"As a Westerner, my heart was lifted in the 1980s when I heard about Sarvodaya. It answered my longing for a way to transform our very individualistic and materialistic culture. Thus began my own 40-year journey to translate Dr. Ari's principles into American cities." - Richard Flyer A disciple of the late, recently deceased Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, who was informally revered as the Gandhi of Sri Lanka, Richard Flyer has dedicated his life to integrating embodied spirituality and the building of community-based ecosystem networks. Author of Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation (2023), he synthesizes his learnings from five decades of experiments and explorations across different nations, wisdom traditions, and organizational structures, seeking a shift from a culture of separation to a culture of connection. The book provides his autobiographical and historical roadmap outlining "how we can emerge from our fragmented and conflicted social networks/silos and create sustainable, interconnected ecosystem networks consisting of local leaders, organizations, businesses, and local government -- in parallel to our already established systems." He concludes that a new culture of connection can only be created from the bottom up by connecting and amplifying the positive work of local communities. Realizing that every crisis in the world is at its root a spiritual crisis, he writes that we must first cultivate "spiritual climate change" within ourselves and practice it daily "in the context of a down-to-earth, face-to-face, local community" rather than "trying to reform, fix, or tear down the systems by which society operates." Birthing the Symbiotic Age is partly based upon Richard's first-hand experiences with Sarvodaya Shramadana, an ongoing grassroots movement in Sri Lanka, founded in 1958 by the late Dr. Ariyaratne. The movement has mobilized millions of poor across 15,000 villages in Sri Lanka to build tens of thousands of small businesses, preschools, health centers, village banks, etc., without any government support -- restoring to the poorest people "control over their own lives and destinies." "Meanwhile, I've gotten to experience Sarvodaya's wise theme and motto time and time again: We build the road, and the road builds us," says Richard. In addition to his decades-long involvement in various regenerative projects in Sri Lanka, Richard has been engaged with a syntropic food forest project in Big Island, Hawaii, and a Local Food System Network in Oahu. He is also the visionary behind Symbiotic Culture Lab, which aims to activate 50,000 micro-bioregional villages, towns, and cities as community networks by 2033. In reflecting on Dr. Ariyaratne's unique impact flowing from the blend of personal spirituality with community-based practice --which inspired Richard's own desire to develop and embody spirit in his community-building work in the West -- Richard writes, "Dr. Ari is an example of living a spiritual life wherein one does not have to make the ego smaller by beating it into submission. Rather, by living a daily, engaged Spiritual AND community life -- being of service to others, with all its challenges and egos involved, and by seeing everyone as sisters and brothers -- our ego identification with everyone keeps growing until it disappears!" Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the 1960s, Flyer enjoyed a typical American childhood until he had his first spiritual experience at the age of twelve. "I connected to a 'Luminous Web' that I recognized as the Ultimate Reality beyond that which we see and feel with our senses. The experience was truly 'trance-ending' -- ending the trance of separation. I was left awestruck and feeling connected to something larger than myself -- in fact, connected to everything." Rather than retreating from the material world after such an "other-worldly" experience, he writes that he "ran TOWARD the world. I was fueled by the desire to embody the Love I had re