Prolegomenon

The invitation, and the foundation — why this matters, and what a Community Company actually is. Read this first; then set your feet on the Path. Together.

Dearly Beloveds,

We stand at the crossroads of history.

A moment in time that will shape life on Earth for millennia to come.

Future generations will look back and ask:

When the crucial moment was upon you, what did you do?

Facing a vast array of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and accelerating towards the chasm of collapse, humanity faces a profound crossroads.

LIØNSBERG stands at this juncture, lovingly and freely offering a Way towards the best possible future for All.

This guide is intended to help humanity confront and overcome the meta crisis, and co-create Heaven On Earth. One local community at a time.

A Portal Into a New World

The journey that follows is unusual to say the least.

It may help to think of this as a portal into a mythic New World. Vast, real, and transformative. Like stepping through a wardrobe into Narnia, finding yourself aboard a craft in Star Wars, battling wraith in Lord of the Rings, or being pulled into Jumanji. Except this world is not fiction. The stakes are more than real.

When you step through The Gates of LIØNSBERG you will be entering New and unknown territory. It may feel strange and disorienting at first, but also oddly like coming home.

Some serious adults may scoff or object to the idea of such a transformative Path being cloaked in story, pattern, and play. However upon deeper reflection, they may remember that an epic tale is perhaps the only vessel able to hold a world through such a transformative crisis.

Welcome to LIØNSBERG.

A Hero, on a Quest, Meets a Guide, who Offers a Way

There is a tale as old as time about a Hero on an epic Quest towards Destiny, who faces a seemingly insurmountable Challenge. Just as all appears lost, they cry out for help. A mystical Guide appears, who offers them a Way to avoid failure and achieve success.

You and your community are the heroes of this story.
You are the ones who must make the decisions and walk the Path.

LIØNSBERG simply stands at the crossroads, offering a Way.

The One Thing That Enables Everything Else

What is the One Thing... That everyone thinks is impossible... That if accomplished... Would enable everything else to succeed?

Sit with this question for a moment.

What rises?

Across countless experiments, the answer has consistently resounded. Though spoken ten thousand different ways in ten thousand different languages, the essence is the same:

UNITY.

Us The People. Standing together. In Spirit and Truth. With proper governance. Proper order. Proper resourcing. Proper support.

From there, everything else becomes possible. Every challenge can be met. Every problem can be solved. Every opportunity can be seized.

Through the wisdom, power, and strength of Us Standing Together in partnership with ØNE and One Another.

Because there is no "them".

We are the Ones we've been waiting for.

Becoming a Self-Governing Body

Following the realizations that:

1. There is something wrong
2. The solution is Our Responsibility
3. There is another Way
4. None of us can do this alone

This guidebook is designed to walk you and your community through the process of forging a free and self-governing body — endowed with its own legal personhood and agency — whose sole purpose is to help your community develop towards the fullness of its potential and flourish in harmony.

That single act is what makes everything else possible. The one body that exists solely to support all the other bodies in your community.

In your local community, if there are no issues to be solved, no sensemaking required, no decisions to be made, no resources to be allocated, no sicknesses to heal, no wounds to tend, no youth to educate, no poverty to eliminate, no messes to clean up, no families to house, no loved ones to feed, no culture to uphold... then this process is entirely unnecessary.

For the rest of us, there is clearly work to do that no individual or organization can do in isolation.

By definition, this requires time, energy, attention, and resources to be applied in a coordinated and focused Way by teams of people committed to shared priorities, goals, and values.

While it might not be enough, as a starting point this shared effort requires at least the basic level of consciousness and competence that would go into building a roadway, building, bridge, or any other significant human endeavor.

This guidebook will walk you through the process of imagining, designing, and building a self-governing LIØNSBERG Community Company for your local region. A self-governing legal body with the capacity to make decisions, solve problems, allocate resources, and accomplish goals in service of All.

The etymology of the word "company" derives from the Latin "com" (together) and "pan" (bread) — a fellowship that shares meals. It was subsequently expanded to encompass any group of people united in service of a shared goal.

Every community on Earth shares an implicit and ultimately ineffable goal. Arising from absolute and unconditional love, it is something like:

The total integrated wellbeing, development, right relationship, and flourishing of all generations of life.

Nearly all communities lack a self-governing body explicitly united in service of that goal.

The LIØNSBERG Community Company solves this problem by incarnating a sovereign and self-governing local body whose sole purpose is throughput of The Goal, along with a cosmic-grade operating system to deliver it.

What, Exactly, Is a Community Company?

A Community Company is the self-governing body of a local community, united in service of The Goal. It is defined by what it is for and who it answers to, not by any particular legal form.

Three things make a Community Company what it is:

1. A People. A bounded local community — as a working unit, often roughly 10,000 people (a town, a district, a cluster of villages, a neighborhood-of-neighborhoods). Small enough to know itself; large enough to meet most of its own needs. This is the basic self-governing cell of a new civilization. (See "The Fractal" below for how cells federate outward and upward.)

2. A Purpose and Driver. A single, sovereign purpose and need calling it into being: throughput of The Goal for that community — the total integrated wellbeing, development, right relationship, and flourishing of all generations of life in that place.

3. Five Emergent Properties. The moment its founding members voluntarily associate, five things come into being together — and naming and tending them is what turns a gathering into a Company:

   • a Domain of Responsibility and Authority — what this body is responsible for, and what it has authority over;
   • a Selectively Permeable Membrane — who is in, how members join and leave, what crosses the boundary and on what terms;
   • a Field of Agreements — the shared governance, freely consented to: purpose, principles, decisions, commitments;
   • a Commons — the shared resources the community pools and stewards together;
   • a Federated Ecosystem — the interexistence and right relationship of this Company with all others, so that no cell of the body stands alone.

A Community Company is sovereign first, and structured second. It does not need anyone's permission to exist. It begins the day its founders agree to voluntarily associate in service of The Goal — long before any paperwork. Legal personhood and form emerges when the work requires it. When it needs to hold money, sign contracts, limit liability, or interface with the existing legal world, a legal person is born and federated.

The Fractal: One Pattern at Every Scale

A Community Company is a cell, not the whole body. The same pattern repeats upward by voluntary federation:

A Continuously Improving Superorganism

To ensure that no one is involuntarily left behind, let us imagine the entire planet covered in such communities, each embarking on a shared journey towards flourishing and abundant life.

While there are indeed uniquenesses to each place, the vast majority of basic desires and needs are common to all.

We all Value the same basic things.

Love. Belonging. Water. Food. Shelter. Clothing. Learning. Economy. Healing. Wellness. Spirituality. Regeneration. Justice. Meaning. Purpose. Governance.

Now imagine a world in which the very best shared solutions to these universal desires and needs were continuously improved and shared by each community.

In this world, the 100th community to form a Community Company would benefit from the wisdom, learning, and best practices of each of the first 99.

Each time a new solution was discovered, it would be "pushed" up to The Commons, so that it could be "pulled" down, localized, and adapted by any community that so desired.

The end result is a shared planetary superorganism whose purpose is to co-create Heaven On Earth.

The Crucial Decision: Unity or Isolation

The entire LIØNSBERG philosophy and playbook is freely available online. The technological backbone enables anyone to copy or fork the entire body of work with the click of a button.

However the Spirit of LIØNSBERG begins and ends with Unity, and the entirety of its power lies in synergy and right relationship.

Ten thousand warring and competing Community Companies would quickly destroy the planet. Ten thousand collaborating Community Companies co-create Heaven On Earth.

The Spirit, Heart, and Essence of LIØNSBERG is Unity.

To Know the Way, One Must Live It

There is a well known saying among masters of the Way:

To know the Way, One must live it.

The opening 1,500 words of this guidebook could be collapsed into three hundred or expanded to three million.

The reality is that this Way can only be known through experience. So with that short introduction, we now set our feet on the Path of forming a small steering committee, establishing a Community Company, and inviting the first three percent of the local population to join.

From there, everything else becomes possible.

Forward to Step 1 — Forming a Steering Committee — begin walking the Path. Back to The LIØNSBERG Community Guidebook — the entrance portal.