| Intro / Bio: | I am a computer programmer, a writer, a spiritual seeker and an interfaith worker. I built the Interspirit network system beginning in 2002.
I have followed a vision of co-creative/collaborative networks all my life. I began building online "bulletin board" systems in 1986, and in 1993 started the "Bridge Across Consciousness" academic listserv network. "The Bridge" ran until 1999, and distributed 30,000 messages to an audience of academics and graduate students and spiritual seekers, on issues in the epistemology of religion and the question of whether religions are pointing towards a common reality.
In 1996, as the web began to make its appearance, I created origin.org, and developed "United Communities of Spirit". From there, I developed a variety of related interfaith projects including Interfaith Voices for Peace and Justice and the World Interfaith Congress. In 1998, Barbara Marx Hubbard moved to Santa Barbara, and I built the Conscious Evolution Network. I have worked closely with Barbara and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution since those days.
In 2002, realizing that my projects were very often repeating the same features, I built an "integrated" framework called "Interspirit", somewhat like Yahoo Groups, that could support many projects and organizations, with the idea that they might collaborate. I have worked with the United Religions Initiative, the Parliament of World Religions, and the North American Interfaith Network, among others. I was an invited delegate to the Assembly of Religious Leaders at Montserrat prior to the 2004 Parliament.
Other spiritual projects built on the Interspirit platform have included The Global Resonance Network and Network of Circles. I have built a variety of projects for the "women's circle" movement, including StandingWomen. In 2005, I became interested in "transpartisan" approaches to politics and began to understand the possibilities of a politics/governance built on mutual understanding and co-creativity rather than brute force competition and win/lose models of decision-making. In 2010, I built the Sharedpurpose.Net system, intended as a political organizing tool, inspired by the Barack Obama campaign of 2007/2008. SharedPurpose too, actually runs on Interspirit.
When Kurt Johnson and David Ord published The Coming Interspiritual Age, I immediately saw it as important, and began a correspondence with Kurt that has continued. When I heard about the Dawn of Interspirituality conference, I began working on this new Alliance project, sensing at long last that it may be time for a new vision of integral spirituality -- as we come together to weave wholeness from the many scattered elements of this vast global movement.
Today, my commitment is to a new "integral sacred activism", that I believe can expand and interconnect thousands of groups and individuals all over the world, each bringing their part, each taking on some critical issue, and working across boundaries of diversity to work out informed holistic "win/win" solutions to the myriad of pressing issues today facing the world community.
Ours is a special moment, demanding a new kind of visionary spiritual leadership. I believe the people entering this Interspirit Alliance can help develop this new visionary leadership, based on informed and inspired collaboration and attunement with the energies of Deep Spirit. I am grateful for the presence of every single person who shows up here, and who offers some gift of their own vision and innocence to our collective resonance and wholeness. Thanks for being here.
Projects and references
|
