My conversation with Richard Flyer brought a particular depth and sobriety into the Third Attractor inquiry. It grounded the conversation in lived experience, spiritual lineage, and decades of community building work, while refusing both ideological shortcuts and purely conceptual solutions.
One of the most important contributions Richard made was to frame the Third Attractor not as something humanity needs to invent, but as something that already exists as an underlying sacred design. For him, the Third Attractor points to an invisible but real spiritual architecture that manifests through nature, through human beings, and through the systems we create to live together. Love, in this sense, is not a feeling or sentiment, but an organizing principle. A kind of divine architecture that can be aligned with, rather than engineered.
This emphasis shifted the Third Attractor conversation away from innovation narratives and toward rediscovery. Richard spoke repeatedly about alignment rather than creation. The work is not to design a new future from scratch, but to notice where a deeper pattern of goodness, coherence, and relationality is already present and to bring our structures into resonance with it. This reframes the Third Attractor as an act of remembrance rather than disruption.
Another central thread Richard added was the insistence that true non duality must include both transcendence and immanence. Drawing from Christian mysticism, Sri Aurobindo, and his own lived spiritual experience, he challenged a subtle form of metaphysical elitism that treats non dual awareness as the highest or final state. Instead, he pointed to a more expansive reality in which a transcendent sacred order and an immanent unfolding world are held together. Not either or, but both at once.
This perspective resonates strongly with the evolutionary non duality that has been present throughout the Third Attractor conversations. Being and becoming. The eternal and the emergent. Revelation and co creation. Richard articulated this as a lived spiritual orientation rather than an abstract philosophy, rooted in relationship, devotion, and action.
A major contribution of this conversation was also the distinction between values and virtues. Richard made a careful case that most values are relative and conditioned by ego, culture, and worldview, while virtues point to something more universal. He did not claim this as a theoretical argument, but as an experiential insight that emerged from years of community work.
What mattered most here was not the claim of universality itself, but how virtues function. Richard emphasized that virtues never operate in isolation. Integrity without love becomes dangerous. Compassion without wisdom can become destructive. Virtues work as a constellation, constantly balancing each other, and acting as an interface between the transcendent and the everyday. In this sense, virtues are not moral rules but living energies that guide action when embodied together.
This was not presented as an idealistic abstraction. Richard grounded it in concrete examples from his work in Reno, Nevada, where diverse community leaders across political, religious, and civic lines identified shared virtues through lived dialogue rather than ideological agreement. He also pointed to the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka as a long standing example of how virtues can function as operational principles for building real economies, governance structures, and social cohesion.
Perhaps one of the most important emphases Richard brought to the Third Attractor conversation was his refusal to separate inner development from collective action. He challenged the Western tendency to treat spirituality as a private pursuit and community building as a secondary application. For him, the practice happens in the action itself. Inner development is not something that precedes community. It emerges through the effort to unify, to listen, to confront one’s own blind spots, and to stay in relationship across difference.
His personal story of recognizing and transcending his own ideological conditioning while working to unify a politically divided community illustrated this powerfully. The Third Attractor, in this light, is not about transcending conflict by rising above it, but about engaging it from a deeper commitment to human dignity and shared belonging.
What Richard ultimately added to the Third Attractor inquiry is a strong ethical and spiritual spine. One that insists that any future worthy of the name must be grounded in goodness, not reaction. In virtue, not ideology. In lived relational practice, not abstract agreement. And in humility before a sacred order that we participate in, but do not control.
This conversation reminded me that the Third Attractor is not a movement to join or a system to adopt. It is a way of aligning life, culture, and community with something deeper that is already here, waiting to be recognized and lived.
