

Related with Blue Revolution are many new concepts: from seasteading and floating cities to farming the seas. Using our technologies and understanding, we could build a regenerative human-built environment and farm the seas in an ecological way, working with Nature: harvesting and improving ocean ecosystems at the same time. (see Green Wave or Agrisea for ocean farming; Blue 21 and Oceanix for floating towns etc.)

2.4. Toward a Commons-based society

We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems” (Margaret Mead).

Try to build around you a brotherhood or a sisterhood (your 5 best friends) and choose to live solidary: one for all and all for one. Share not only jokes and stories, but live together as a brotherhood. It is a much viable life strategy for the future that we are expecting. It will be more challenging but rewarding at the same time. Your brotherhood will grow up to a real clan (12-15 closed friends). Cross the invisible threshold from individualistic to cooperative life strategies: and try to live in a co-living, co-working, co-parenting, co-learning environment.

Crossing this threshold is the true evolutionary breakthrough that is needed for overcoming our crisis. It is the necessary “disruptive technology” that will help us in the long run. It is possible for us to achieve such a solidarity level: We are biologically adapted to live so. Then, taking advantage of nowadays conducive environment toward community and cooperation, let us unite with other clans and bring forth a Butterfly Community.

If we will learn to integrate in a synergistic way the humans’ complementary aspirations and needs, for sure what we will bring forth will be beyond our separate possibilities.

I propose an open-project to orient our conscious evolution.

What is important is to figure out just our “next right step” toward higher degree of human correlation and cooperation (this is the direction of Life evolution). Then, what will be further, we shall see (sense-and-respond). People who will choose consciously to evolve and will switch from individualistic to cooperative life strategies will found themselves with an important biological advantage in the face of the upcoming challenges. Nature’s lesson is clear: who chose to evolve, went further; who chose not to evolve, went extinct.

We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.” (Charles Eisenstein)

Butterfly Communities could be such a miracle!

2.5. A human civilization organized as an ecosystem

The future human society, in order to be able to self-organize, self-govern and co-evolve with its environment, it needs to have a holarchic architecture – the architecture of Life.

The first level of integration of a holarchic global architecture should be the human-scale communities (150-180 persons). These Communities have to be as much as possible self-governed and self-sufficient. Without autonomy at this basic level, the global social architecture that we are imagining will fall down.

Butterfly Communities need to be in mutual-consistency with their larger social and ecological environment. They are the imaginal cells of the emergent Butterfly Society. They have to be like cells in an organism, where each cell is an inter-dependent entity trying to maintain its integrity. Only maintaining its integrity, a cell could fulfill its function inside the organism it belongs to. We have to assure the rights and enhance the abilities of Butterfly Communities to be autonomous: self-governed and self-sufficient.

Autonomy is very different than independence. Our cells are not independent, but autonomous (inter-dependent) entities that are in symbiosis, bringing forth our organism. The wolves are not independent, but autonomous (inter-dependent) living beings, in symbiosis with their ecosystem. Autonomy is related to self-determination and self-expression on one hand and with inter-dependence and mutual-consistency with its environment on the other hand.

Autonomy is a synergy between self-determination and correlation with others. In a holarchy, people are autonomous and equipotent. Each Butterfly Community has to be autonomous. If we want to build a higher level of integration than the human-scale level, we need autonomous Butterfly Communities as organs of the Village organization. Each Butterfly Community has the possibility/right to adapt its internal organization to achieve its role in the Village.

We evolved to be moral in our clans and tribes. But are we able to sustain the next level of collaboration and mutual-consistency beyond tribe level? Let us propose as our next levels of holarchic organization the “Village” and the “City”. As we evolve toward a Universe-centered based consciousness, we will be more and more able to sustain such a new level of collaboration.

It is very possible that 8 Butterfly Communities to be able to live in a mutual-consistency inside a Village. Now we understand their needed autonomy, not as independence from their social environment, but as needed integrity to really self-express and authentically participate in bringing forth their unique Villages. The holarchic organization is in mutual consistency with our instincts and innate tendencies toward collaboration and will reinforce these tendencies.

This is just a proposal from where we can begin to prototype a new social architecture. What I am presenting here is a new way of thinking our society. I am envisioning a new model, based on autonomous communities as the basic blocks of the social fabric, integrated into a coherent, holarchic architecture.

Bringing forth our brotherhoods, clans and communities could be seen as the first step in the evolution of our species toward a Universe-centered consciousness.

The social architecture I am proposing could look to you not achievable for many reasons: psychological, political, economic. The real challenge is to evolve our psychological capacities: to cross the invisible threshold toward cooperative life strategies.

If we develop our psychological abilities (that now are limiting us to individualistic life strategies) I can imagine people, as imaginal cells inside the body of the caterpillar, uniting themselves in clans and communities, finding their ways of co-existence in the midst of our society. I can imagine Butterfly Communities as imaginal cells uniting themselves with other Butterfly Communities, finding their ways of co-existence in the midst of our society. Our collapsing capitalistic society is the caterpillar body.

The collapse we are speaking, already started 50 years ago, collapsing sub-Saharan societies. It continues collapsing country after country and ecosystem after ecosystem. For Europe, the collapse is still for the future, but it will come. Capitalist society will collapse inevitable, not to total ruin, but rather becoming a womb birthing a new human society.

In the bifurcation point, where we can head toward an Europe I imagine here or toward a Europe fighting like Burundi and Rwanda, these imaginal cells, the Butterfly Communities, could become a possible model for a new social creation.

2.6. An integral Community

To bring to life a Butterfly Community, first of all we need people who took the evolutionary journey toward a Yellow-Turquoise level of consciousness able to sustain open, collaborative, equipotent relations.

Without Yellow-Turquoise people, without a consciously chosen symbiotic behavior and nonviolent communication, all these organizing principles and values will be impossible to be embodied. We can evolve from Green toward Yellow-Turquoise as we are bringing to life these living communities.

We cant design neither embody living communities, without first to change our perception at a personal level and see the world as a living system. The new metaphysics of the Living Universe is opening us the Fourth Frontier. Our new archetypal hero is the community. The new perspective will reshape the humanity.

Besides our personal evolution, we need to strengthen the community collaborative capacity. It is worth such a thing because the reward of cooperation is huge and could make the difference we need. A holarchic structure and an open, participative culture, enlivened by green-yellow-turquoise people will ensure our cooperation.

To strengthen our cooperation, we can intertwine three “internal-manager” and two “exterior-manager”. Let me explain what I mean through these “managers”:

First internal-manager is already inbuilt in humans, if our communities remains at a human-scale. It is about our innate morality and inner commandments that help us live cooperatively at a human-scale level.

Our second internal manager is represented by our shared Yellow-Turquoise participative culture, brought forth by sharing the same worldview of the Living Universe.

The third internal-manager could become functional if we will choose the same high purpose, that could fulfill all our aspirations and needs: to bring forth a fair society harmoniously embedded in the planetary ecosystems.

Besides this, we add a first exterior-manager layer: a self-organizing holarchic structure. When people will evolve a Yellow-Turquoise consciousness, will share the same purpose and will be organized in a self-organized community, there will be more fairness and correlation between us, and a harmonious integration into the local ecosystem.

This article is especially dedicated to the second exterior-manager: a shared co-living, co-working, co-learning, co-parenting space.

The second exterior-manager could become, alongside all the other layers, a powerful organizing principle for some Butterfly Communities. The addition of this layer will transform a community into an integral one. I mean a group of people who choose:

– to live together in the same built-environment (co-living),

– to work together (cooperation, coherence, correlation),

– to learn and evolve together (co-learning, conscious co-evolution),

– to raise their children together (co-parenting),

– to ensure a higher level of solidarity and mutuality (inter-being)

– to celebrate together the joy of life (co-celebration)

– to co-create together their social environment (social participation)

They choose to engage life as a tribe, as a big family, as a solidarity circle, to raise their symbiosis levels. They choose a nonviolent communication and a symbiotic behavior. They feel that something meaningful unite them and so, they feel to intertwine their lives with others, bringing forth an integral community. These integral communities are not small egalitarian clans, but holarchies able to correlate multiple clans and communities.

Some people feel they want to bring forth a higher level of inter-being for human species (symbiotic behavior). For them, these integral communities are adequate places to evolve a relational self and a powerful connection with their natural environment.

2.7. Self-Sufficiency

Self-sufficiency & autonomy are important features of any living system.

On our living Planet, these features are achieved through symbiosis, not through exploitation. Self-sufficiency is the basis for autonomy and liberty. If you are a dependent being, you are not free: you can not express yourself authentically.

In Nature, there are no dependent or independent beings, but only inter-dependent. There are no masters or slaves. How we ever could brought forth societies based on authority and obedience, on slavery or exploitation? This kind of state looks alien to Nature. It is the time to imagine a human society based on symbiosis (and not parasitism)! 

Designing each Butterfly Community as a self-sufficient, self-governed entity could be the first step toward a fair civilization. A global fair civilization requests a holarchic (multi-level) social architecture, with autonomy at every level of integration. It is beyond our comprehension to speak now about all the emergent properties that could arise from such new paradigm based on inter-dependence, mimicking Nature, but for sure these new properties will resemble Life.

Our sea farms will be designed to integrate themselves into the ocean ecosystem. Our aquaponics will be designed as integrated ecosystems. They will need just a small material input, energy and wise stewardship to function efficiently.

Imagine a natural ecosystem: trees and plants growing and fruiting, animals and birds raising their children: in Nature there is no material exterior input, just the solar energy and a wise recycling of the basic life ingredients. Mimicking Nature we can design a highly integrated indoor farming, almost like a natural ecosystem. It is all about how we manage to cycle the elements. In Nature, there is no exterior material input, just a continuous cycle of the elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, calcium, iron, magnesium and all other elements. They are always transforming : becoming plants and fruits and grasses, being eaten by animals, becoming their flesh and their feces and urine. Then becoming again grasses, plants and fruits. All these cycles employ exchanges between living beings and their life-support (lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere).

In the same way, we are aiming to design our “spaceship-like” farms as a integral system, as a continuous flow of elements. For achieving this with our farms, we have to steward our farms as Nature does.

For floating structure in cold regions, it will be more efficient to be covered by a transparent geodesic dome. They will be huge greenhouses. There will be spaces for fruit trees and many other types of plants. Besides their farming purpose, they will be beautiful and will have a great architectural purpose too, making us feeling deeply connected with our nourishing environment.

In order to bring forth autonomous communities, we have to figure out how we could be as much as possible self-sufficient.

A Butterfly Community should be perceived as an g-local economic organization: able to produce enough to sustain itself, able to bring something valuable for the society.

I imagine our generative human-built environment, designed from the beginning as an ecosystem, working in symbiosis with Nature: generative as much possible, recycling as much possible, able to produce its energy, food and water, able to repair itself. It is our job to figure out how we will manage higher levels of autonomy for our communities.

2.8. Spaceship Architecture

Spaceship Earth concept was used by Buckminster Fuller in the context of his primary concern: a vision for comprehensive planetary planning that resulted in new strategies intended to enable all of humanity to live with freedom, comfort and dignity without negatively impacting the earth’s ecosystems or its regenerative ability.

As a childish wish-thinking, I would like to live in a golden palace. But as a mature human being, aware of our ecological challenges, I choose to live in a voluntary simplicity way.

The architecture is a way to express the values and aspiration of a culture. It inspires us, it is sending us a message, it helps us to inherit the specific values that it embeds. A voluntary simplicity architecture, a spaceship architecture is more suited for the next civilization.

We have to learn how to thrive inside the planetary boundaries. The planetary boundaries concept presents a set of nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. (see Planetary Boundaries frameworkThe Doughnut economics of social and planetary boundariesDegrowth movement)

The spaceship architecture of the basic floating module will elegantly highlight the inter-dependence and solidarity between its inhabitants: humans, plants, animals with the structure itself. The structure itself, with all its functional departments, could be perceives as an extended organism!

Its inhabitants will be closed to their sources of food, water and energy. I want its design to make us feel as we – the humans, our gardens and farms, our energy facilities and the structure itself – are a new living being. That we are one with our food sources (plants, algae, fishes, fruit trees, chickens, mushrooms etc), water sources and energy sources. That we are one with our environment which protects us, nourishes us and empowers us.

This kind of architecture will enhance the awareness of our inter-dependence not only between us but with our environment. It will make us feel connected and responsible.

It is the time for a “disruptive” architecture!

2.9. Voluntary Simplicity

Voluntary simplicity is an anti-consumerist way of life that opposes the high consumption lifestyles prevalent in consumer societies today and voluntarily embraces ‘a simpler life’ of reduced consumption. As a practical matter, this living strategy characteristically involves providing for material needs as simply and directly as possible, minimizing expenditure on consumer goods and services, and generally seeking non-materialistic sources of satisfaction and meaning. It is predicated on the assumption that human beings can live meaningful, free, happy, and infinitely diverse lives, while consuming no more than an equitable share of nature. (Samuel Alexander)

Voluntary Simplicity is not about living in poverty; it is about living with balance. What does a more balanced and sustainable way of living look like? We are the generation to invent cool lifestyles for living on our hot planet. (Duane Elgin)

The exploration of new ways of living that support new ways of being is a movement that arises from the awakening of compassion, the dawning realization that the fate of the individual is intimately connected with the fate of the whole. (Ram Dass)

The days have now passed when we can ignore the impact of our individual decisions and lifestyles upon the collective. Personal responsibility for the greater good must become the mark of an informed and conscious people. (Edgar Mitchell)

What does “voluntarily” mean? To live more voluntarily is to live more consciously. To live more consciously is to live in a life-sensing manner. It is to taste our experience of life directly as we move through the world.

