The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.  @science & metaphysics

 When I talk of community it is more than a group pf people living and working together, it is, as I have said before, meant to be an organic process.   Organic power is trusting that what needs to happen will happen naturally, as opposed to political power where some people need to push laws and regulations to make things fit what they perceive it ought to be.  The organic process is not anarchy, but simply letting things happen as they will – a kind of self-assembling system if you like.  There will be goals and objectives as they are needed but having a bulleted list is not necessarily the process that must be taken.  I have said that there are principles of sustainable living that can guide us.  The definition of principles: dictionary, “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.”   For those who have read much of what I have said, this will not be a mystery.  The decisions to be made will rely on what we think are the cornerstones of a fair, just and harmonized way of life.

Just to recap, what we have today is a centralized power structure that requires us to conform to set economic values that do not serve our needs or really benefit the majority of us.  We all spend inordinate amounts of time living to work, rather than living fruitful lives doing our own thing.  Don’t get me wrong, we do need to put food on the table and do chores that must be done, but the long work hours and weeks of slaving away just to make ends meet, or to keep paying the bills to support a stressful lifestyle are not of our choosing.  That has been imposed upon us by a system developed by a hierarchy to support that hierarchy.  We have been doing it for so long we think it is the norm and not the aberration that it is.  Study after study shows that people support what I am calling sustainable living.  It comes in many guises.  One such term that is used a lot is ‘Intentional Community.’

The Intentional Community (IC) website is a good resource (www.IC.org).  The simple explanation from this site for IC is:

“Cooperation is the Key to Sustainability

Humanity thrives when people work together. An “Intentional Community” shows what happens when people take this premise to the next level — by living together in a village of their own making which reflects their shared values.

Intentional Communities come in many shapes and sizes, and go by many names. This includes cohousing, ecovillages, cooperative houses, communes, and so on. We believe there is strength and beauty in this diversity, and our aim is to support it.

IC.org exists to serve this community movement. We offer tools, resources, and information to find, start, or join an intentional community, and to make the most out of your community project.”.

I will say straight away that many of these ICs that exist around the world will seem ‘new age-like’ but when you get past biases based on current consumer lifestyles you will find that they encompass the principles of sustainable living that I have often talked about.   From my SL text about community Resilience – a goal of IC’s:

Resilience is about being flexible and adaptable to conditions as they change around you.  Species that are resilient are able to weather environmental changes and bounce back.  Those that aren’t go extinct.  Communities are the same way.  Those that show reliance go through trials and tribulations and the stresses of change but emerge as stronger communities.  Those that don’t, go in to a spiral of decay and finally chaos and dissolution.  Resilience is about a community’s ability to absorb perturbations and still retain similar functions of everyday transactions.  It is also about their ability to of self-organize themselves and create the capacity to learn, change and adapt.  Communities that have resilient exhibit high levels of social capital, high levels of interactive and collective action, and specifically a community full of people that look out for each other with a focus on the common good.  It is where a vision of solidarity exists that binds people together with a common bond of belonging and caring.  Communities at risk are those where groups of the community population may feel marginalized and be ‘left out in the cold.’  A resilient community usually has high levels of self-efficacy and more of a collective sense of what is needed.  This is readily translated into total well-being of the community.

SL is not a group of people trying to be saints.  People are people complete with all their baggage and preconceived notions (beliefs) of life – and that’s the way it ought to be.  What makes IC’s work and succeed is when we recognize our differences as strengths and decide to work cooperatively rather than competitively.  What makes IC’s fail is when they have competition and dogmatism about process creeps into the structure.   In other words, the belief that there is only one right way to do things.  If you start out with the golden rule and use it as a benchmark of behavior, I don’t think you can go too far wrong.

The one principle that seems steady in an IC is the willingness to cooperate and be a part of the group.  If you want to be a hermit that keeps yourself to yourself, insist on things being done your way, or if you are self-serving and want to hoard stuff, then you are probably unable to break out of the consumer mindset.  One reason for many people to begin or join an IC are to feel a sense of belonging, which is a powerful drive that most people have.   “What do we want?” is a question I have asked many times in this blog (e.g. see Vision posts).  When you have a community where people recognize that they can rely on others, it brings a sense of unity that is all but missing in most modern urban environments.  It is possibly one of the most profound drives we have and one that our ancestors would have recognized, without having to be told about it, in tribes and villages before the industrial revolution.  How profound is this need to feel a sense of connection and belonging?  Let me tell you a story of how urban life in the MDCs after the Second World War was managed by big business to develop a sense of connection that people flocked to without really thinking about it.

TBC………………….


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