Principles

Orientation Tools

The World Ethic Forum is engaged in finding new pathways in a territory for which we only have fragmented charts.

This requires capacities and equipment that can support us in finding our bearings, setting our direction, tracking where we are, sensing the most appropriate next moves and, most importantly, nurturing the calling that inspired us to venture beyond what we know in the first place. 

Over the first few years, two main sets of tools have helped us orient in our exploration: 

  • An original set of propositions articulated in 2021 around the concept of radically shared aliveness
  • An original set of design principles that evolved through practice since 2021 and informed the way we came together as a group.

The process we’re engaged in is highly iterative. As we progressed, we gained more clarity about ourselves and our inquiry. To reflect this, at our 2026 gathering, we were able to articulate a fresh set of principles, acknowledging the collective learning that has occurred since: five areas of attention, expressed as word-clusters, that had been shaping our work and our collective body implicitly, now made explicit.

Those are: 

(1) Courage. Bravery, daring, agency. The willingness to go where others might not, but also to step up, speak, or act, if the situation calls for it.

(2) Presence. Attention, perceptiveness, embodiment, sensibility. The capacity to be here, fully embodied, attuned to what is actually happening – with our wider ways of knowing.

(3) Hospitality. Plurality, diversity, More-than-human. A commitment to make room for other people, other worldviews, and the many beings, manifestations and energies beyond the human who share the field with us and who we acknowledge as co-creators.

(4) Commitment. Shared responsibility, showing up together. Everything is interconnected and indeed intraconnected, including our resolve. It is not about any single individual, but the collective, and the individual as part of the collective, and the collective as part of the individual, as it forms over time.

(5) The long arc. Ancestors, future generations. A way of situating ourselves in time that reaches back and forward beyond our own lives over many generations, to act as future ancestors, upholding legacy.

Those principles guide the ‘how’ of what we do. They also form part of the ‘what’ that shapes a culture of care and kinship rooted in radically shared aliveness. They show the posture we embrace, what the German language would call ‘Haltung’, how we hold ourselves together, and with what inner stance we step into and meet the world. To an extent, they sit adjacent to the capacities that are the core focus of our work.

You can read more about the origin of those principles on this blogpost, and about our original set of principles on this page.