What does “simple” mean? To live more simply is to live in harmony with the vast ecology of all life. It is to live with balance, taking no more than we require and, at the same time, giving fully of ourselves. Voluntary simplicity is a way of living that is outwardly simple and inwardly rich. It is a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with the living. (Kyle Kowalski)

Living in a Butterfly Community, with all those highly efficient food-water-energy system integrated into our regenerative building, with the governing system distributed into the community, with the educational system distributed into the community, with the judicial system distributed into the community, even with the medical system distributed into the community, without police and “professional” politicians, without the need for long-range transportation – and the list could continue: can you imagine how highly efficient and fair will be our holarchic society? Without sustaining all those inefficient and outdated social systems, our new society will need way less resources to function and thrive.

Bringing forth this fair and regenerative society is the next step in human evolution.

Human life will be radically different, oriented toward empathy, self-expression and co-creation.

2.10. The Floating Basic Module

A Butterfly Community could be hosted by a floating structure. Let’s call it – “the floating basic module”. In the future we will be able to provide you suggestive photos and videos of the floating basic module, but now all we can do is to describe it in words. So, lets try a description:

Imagine this floating basic module as a box with a height of around 10-15 m and sides of 100-180 m. This box will float on sea-water and inside will host an aquaponic vertical farm, various other installations necessary for the proper functioning of this structure and a huge aquarium that will mimic a coral reef. Also, this huge aquarium will be a swimming pool. It will be just like swimming in a coral reef.

This floating structure will provide the basis on which the community will build its common house. Now imagine a geodesic dome with a radius of 50-90 m covered by Ethyl-TetraFluoroEthylene. (It is a strong highly transparent foil, self-cleaning, recyclable, more durable, more economical and lighter than glass.)

The space under this huge transparent geodesic dome is able to host around 180-200 adults community, a lot of students and visitors in a proper manner: individual and common spaces; different spaces for different activities. There will be a large inner courtyard, a living-space where the community could come together. It can host artistic performances, conferences and exhibitions, but also could transform itself in a playground for children, a huge dining room or a rehearsal space for our artists. There will be multiple terraced gardens. The geodesic dome will be transparent and will transform our entire living space into a garden with a Mediterranean climate. There will be a generous “forest” with a multitude of fruit trees and other Mediterranean plants – which will provide the community with fresh fruits and vegetables and, of course, a lovely place to walk and meditate and a playground for children. There will be sea-farms (algae, fish, shellfish etc.) Our floating module and its sea-farms will be a regenerative human-built environment, harmoniously integrated in its marine ecosystem.

The main advantage of our basic floating structure is that it can be designed as a module.

Being modular, the basic floating structure could unite with other 8 modules bringing forth a Butterfly Village.

2.11. Why floating cities?

The floating cities offer many advantages.

In the near future, they will become an alternative for human habitation and a chance for an alternative social space. Let me introduce you these benefits. I will group these advantages to be easier for you to understand what the floating cities could really bring.

A. Advantages related to location:

1. We can expand the old cities on the surrounding sea

The majority of the world’s population lives in the coastal area. The coastal area is already densely populated, but this area – and especially its large cities – due to the multiple economic benefits, continues to attract a large number of people. Cities can no longer expand and all they can do is crowd more and more under the pressure of newcomers. Floating cities offer an unexpected alternative to this social problem: instead of crowding the continent, we can expand on the ocean!

2. Floating cities can change their shape according to our needs

Imagine a floating city build from modular floating structures. Therefore, a floating city can be model and remodeled according to our needs. We can change its urban architecture! This is impossible in a normal city.

3. Cities that can be “disassembled”, transported to other locations and “reassembled” in a different way

Imagine that, for various reasons, in a certain region there is an urgent need for an increase in accommodation. In this situation, floating structures, suited for accommodation purposes, can be brought from the surroundings to fill this need. In any case, a floating city built from modular floating structures can be dismantled (entirely or partially), transported to another location and reassembled there in any form needed, depending on the requirements of the new location.

4. Rising with rising sea levels

Inevitably, global warming will bring with it rising sea levels. This is truly a huge challenge for cities, for the security and well-being of coastal residents. The classic cities, founded on land, will be flooded by rising waters. Only floating cities can be the solution to such an ecological challenge. Floating homes are well suited wherever there is a possibility of flooding. Huge areas around the world are subject to catastrophic floods every year. Floating houses can be a solution even on the mainland, not just on lakes or seas!

In April 2019, the United Nations Human Settlement Program (UN-Habitat) discussed the possibility of using floating cities to help prepare for and alleviate infrastructural damage related to climate change. These floating cities would not only be built on water but would also have a symbiotic relationship with it, designed from scratch to be climate-neutral and completely sustainable.

B. Advantages related to construction and maintenance:

5. Dancing structures against earthquakes

Floating on water, the structures can better withstand earthquakes, as their base can move, taking the shock. Therefore, their resistance structure will not consume as much material as one grounded, which must be stronger to withstand earthquakes. Floating cities are earthquakes resilient

6. Spaces covered by transparent geodesic domes

Geodetic domes can bring many advantages to buildings. Our built-environments can be designed from the beginning as having their buildings protected by geodesic domes. Under these conditions, the building’s construction and maintenance will be cheaper. Being protected from cold, wind, rain and frost these buildings will not require as much building materials (for insulation and rain protection) and maintenance.

7. Heating and cooling using water heat pumps

Water has high thermal inertia. Floating cities can take full advantage of this water quality and heat pump technology to heat / cool their buildings. The floating modules will be designed from the beginning with heat pumps that will heat the structures in the cold season and cool them in the hot season, using the water under them.

Houses on Water

The real breakthrough that Floating Cities are bringing, in addition to their advantages related to their flexible location and easier maintenance, are incredible and help us take the first steps in a proactive transition to a fairer and more sustainable human society, harmoniously integrated into the planetary ecosystem.

We have to learn how to live in alignment with the principles and processes of Nature.

The concept of Floating Cities – part of the Blue Revolution – helps us to take the first steps in this transformativ process. Butterfly Communities Open-Project is at the forefront of this spiritual and social revolution.

C. A regenerative human-built environment.

8. Quasi-Self-sufficiency in food, energy, water

The new floating cities will be designed from the beginning to be self-sufficient in terms of energy, drinking water and food for their inhabitants.

The food is provided by vertical indoor farms, by sea-farming, by the terraced gardens inside of the geodesic dome greenhouse. Of course, when 8 Butterfly Communities unite in a Village, their self-sufficiency will increase even more, due to mutual support and correlation between them.

