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 vision for a new world: a place where we can be authentically human, a place we can feel more deeply, think more profoundly, and to live more open-heartedly. When we are our most authentic human self, we are also our most divine self. With the recognition of our sacredness, we create our most desired future.

To manifest this flourishing world, we need to unveil the pains of our collective traumas, share the poignant beauty of the world that exists eternally, and collectively heal through reflection, self-love, and conscious decision-making.

Flourishing is an ethic guided by non-judgment.

Unlike traditional ethics, the morality of flourishing is relational (Chris Cuomo, 1998). To flourish, we make autonomous choices in a world of imperfect systems. We acknowledge our commons, the common resources we share, the public spaces we gather in, the common essences that make us who we are as human beings. We flourish as individuals, but together, we form a flourishing commons.

Before we reach this state, we must acknowledge 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.

Are we willing to reverse our Tragedy of the Commons? To do so, we need to understand the real reason behind the Tragedy. 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?

People have historically 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. Let's not make any more reasons to oppress 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. 

Feelings of confusion, loneliness, despair, or apathy arise because of our collective amnesia to the true meaning of our common home. Since the essence of spirituality is to recognize that every element in the universe is interconnected, then both the good and the bad sides of society are also ways that we humans try to make home out of our lives on this planet. Each one of us plays a notable role in this making of the world.

How at home are each of us in our social roles?

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 of what it means to live with purpose.

A flourishing commons starts with a paradigm shift of how to be in the world by:

Turning knowledge into wisdom

Not all bodies of knowledge are equal in our old paradigm. Some types of knowledge are institutionalized and granted validity while others survive on the sidelines through resistance and others get 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 lived experience to successfully break through old perceptions, 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.

Tending to our inner and outer nature

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 the fact that we are co-creators of 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.

While environmental activism aims to change our outer landscapes, our inner landscapes resist the change because of our collective programming to make problems, engage in identity politics, and see parts of the world as separate. Human expertise and responsibilities are separated into disciplines and professions tied to different social statuses and legal implications.

For instance, the work of physical world-building are reserved for certain individuals (e.g., architects, landscape architects, urban planners, politicians) but the work of Earth stewardship and social visioning is meant for everyone. Similarly, the work of health keepers are reserved for certain professions (e.g., doctors, therapists), but the work of self-awareness is meant for everyone.

A flourishing world needs more everyday people to embody the archetypes of stewards, healers, and visionaries to tend to our inner and outer natures.

But will we choose to use identities as defenses for hierarchies and insecurities, or will we open our hearts toward collective flourishing by sharing and accepting each other's gifts to the world regardless of our titles?

Transmuting pain into beauty

Tending our inner nature means taking care of unkempt emotions and beliefs. However, human civilization has a long history of aversion towards emotions. So, we will generally avoid painful emotions and displace them with a pursuit for idealized happiness. Nevertheless, 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 again. 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

Lastly, we need a paradigm shift in the way we see value.

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 our 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 commodity markets (e.g., dating, labour, housing, etc.).

Commodification is a way of seeing the world by devaluing the inherent value of people, things, places, experiences, and energy. It is a coping mechanism for a base-line scarcity mindset. Commodification has no correlation to usefulness. As long as we cannot see an item’s intrinsic worth (e.g., a drawing, an essay, a flower, a house, a course, a piece of technology, clothing), we can create a commodity out of it.

To avoid attachments to a commodified world, some people turn to sacrifice as a spiritual principle. But flourishing cannot be achieved through self-sacrifice. The process of flourish is also a process of learning how to be grateful. Gratitude cannot exist without the awareness of 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.