The Common Ground Project · Book 1
The Ground Beneath
What 85 Traditions Independently Documented Across 50,000 Years
Eighty-five religious traditions. Ancient and living. Written and oral. From every inhabited continent. When examined without devotion or agenda — when the doctrine and ritual are set aside and only the structure underneath is studied — something unexpected appears.
They converge.
Not on theology. Not on ritual. On twenty-two specific structural principles that every civilization that lasted long enough to leave a record independently identified as foundational to human life. The Ground Beneath documents that convergence. No tradition is elevated. No tradition is dismissed. The data is presented. The reader draws conclusions.
85
Traditions examined
50,000
Years of practice
22
Shared principles
The symbol on the cover
The bronze disc at the base of the tree is the Kongo dikenga — a circle divided by a cross, with four cardinal marks and a center point. It appears in the Kongo tradition of central Africa as a map of existence: the living world above the horizon, the world of ancestors below, the four cardinal moments of a life.
The same symbol — independently — appears in the Lakota medicine wheel. In the Maya four-directional cosmogram. In the Celtic wheel cross. In the Vedic solar wheel. In the cosmologies of traditions that had no contact with each other across thousands of years and an ocean.
It was chosen for the cover because it is not claimed by any single tradition. It belongs to all of them. That is the argument of the book expressed in a single image.
The twenty-two principles
These are not religious doctrines. They are the values every civilization that lasted long enough to leave a record independently identified as foundational. Their presence correlates with endurance. Their erosion correlates with collapse.
FOUNDATION · Existence Is Relational
I · Reciprocal Ethics
II · Reciprocal Ethics
III · Continuity After Death
IV · Abundance Carries Obligation
V · Truth as Foundation
VI · The Weight of Taking Life
VII · Accurate Self-Constitution
VIII · Release of Held Grievance
IX · The Sacred Moment
X · Necessary Disorder
XI · Ceremonial World Maintenance
XII · Transformation Through Dissolution
XIII · Passage Cannot Be Self-Declared
XIV · Capacity Defines Obligation
XV · Sacred Leadership
XVI · Reciprocal Ecology
XVII · Collective Memory Obligation
XVIII · Hospitality as Sacred Duty
XIX · Prohibition on Sacred Pollution
XX · The Body Is Sacred Infrastructure
XXI · Transformation Requires Witness
Coming 2026
Available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook.