This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is Power.

Beauty Truth Goodness

Map 5 conveys the qualities of spirituality in the city. Its zones of Grace, Space and Place reveal where the core spiritual values of Goodness, Truth and Beauty are manifested. The Kosmic addresses of these core spiritual values of the Integral City have both vertical and horizontal locations. Spirituality itself responds through these qualities and values in a holographic way …

(For more details see Chapter 1: Spirituality in the Human Hive: Involutionary & Evolutionary Cycle of Love.)

Hamilton, M. 2018. Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia’s Human Hives. Minneapolis, MN: Amaranth Press,LLC , Appendices p.322

Scroll to end of newsletter to access Free Resources.

Hospitable to the Soul

More than an ecovillage … we are a thriving, regenerative spiritual community, hospitable to the soul of Planet, Place, People, Person.

That is the statement that has emerged from a community-wide year-long search for Purpose, Aims, Vision and a Local Place Plan for Park Ecovillage Findhorn, Scotland.

Now in the Sacred Season is the perfect time where we see our service shift to a new phase of connecting our community to more of itself.

For me, this has been a journey of synchronicities arising from deep intention. A journey that began with our feet in the mud – anticipating mess – but guided not only by the Landscape Angel (Gaia’s Local Representative) but also by the Angels of Transformation and Courage who served the eco-village teams who looked for the essence of the ecovillage.

When we asked how could we translate the impulse to transform into a declaration of what we aspired to become for the next ten years – we realized the local council had created the perfect “enabling legislation”. They invited us to submit a Local Place Plan (LPP). As we created the path by walking towards the LPP, we discovered we aspired to a suite of possibilities that could serve our Place, People and Persons and all Life while altogether we reignited our service to the Planet.

While my role had been ostensibly local, before we completed our work, an invitation came to learn from Iain McGilchrist (author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things) his views on the Future of Humanity (at a one-day discovery portal, sponsored by the Science and Medical Network). McGilchrist proposes that humans are definitely in a polycrisis (or metacrisis as Jude Currivan prefers). And our meta/polycrisis is caused by humanity losing touch with our soul. “How could we reconnect with our soul?” McGilchrist asked. And then firmly replies:

“By reconnecting with Beauty, Truth and Goodness”.

His assessment and proposal touched me deeply. Not only because it so closely aligned with what we were doing in the Ecovillage – but because it expanded the core purpose we had extracted in mid-year: namely, that we are a thriving, regenerative, spiritual community in service to the world. McGilchrist’s proposition revealed to me in an instant we were not only more than an ecovillage – but we had been recognized by Quaker Alastair McIntosh (Soil and Soul) – as serving the world because we were “hospitable to the soul”.

Was it too much of a stretch that we were hospitable to the soul because we aimed to live by 3 founding principles? Could Beauty, Truth and Goodness be the seeds and roots of our empowering guidance to Co-Create with the Intelligences of Nature, Deep Inner Listening and Work as Love in Action ?

No doubt we have been living through our own local version of the global meta/polycrises from: broken alliances (Brexit), lost economies, covid pandemic, lockdown paralysis, arson destruction of our Sanctuary and Community Centre, disappearance of our core Foundation and economic generator, loss of thousands of guest visits every year, laying fallow our food garden, losing our local bus system, closing our popular car share and coming to terms with our community average age now being three or four generations older than 1962 when we started.

But out of these meta/polycrises we seem to have discovered the wisdom and anchoring that comes from living into elderhood. We found £400,000 to buy 1/3 of the land and key buildings from the Findhorn Foundation – giving them the cashflow to reinvent themselves and giving the community the freedom to invest and develop a new economy. Perhaps we may become a place of cooperative, shared ownership. We are already creating a vibrant Education Circle offering to visitors the lessons learned from living the 3 Principles. We surprised ourselves by cooperatively publishing a Newsletter sponsored by three organisations who are demonstrating how to weave a web of intentions and inspiring outcomes.

All of this has been happening as we focused on co-creating our Local Place Plan. We have listened to the land, dialogued with each other,  produced 5 Trade Shows, undertook 7 surveys, inquired deeply about the infrastructure systems, housing, environment and economy and talked with our neighbours.

We have manifested Beauty, Truth and Goodness in our quest and are thereby being Hospitable to our Own Soul. Thus we are preparing the ground to recover and serve being Hospitable to the Soul of All who come to visit – in person, online or by nurturing the Findhorn versions of Beauty, Truth and Goodness in their own local places. Perhaps what we have to offer is a Portal to all those possibilities (as Simon Divecha so tantalizingly suggests in his essay of that name?)

When I stand back and look at the activity in our ecovillage in 2024 – with the witnessing and pointing out instructions from Alastair McIntosh, Ian McGilchrist  and Jude Currivan, it lights in me a fire of Love for this Community. There is no doubt in my mind/heart/spirit we are:

More than an ecovillage … we are a thriving, regenerative spiritual community, hospitable to the soul of Planet, Place, People, Person.

Dancing Soul Connections Arising in our Integral Cities

As Spirit we incarnate from Source/Love through the Involutionary path of our energetic existence.

As we incarnate we reveal the Beauty, Truth and Goodness through which we impact Grace, Place and Space.

As incarnate beings we develop our soul journey back through the Evolutionary Path to return to Source.

This In-Spiration and En-Soulment are complementary energies that flow through us and around us like a Torus.

(Read more about how the Big Three of Beauty, Truth and Goodness are related to the 4 quadrant framework that is represented in Integral City Map 1.)

In exploration with Nish Dubashia 2 years ago, we discovered how this Involutionary/Evolutionary Model is represented in essentially all belief systems in some way.

The “Generic Model” of Spiritual/Soul journeys is captured in Map 5.

… When we don’t live with Gaia’s/Master Code of Care – we experience loneliness, disconnection, anxiety and unhappiness – the very opposites of what life lived with Care offers Self, Others, Place and Planet.

When any one of these fundamental incarnate qualities of Care is broken, then we become misaligned with and disempowered from our individual human souls. And when this happens in the collective then we create the conditions we call meta/polycrisis.

On the other hand if our individual practices can keep our Inspirited selves (on the Involutionary path) aligned with our Evolutionary selves (on the Evolutionary Path) then we live coherently with Beauty, Truth and Goodness…

When our Evolutionary/Involutionary energy torus is thus revealed – we can easily see that we are indeed creating Indra’s web – but in a multi-dimensional way that if we could see it would reveal a whole Field of Ensoulment Energy filaments.

Click here to read the full article.

Integral City Ecosystem of Year 2024: Neighbourocracy, Children’s Parliament, SONEC

This year’s Integral City Award is to an ecosystem with three sub-systems each of which and all together are demonstrating Integral City Intelligences.

The first subsystem is Neighbourhood Parliaments – now often know as  Neighbourhood Democracy or Neighborocracy.

The second is Children’s Parliaments.

The third sub-system is SONEC.

Let’s consider the “organs” in this ecosystem (and notice the Integral City Intelligences linked in italics).

Neighbourhood Parliaments

Joseph Rathinam (a Living Cities Earth Co-Founder)  has helped inspire grassroots neighbourhood democracy across Southern India.

Joseph Rathinam has been training people to set up and operate Neighbourhood Parliaments for almost thirty years, and has been the elected leader of his own neighbourhood in Chennai (a city in Tamil Nadu, southern India) for about twenty. He has helped people to set up tens of thousands of hyperlocal democratic mutual aid institutions across India and around the world (as reported by Citizen Network).

Most recently, city officials in Augsburg, Germany, have decided to adopt a European version of the Neighbourhood Parliament model in the wake of his visit to Augsburg in August of 2022. They want the high-engagement, low-cost benefits of neighbours helping neighbours that this model promises.

