Why Community?
Introduction
The purpose of this article is to describe intentional communities of different kinds, and why people form them. It is not an exhaustive list by any means, but is meant as a starting point for group discussions. In order to be a bit directed, though, three points are made. First, communities are local; they are not chat groups on the Internet. Second, communities are intentional; therefore, a certain commitment among its members is required, otherwise it will fail. Third, the members of successful communities have one or more aims in common; this implies that each community is exclusive to those who share these aims and who are committed to fulfilling them to the extent required. Communities are not open to everyone; on the other hand, they are open to anyone who meets the criteria.
The external form of a community can manifest only after its aims are formulated. A wide variety of forms have been tried in the past; some of these are discussed below. In addition, communities are not necessarily permanent. This depends entirely on its aims. Some are meant to last indefinitely or as long as possible; others exist for a time and are then intentionally disbanded.
Finally, the scope of the commitment must be fully understood during the early planning stages. Modern communities almost always have a financial requirement either for their operation or membership. This may be minimal or substantial; it may be buying some lumber or food occasionally or may include purchasing land and building residences. Everyone concerned should understand all the ramifications of the necessary commitments up front, financial and otherwise. Fortunately, it is possible to be endlessly creative with these things both internally and in the ways the community interacts with the outer world.
Aims and Forms
There are many reasons to live in a local community, however that term is defined. Mankind has always lived in communities of one kind or another. We lived in mostly rural communities in this country until about seventy years ago when the population started to move to the cities; new, urban communities were formed in their stead. Only since the 1950s have communities disintegrated, when corporations grew larger and pulled millions of workers to new locations where jobs were being created. Multigenerational families living together are now a rarity. Stress and related causes have pulled half of all marriages apart, all too often leaving single parents with no close family or support community.
When the idea of forming an intentional community is discussed, however loosely- or tightly-knit it is envisioned, The whole range of purposes communities served in the past should be remembered, either from the recent or ancient past. To consider only one reason or the wrong reasons for forming a community dooms the venture from the start. Any kind of relocating or repurposing of lives must have the support of everyone involved; the motivation to do so must be clear and compelling.
This article looks at a few reasons communities have existed in the past, and might again serve important purposes again today. It makes no assumptions about what form such communities might take. A loose-knit group might merely agree to assist one another at certain times, socially, economically, or in a variety of practical ways. More physically-manifest communities might seek land to build on; they might have a community garden, community businesses or meeting places. All this depends on the intent of the creators. Having a sense, though, of what kinds of communities we have created in the past will assist us in forming new ones. The intent of each community comes first; the form it then takes comes second.
Virtual Communities
These are part-time, informal communities that range from day care to food-buying coops to small-lot gardens. But whether home repair assistance, barter groups or weekly church-related meetings, people do not relocate to join such a community, nor do they make economic or societal commitments to each other. These groups are often ad hoc and do not require more than minimal commitments from their members.
These types of groups are mostly peer-to-peer, in that rank and hierarchy are absent, other than those who volunteer or are elected to perform certain duties in the short term; these responsibilities often rotate on a regular basis. Contrast this with nearly all business and government jobs where hierarchy and rank are foremost. There, volunteerism is rarely part of the deal because money is at stake, sometimes big money, so somebody has to make sure the others do their jobs.
Motivation is often low, since job performance consequences aren’t personal (unless they’re egregious). People keep these jobs, though, for the same reason their parents and grandparents sought them in the first place: opportunities in their local communities weren’t economically attractive enough to remain in them. There certainly is something about the lure of bright city lights, the big corporate job and the big bucks that hook many people, at least for a time. Once this wears thin, people leave their jobs, but there is no longer a community to reabsorb them. Hence the need we feel to create new ones.
The "Disaster" Syndrome Community
A more extreme type of virtual community is widespread, often in rural locations. It’s a sort of “we’re all in this together,” us against them or it grouping, which can range anywhere from an Amish community seeking to protect their way of life, to a local, private militia, armed and “prepared,” ready to protect their way of life. People who see the world falling apart around them—in their views at least—seek to protect themselves from the forces abroad in the world.
These types of communities always have a guiding principle that is stronger and more compelling than the more informal, virtual communities. They are willing to relocate to be near others of like minds, or in the case of the Amish, they never left. They also have a religious precept or one inspired by religious sentiments. Mormons are an example, who get together to put up food for possible hard times, which also gives them the chance to express their moral sentiments among themselves.
Many, though, are not persuaded that hard times are at hand, and therefore don’t see the sense of a community created to stand against them. Some even deny that hard times are a possibility, and would certainly never commit themselves to any sort of community with this as its guiding or only principle. One can never predict hard times or good times; the default law of the universe (although not the only law) is the Law of Accident. In any event, orienting oneself towards doom and gloom is not productive in and of itself, and few are the ardent followers of such predictions.
Intentional Communities
Perhaps, though, there are other, more positive ideals that would make communities more attractive. The State (local, state and federal governments) now takes care—using that word advisedly—of many needs communities used to handle themselves, by their very structure and locality, along with a sense of obligation that is severely weakened in these modern times. Two examples will suffice.
Ageing Care
Many of us are at the age where our parents may be unable to care for themselves as they once did. Many of us may be nearing that age ourselves. We have largely relegated and delegated the responsibility for elder care to the State or to private, for-pay companies. The term retirement community evokes a picture of somewhere in Arizona or Florida, say, with warm weather and golf courses, shorts and straw hats. Such places are expensive, and most people have to sell their homes and move south to enjoy them. This means, of course, leaving whatever community they lived in with their families to a new community, although this is a different sort of community. Whereas before, the community (okay, usually it was only a neighborhood) was multi-generational, mom and dad, the kids and maybe grand kids, after relocating it is only the grandparents and a bunch of employees. Plus a lot of other grandparents.
The next step is a retirement “home,” where there are fewer grandparents and more employees, many of whom are doctors and nurses. The final step is hospice or a hospital, where nearly everybody is a medical professional. An employee.
A century ago nearly everyone lived and died in the community they were born in. People knew how to provide for each other and care for each other, young and old alike. These are skills we now pay strangers to handle.
Care for Children
When parents separate or die, their children bear the burden of the consequences. These are mainly emotional and economic. Children sometimes feel the divorce was their fault, which of course it wasn’t. It’s the fault of the system their parents and all the rest of us buy into. The result is a single parent or possibly the State as the parent if both former parents either die or are considered unfit. The typical case leaves one parent at home to raise the children. There may be more than one home now, and more than one family the children now belong to, which is a good thing. But most of the hours of the week are spent with one parent, who all too often reaches the end of her or his rope and takes it out on the kids. We’ve all seen variations of this story.
Again, lacking a community, we hire the solution. Daycare and schools can handle the kids on weekdays. The fortunate few can hire a live-in nanny, since grandma and grandpa don’t live-in anymore. Such steps are necessary, given the economic circumstances most of us live in. The single parent (or both parents these days, if that’s the case) have to work. Fifty years ago mom stayed home and dad went to work, but no more. A single parent, especially, must nearly always work to make ends meet.
Contrast this with our ancestors, who raised their children communally; there were always plenty of adults around to supervise children and give mom or dad a break. This is the corollary to the previous case: there were always plenty of younger adults and older children to look after their elders. Today we think, “Well, but times are different now; things are more complex.” Things are more complex, but the times are different only because we have let them become different. Economic forces are the enemy of community. The lure of riches and opulence, of the latest must-have toys—nearly all of which are unnecessary—help assuage our sense of aloneness and feeling that the world is a place of no meaning, at least as it’s advertised. And who does all the advertising? Those same economic concerns that benefit from our consumption. Many of us work for the large corporations, but few of us reap the benefits those at the top of such hierarchies always have. We think that someday we might be among them, which keeps us chasing each other up the economic ladder. In the long run, this is at our own expense and the expense of our families. Were it not for the desperate lack of meaning we find in today’s world, many fewer of us would be willing to stay in that race.
Cohousing
Mention should be made of a modern trend that began in the Scandinavian countries. Co-housing is a term for a planned community of private residences and common areas, purpose-built for each group with an aim to do this. There are many cost advantages of scale and on-going economy in these communities. Arrangements vary, but such items as major appliances, tools, even vehicles, may be bought in quantity. Fewer such items are required than in individual households, since they are shared among the community members. Food may be bought in bulk and either distributed to the members or prepared for communal meals. Produce gardens and orchards are often features of these communities.
Two major drawbacks to the idea of co-housing are these. First, it is a different lifestyle than most people have experienced, and takes some getting used to. There are unique obligations to the group as a whole in co-housing living, that do not exist elsewhere. Not everyone can or cares to adjust. Second, significant financial issues must be addressed. Who owns the land, the residences and the common areas? Can anyone sell their share to anyone else? These issues have been successfully addressed; their solutions depend on the aims of the community, which can be anything from cheaper, pleasant living in a semi-rural setting (for example), to spiritually-oriented groups that run schools and businesses together which support the community and its members.
The possibilities for different forms of co-housing have barely been tapped in the United States. At a minimum, they offer solutions to caring for children and the aging discussed above. They can offer their members (and the surrounding region) much more. Some of this is discussed in the following sections.
The Search for Lost Meaning
An interesting exercise is to think of the different categories of places there are. There are different buildings where commercial business takes place. Office buildings, factories, retail shops, mega-shopping malls and sports complexes. Governments own buildings used for administration, and own land for the use of the people. There are military places, both buildings and open land. Other open land is government-owned, commercially-owned or privately held. No more open land is un-owned. Some governments even claim to own Antarctica and the Moon. There are other buildings where we keep the undesirables among us. There are buildings for religious uses of various descriptions. There are buildings and land for educational uses.
Finally, there are places where we live, which are nearly always buildings of one sort of another. There are huge single-family dwellings on one end of the scale and huge apartment complexes on the other end. Most houses and building units have one design criteria: provide as much space as can be afforded for as few people as possible. Long gone are the family homestead and family farm. Houses are now designed for the “nuclear family,” which used to be mom, pop and 2.3 kids, but which are now increasingly occupied by a single parent family or even a single person.
Don’t we like one another? Is it that we don’t like members of our own family? This is true in the cases of divorces, but we must press for more basic reasons. What factors caused the divorce? Economic stress is often the real cause. Doing a meaningless job for low pay is another. Societal limitations on the expression of love or the enjoyment of sex split up many marriages in a species that is not entirely monogamous. How many marry for economic reasons and later find these are not reasons enough?
Dislikes, distractions and stress are certainly not the only reasons we increasingly prefer to live alone. We are constantly encouraged to live in the smallest of groups. It is better “economically” if our households contain as few people as possible, for then corporations can sell more lawn mowers, more washing machines, more tools, more kitchen appliances—all of which sit idle most of the time. Could it be that the very act of forcing people to be alone with each other in their split-levels is the very thing that forces them apart a few years later? One or two people have to pay for the house, either rent or mortgage. Maintain the house. Raise the kids. Do all the chores. Have all the fights when they get tired of each other’s faces. More adults around would spread the load, increase the income and ease the tension. But then, more adults don’t fit the nuclear family economic model. Can’t sell as many toasters.
Is that beautiful Amish barn-raising scene in the film The Witness starring Harrison Ford forever a thing of the past? Each guy now drives his pick-up to Home Depot, hauls the stuff home, builds whatever, which is then enjoyed by, and is for the benefit of, the minimum possible number of people: the immediate family and occasional guests. He does this for free; he even buys the materials with his own money. The Amish do it for each other for free because this is an obligation of living in their community.
The point is not to crusade for the Amish or any other kind of lifestyle, but to look at the cost of our values and assumptions. We burn through our lives so quickly. Only late in the game do we realize the costs of our chosen paths. Lack of meaning in our lives is a lack of transcendent, enduring values. Our lack of sacred or spiritual values is reflected in the lack of sacred, spiritual places in the world. Our world is a commercial world, filled with commercial places that create and sell to be consumed by us over and over. It is just this commercial consumerism that drives out higher meanings in our lives.
When (and if) we discover this we begin to seek for this lost meaning. This is, however, extraordinarily hard to do alone, as all genuine spiritual traditions have taught. Yet it is from our societal aloneness where we start; finding others to share a path of spiritual development is a prerequisite for continued progress along that path. This is perhaps the most important reason we have formed communities in the past. Whether monastery, ashram or long house, people with similar spiritual goals have come together to pursue spiritual paths. The need is no different today, yet the places to pursue such goals are few. Imagine if there were as many places for spiritual contemplation as there are fast food outlets!
Its worth looking at how such places might fit into the modern world, and how they might facilitate inner, spiritual development.Spiritual Retreats
If the world is too much with us, then places must be sought or built that keep the world at bay, that provide the necessary isolation from the things of man. This is the function of the spiritual retreat. One model is the ashram in India and elsewhere, where a teacher secludes a group of students who wish to follow his path. In this setting he can more easily control influences and distractions, and can provide a locale for the necessary inner work. Lesser known, perhaps, is the advantage that certain facilitating energies are evoked in such sacred places that are suppressed or wholly unable to manifest in the outer world. This is the meaning of the term sacred space.
Another example were the monasteries of Medieval Europe. For centuries they were independent from and superior to the ecclesiastical churches. The abbot or (surprisingly often) the abbess ranked higher than the bishop. More importantly, monasteries were the sole repository of learning during the Dark Ages, especially in Ireland. Monasteries were the cultural centers of the region; they housed schools and engaged in commerce. The style and content of their teachings is not what’s important to note, only that the monastery was a refuge from the secular world where spiritual progress could be made that was impossible elsewhere. We do not know how many other such places outside the Church existed during those times, as they would have been certain to remain secret. We don’t even know what was taught in many of the monasteries. Officially, it was the Catholic party line, but evidence exists that the more effective, and much older, pagan and Gnostic spiritual knowledge was practiced inside their walls.
Places of spiritual retreat are bridges between the secular world and spiritual worlds. They are the necessary buffer that allows sacred space to be created and maintained without and within. Only by de-manifesting the mundane may the sacred be evoked and itself made manifest. This task is much easier in a group, hence the need for a private locale where such energies may manifest. And what is the nature of these energies? One example comes from Hugh Mynne in The Faerie Way. He says, “Whenever any one of us seeks to approach the Earth of Light [or the Earth of True Reality], one of its natives immediately hurries toward us—‘an ally of immeasurable benevolence.’” Different modalities of manifestation exist, of course, but most of us have no exposure to the possibilities of sacred space.
Monasteries and ashrams are part of past ages or Eastern orientations that cannot succeed in the modern West without substantial modifications. New models for spiritual retreats must be created, but the possible variations are great indeed. Two examples will suffice to indicate some of what is possible.
Gardens of Life
This is a simple idea of a private space in a rural or semi-rural area, away from other human activities. It is mostly open space, possibly walled or fenced for privacy and protection, but also to keep the space pure from accidental, outside influences. It is a sacred space, in other words, and is actively kept that way. Buildings may be erected as needed for meetings, retreats or maintenance of the grounds, but is not a residential community (although it might become so at a later stage). Paths through wooded areas might be constructed, with benches, tables or simple structures to get in our of the rain. Flowers and vegetable gardens might be grown.
The idea is to create a peaceful, isolated space which facilitates inner spiritual contacts. The distractions and “noise” of modern life prevent us from being aware of the constant impress of the spiritual realms. We are generally unaware that they literally clamor for our attention. A Garden of Life would allow a space, unaffected by other activities that occur in the outer world, with only one purpose: to assist spiritual development and communion with our teachers and allies.
Such places do not exist today, at least without the baggage of a formal religious institution, which is not what many people want. But they would be relatively easy to create and maintain, given a small group of people who wish to do so.
Autonomous Spiritual Colleges
This is a more ambitious type of project, where the members first teach and learn from each other (assisted by suitable master teachers—which do not have to be currently-incarnated themselves), then undertake to teach others, and to train other teachers. Housing and suitable grounds are now issues, but teaching various skills and modes of being and consciousness become economic solutions. There are many other possibilities. All depends on the aims and commitment of the group; little depends on its current capabilities. It’s not possible to be more specific about this, as each group embarking on a project like this will receive its own guidance and make its own decisions.
Reciprocal Maintenance
Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist, used to tell his graduate students they would wind up doing great things. There would thereupon be much doubt and denial, to which he would reply, “If not you, then who?” If there is very little seen to be done regarding assisting each other with mutual spiritual growth, then nothing will get done. We may figure we are almost “there” already, and besides, there is still plenty of time. But if there is a huge amount that is seen to be done, then accomplishing a small piece of it may seem doable. “After all, it’s just a tiny piece. Maybe I could do something.”
A new idea popped up in the first part of the last century that has been attributed to Gurdjieff. J. G. Bennett calls it Gurdjieff’s greatest discovery, although it remains relatively unknown amid the greater body of his work, partly because Gurdjieff himself was so cryptic about it.
Gurdjieff began by asking, “What is the sense and significance of life on the earth in general and of human life in particular?” The central part of the answer involves what he called the doctrine of reciprocal maintenance. He wrote in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, “in all probability there exists in the world some law of the reciprocal maintenance of all that exists.” To explain this concept, albeit obliquely, he divided all modes of existence into essence classes. Each essence class is characterized by a pattern of possible experience; each class occupies a specific place in the cosmic order. Each class transforms energy from a lower class into energy for a higher class. The higher classes eventually feed energy back to the lower classes; these energy cycles define the working of the universe at all the interrelated levels of manifestation.
To simplify all the gory details, we can take man as an example, for he is one of the essence classes. Each class’ nature exists as a spectrum from the class below it to the class above it. Man’s nature is a conscious being, but this consciousness ranges from near-animal level—the essence class below man—to near the Demiurge/Creator/Angelic level—the essence class above man. This means that man has the potential to attain the next level above, but is also liable to slip to the level below—that of animals who live only by their passions and senses. We can live a passive, quasi-animal life, or we can work to gain the creative ability to transform the world. Only in this latter state can we come into harmony with nature and fulfill our obligations to the other essence classes.
The point of reciprocal maintenance is that each essence class is responsible for transforming certain types of energy. It is only through universal giving and receiving of energies that cosmic harmony is maintained. More than this, it is the only way cosmic harmony may be restored. For man, Gurdjieff repeatedly stated, as J. G. Bennett relates in Gurdjieff: Making a New World,
… the same service and sacrifice by which we play our part in reciprocal maintenance transforms our nature from thinking animal to free individual and creates on earth a society that is in harmony with nature. Man’s nature is dynamic: in order to be, he must become. In order to become, he must pay the price of his existence. When he has done so, unlimited vistas of cosmic realization open to him. He can become the trusted ally of the Supreme Power by which the world is governed.
Think of the ramifications of this idea: Humankind has an obligation—not to rape, pollute and despoil the planet (and ourselves)—but to play a key role in the maintenance, harmony and evolution of the entire universe. What a concept! And what a responsibility.
Here’s the punch line of all this: In order to fulfill our cosmic obligation we must perfect ourselves; the former depends on the latter. Perfecting oneself consists of many things, but chief among them are service and sacrifice. These topics are too large for an article such as this, but we can stop here and draw two conclusions.
First, spiritual transformation is easier if done in a group, as discussed above. Second and more importantly, the doctrine of reciprocal maintenance provides as strong a motivation as possible for attempting it, and for forming groups and retreats to facilitate it.
Maslow was right: “If not us, then who?”
Go on to Part 2, Further Thoughts on Community?