The Tara Project

Note to the reader: While we are not anti-AI, nothing in this brief is AI-generated. Every sentence comes from thought and feeling. I believe you understand why that is important.

Introduction: Organs of a Healthy Civilization

The purpose of the Tara Project is to contribute in a unique, powerful, necessary, and beautiful way to the formation of a healthy civilization.

The elements of a healthy civilization already exist, some embedded within our own; others on its fringes. They comprise most of what we call "alternative," "holistic," "conscious," and "sacred." They include new-paradigm sciences and technologies, ways of growing food and tending the earth, ways of organizing labor and creativity, modes of developing untapped human capacities, methods of collective governance, and healing modalities for mind, body, and spirit.

They include as well new-and-ancient stories, narratives, myths, and ways of knowing. They offer a different conception of who we are and why we are here, purpose and destiny, being and relationship.

Today these elements are reaching the necessary density to crystallize into an integral whole, activating latent synergies to form an entire society parallel to the existing one—the progenitor of a civilization dedicated to life and beauty on earth. It is like a super-saturated solution that just needs a few seed crystals to drop in at the right places for the whole vial to phase-shift into a coherent organic crystal.

We aim to convert existing nodes and networks into a fully "organized" system. We understand organization in the original sense of organs: a phase transition into a level of complexity where a network becomes an organism. It is not an imposition of form.

The Tara Project identifies and empowers the self-amplifying synergies, the positive feedback loops, that generate the organs and systems of a viable, coherent parallel society. We build its narrative scaffolding; we offer behind-the-scenes leadership and direction; we direct attention, capital, and creative talent towards its key nodes.

That is how we will catalyze, accelerate, and organ-ize the emerging networks of new-paradigm sciences, technologies, narratives, and social forms.

The Tara Project serves a transition in civilization's defining mythology and mode of consciousness, along with all the systems built on it. A new consciousness, a new story, a new civilization is emerging. That is what we serve. That is what we source from. That is what we aim to bring into social and material reality.

What is a Parallel Society?

The Parallel Society is a progenitor of a healthy civilization. It networks into a coherent whole the various elements of a more beautiful world, comprising much of what we have called "alternative." It binds together new-paradigm science, technology, medicine, education, agriculture, economy, and governance.

The Parallel Society is a "third attractor," an alternative to the grim choice between runaway catastrophe (exponential tech, bioweaponry, ecological collapse) and AI-powered technological dystopia (the surveillance state, IoT, CBDCs, the control grid). Those fighting to alter these timelines need a "Yes" to complement their "No." Humanity cannot only choose away from something; it needs something to choose toward.

The Parallel Society grows alongside mainstream society rather than waiting for it to collapse. It is neither rival nor challenger. A direct challenge attracts opposition. The parallel society quietly builds the systems, the knowledge, the culture, and the narratives to run a healthy civilization.

The Parallel Society is symbiotic with the default society. People, materials, money, ideas, energy, and information flow between them. Many of its members occupy prominent roles in the mainstream. It feeds the default society with "mainstream-adjacent" alternatives to its most toxic practices, generating goodwill and financial capital that then spreads through the parallel society to fund its more ambitious projects.

The Parallel Society outperforms the default society due to its self-amplifying synergies. As its organs take form, it provides an environment where new cells can grow. As they grow, they further energize the whole in a positive feedback loop.

The Parallel Society co-resonates with ascending values and consciousness. It embodies the understanding that humans are interdependent—in fact inter-existent—with nature and each other. It is a transitional stepping-stone away from an age of separation, scarcity, and control.

The Parallel Society reclaims the sacredness that modern thinking has exiled to a non-material "spiritual" realm, or denied altogether. It incorporates much that has been exiled from official reality, such as ET communication, mediumship, divination, shamanic technologies, indigenous cultural knowledge, psychedelics, psi phenomena, sacred sites, and relations with the more-than-human world.

The Parallel Society comprises new forms of social organization. It does not mirror the structures of the default society – the same kinds of organizations with better people running them. Structures are not value-neutral, but condition the behavior of those within them. We need new structures aligned with the values of a healthy civilization.

Why Now? The Phase Transition

The parallel society comprises sciences, technologies, economies, and cultural institutions. These have been developing for a long time in relative isolation from each other. They were islands of the future in an ocean of the past. Often they sunk beneath the waves before they fully matured—bold yet doomed experiments that nonetheless set the morphic template for the world to come.

Today these nodes have proliferated to the point that a new degree of connectivity is possible, a new level of density and scale that can support second- and third-order structures, in which islands of coherence become attractors.

• Whereas once we had a loose network of isolated scientific mavericks, inventors, and heretical lineages, now we can create entire new-paradigm research institutes and universities that serve as hubs for an alternative scientific community.
• Whereas tens of thousands of organic and regenerative farms operate in the United States—dependent on USDA certification, corporate grain mills, oil presses, slaughterhouses, and infrastructure—now we can build an alternative system of production, processing, certification, distribution, and agronomy research.
• Whereas once we had small wellness centers, now we can create alternative hospitals that bring together multiple healing modalities, linked together into a global network, drawing on organized research, supported by alternative insurance companies and technology incubators (and fed by a parallel food system).
• Whereas once we had promising sustainable technologies, now we can join them into vertically- and horizontally-integrated industrial ecologies, economies, and cultures. Regenerative closed-loop industrial parks can exploit synergies that allow them to outcompete legacy industries.
• Whereas once we had a many philanthropic foundations funding separate projects, now we can bring them together to fund institutions and systems, aligned according to shared narratives and theories of change.
• Whereas once we had a loose network of alternative educational institutions, now we can integrate them together into an alternative system of primary, secondary, and higher education that prepares young people for a future that just isn't on the curriculum or the pedagogy of the mainstream system.

Tara Project Phase One (9-12 months)

Output: The Tara Survey

We will deliver a first-of-its-kind report to funders and allies that brings together the following:

1. Taxonomy of the space. What are the elements of a next civilization that we should assess, without prior judgment about their legitimacy. What might a parallel society comprise?
2. A survey of funding organizations that have done meaningful work on the topics identified in the taxonomy. What have they found? What is the output of their years of experience? What produced results? What has been neglected? Who are the aligned funding partners for Phase Two of the project? Where is there duplication of effort, and where are there unrealized synergies?
3. A survey of the research landscape. We look at research groups, both well-known and off-the-radar. Which groups have produced meaningful results – and which have not? What results are important but not publicly known? Which have used funding responsibly and which have not? Gap analysis: Which areas of research are thriving, and which are under-resourced? This is a comprehensive lay of the land that identifies and locates best and worst practices: fraud, epistemic errors, operational dysfunction, ego problems, technical incompetence on the one hand; on the other hand, productivity, methodological soundness, operational efficiency, collaborative ethics, etc.
4. An implementation survey. Some elements of a parallel society are already operational. What are they? In what areas are there proven methods that have not been implemented? What are the economic, social, cultural, or political obstacles to implementation? What unrealized areas are ready for prototyping? What nascent prototypes are ready for scaling?
5. Compass & roadmap. We identify short-, mid-, and long-term priorities for funding and research. What are the catalytic nodes for targeted investment of money, energy, and attention that can coalesce the network of networks into organs and systems? Where is its connective tissue already emerging? What are the most viable and necessary technologies, the highest-priority research, the critical areas for business development? What organizations have reliably produced meaningful results, and are ready to implement new, high-impact projects?

Methodology

We won't be doing bench science or testing in Phase One. We will apply methods similar to investigative journalism: (1) reviewing published materials with the help of experts and area-specialists, and (2) interviewing leading people in each field: scientists, researchers, practitioners, journalists, and funders. We will get their sense of the field as a whole, its most promising areas, most exciting advances, cul-de-sacs and gaps, relationships among key players.

Through these meetings, we will also develop the alliances and expert relationships that will be essential for Phase Two of the project.

Proposal for Phase Two. Separate from the survey report, Phase One will also produce a proposal for the next stage, including collaborators, time, budget, process, and priorities. This will draw from the report and from the knowledge and relationships we have developed in producing it.

Drawing on the interviews and lay-of-the-land surveys of Phase One, we will begin to develop the narrative scaffolding (myth, sense, meaning) of the parallel society and a healthy civilization. Its elements are already familiar. Some are about a return to nature, healing and regenerating the earth. Others express notions of spiritual progress unfettered by physical limitations. Still others focus on social harmony and relational healing. How do these fit together? What is the unifying, civilization- guiding mythos that might emerge from them? We will develop and refine this narrative scaffolding in conversation with influential figures in each relevant field, and begin to develop communication tools and media assets to establish it.

Runway funding: $900K to fund team lead Charles Eisenstein, 3 researchers, EA, travel expenses, media asset development, other expenses.

Tara Project Phase Two

1. The Tara Project is an organ of discernment for those who direct capital and creativity into new-paradigm projects. These realms are vulnerable to grift and delusion due to an absence of well-developed systems to rigorously test and authenticate new inventions, methods, and theories. We will develop a team with the necessary due-diligence capabilities, so that we can perform financial, technical, and ethical assessments to distinguish the fraudulent from the speculative, the speculative from the promising, the promising from the proven, and the proven from the urgently necessary.

2. As we identify key catalytic nodes within the emerging matrix of new-paradigm and regenerative technologies, sciences, practices, and communities, the Tara Project infuses them with resources of attention, capital, and creativity.

Beyond directly funding small catalytic projects, the Tara Project nucleates the consortia of funders and talent pools required for projects with systemic impact. Just as in the legacy system, major projects usually cannot rely on a single lender or investor. Instead, a consortium coalesces around a reputable anchor that signals to funders, scientists, and leaders where to put their energy. The Tara Project will develop the necessary cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary knoweldge to perform this function.

We choose projects both on intrinsic merit and their catalytic capacity to generate interlinkage and organ-ization. We prioritize mutually supporting projects across multiple domains: science, technology, medicine/healing, agriculture & food, education, social systems.

3. The Tara Project builds an agreement field for a new kind of society. The agreement coalesces around touchstone narratives that unify diverse initiatives through a common sense of purpose. Much of what needs to be done to build a Third Attractor, a parallel society, only makes sense if others are playing complementary roles. An excavator won't dig a foundation if he doesn't believe that a carpenter will build a house. We invoke the narratives, myths, and agreements that in turn show up as massive multi-party deployments of capital, energy, labor, and creativity. We survey the field and direct it toward "what's next."

The Tara Project creates this agreement field through

• Media (public and not-so-public)
• Convening conferences and other gatherings
• Behind-the-scenes support for conferences to infuse them with parallel society DNA.
• Conversations and symposia with the key node leaders we have brought together.
• Directing attention toward promising projects and technologies.
• Conferring legitimacy upon those we have carefully vetted for effectiveness, relevance, and integrity.

The Tara Project operates behind the scenes. It does not strive for public name recognition. It does not vie with existing organizations and alliances, conscious leadership groups, foundations, conscious investing groups, or conscious philanthropy groups. Instead, it energizes and guides that entire ecosystem. The Tara Project is a nexus for collective sense-making. It is a compass for leaders, funders, and practitioners who build and interlink the elements of a parallel society.

Example: Agriculture

Agriculture offers a clear example of the current situation and newly emergent possibilities. Currently, innovative regenerative farmers must usually:

• Obtain certification from the USDA
• Sell on the organic commodities market, large supermarket chains and wholesalers, or rely on direct-to-consumer sales channels.
• Send their livestock to far-away USDA-approved slaughterhouses
• Send their grain to distant grain mills far outside their bioregion
• Conform to burdensome regulations designed for (and often by) industrial farms.
• Abide by perverse GAPs that stymie innovation
• Conform to the requirements of regulators and markets that are inimical to the best and most innovative practices.

There are now enough small, organic, regenerative (and beyond) farmers to support an entire infrastructure—and as that infrastructure develops, such farms will become more viable. We aim to connect the two ends of this positive feedback loop.

Infrastructure includes sales & distribution infrastructure, processing infrastructure, social infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and all aspects of the supply chain. Farmers' markets and CSAs are fine for vegetables and meat, but not for grains, legumes, oil crops, and other staples. Nor can they supply institutional buyers. A parallel infrastructure would include:

• Grain mills
• Oil presses
• Hullers
• Slaughterhouses
• Certifications
• Commodity exchanges
• Institutional buyers like schools and hospitals
• Financing
• Manufacturing of new-paradigm inputs
• Equipment sharing structures
• Land repair specialists
• Technical experts (in new-paradigm practices and equipment)
• Legal experts

Many of these elements are already emerging; others are yet to be born. We will identify key nodes for investment (business and philanthropic) to accelerate the emergence of a parallel agricultural infrastructure.

Example: Science

Diverse new theories in physics and biology are rising to challenge established paradigms, and legions of researchers, engineers, and inventors are applying them to various fields: energy, medicine, materials, agriculture, communication, computation, and transportation. But it is hard to discern which of these have substance and potential, and which are delusional or fraudulent. Developers deploy scientific-sounding terminology: their inventions work with "toroidal fields," "scalar waves," or "mitochondrial activation." And maybe they do! But how can we know that?

Thousands of mavericks each pursue separate theories; thousands of inventors offer black-box devices using "proprietary technology," but what is lacking is an alternative scientific culture where researchers replicate each other's experiments, test each other's hypotheses, refine each other's theories, share results on commonly recognized platforms, and build on each other's technical innovations. Yes, there are informal networks, there are organizations like IONS and the Society for Scientific Exploration, and there are conferences on UAPs, biodynamics, free energy, psi, and other topics, but these have not yet congealed into a fully integrated new scientific establishment. New-paradigm research is still highly compartmentalized, stifling the free exchange of ideas necessary for it to progress.

The time is ripe for such an establishment to emerge. It would link together:

• Labs and research institutes dedicated to edge or beyond-edge scientific exploration, with dedicated staff, advanced equipment, and adequate funding
• Cross-disciplinary grant-making organizations dedicated to new paradigm research
• Technology incubators
• New models of peer review and authentication of results.
• Conferences
• Awards
• Publications
• Teaching institutions

The Tara Project will weave a common vision with leaders in new-paradigm sciences of a parallel scientific establishment, and it will propel this vision forward with strategic funding.

Example: Medicine

The last several decades have seen an explosion of alternative, holistic, natural, and Eastern medical modalities as the limitations of the conventional allopathic system become more and more obvious. The substrate of a parallel system of medicine is well established, comprising hundreds of thousands of practitioners and researchers.

There is already a certain degree of infrastructure that serves them: testing laboratories, research laboratories, conferences, and in certain well-established fields like TCM, certification and licensing bodies. For the most part though, this infrastructure is still rudimentary.

The state is set for a full-on parallel medical system. Its anchoring nodes would include hospitals that incorporate clinical, teaching, and research functions across multiple synergistic fields. Imagine a hospital where every aspect of its design embodies an enlightened understanding of light, electromagnetic grounding, structured water, sound, and other elements. Imagine a network of such hospitals, each with a different focus, sharing research and resources.

The Courtship of Tara

The World-man is the collective being of all humanity in its masculine aspect, the oversoul of mankind. He is a vast and magnificent being; every man who ever lived is one of his cells.

Once not too long ago he was full of vigor and zest, eager to create, eager to build bigger and higher, better and more, oblivious to the consequences. But recently he has looked upon the body of the earth his mother, Mother Gaia, and his stirrings of unease have turned to grief and alarm. Because, it is apparent that Mother Gaia is very ill.

One day the World-man goes to Mother Gaia and says, "Mother, you are not well. I am afraid for you. I believe I have taken too much and too recklessly. Tell me what I can do."

She repies, "I am not just sick, I am dying. And when I die, when my animating spirit has departed the world, life systems on earth will collapse. The whales will die. The fish will die. The oceans will die. The forests, the frogs, the insects, all will perish. All but you, humanity. You will not die, but you will be alone, my son, alone in your climate-controlled cities, eating lab-grown food, with only digital simulations of the life you have destroyed."

"That's terrible! Oh mother, is there no hope? I will try to do better. I will do less harm. I will leave a lighter footprint. I will implement sustainable growth, how about that?"

"It is too late for that, far too late," says Mother Gaia. "I am dying."

"No! Let me die instead. Earth will be better off without me. I'll erase civilization. I'll go back to being hunter-gatherers. I'll go extinct so life can thrive."

Anger flashes in Mother Gaia's eyes. "Do you think I birthed you for no reason? Do you think you were my big mistake? Do you think I want you to remain a child, or even to die? No. Every gift I have given you, your abilities of hand and mind, and all the materials for civilization, all has a purpose. You will know what that is when you come of age and marry."

"You see, another feminine spirit desires to animate earth. Her name is Tara. If she comes, earth will blossom in a profusion of life and beauty greater than you have ever known, even in your childhood. And the good news is: Tara is already in love with you. For she will not be your mother as I am, but your lover, your partner. Together you will create much beauty and spread it through the cosmos."

"Wonderful!" exclaims the World-man. "When is the wedding?"

"Not so fast," says Gaia. "She is in love with you, but she is not convinced that you are ready or qualified to be her consort. You are going to have to woo her to win her consent. You must show her that you love her, too."

"How do I do that?"

"With gifts. You must bring her gifts of courtship. You must bring her gifts that demonstrate you love life (for she is the spirit of life) and that you are sincere in your desire to serve life. Only then will she consent to give you her hand."

Gaia explains, "Every act that any human being does in service to life and beauty lands as a gift into Tara's lap. Even if no other human admires or acknowledges those acts, Tara does. She sees them and receives them. Any gift to life—human or otherwise–is a gift to Tara, and the more brave and beautiful the gift, the more it will move her. She will approach you, step by step, and as she does earth will burst into new abundance."

"Yes!" says the World-man. "How much time do I have before I start?"

"There is no more time. You have to start now. You see, my son, I am slipping soon into a coma from which I will never awaken. Already the indigenous people speak of the spirits fleeing the sacred rivers and forests. Already the dying is accelerating. My life systems will fail one by one, and if your courtship is not successful before the last one fails, then you will no longer have any life to which to give. You will have chosen another path."

"I will begin the courtship now," says the World-man.

The World-man gazes once more into the fading eyes of his mother. He kisses her hand and whispers goodbye.

Leaving her side, he visits every person on earth. Can you feel him now, urging you to make courtship gifts for Tara? Can you feel his ardor?

Tara is present too. Can you feel her hopeful gaze?