The model of neighborocracy has these Integral City Intelligence features:

Collective/Social

  1. Street-level– The basic unit is street-level government – no more than about 150 people or 30 UK households
  2. Inclusive– It is essential that everyone is included and everyone has a vote and all decisions are by consent (although you can vote ‘I can live with that’)

Strategic: Inquiry & Meshworking & Navigating

  1. Empowering– Everyone takes on a leadership role – minister of finance, energy etc. – roles and strategies are agreed together
  2. Subsidiarity– What can be done at the street level is done at the street level – the indirect goal is to invest in each other – not in corporations
  3. Federative– Streets federate to neighbourhoods – neighbourhoods federate to municipalities – municipalities federate to regions – goal is global democracy

Contexting: Living

  1. Intergenerational– There are 3 interlinked kinds of Parliament organised by age: Children/Young People/Adults

Strategic: Navigating

  1. Convergence– Don’t threaten the existing system of power – run parallel- create positive pathways with old system .

Joseph’s work reflects Emergent Intelligence and builds on the work of Father Edwin Maria John who started to develop Basic Communities in the 1980s, and which it was itself inspired by the Liberation Theology movement from Latin America and Ghandian Village Self Reliance (Swaraj). It links to the emerging practice of sociocracy and the emerging movements of New Municipalise, or what Citizen Network calls Neighbourhood Democracy.

Click here to read more about Integral City Ecosystem of Year 2024 – with Children’s Parliaments and SONEC

Integral City Meshworker of Year 2024: Sue Cooper

Sue Cooper

Meet Sue Cooper, Mindful, Compassionate, Peace Weaver:  Integral City Meshworker 2024.

Sue Cooper: Nurse. Ayurvedic Lifestyle Educator. Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher.  She is continually amazed at all that this beautiful life has to offer. She receives guidance with Grace and serves community empowerment with Care, Compassion, Love and Aliveness.

Sue Cooper is a graduate of Integral City Meshwork’s Beyond Resilient Course and has been taking her learnings to her home cities – Nottingham and Nottinghamshire – especially through her influence as a Living Cities Earth Co-Founder.

Sue calls her work Living Cities: Notts – applying the Integral City framework of the four voices to call the whole Living Cities: Notts System to learn from itself.

Sue started her career as a Nurse and then amplified that profession with Ayurvedic practices (learning with Deepak Chopra). The words that set Sue alight as a new trainee nurse in the early 1970’s came from Florence Nightingale (1820-1910):

‘The role of the nurse is to put the patient in the best possible condition so that nature can act and healing occur.’

Sue explains:

When we care for the whole person – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual in relationship with others and the environment we create a compassionate relationship and promote comfort and care. Florence Nightingale believed that incorporating five essential elements, pure air, clean water, efficient drainage, cleanliness and light/direct sunlight, these elements accelerate the body’s innate healing abilities. Whilst we now have drugs, surgeries and incredible diagnostic technologies, we must remember our interconnectivity in the World and the fundamentals of actively caring for ourself, each other, our community and our home, Mother Earth not only when we become unwell but as an act of deep responsibility to maintain vitality and active health.

For over 10 years I travelled and explored many natural healing modalities from indigenous cultures around the world, their applications to modern day Self Care and the fusion with scientific research from Health Care. 

Click here to read the full profile of Meshworker of the Year 2024: Sue Cooper.

Celebrating Elisabet Sahtouris 1938-2024

It is with deep joy we celebrate the life of Evolution Biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris. It is with deep sadness to lose her to this world.

Elisabet lived life to the fullest and created her final book VISTA as a testament to a life well lived and worth living.

Elisabet and I met at a Society of the Future event where we discovered she looked at cells as cities and I looked at cities as cells. After that we were “fractally bonded.”  I am forever grateful that Elisabet took time and interest to author the Foreward to the second edition of Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive.

