A Flourishing Commons is...
for those who want to be inspired, for those who want to know that our existence on Earth matters, and for those who want to trust that there is always an essence to being human that is worth living for.
It is a place where we learn how to be more human—to feel more deeply, to think more profoundly, and to live more open-heartedly—because when we are our most authentic human self, we are also our most divine self. When we recognize our own sacredness, we are holding space for our most desired future.
In support of a flourishing world, our mission is to help unveil the pains of our collective social-ecological traumas, share the poignant beauty of the world that exists eternally, and collectively heal through reflection, self-love, and conscious decision-making.
However, before a flourishing commons, exists a tragedy…
The “tragedy of the commons” (William Forster Lloyd, 1833) reveals that individual actions of self-gain from shared resources would eventually destroy the well-being of a society’s commons. Undeniably, we are living this Tragedy, this paradigm fueled by oblivious and unhindered consumption. Yet are we willing to reverse our Tragedy of the Commons?
The real tragedy behind this parable is not about the commons, per se…
Like the Greek tragedies, our Tragedy is also one formed by a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fundamental flaw in this consumptive paradigm is the false belief that our commons can be commodified.
Our physical home on Earth (i.e., the land we live on, the air we breathe, the water that cleanses, and the food that nurtures), and our psycho-spiritual homes (i.e., our sense of self-worth and our dignity irrespective of our external wealth) have been commodified in error to give narrative to a false sense of scarcity.
A Flourishing Commons invites you to consider a paradigm shift to re-envision our world.
Imagine a world that fills your heart with love, a world where you feel unconditionally supported, and where you are free to be who were meant to be and speak your innermost voice of truth. How beautiful would that world be?
Now, in the world that you currently live in, do you feel disheartened by rising social and ecological problems? Do you feel oppressed by this world’s systemic challenges? Do you have to repress your true feelings because of political correctness, polarized beliefs, or people’s discomfort with differing opinions?
In our history, people have been shamed, controlled, and even killed for being themselves and speaking their truths, so there are plenty of reasons for any of us to have deep-seated fears of judgment, persecution, and social abandonment. We don’t need more reasons to shame, manipulate, or threaten each other.
The beautiful new world and the oppressive old world look irreconcilable, but perhaps, they are merely two points on a journey to return home.
Any feelings of confusion, loneliness, despair, or apathy arise because of our collective amnesia to the true meaning of our common home. A core essence to spirituality is to recognize that every element in the universe is interconnected. So, despite the good and the bad that happens in a society, we are simply just trying to make home out of our lives, collectively, on this planet. Therefore, each one of us plays a notable role in this making of the world.
But how at home are each of us in our social roles (as students, educators, designers, environmentalists, advocates, etc.)? More importantly, how at home are we purely as living entities? The Tragedy of our Commons is telling us that we may have neglected this primordial home of ours. It’s time to return to loving ourselves inherently as human beings. It’s time to re-envision the world with new narratives in knowledge production, place-making, and social advocacy.
A flourishing commons starts with a paradigm shift of how to be in the world by:
1. Turning knowledge into wisdom
Not all bodies of knowledge are equal in our old paradigm. Some types of knowledge are institutionalized and deemed valid. Some types of knowledge survive on the sidelines through resistance while others have been persecuted out of existence. Lurking beneath the mainstream paradigm of objective-scientific knowledge is a deep collective fear of not-knowing. This fear creates a desire to consume more knowledge and build defensiveness to preserve an existing illusion of certainty.
This paradigm of knowledge perpetuates insecurity and separateness. Alternatively, knowledge without insecurity is the willingness to break through existing perceptions of the world. We often need embodied experience to successfully break through old perceptions (because the mind is quite stubborn and textbook learning won’t cut through it), but as we are changed in the process of learning and understanding, we develop greater wisdom.
In a world of narratives that feed insecurity and unworthiness, we make a difference by turning knowledge into wisdom.
2. Tending to our inner and outer landscapes
As the ancient hermetic saying goes, “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…” Although ancient wisdom reveals that our inner and outer worlds mirror each, conventional problem-solving approaches to social issues ignore our inherent enmeshment with the world. By treating world conflicts as “problems”, we unknowingly treat ourselves as problems too. We then constantly miss the mark, like a dog chasing its own tail.
Environmental activism aims to change our outer landscapes but systemic entanglements in collective paradigms of separateness, problem making, and identity politics limit the individual’s potentials. Alternatively, institutionalized professions see the professional as titles of identity and legality. Yet, as stewards of the Earth and visionaries of society, architects, landscape architects, urban planners, etc., are sacred archetypes of our spiritual, pragmatic, and compassionate service to the world. A flourishing commons needs more of these archetypes manifested in everyday people to tend to our inner and outer landscapes.
Will we choose to use identities as defenses for our insecurities, or will we open our hearts toward collective flourishing by sharing our gifts to the world regardless of our titles?
3. Transmuting pain into beauty
Tending our inner landscapes means taking care of unkempt emotions and beliefs. However, human civilization has had a long history of aversion towards emotions. We generally avoid painful emotions and displace them with a pursuit for idealized happiness. In spite of this, repressed emotions don’t disappear. Instead, they foster nihilism and aggression. A social world that endorses narratives of scarcity, not-belonging, and unworthiness is deeply wounded. The pain of this wound lives in our collective unconscious.
We heal by witnessing pain with empathy. In-between suffering and healing are poignant moments of awareness, reminding us that there is beauty in learning to be human. To heal our society’s greatest wounds, this beauty inevitably must be greater than society itself.
Found in our own nature is a faith that we must choose in, to flourish.
Returning to the inherent value of life
It may seem ironic to talk about healing overconsumption on a membership and shop page, but a paradigm shift lies in the way we see value. Commodification is a way of seeing the world by devaluing the inherent value of people, things, places, experiences, and energy as leverage to cope with a base-line scarcity mindset. A commodity can be pragmatically useful (e.g., a house, a course, a piece of technology or clothing) or can be pragmatically not-useful (e.g., a drawing, an essay, a flower, a view of the sunset) as long as we cannot see its intrinsic worth.
Money, as its intended usage as a medium for barter, has no value. It is humanity’s psychological confusion over our own value that has made money a scapegoat for our collective fear of not-enough and distrust in life's process. We have devalued our lovability, workforce and creative energy, and right to be at home in this world through all kinds of markets (e.g., dating, labour, housing, etc.).
Spirituality is neither about indulgence nor sacrifice, but it is about learning how to be grateful. We cannot be grateful unless we see abundance. So, to heal ourselves and our world, to bring about desired change at personal and social levels, we need to know how to love and value ourselves.
