Seeds of Renaissance Manifesto

For all the living beings whose hearts burn to see a new world emerge.

Preface

This manifesto is non-sectarian, it is to be alive and not to be set in stone, dead and irrelevant. It is a reverence and celebration of life. It expresses patterns and guiding principles, like a common DNA, from which evolutions may arise. Therefore, we hope it will be taken and evolved into many forms by others.

It asks us to look clearly at the world we have inherited and made, to sense what is dying and what is being born and to ask what each of us is called to do at this extraordinary threshold. It offers the vision and guiding principles for seeding a Civilizational Renaissance: a recognition that the crises of our time are symptoms of a deeper cultural turning and that a profound rebirth is possible.

It is, ultimately, a call to arms to create together a garden filled with a multitude of expressions of a civilisational renewal, united in their sharing of common principles.

Introduction

‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’ Arundhati Roy

Human civilization has always been a story of transformation – of old worlds dying and new ones being born. We are living through such moments. The crises of our time – ecological, political, social, spiritual – are not separate emergencies to be managed one by one. They are the symptoms of a civilization whose foundations are cracking. And as in every great turning, crisis carries within it the seed of rebirth.

This manifesto attempts to articulate the essence of that emerging vision: the seeds of renaissance and its principles.

Manifesto

So what will be this Renaissance we are seeding? It is yet to be known but we answer to the call of a dawn, calling us to value interbeingness, awakening to the wisdom of the whole, inner-evolution and dancing with the richness of complexity. We believe and witness that there is an innate calling in life to care for the whole, BElonging and a freedom to exist in our individuation. This is the unfolding from freedom to be-wholing. It is liberation intertwined with belonging.

This life movement cannot be repressed by fear, war, terror, death, dictatorship because it is in every human heart. Our ability to understand, love, care and contribute is an expression of our intuitive knowledge of the truth of our interbeingness. By doing this, we become authors of tomorrow’s future and priests to the dying past.

Life as an art.

In this soil we plant the seeds of a Renaissance.

1. Our work is a practice of hope, because where there is hope there is action and where there is action there is vitality, life and change.
2. Our work is mystical, political, ethical, spiritual, religious and artistic.
3. Our work expresses the good through community, the truth through wisdom and beauty through art.
4. Our work is to calm our inner landscape so we can listen deeply for the whole which we are always part of.
5. Our work is to create a space to be with the unknown and the possibility of creation that comes with it.
6. Our work is to witness joy, darkness, hope, sadness, tragedies and miracles and for those to guide us into living wisdom.
7. Our work is to inquire and listen for a world that works for everyone and everything.
8. Our work is to let go of and develop what is needed for a renaissance to be born.
9. Our work dances with the shadow to integrate them, so we are no longer run by them and take responsibility for the suffering it has caused to others.
10. Our work is to inquire into the nature of reality through embodied empirical practices and rigorous thinking as the quality of our thinking leads to the quality of our speech – we seed the future with our words.
11. Our work honors our ancestors' efforts whilst learning from their mistakes.
12. Our work stands to liberate ourselves from nihilism and relativism and to go beyond the limitation of the superiority, equality and inferiority complex.
13. Our work is a demonstration of the power of vulnerability with others and authenticity with oneself.
14. Our work is a practice of being with our cognitive dissonance and freeing ourselves from the painful shackles of our discriminating biases.
15. Our work is understanding and compassionate while being expressed and unapologetic.
16. Our work is contemplative and activist at the same time.
17. Our work is to sit in silence together, pray and activate our oracular bodies with rituals in an embrace to mother earth.
18. Our work remembers joy as transformative practice and so we have the inner fuel to pass through times of darkness.
19. Our work explores impermanence and eternity in touching the ultimate dimension and linking it to the relative world.
20. Our work is in the emerging interbeing.
21. Our work is life as an art.

Essay

1. Introduction – Singing the Song of Spring

Guiding question: what is the responsibility of seeding a Renaissance in society – and in this particular moment of profound societal, political, ecological and spiritual crisis?

Like doulas we witness the last breath of a dying past and the first breath of a future being born. Gently tending to this vulnerable moment of death and new life, we water the seed of a renaissance and listen for what wants to emerge from the wholeness of our interbeingness. And from our soul we sing the song of spring – this is the call for rebirth.

We activate a dormant dream and birth it into reality, by seeding a renaissance and grounding what is ethereal into the earth. We hold the vision of what is possible yet not yet there. Therefore we need to hear our song sung back, to maintain hope and faith in the vision of what our heart knows is possible. Like the swallows our song announces the coming of spring as we enter a dark night.

2. ‘Meaning’ the North Star of Humanity

What is unique to humanity is our quest and creation of meaning and therefore culture through art and ideas that becomes alive in the network of our relationship. The act of seeding a renaissance is an expression and inquiry about the meaning and purpose of Life. This is what gives us the role of being the priests at the threshold of transformation.

Because we are meaning creating beings, we swim in a world made of concepts. Concepts so strong that when we dream, the world we make through them seems real, yet dreams have no physical existence. In seeding a renaissance we are both the gardener and the alchemists of the meaning world, creating new interactions, opening new paths that were hidden from our sight towards a renaissance.

3. In Between World

“You have the old world in you.”

We are creatures “between worlds”. Standing on the scrapyards of the past, we can envision a paradise beneath the carcasses of modernity and our hard labour is an offering to the future, we till the soil and clean the ruins for an unborn future to rise. In seeding a renaissance we recognize that we hold in ourselves the pattern of the old world and that shedding them takes time, care and patience, it is the work of generations.

Our life is a life of devotion, in connecting with the soul, integrating the world of shadows and exploring unwalked paths. In doing so we take a risk because where we go, no one has gone before. Even if we will likely fail against our aspirations, the bet we have taken is the one where the life force resides. So we carry in us the old and the new, and, for a new civilization to arise we must heal the rift between worlds to propel us beyond the cult of the individual and nihilism to a truth beyond self, a truth of inter-being.

4. Shadow Work – Change or Transformation?

What is the difference between change and transformation?
It would be the difference between a chameleon and a butterfly.
The first one changes and the second one transforms.

In seeding a new civilization, a commitment to inner work and especially shadow work is required. Because the greatest evil is not done by evil people but by good people who do not know themselves, and, in particular, who do not know their own shadows.

There are two halves of a circle when it comes to this transformation, being present to our suffering and being present to the suffering we cause to others. Transforming our shadows implies being able to witness and integrate them both without being given by them.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Saint Bernard

Because our shadows are usually what is in the way of fulfilling our deepest desire transformation requires a level of awareness of the undercurrent forces both collective and individual that moves us, because our shadows run deep, they are at the source of wars, extraction, the killing, the revenge, the manipulation, the rape, the gossip, the suicides, the bullying, the blind eye and our lack of integrity. We can only integrate what we are conscious about, therefore shining light onto our darkness is a key aspect to transformation.

5. Truth, Faith and Liberation

“The truth believed is a lie.” Werner Erhard

When we talk about truth, we don’t mean the rationalist’s logic or any dogma that should be blindly believed in without inquiry for oneself. When talking about truth, we mean an experience of human nature and reality available to every person through their introspection and contemplation; universal and non-discriminatory; inescapable as gravity. The experience of truth is what grounds our faith in the possibility of liberation because truth and liberation are not separate.

In a modern materialist world, the truth is scientific, rational and measurable, a precision of the form. In the feudalistic world the truth is revealed to the chosen one. In post-modernity, refusal of truth is held as a truth in and of itself. How might a relationship with truth express itself in an emerging civilisation?

6. The Dance of Interbeing

After a reign of individualism we see its limitations. The remedy to its decadence is to lean towards our interbeingness. The beauty of self-expression that individuation has given us, is enhanced by the dancing with a greater space of relationship, an expression of collective consciousness. A dance of the interdependency of self and world. A commitment to practices* that would help one get in direct contact with the inter-being nature of reality is key in midwifing a new civilization. Interbeing transcends our dualistic relationship to life by getting away from dualistic subject-object dynamic into greater alchemy of integration. This gives birth to the embodiment of collective wisdom, a delicious nectar of wholeness to drink from and swim in, one that gifts us a sense of direction, meaning and belonging.

*Notes: we-space practices such as Emergent dialogue, collective presencing.

7. The Healing Link Between Past and Future

Interbeing is also with our sense of time and lineage.

The collective crisis of loneliness is a direct disconnection from our inter-being, by disregarding the past and it is directly reflected in how we regard our elderly and in doing so we cut ourselves off from the powerful ancestral line. The pain we have with our ancestors turns them into ghosts and condemns us to live a life haunted by them, unable to find peace and create freely. Our identity will struggle to reveal and anchor itself if we do not understand that we are the manifestation of the past, present and future all at once.

This illness arises from the view of seeing ourselves as individuals and not as interbeing with present, past and future. An overfocus on an atomistic self does not allow us to heal intergenerational trauma and also disconnects us from the power of the life force of the future. A greater perspective of oneself as an ancestor allows us to step into our responsibility and mature. Our resistance towards responsibility is also a symptom of a society that worships “youth” – those free of responsibility. Without responsibility, our growth is stunted, we stay in a child-like state unable to mature into our wisdom. It is time for us to embrace responsibility and see ourselves as ancestors.

What was your face before your father was born? Are these eyes yours, or the ones of your mother's? Is this body yours or the one of your child?

Practices: such as touching the earth.

8. Alchemy of the Spiritual, Religious and the Political

Modernist belief in freedom and a fear of dogmatism has separated the spiritual and the political. When politics gets into the religious realm it hardens and calcifies the life from our spiritual world. Yet, we might look at this combination from a different order, where the spiritual imbues our politics, our politics become more human. We can see such examples with Gandhi, the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King and the stand of the Quaker community to end slavery.

Therefore, attention to sacredness, collective ritual and respect for inner life is essential to the flourishing collective, which is the proper end of politics. In insisting on a separation between the spiritual and the political, we have cut our politics off from our deepest sources of intuition about who we are, what we aspire for and what our body and soul needs.

Good governance requires insights about human beings, their nature, and their material and spiritual needs. These fundamentally include insights of a spiritual nature. Art is a natural bridge for the spiritual and the political, and a vehicle for softening this rigid boundary.

In a modern secular context, individualism has shaped our relationship with the sacred: my path, my realization. If spiritual life is not shared with and contextualized by something bigger than ourselves, a vital dimension of spirituality is missing; an experience of being human is possible only in communion with others. The presence of such context is what allows us to live a fulfilling life of service, which is key to how we conduct and show up in our politics.

9. Cultural-Political Context

Student: “When do people change?”
Zen master: “When they have to.”

A movement always appears within the social, cultural and political context of its time. Therefore, the appearance of a new civilisation has its roots in today’s political, cultural and economic instability, along with the decline of the dominant cultural paradigm: modernity. Modern values of the world of individualism, progress, rationality, freedom and equality have served us greatly but now they throw long shadows, calcifying into endless growth, materialism, techno-solutionism and an addiction to certainty and control, driving global exploitation, destruction of nature and loneliness.

Yet at the same time postmodern refusal of absolutes has led to a denial of the true, the good or beautiful as real values – its nihilistic blindspot holding as a truth that there is no truth cannot sustain cultural renewal, as it is condemned to be directionless.

The conflict of these opposing cultural paradigms entrenched an ever-widening wisdom gap.

Reacting to our past, we are not fully free to create anew. A new dark age is in process, where worldviews still jostle for primacy. One may pick a side and join the culture war – or seek a vantage point beyond the conflict, from which to explore and nourish a vision of a civilizational Renaissance.

At a time between worlds, we must examine our heritage of the traditional, modern and postmodern world. It’s ours to ask: What views and values ask to be born? Which aspects of our inheritance would we wish to carry forward, and from which do we wish to be liberated?

To seed a Renaissance one cannot shy away from the political nature of human beings, politics is the act of coming together and finding alignment beyond our differences and wars happen where our politics fails, so we must reclaim the power of politics as a pathway to resolve our greatest collective action problems.

10. The Art of Life Itself

In pioneering new wholesome ways of living, our way of life might not be considered acceptable by today’s standards, because our very way of life threatens and confronts the status quo. When others witness the artistry in which we live life itself something new opens up, because it is the beginning of the embodiment of a new way of life: from the way we build our home, to the way we engage in our romantic relationship, to how we navigate our sense of belonging and identity, to how we make art, to how we raise our children, to how we honor our dead. Our embodiment in living is one of the greatest ways we plant the seeds of a renaissance. It shows that there is a way to be on a powerful spiritual path while raising children. We share the sacredness in daily life, to imbue each moment present to its gift and embrace the magic of the experience of being alive. Therefore, the boundaries between life and art are blurry. It invites all human beings to connect to their artistic self and to approach their life both with the same experimentation and reverence we give to artworks.

Colophon This manifesto was based on the Art of the Second Renaissance Manifesto written in 2024 by Sylvie Barbier.

Our safeguarding principles

We are committed that our dreams of utopias do not turn into nightmares. This is why we are committed to these safeguarding principles for a wiser, weller world to emerge and stay on a path of Reverence for life.

1. Openness, Non-Attachment to view and Freedom of Thought

“Don’t confuse your ideas about truth with Truth itself.”

Openness: Aware of the suffering created by fanaticism and intolerance, we are determined not to be idolatrous or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even our own one. They are not doctrines to fight or kill for. We will train ourselves to look at everything with openness and the insight of interbeing in order to transform dogmatism and violence in ourselves and the world.

Non-Attachment to view: Aware of the suffering created by attachment to views and wrong perceptions, we are determined to avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. We are committed to learning and practicing non-attachment to views and being open to others’ experiences and insights in order to benefit from the collective wisdom. We are aware that the knowledge we presently possess is not changeless, absolute truth. Insight is revealed through the practice of listening to the whole and deep looking. Truth is found in life.

Freedom of Thought: Aware of the suffering brought about when we impose our views on others, we are determined not to force others, even our family members and children to adopt our views. We are committed to respecting the right of others to be different, to choose what to believe and how to decide. We will, however, seek the courage to stand against the destruction of life, learn to help others let go of and transform fanaticism and narrowness through loving speech and dialogue, to care for and protect life but not to use violent speech and actions.

2. Communication and speech

Aware that lack of communication brings separation and suffering, we are committed to develop ourselves in the practice of compassionate listening and loving speech. We will practice to share our understanding and experiences with members in our community in order to arrive at collective insight.

We are determined to learn to listen deeply without reacting, and refrain from uttering words that are violent. Whenever difficulties arise, we will practice looking deeply into ourselves and others to recognise all the causes and conditions, including our own habit energies, that have brought about the difficulties. We will take responsibility for all the ways we may have contributed to the conflict and keep communication open. We will not behave as a victim but be active in finding ways to reconcile and resolve all conflicts however small.

We will refrain from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence and always ask ourselves whether our perceptions are correct. We will speak with the intention to understand and help transform the situation. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure, therefore we will not create or participate in triangles and engage in gossip and when difficulties arise first try to communicate directly with the person involved and if in need of support we will ask for mediation: different processes can be used such as beginning anew, deep listening and recreation. Note: before engaging with the process we will be honest with ourselves if we are ready to take steps into reconciling and not weaponise the mediation and if we are not able to come with a willingness to heal and harmonise we will take responsibility to express that we are not ready at the moment, and allow the group and others to move forward.

We will do our best to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may make difficulties for us or threaten our safety.

3. Integrity & Right Relationship with Power

Aware that greed, status, power, recognition, and wealth can distort both individuals and communities, we commit ourselves to integrity.

We remember the purpose for which the Seeds of Renaissance community exists. We will not use the community, its relationships, resources, reputation, or spiritual life primarily for personal power, status, fame, or profit, we will remain attentive to the moment when these desires begin to govern our decisions or compromise our values.

When entrusted with authority, money, visibility, or influence, we will understand these not simply as privileges but as responsibilities.

We recognise that what we possess—our land, money, knowledge, creativity, time, relationships, and the Earth itself—is not ours alone. We receive these things temporarily and are responsible for how we pass them onward to the next generations.

We are committed for our words and actions to correspond; to speak truthfully, to honour our commitments, acknowledge our mistakes and to avoid double standards. We commit ourselves to alignment between our inner values and our outward lives.

Integrity is the practice of becoming whole: allowing what we believe, what we say, and how we live to come increasingly into relationship with one another.

4. Reverence for Life

“Peace is not only a political position; most importantly when lived, it becomes a practice.”

Aware that much suffering is caused by war and conflict, we are determined to cultivate nonviolence, compassion, and the insight of interbeing in our daily lives and promote peace education, mindful mediation, and reconciliation within families, communities, ethnic and religious groups, nations, and in the world. We are committed not to kill and not to let others kill. We will not support any act of killing in the world, in our thinking, or in our way of life. We will diligently practice deep looking to discover better ways to protect life, prevent war, and build peace.

5. Sexual energy

We are determined to only engage in sexual relations where there is consent, respect and care. We know that to preserve the happiness of ourselves and others, we must respect the rights and commitments of ourselves and others. Recognizing the diversity of human experience, we are committed not to discriminate against any form of gender identity or sexual orientation. Seeing that body and mind are interrelated, we are committed to learning appropriate ways to take care of our sexual energy and cultivating loving kindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness for our own happiness and the happiness of others. We must be aware of future suffering that may be caused by sexual relations. We will treat our bodies and the bodies of others with compassion and respect. We will do everything in our power to protect children from sexual abuse and to prevent families from being broken by sexual misconduct. We will be fully aware of the responsibility of bringing new lives into the world, and will meditate regularly upon their future environment.

Colophon These principles are directly inspired by and drawn from the training of the Order of Interbeing and the Quaker Testimonies. We believe they offer a solid foundation as they come from a long lasting lineage of peace for a wiser, weller world to emerge and stay on a path of Reverence for life.

Read the long essay on the vision