A Boomerang from the Ancient Future

Today is the one-year anniversary of the birth of the UP Game. I decided to write a three-part celebration of the past, present and future of the United Planet Game this week. Starting by celebrating the past — I found a journal entry that I wrote this time last year. I never shared it with anyone. With all that unfolded that week of the launch of the first UP Game, I didn’t want to draw too much focus on the visions I had seen prior.

There are many lessons learnt over the year, but I’m pleased to share the principles laid out here are the bedrock with which we’ve been designing the UP Game and everything we collectively envision for the United Planet. Tomorrow I will share a synthesis of the year to date and the following day will be a love letter from the future.

I invite you, dear reader, to embody your vision of the future! We encourage more societal Grand Experiments that form the Earth Shot for the greatest we can be. Our goal is simply: A thriving civilization in harmony with all life.

16th March 2020, Civana House, San Francisco

I wanted to do an update from Ground Zero in Civana House. At Midnight the city and 6.7 million people across the Bay went into mandated stay at home by the Mayor and State. We are keeping our spirits high with resident #Quaranteam at Civana House. We wish to be a Lighthouse of Hope amidst this ocean of fear. Our mission remains to prototype what role a Planetary Embassy could play in the hope that every city and bioregion around the world will have Planetary Embassies in the near future.

We start our days where all the residents gather at 7.30am in our Sanctuary for an hour of meditation and breathwork. We then celebrated St Patrick’s day with a Leprechaun Dance Party where we all dressed in green and let rip to Treat by Santana: https://www.facebook.com/luciantarnowski/videos/10103124601386181/

We have been part of birthing what may have the legs to go all the way. It is called The UP Game. The experiment is made up of 50 people who began by meeting over zoom on Monday for a 2-hour sprinting sanctuary. The majority of our incredible team are the 40 systems changemakers that were due to be meeting for a 20/30 Labs in Esalen this week. After this was cancelled, we moved to everything online. We are experimenting with new formats for online collaboration which is something I get very turned on by. For the last 12 years, I’ve focused on enabling multi-stakeholder learning and collaboration communities.

The 50 people come from all over the world and are beginning to form into a deeply vulnerable connected community of purpose. We have chosen to split the imagination sprint into two frequencies. The first is Yin where we focus on broadly Self-Mastery. We are making time for deep connection, embodied movement, prayers, intimacy and vulnerability. Our Yin time began this morning with a dance party in green. Tomorrow it is beginning with a rainbow dance party.

We believe that bringing play back to how we tackle challenges is essential. Liberating the inner child of the collective is an essential part in unlocking our collective capacity for planetary integrated cooperation.

The second half is the Yang frequency. We focus on Collective Thriving. This is where we get action orientated. We have broken into a series of Guilds — essentially working pods focused on all areas from food, mental health, narrative and media and numerous more. Our format for the first prototype is over 4 days with 2 hours on Monday, an hour each day on Tuesday and Wednesday and then 2 hours on Thursday. What if we could create a culture where it was part of ones Civic Duty to play the UP Game for 8 hours a week to create value for the commons.

The basic intention of The UP Game as it stands is how can we design a game where the way to win the game is to create a win for all society. We win the game when we all win the game. We discussed creating an in-game currency called Stars that would be pegged to the exchange value of the US$ on 16th March 2020 — the day we kicked off the game. The US$ will inflate with the economic crack addiction the little greedy boys club have to quantitive easing and the FED just printing more money on the trust of a breaking system made up of a debt of gigantic quantity. As people trade their US$ it will get more and more expensive to buy Stars. This way people transfer more dollars to stars as a more stable store of value in these times. Once the currency is in Stars, they become a whole new phenomenon of upgraded money. Stars are Smart Money — more like the infinity of energy abundance that we see in our universe. The Stars can be used to fund Smart Contracts for the Guild DAOs to take on societal challenges.

Our goal is that through Stars we can prove the cooperation outperforms competition. However, we recognize as with every new incentive engine there is enormous potential for unintended consequences. Part of our questioning is ‘If we know we’re building a lightsaber factor how do we ensure we only make blue ones?” How can we collectively design a game that would have structural integrity with natural law? We do everything we can to replicate the patterns of nature into the game. The is way a design principle is a fractal of our natural world. As the Hermetic Principles teach us in the Kabbalah ‘As above, so below.’ An example of one such principle is the 100x principle. This is a principle that no player in the UP Game can earn more than 100x the minimum of any player. So, for example, if around the world the maximum a player could earn in a day is 1000 Stars (equivalent to $1000 on 3.16.20) then the minimum is 10 Stars (equivalent to $10 on 3.16.20). This would create a daily incentive for those of us earning 1000 Stars each day to design ways for those earning 10 Stars per day to earn more. In doing so the cap would be lifted by 100x the increase. What this does is rewards the most capable among us to be celebrated as community heroes and the celebrities of the future. But also, it ties the interests of the margins of society — The 1% to the 100%. This is certainly worthy of experimentation in a world where 7 men own more than 50% of the population of the planet.

One intention of the game is to enable people to embody their future self and find the team that they can practice self-mastery. Part of the objective is collective healing of traumas. It is highly likely that given trauma is created in relation to others that our collective healing will be in relation to the collective. Our goal is cultural explorations of a yearning towards the best version of ourselves. This is our spiritual practice.

We need to wake up. Corona is perhaps the greatest opportunity we’ve ever seen for a moment of planetary unification. I am grateful that our common enemy is a virus and not another man.

I’ve prayed for years now that we can have this moment of collective unification without violence. I have had many dark nights of the soul thinking of what horrors would happen if this got violent. My father was born in 1929 and was a prisoner of war in Poland. He experienced the brutality of the Second World War. He took a shot at a Nazi officer aged 13 and was imprisoned, escaped and lived for almost 2 years on the run, often in states of starvation. He taught me ‘Society is one missed meal from anarchy.’ The veil of security is very thin. He also taught me to never think any of us are any different than the worst of the Nazi officers. Anything they did you and we and I are capable of that and more. Denying our individual and collective shadow is denying part of our humanity.

I hope our common enemy unifies our collective potential to be the Civilization that completes a planetary metamorphosis. Let’s take it for now that that is in fact Corona and the time for us to rise up together to transform every aspect of our society is RIGHT NOW. This is the time of our finest hour. This is what we have been being prepared for. This is our dharma.

The band is getting back together!

So I pray that the experiments happening in communities around the world will birth a new unifying culture around our shared humanity. We have never been so interdependent. We are one. We are living parts of a living system. I have faith that what is unfolding is nothing short of a planetary immune system response causing us to stop and unite. A new normal is coming.

And the best part of the story is that we don’t need to stop at merely solving our problems of the current system best mapped by the Sustainable Development Goals. NO — We can reach for the stars. We can surrender with humble audacity that we are the ones to transform this world. And why stop short of creating a thriving civilization for all.

Dreams are not what we have in our sleep. They are what prevent us from sleeping.