Elisabet wrote:

Foreword by Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD, for Integral Cities, new edition:

           Looking down on Earth’s surface from an airplane, whether by day or night, our cities look remarkably like cells—nucleated cells, with their obvious nuclear ‘downtown’ hubs, scattered smaller concentrations of buildings like cell organelles, flowing transport systems, extensions into the surround like the pseudopods of amoebae.

          This has struck me again and again in flying around Earth as an evolution biologist and futurist seeking answers to our big questions on whence we came and where we are headed, all the while teaching my evolving take on them. Eventually I realized that cities were indeed living entities in their own right, and now undergoing a rapid evolution comparable to the origins of the nucleated cells they so resemble.

 Thus begins A Tale of Cities and Cells, in which I trace the origins and destinies of cities as that part of Earth’s biological evolution in which our human species reflects the building of nucleated cells as cooperatives by our most remote microbial ancestors. Marilyn Hamilton’s conception of cities as intelligent human hives is completely consistent with this view and thus a delight to me in her marvelously worked out details of just how cities are living entities.

In the decade since the first edition of Integral Cities came on the scene, significant advances in my field of evolution biology further support this conception of cities as intelligent human hives that fail or thrive depending on how much they function like the healthy living organisms they can and should be, and are thus consistent with this book and its companion workbook’s analyses and practices for enhancing city health and wellbeing.

Click here to read the full Forword.

Click here to read In Memoriam Elisabet Sahtouris, Source of Synergy Foundation .

Click here to read/download Elisabet’s fascinating autobiography in her book VISTA.

In Memoriam Elza Maalouf 1965-2024

Also with deepest sadness we grieve the passing of Elza Maalouf – a pioneer of developmental evolutionary AQtivism – especially for the Middle East and for women.

Elza was much respected for her seminal book “Emerge” where she explored the history and opportunity of democracy – and its impact on individuals, families, organizations and nations. We learned from Elza never to assume that “one size fits all”. She taught and lived as an exemplar of meeting people where they are at. Elza had the prowess to do this remarkable work in the male dominated board rooms of the Arab World. And she could stand before a group of western women keen on ensuring the rights of women (as expected in America, Canada and Europe) were defended despite huge differences in the cultures and life conditions of women in the Middle East for whom Elza invited an overview that would allow differences to thrive and mature in their own time.

As an award-winning author, political theorist, and consultant Elza focused her work on business, cultural and political development of the Arab world. She was the cofounder of the Center of Human Emergence Mideast, a think tank that emphasizes the scientific understanding of cultures through stage development.  She was a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle, a community made up of the brightest global minds in the fields of science, spirituality, and consciousness studies.

Rest in Peace, Elza. You are deeply honoured and widely missed.

Click here to read In Memoriam Elza Maalouf, Source of Synergy Foundation 

Integral City Constellation Events with Power

  • Have a WATCH PARTY with “A Radical Guide to Reality“.  Invite your friends, family and especially youth to enjoy cosmologist Jude Currivan’s time/space travel adventure . FREE 15 minute watch (in 17 languages) – journey into the Heart of Consciousness. Celebrate the Old Year. Open Inspiring  Doors to the New Year.

  • Are you ready to become the leader your city needs? 13-14 January 2025 4 pm – 8 pm GMT Online

    Integral City Meshworks as a Partner with Living Cities.Earth has co- designed a quick and easy webinar introduction to “Humaning Well Now” . Full Details and Register with Eventbrite – a $250 value by Donation!!