When each floating module is itself a farm and an energy plant; when each has its own rainwater collection and filtration installation and its own wastewater recycling technology; when intra-urban transport is from the beginning designed to be as reduce as possible and environmentally friendly (bicycles, mobile electric vehicles) – it is clear that the new floating cities will have a substantially smaller ecological footprint than the classic cities. The Butterfly Cities will be way less expensive than normal cities.

9. Living buildings;  Living Cities

Speaking about future human-built habitats, we start to use a language taken from biology: living buildings, living cities, urban metabolism, living materials, etc. Inspired by biomimicry, we started to design new materials and technologies that work with Nature, not against it. The designers changed radically their perspective: they are proposing regenerative designing principles and start to build buildings that resemble rather an ecosystem than a machine. A town or a building is seen as a process, as a dynamic system, integrated into its environment in a regenerative way. The word living- enhances a specific relational architecture that resembles the organic architecture of life. A living-organization, a living-economy, a living-building employs a dynamic/ learning/ adaptable architecture.

A living building is a generative building: it not consumes endlessly resources for its life: it could even create more and regenerates the ecosystem where it is embedded. A city with its farms and factories could be generative too. It depends only on how it is designed.

The paradigm shift from seeing the Universe as a machine to seeing it as a living reality, embrace all aspects of human culture. The floating cities will be designed from start as ecosystems, integrated into their oceanic environment, having their metabolism. They will be designed to thrive not by exploiting their environment, but by fulfilling an ecological role in it.

Our future floating cities and their sea-farms have the chance to be the first regenerative habitats ever built and the first-ever fair society created by humans after we opened the second frontier.

If we will design them from the beginning to fulfill a socio-ecological function in their Bioregions, if we will design them as much as possible as living communities, autonomous and inter-dependent between them, embedded in their ecosystem and inter-connected with the whole world: they will start to resemble living entities. They will start to sense their environment and respond adequately. They will be able to learn and co-evolve and, therefore, to teach us more about how a living society could be brought forth.

10. A proactive transition toward a fair society

To prototype is a very used approach to make things. Prototyping could be used not only for innovating “disruptive” technologies, but for innovating “disruptive” laws too! It could be used to craft new “disruptive” political structures or “disruptive” holarchic social architectures!

Let’s imagine how we could prototype a small island of a parallel human society, built from the beginning in tune with Nature’s organizing principles! Let’s imagine how “we the people” of European countries, could co-create a small Yellow-Turquoise Butterfly Society on a floating island!

We already started to innovate and prototype new materials and technologies in tune with Nature, mimicking its principles. We already have the ecological awareness and technologies that could build generative floating structures that could host, in an almost self-sufficient and generative way, human-scale communities.

Mimicking Nature’s organizing principles, “we the people”, successfully managed, time and time again, to unite ourselves around the most basic human shared purpose – how to fulfill our material needs and spiritual aspiration working together in generative and fair ways.

What we still lack is a pro-commons legal paradigm and a political system to allow and foster the proliferation of such kind of new socio-economic living entities – as Butterfly Communities aim to be.

Many of us have already evolved the awareness that the hyper-centralized governance is not working anymore and what we need is a distributed peer-to-peer governance, a commons-based economic and political world. The old order is crumbling down. As in old prophecies, the apparent strong giant has feet of mud. Goliat always is defeated by the young David!

I believe that the economic/politic/ecological situation of  Europe is a good place for humanity to start a conscious and proactive transition from the capitalist order to a pro-commons order. The Butterfly Communities could be seen as the perfect opportunity to prototype, in safe political condition, an incipient human society built from the beginning in tune with Nature.

It will be a politically autonomous small island where humanity could prototype a new law system to work in tune with Nature’s principles. They could become a laboratory for experimenting and prototyping a new society. They will be the perfect way to prototype and find the best ways of self-governance and holarchic cooperation. An opportunity for the whole humanity to learn how to foster a proactive transition from the crumbling dysfunctional old order to a functional one.

11. A common project for all the world nations

An alternative social-world Island could become an international project.

Different nations could invest in it and people from all over the world could become its citizens. The Butterfly Society will become a living social laboratory. Various national and international institutions will carry out numerous research projects in all areas of life, especially in politics, economics, legislation, education, medicine, psychology, biology and so on. Artists from all over the world – singers, dancers, filmmakers, actors, poets, artisans – will gather here and co-create tomorrow’s art that will inspire the new human evolution. They will make “the evolution irresistible”!

12. Marine ecosystem regeneration

Oceanic acidification and eutrophication processes, coupled with overfishing and the collapse of so many marine ecosystems, have pushed the global marine ecosystem to the point of collapse.

But there is always a solution. A smart way of sea-farming could use excess phosphorus and nitrogen to grow algae, fish and shellfish and restore the ecosystem. Floating cities can have their own sea-farms and harvest the ocean’s bounty while regenerate the marine ecosystem.

2.12. Why Europe?

Using our technologies and understanding, we could build a regenerative human-built environment and farm the seas in a generative way, working with Nature: harvesting and improving ocean ecosystems at the same time.

I believe the best way to start a Butterfly Society will be as a floating world, taking a step further the Blue Revolution. And the best place for this start could be Europe for many reasons: from political and technological to cultural and ecological.

European seas are perfectly suited for this endeavor. European seas are at a critical ecological point from eutrophication. Different types of sea farming, wisely designed, would improve the Baltic, Nordic, Mediterranean or Black Sea sea ecosystems. For a lot of towns, belonging to all adjacent countries, expanding on waters could be an important solution for their future development. Inevitable, sea levels will continue to rise. A floating city is a perfect solution for this kind of ecological challenge. In addition, the European governments are much open for collaboration and renewal. The Blue Revolution offers us incredible other opportunities to build a regenerative civilization and improving our ocean ecosystems.

From what I know, from Netherlands to Denmark to Sweden, from Germany to Norway, there are many different projects that experiment with floating houses and geodesic dome structures as new way of habitation (see Dome of Visions – Copenhagen / Stockholm or even beyond Arctic Circle)

I envision that, in the near future, the Baltic Sea countries could unite in a common project – the creation of an artificial island – something very similar to what the Butterfly Communities Open-Project proposes – as a proactive search for a more equitable and sustainable human organization and a center for research and experimentation of new regenerative ways of sea-farming that could heal the Baltic ecosystem and, at the same time, harvest the richness of Nature.

2.13. Butterfly Communities designed as Co-Operatives

cooperative is “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned enterprise”. Cooperatives’ values are based on responsibility, equality, equity and solidarity. Co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others. (from wikipedia)

A cooperative is a legal entity owned and democratically controlled by its members. Members have a close association with the enterprise as owners, employees, producers and consumers of its products or services. Membership is open, meaning that anyone who satisfies certain non-discriminatory conditions may join. They are distinguished from other forms of incorporation in that profit-making or economic stability are balanced by the interests of the community. (from wikipedia)

A cooperative organization could have a huge beneficial impact on its region.

Let me tell you a story: In 1941, a Catholic priest, José María Arizmendiarrieta settled in Mondragón, a town with a population of 7,000 that had not yet recovered from the poverty, hunger, exile, and tension of the Spanish Civil War. In 1943, he established a technical college that became a training ground for managers, engineers and skilled labor for local companies, and primarily for the co-operatives. Arizmendiarrieta spent a number of years educating young people about a form of humanism based on solidarity and participation. In 1955, he selected five young people to start a co-operative organization. Now, the Mondragon is a federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. It is the tenth-largest Spanish company in terms of asset turnover and the leading business group in the Basque Country. (from wikipedia )

Each Butterfly Community could be seen as a co-operative organization where members are united by a shared purpose: how to fulfill their material needs and spiritual aspirations working together in a fair, joyful and regenerative way, having the chance of an authentic expression. They could cooperate in federation of Butterfly Communities as Mondragon cooperatives do.

2.14. Butterfly Communities designed as Commons

The concept of the commons comes from Roman law, which refers to the res communis, the thing which belongs to everyone, as opposed to the res nullius, which belongs to no one. The concept of the commons consequently appears in the definition of various ownership statuses to designate areas shared within a community: a path, a beach, a forest, a pasture etc.

A commons is a natural or cultural resource shared by a group, with specific distribution, preservation and promotion rules. Although in practice, the commons dates before its definition by Roman law, the concept experienced a success in the Middle Ages with the “communals” and the rewriting of Roman law by European theologians after the Gregorian reform. Since human has been conducting agriculture, rural communities have been managing certain areas collectively, depending on rules which allow them to be identified as commons.

A common refers to three components:

– a resource,

– a community

– a set of rules

The commons are the most ancestral relationship to property known to humankind” (Gael Giraud)

An interrelated concept to commons is commons-based peer production, that describes a new model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively. Other interrelated concepts are the processes of peer governance and peer property. Peer governance is a new mode of governance based on participative decision-making (ex: Holacracy, Sociocracy). Peer governance is the way that peer production is managed. Peer property advocates for innovative legal forms that would enhance the commons-based peer production. Whereas traditional forms of property are exclusionary, peer property forms are inclusionary. (from Gael Giraud)

A commons integrates humans along with their shared environment in an indivisible, integrated whole. Commoning is the art of stewarding this whole in a regenerative way. All the people which bring forth their commons have a shared purpose: how to fulfill together their surviving needs and spiritual aspirations in a fair and regenerative way.

We need a new juridic paradigm, where the ownership will be generative and inclusionary, enhancing the cooperation and inter-dependency between people, communities and their environment into a mutual relationship. Weaving human communities with their environment in a generative, responsible and mutual-consistent relationship is imperative.

We will not be able to overcome our ecological and social crisis without evolving a higher level of consciousness. The laws that could weave humans and ecosystems in a responsible relation cant spring from a self-centered consciousness.

When I am speaking about Butterfly Communities and their global social architecture, I envision them as commons, solidary with their environment and all our Planet as a global commons.

2.15. Butterfly Communities designed as a big Family

More than everything, I see Butterfly Communities as big families, as tribes.

We are biologically evolved to live in tribes.

Employing holarchic lens, imagine a big circle: it is the Butterfly Community, the tribe. The 10-12 smaller circles inside the tribe are its clans. Going upstream on the thread of history, we could witness how some friends have united themselves in brotherhoods to enhance their well-being and chances for success, following their allurements and making “the next right step” in Life evolution toward wider and wider scale of cooperation. Their kinship comes from a strong friendship, from sharing almost the same values, aspirations and purpose, and from their conscious decision to help each other. They are a solidary circle: helping each other to cope with life challenges.

They live in a Butterfly Community as a family inside a family, as a holon inside a holon, as a prokaryotic cell in an eukaryotic cell. They have their own shared clan purpose, not necessarily identical with other clans, but in correlation with others, as all are living in correlation inside the Butterfly Community. They can self-govern their brotherhood how they want, how they establish in common. This could be through a heterarchy or through a negotiated hierarchy (see Ortegrity by Timothy Wilken), however they decide it is more efficiently for them to accomplish a specific outcome.

The brotherhood could be seen as a circle/ a team of a holarchy (see Holacracy and Sociocracy). They could be a group of theatre artists, a group of dancers and musicians, a group of trainers. They could be a group skilled in permaculture or aquaponics, a group of politicians, engineers or entrepreneurs inside the Butterfly Community. Their clan purposes are strongly intertwined with the other clan purposes, not necessarily identical, but complementary. Each clan has its own identity inside the community, its own function in sustaining the functionality of the whole community, exactly as organs have into an organism. Some of community businesses will run inside its clans, in correlation with all the other clans necessities. There will be a whole range of links and bindings between clans inside the community.

A Butterfly Community will also have a lot of functions to perform as a whole (as an economic organization: public relation, accountancy etc; as a household: to prepare the food, to clean the house, to educate its children).

A Butterfly Community is designed to become organism-like. Each community will find its own way of self-governance. The clans will work together in correlation, as organs do into an organism. At the community level, we will witness the appearance of a lot of emergent properties, inaccessible from a clan level.

What I want to highlight here is that we will do this as a family, as a big household. Our way to farm or do business will be not an Orange, capitalistic-industrial way. Our way to educate the children will be not an institutionalized way. It will be a humane way!

It will be regenerative not only to environment, but first of all to the community fabric. It will be a more playful, joyful and meaningful way to live.

2.16. Our breackthrough as a Living Community

In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux, mapped the emerging organizing principles of future economic organizations. He gathered all these emerging patterns into an elegant concept: the Teal organizations and their 3 breakthroughs: evolutionary purpose, self-management and wholeness:

– Self-management

In traditional organizations, management is the responsibility of the manager or the “boss.” The work of planning, controlling, and coordinating is centered on this figure, while others follow what has been defined. Evolutionary organizations present a breakthrough with this practice: management becomes the responsibility of all. The boss’s coordination and control functions are replaced by highly transparent processes where peers are accountable to each other, creating a peer-pressure environment.

– Evolutionary Purpose

Evolutionary organizations do not seek profit alone. According to Brian Robertson, the purpose can be defined as the deepest creative potential that the organization can sustainably express in the world. It is present in the day to day and directs the organization through the objectives, the strategy and the decision making. The purpose is never left out, being a strong intrinsic motivator that attracts people who are not there just for the money and are not going to look for shorter ways that will harm the organization to climb the ranks, earn a bonus at the end of the month or satisfy the boss. Based on this premise, processes are radically simplified (in terms of control mechanisms) because it is an assumption that everyone is there to do their best and believe in the contribution of the organization. Evolutionary organizations are seen as a living organism with a sense of self-direction. People are more concerned with feeling, discovering and listening to the purpose than about creating detailed plans to try to predict the future. It is more about sensing and response.

– Wholeness

Since the invention of hierarchy and processes, people have let go of the questionings, the uncertainties, the emotional and spiritual side as they go to work. There is a clear separation between the “personal self” and the “professional self”. We were taught to show determination and strength at work, leaving doubts and uncertainties at home. In evolutionary organizations, everyone is invited to participate in a whole way. There is no separation between professional and personal persons. The purpose allows for the union of what I want, what I am and what I believe. (after Davi Gabriel da Silva)

The Butterfly integral community breakthroughs will be much more than those three breakthroughs, as they are explained by Teal promoters.

Their most important, long-ranging breakthroughs are brought forth simply by their higher level of consciousness, manifested in their solidarity and voluntary simplicity, in their humane and integral way to live, by their playful, joyful and meaningful way to be.

It is not about the priority of “economic growth” anymore.

The Yellow-Turquoise communities will be much more than “economic organizations”: they will be “ecological organizations”, having a much higher purpose and role to fulfill than just economic: they will be more humane, more ecological and more livable communities.

Butterfly Communities will lead the conscious (r)evolution.

This open project is about a totally different paradigm of human living and purpose, an expression of a whole new level of human consciousness. Their breakthroughs are not only into the economic layer of human society, but into all its other layers.

3. Butterfly Communities – an alternative social space

3.1 A human-scale community

When I think of the social environment of a Butterfly Community, the first four things that come to mind are: tribe, holarchy, commons and human-scale.

These four features go very well together. Although holarchy and commons are a seemingly new way of organizing human communities, they are as old as the tribes. A tribe is a holarchic organization. A tribe is the very definition of what a human-scale community is. A tribe, its culture and its environment is the very definition of what a commons is.

Most of our history as a species, we have lived in tribes.

We are perfectly evolved to live in tribes. In a human-scale community we choose to live morally and collaboratively – simply because these life strategies prove effective at this scale of human organization, when people know each other.

The tribe marks our circle of survival and our circle of morality. Deep in our souls we need to belong to such a tribal community.

As far as I know about the Old Neolithic Civilization of Europe, a Neolithic village (let’s take the example of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture) was made up of numerous households. Such a household belonged to an entire clan (grandparents, parents, children, uncles, aunts, grandchildren). The clan was the basic unit of a Neolithic village/tribe. The clan was almost autonomous within the tribe. Its leader was part of the “Council of the Elders” – the leading forum of the tribe. The Neolithic village had a holarchic organization: Each clan is a self-governing circle, in inter-dependence and correlation with all the other clans. The Council of Elders is the upper circle that correlates the clans. The same will be in our Butterfly Community: the basic unit will be the clan and its quasi-autonomy within the community.

It is important to understand that Neolithic society is a Magenta society (see Spiral Dynamics) – fundamentally peaceful (the villages were not protected by defensive walls), based rather on peaceful negotiation and not war. For a peaceful organization, the holarchy fits the best. When humans opened the Second Frontier – conquer the world through military advancement, the hierarchy proved to be a more efficient way of organization than holarchy for military purposes. Now, at the end of Orange Civilization, when war is clearly not a solution anymore, we rediscover again the blessing of a more participative and peaceful way of organization: the holarchy – “an idea whose time has come”.

The neolithic Village has a commons-based world. The concept of “private property” was poorly developed. Everything belonged to the whole community in co-ownership: the mountains, where the sheep grazed; the forests where the wood was harvested; the hay-fields where the cows grazed; the rivers and lakes where the fish were harvested etc. This land was managed in a regenerative way, because the community had all the incentives to preserve and enrich it.

The Neolithic village – the community of people; their laws and customs; and their environment – are the perfect definition of what a commons is.

Butterfly Communities Open-Project proposes as its way of social and economic organization something similar with the old neolithic village (that fits perfectly with our innate morality and physiology), but at a whole new Yellow-Turquoise level of understanding and consciousness.

Butterfly Community is not a Magenta Neolithic Community, but a g-local Yellow-Turquoise community, correlated with its eco-socio environment.

Butterfly Communities Open-Project proposes the commons (as a way of co-ownership) and holarchy (as a way of self-government). In fact, they are just a rediscovery of very old ways of human organization that are innate to humans.

The Neolithic Magenta village – peaceful, holarchic and organized as a commons – was replaced by the Red, Blue and Orange hierarchical organizations. We almost forgot that co-ownership and holarchy are our basic human way of organization. Now, at the down of the capitalist society – in which the predominant form of organization is the hierarchy and the predominant form of ownership is private property, the rediscovery of co-ownership and holarchy organization brings a step forward on our social evolution. But now, we are no longer talking about the “Neolithic Magenta village”, but about the “Yellow-Turquoise g-local community”.

3.2. Butterfly Communities – a new educational environment

The old institutionalized school is informed by the old myth of competition and separateness that see the human world in endless war and the natural environment as dangerous and without intrinsic value. It was invented to fulfill two important needs of industrial revolution societies: to instruct people to work in the industrial environment and to be “patriots”, to be ready to fight for their “nations”.

The ruling elites needed a way to assure the obedience of their subjects and the best way was the old “unity through conformity”. Actually they needed highly dependent and obedient people. To make them obedient through religion was a little out-dated, so they invented the institutionalized school as the new way to infuse the new ideology of the nations in endless war for supremacy and the world as a mere mechanism. This is not a nice presentation of Modern Society, but is very accurate about the goals and the scope of the institutionalized school.

More than 200 years passed while the society changed dramatically, but the goal and the scope of the institutionalized school remains the same: highly conformist people, taught to obey ideological authorities and to compete between them. The institutionalized school is completely out-dated. You can not prepare people for the upcoming VUCA challenges through old-style institutionalized school goals and methods.

What we can do to improve this situation?

Howard Gardner have written a game-changer book “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligence”, which started a true revolution in education: He wrote about self-education, about our unique set of talents and allurements, about our responsibility to develop our unique set of abilities. We have the right and the responsibility for self-determination in education. Daniel Pink, in his book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, wrote about self-motivation and self-evaluation. We know what drives us to learn and self-improve.

The concept “inter-active education”, along with neuroscience, shows us that our brain is not biologically built to learn and integrate the information through old-school mechanical style and gives us insights how to evolve more efficient learning methods. We realize that institutionalized school are totally misdirecting our effort from real learning toward racing with our class-mates. It becomes clear that old mechanical school methods are not healthy for children’s soul and body. But there are way better ways of evaluation which can orient us toward a real learning process, more co-operation between us and an authentic self-expression.

Many books were written to give us a better understanding of how we can design more efficient learning methods. First, we have to reorient the education toward real educational goals and find better ways to organize the learning environment itself. The government has not the responsibility, neither the right to educate me or my children. But, accordingly to subsidiarity principle, it should help me to self-educate. I have all the rights to self-determine my education, all the rights to choose with who and what/ how/ when/ where to learn. This is my birth-right!

I easily can imagine how each Butterfly Community will design for their children a learning environment as adequate as possible. It will be based on inter-active, co-learning methods, self-determination, self-motivation and self-evaluation. It will be a collaborative education for collaboration and solidarity; a inter-active education for social participation; an education for continuous self-education, a creative education for sense-and-respond ways to engage life. All these beautiful ideas are just the door toward a higher level of education, that we barely can grasp now. A new level of human consciousness will bring forth a new level of conscious self-education.

Everybody is invited to engage this open project and find better expressions for our future educational organizations, goals and methods. We can not afford anymore to let our children spirit to be broken in the old factory-like schools.

My first motivation to bring forth a Butterfly Community is that our children to be born, to live and learn in a generative culture. To learn in a funny and healthy way.

The co-creation of a generative environment is either very simple, for a green-yellow-turquoise psychological developmental level, either impossible for lower psychological levels.

The same principles that make a community to resemble a living entity, make it to be more participative/generative as a social, artistic, religious, educational, politic or economic environment.

The generative quality of a social environment is an emergent property brought forth by its relational architecture and the quality of human communication.

Besides holarchic organizing principles, we need people capable of responsible, creative and authentic self-expression, non-violent communication and stigmergic correlation with others.

We can’t maintain even a small brotherhood with an individualistic mentality and with a set of emotions suited for competition and ranking. We have to develop skills that support, enhance and reward the collaboration between us.

This open-project is an open-door toward the future, an invitation.

It is speaking about some principles and how to do the first steps toward a collaborative way of being. Its aim is to make you dream of a better world, to inspire you and to give you the courage and the determination to cross the “invisible threshold” from competitive and exploitative strategies toward more cooperative and generative ones.

We are here not to fight or force or control, but to listen, to let us inspired, to dance.

The Butterfly Communities will be living laboratories for bringing forth a generative society. Our responsibility is to co-create together a better world for all.

3.3. Butterfly Communities – a new artistic environment

Everybody is called to participate, following its talents and allurements, to shape the new civilization: politicians and entrepreneurs, educators and scientists, inventors and artists.

The new scientific understanding, in order to bring forth a new civilization, it needs to be embedded in myths and rituals, in poetries and stories, songs and dances, in new laws and social institutions. “The role of the artist is to make the evolution irresistible.”

We humans take decisions on an emotional base. We dialogue with life through feelings, senses, emotions, intuitions, fears, inner-calls, passions or allurements. And only then the rationality tries to build “rational arguments” to sustain our emotional decisions. Not the analytical scientific presentations will drive us, but our emotions. Only the emotions have the power to change us, to reorient our behavior, perception and decision. It comes the turn for artists to express the new revelation in artistic ways. They can make the “song of the Universe” to be heard by humans: through myths and symbols, rituals and celebrations, dances and songs, poetry and fairy-tales. The stories, the myths and the legends are more powerful to inspire and unite us than analytical scientific presentations. Art is absolutely crucial in empowering a movement.

3.4. Butterfly Communities – a new religious environment

Reality is my God. Evidence is my scripture. The Universe Story is my creation story. Ecology is my theology. Integrity is my salvation. Ensuring a just and healthy future for the entire body of life, is my mission.” (Michael Dowd)

A spiritual perspective – a metaphysics – expresses itself throughout all human manifestations: social, political, economical, religious, educational, artistic etc. Some people are often saying: “I am a spiritual person, but not a religious one”. Here it is a misunderstanding, a confusion of terms. Correct would be: “I express my spirituality through political, economical, religious, artistic and many other kinds of expressions”.

Religious expression is actually the main way to express your spiritual understanding and relation with the Universe. Of course, political, economical, social, artistic and religious expressions are in mutual-consistency, all of them being brought forth by the same spiritual perspective and are aiming together toward a unique direction: to insert yourself as adequate and authentic as possible into your environment. What we call paradigm is an integrative perspective where all its aspects: social, political, economical, artistic, religious, scientific are in a mutual-consistency, reinforcing each-other.

I have had to quit from the orthodox Christian priesthood because my spiritual perspective has evolved and I felt to express myself religious in other ways. I have felt if I will continue as an orthodox priest, I will betray myself. The same with my engagement in capitalistic economy: I felt that I am betraying myself acting in the way the capitalist system was requesting from me. Quitting from many relatively good jobs was not only a honest decision, but also a healthy one. If you betray yourself, acting against your core values, in your political, economical or religious expression, you’ll destroy yourself, breaking your spirit.

We are not only political or economical beings: we are first of all religious being.

The word “religious” comes from the latin “re-ligare”: to reconnect.

Religious expressions are aiming to inter-connect us with the Universe.

They are modalities to dialogue with the Universe, with Mother Earth, with other humans or other living beings. Their prime aim is to connect us with our inner core, with our purpose and meaning, to give us a sense of belonging to a “greater than us” living reality.

Religious manifestations are able to connect us with the numinous Reality not only through analytical modalities, but throughout all others human modalities of being: touching and sensing; dancing and singing, emotions and feelings, believes and intuitions, rituals and celebration.

We can have a real deep dialogue through touching: touching a rock, caressing and kissing each other, making love or walking with bare feet. This could be religious expressions. A walk in a forest, when you purposely want to connect with your nourishing ecosystem, is a deeply religious manifestation. Caressing your baby, shaking hands with a stranger or a friend, feeling the wind, embracing a tree or swimming – if they are aiming to interconnect us – they are religious expressions.

We can sing or dance together. We can read a book or attend a training-course. We can pray, invoking the Sky or the Earth to bless us: they all are religious expressions, aiming to interconnect us with a “greater than us” numinous Reality.

Searching for a meaning of Life or for a purpose beyond our narrow self-interest, sensing our inner-calling and trusting our allurements is the quintessence of religious expressions.

Because we are living into an ever-evolving Universe, connecting with it means to co-evolve with it. Religious manifestations are aiming to interconnect us and help us co-evolve with the Whole. Feeling our inner-calling, following our allurements, trying to bring forth our authenticity – interconnects us with all others, evolves and transforms us into co-creators.

The Universe-centered consciousness is the spiritual place from where we can embraces the whole Universe and perceive it as our larger living body. This understanding needs to find its embodiment in religious, political, economic, artistic and legislative expressions.

It’s our privilege as entrepreneurs, educators, artists, politicians and lawyers to bring to life in our society the new spiritual perspective.

The new revelation opens a new understanding of religion and an incredible horizon for expressing it: Butterfly Communities will bring forth a “daily-life” religion. Its “temple” will be the whole Planet and every living being. The forests, the oceans, the plains, the mountains will be its temple. Its main “ritual” will be the daily life itself.

Life is sacred.

Nature is sacred.

Fairness is sacred.

If we will re-orient our civilization toward re-connection with the Whole, we will start for the first time to live consciously in a religious way, perceiving almost everything as a religious expression, as a mysterious dialogue, as a numinous dance through which we are enhancing our interconnection with others.

Butterfly Communities will bring forth a participative and open religion.

Every community will could create its rituals and improve them when they feel it is necessary. Everybody will be allowed to find its own self-religious-expression in correlation with others, as in a dance. It is not about “sacred forms” and dogmas anymore. It is about to celebrate together the Dance of Life, the uniqueness of every living being, the wonder and joy of Life! The “Living Universe” religion, through all its rituals, artistic creations, symbols and values, it will awake our inner-calling and sustain the spiritual journey toward finding authenticity and self-expression. It will nourish our spiritual intelligence.

3.5. Butterfly Communities – the Heroes of a new metaphysics!

Each metaphysics isn’t just a human invention. Though it is the co-creation of people, colored by their biases and life context, its inspiration comes from above. Each new re-interpretation of reality comes out of particularly gifted and inspired people whose ears are open to the ever-renewing Song of the Universe. The first impulse comes from above, not from below, in the shaping of our metaphysics.

It is always a mystery how the Cultural Creators – the first fruits of each evolutionary leap forward – are able to break through from their social conditioning and evolve toward higher levels of consciousness to bring forth new visions, more integrative re-interpretations of reality!

Now we are opening the “Fourth Frontier” for human evolution, rooted in a new metaphysics, brought forth by the new scientific understanding: The Living Universe!

Each metaphysics has opened a new frontier, a new evolutionary cycle. The Living Universe metaphysics will inform a new spiritual evolution and a new civilization.

If our new archetypal hero will be the community and its main task will be the integration of human diversity and the regeneration of planetary ecosystem, it will inform differently our aspirations and actions than the lonely hero who is “fighting the evil”.

The new archetypal images of synergy and collaboration will inform us toward more cooperative and generative life strategies. The archetypal image of our new hero is the ecosystem – the unity through diversity and the synergy between the parts. It will bring forth human communities that will resemble living systems too.

If the old archetypal images of Life as “struggle” and “fight” will be replaced by new images of Life as “dialogue” and “dance”, the daily life will be engaged as a dialogue and as a dance and the human life will become accordingly: a dialogue and a dance.

The new metaphysics highlights an interconnected living Universe. Therefore, human life and its fulfillment will search for more cooperation and correlation.

The new metaphysics highlights a dynamic image of life as ever-evolving. So, personal aspirations and fulfillment will be oriented toward conscious evolution. The same for the whole of society. The Living Universe metaphysics is able to intertwine the renewal with the destruction (of what is obsolete, outdated, dysfunctional).

The new image of an ever-evolving Universe is able to give us a relevant answer about the source of what we call “evil” (pain, destruction, injustice etc.) The destruction and the renewal are twin sisters, are the two sides of the same reality. There cannot be renewal without destruction. If we will be able to integrate the pain of evolution in our individual and social life, we will engage life differently.

The new image of a holarchic Universe will inform and build a very different social architecture and a new politic and juridic paradigm that will bring forth a fair and regenerative human society.

The new image of Life as a creative adventure, a playful and joyful dance and, at the same time, an amazing meaningful process – will make that our life and civilization to be more playful, joyful and meaningful.

3.6. Facing our Ordeal

Somebody could say that Butterfly Communities project is an utopia.

It is indeed an utopia, an impossible dream – but only for a first-tier level of consciousness (see Spiral Dynamic for what it means first and second “tier”).

“We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.”

The insightful Charles Eisenstein‘s quote could help us to understand that Life is a never-ending evolution.

What now it is possible, in the past it was impossible. What it seems as an “impossible threshold” could be over-passed through evolution. What it seems as a “forbidden world” could become a new thriving environment. What looked impossible for the parents, became possible for their children. The collaboration and understanding that seems impossible for a lower level of consciousness, it is possible for a higher level. The integrative abilities that are impossible for an Orange level, are very possible for a Yellow-Turquoise level.

Nothing could stop the evolution of human species. But the shape that human society will take in the next future depends on us. We are in our most defining bifurcation point. We still could engage our next step reactivley and slip into a quasi-totalitarian society. It depends on us when and how the Yellow-Turquoise civilization will finally take shape.

We have to understand that the human evolution toward a commons-based world it is not depending on politicians, skillful lawyers or rich entrepreneurs: it depends only on our individual evolution toward more integrative levels of consciousness!

Only this personal evolution will foster the changes we all need and want.

Only so we will be able to overcome our challenges.

Blaming and fighting each other, protesting in streets against the abuses and injustices, but continuing our high level of consumption and individualistic way to be, cannot be the solution! All the blaming we are witnessing in mass-media is useless. Because all the dysfunctions we are seeing are only the symptoms of a deeper dysfunction; an outcome of our metaphysical paradigm – that you and me are bringing forth through each of our daily acts, through our individualistic way to be.

Now, we – as a species – are facing our Ordeal.

3.7. Loyalty toward Life processes

Informed by the Living Universe metaphysics, our individual search for legality will start to perceive as the rightful authority the Life processes itself!

Our legality should derive from the Laws of Life, the only authority that truly is nourishing and protecting us. Our loyalty should be toward Life. Our actions should enhance the well-being of all body of Life.

The Living Universe metaphysics has the power to shift our perception regarding the ultimate legal authority: from something that derives outside of us and is beyond us to something that derives from us and should serve our common well-being.

The Yellow-Turquoise consciousness embraces the whole Planet. It feels to be loyal to the Great Circle of Life. It derives its legality from the Laws of Life itself. It feels immoral to obey anything that are not in tune with the Laws of Life.

The Universe-centered consciousness helps us to find our inner-authority.

To think/ perceive legality as something regarding the Laws of Life it is actually to feel legality as regarding your inner core.

The New Story of the Living Universe will inform us differently. Yellow-Turquoise people are perceiving themselves as free, autonomous agents, consciously participating in bringing forth their world. They are very hard to be manipulated by ideologies or false authorities.

They feel to be loyal to our shared humanity.

Their legality as well as their inner-authority derives from Life itself.

Their power of self-determination serves primarily the commonwealth of Life.

Finding authenticity means finding the inter-dependency and inter-connectedness with Life-sustaining processes.

The long-term future society will be necessarily based on equipotent human relation, inter-dependency and community self-determination.