    • Learn with 4 of Living Cities Earth Co-Founders:
      • Marina Demchenko: The Multilevel Approach to Holistic Leadership Development
      • Eric Kohner: The 5 Knowledge Centers for HumanWellNow
      • Darrell Gooden: Transcending VUCA: Value-Memes, Civic Societies, and Sustainable Futures
      • Marilyn Hamilton: HumanWellNOW Integration
  • Online Zoom Forum, EICSP, 15 January 2025 7pm-9pm GMT:

A Dialogical Inquiry: Spirituality and Our Quiet Resolve – Essencing and Presencing Our Professing.  Register Free/Donation with

Edinburgh International Centre for Sustainability and Peace

With Dr. Ian Wight hosting Dr. Marilyn Hamilton and 4 other Voices in Dialogue. We will be exploring being professional together, as authentic self-identifying professionals, with an emphasis on really deeply being, and on the related ‘togethering’ – the ‘we’ as much as the ‘I’.

Celebrating Our Cities as Places of Evolutionary Power in 2024

Whereas a caterpillar lives to eat, consuming as much as possible,

a butterfly lives to pollinate, sipping the sweetness of flowers and fertilizing new life.

~ Jude Currivan (MetaCrisis to Metamorphosis)

December 21 marks the start of what Integral City calls the Power Quarter (from December 21 to March 20). This has been a year of great shifts , extremes and metacrises – showing up in unexpected ways –  in war zones that are melding North Koreans into the Ukraine; ejecting the corrupt leader from Syria even as Russia is also seemingly ejected; reversing14 years of the UK’s Conservative assumptions with Labour’s long covetted access to leadership that requires completely different qualities than when Labour last led; an American election where ageism denied the Democratic incumbent and defied the Republican contender; where excessive wealth dismantled coherence and connections that used to align Beauty, Truth and Goodness. While all these apparently disheartening events have occurred we have also witnessed the emergence of Artificial Intelligence with capacities to do good in healthcare, education and collaboration; the inventiveness of the Earthshot winners across the globe in diverse categories; the persistence of Children’s Parliaments to create leaders of the future; and the rise of renewable energy proliferation. Even on the day of publication we are genuinely astonished at the hope and promise that is published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Bio-Diversity and Environmental Services (IPBES) where 147 countries agreed on the value of shifting change to recognize the inextricable reality of human/Nature interconnectedness. When we look back to 2023 , we resonate once again with our inspiration from the mycelial webs of stories that amplify Beauty, Truth and Goodness. We can take some assurance that the metacrises may be the natural, messy, all consuming chrysallis phase of human civilization as it metamorphoses into a species who can not only care for ourselves, but care for our Places, all Life and our Planet.

Meshful Blessings of this Sacred Season Celebrating Power in our Planet of Cities …

Marilyn Hamilton 

Founder Integral City Meshworks

PS Here are some FREE resources for uplifting Integral City Power:

Videos

  1. Co-Interview The Universal Heart Sue Cooper & Jude Currivan. 
  2. Cosmologist Jude Currivan’s A Radical Guide to Reality (15 minutes, 17 languages)

Bees

3. Bumblee Population Increases in Scotland

Articles/Resources

4. Intergovernmental Panel on Bio-Diversity and Environmental Services (IPBES) Media Release 

5. IPBES Draft Report

6. Simon Divecha, We Are in a Portal, December 30, 2024

7. December 21, UN, celebrates World Meditation Day – Read History and Global Cultures of Meditation

8. Longer Lives Are A Gift

9. Jude Currivan, Meta-Crisis to Metamorphosis, June 2024

10. Elisabet Sahtouris, Foreword, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive

11. Elisabet Sahtouris, VISTA – autobiography of Sahtouris’ incredible life

12. Julie Krull, Why Play is the Secret to Leading Radical Transformation 

13. Mark Satin, political short story, “My Revolution,” November 2024 issue of  New English Review,  https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/my-revolution/

14. THE SONEC HANDBOOK(52 pages)

15. THE SONEC HANDBOOK SHORT VERSION(18 pages)

16. Findhorn Hinterland Trust Newsletter Autumn/Winter 2024-25 

17. Integral City Blogs

18. Newsletters Past Issues 2023 and 2024

19. Explore Integral City Archive of Newsletters and Blogs in our MetaBlogs: