Adventures in Relationship and Community

The question “Why I live in a commune” has answers at many levels, of course.  I will pass over the [fascinating :) ] history of how I came here (to this geographical location and to this place in my life), which is told in a talk I gave a few months ago to the community (click here for audio).  Instead I will focus on the experience of living day-by-day with 10 other people, and nurturing our residential and non-residential community.

The only real requirement for membership in our community is a desire to have fun, and to relate in ways that are fun, growthful, and inspiring.

Intentional community as a 24×7 living laboratory for love-in-action

The intentional community I co-founded with my wife, and in which I live (Trellis House), is designed as a residential, 24×7, experiment in love-in-action.  We learn to relate to each other through our similarities and differences.  We give each other honest feedback about what is pleasurable, or not, in our behaviour towards each other.  Ideally (but not always) we do this with kindness and in a spirit of “finding people right”.  We give people in our extended community our love and attention (at Mark Groups for example); we run a food redistribution charity; and we teach and coach some of the philosophy and practices we have learned about having successful relationships and how to win with the opposite sex.  We support each other in emotional and spiritual growth, we try and be a force for good in each other’s lives and in the community at large, and we save a few bucks and a few hours of work a week doing so.  To me, this combination of greater quality of life and less overhead makes the whole thing a no-brainer – living here, I don’t need to cook for myself every night, hire a babysitter every time I go out, or be a soccer-dad 3 evenings a week.

Life around here is not by any means a “bowl of cherries”.  Conflicts arise, difficulties arise, and they are all treated as an “excuse for intimacy”.  The one thing that is pretty consistent around here is INTENSITY – both the highs and the lows.  I used to describe living in a Morehouse (the community we lived in before coming here) as a “karma factory” – a place where people get to experience all kinds of emotions at a heightened level in order to accelerate their own growth and transformation.  People actually do this willingly, they put themselves through these kinds of intense experiences in order to grow.  People will do anything for love, and they also do very little that is not motivated by love in some fashion, even when they are not immediately conscious of their true motivation (I am reminded of the Tracy Chapman song “For my lover”).  What we offer here are practices and attitudes that help us have more love in our lives.  There is for example a practice called Withholds – an extremely powerful practice for creating intimacy, perhaps even the foundation of our success here.

Pleasure goals versus production goals

Bottom line is that our primary goal here is to relate in loving ways to all the people in our house and in our network, and the fundamental yardstick we use in assessing how well we are doing this is, are we happy?  Are the people we are interacting with happy?  Victor Baranco, the founder of Morehouse, said that pleasure goals are higher than production (or performance) goals, because when we pursue production goals, pleasure is very uncertain; whereas when we pursue pleasure goals, we normally fulfill our production goals as well.  Vic had this insight over 40 years ago, an idea which has now been taken up by Jerry and Esther Hicks and the whole Law of Attraction / “The Secret” crowd and it has made Esther Hicks and her cronies into superstars.

Love as an intention, and the principles of loving

Learning to give and receive love is extremely difficult and very simple at the same time.  It is the fundamental problem of being human and the primary question of all religious and spiritual traditions and most philosophies.  It is, to me, the only question truly worth pursuing.  The attempt to solve this problem calls on and draws out all our intelligence, all our resourcefulness, all of our strengh and character, everything that is good and noble and admirable in human beings.  In addition, it happens to be a very fun and rewarding process to engage in.  I don’t believe, as some people do, that love is ineffable and can never be described, so why bother talking about it.  I believe that those things that we put our attention on increase, and this is the same with love.  I believe that one of the central problems of our culture is that we are afraid to truly open up to each other and talk about the things that are important.  Because, when we are honest with ourselves, most of us feel like miserable failures in this domain.  Our love-relationships are either fraught with conflict or nonexistent; our children don’t listen to us; our daily lives are generally more full of anxiety, complaints and resentments than anything resembling love – heck, most of us can’t even control our feelings when some stranger cuts us off in traffic.  And then try and get some credible, intellectually and emotionally satisfying information about how to be a better “lover”… good luck.

There is a fascinating interview of Jerry Jud, the founder of the Shalom Mountain Retreat Center, entitled Love is an intention.  The entire stated purpose of Shalom Mountain is to teach people how to be better “lovers” (ie to give and receive love).  There is a philosophy behind this (read the “Skills of loving” in Love is an Intention) and a practice ground also, which is the Shalom Retreat.  A Shalom Retreat is an incredible experience which I recommend to anybody serious about this inquiry.  It is, essentially, a weekend experimental community of love-in-action, under skillful leadership.

Living in community as a response to loneliness?

Mother Theresa once said something like, that the United States is the loneliest country in the world.  Having never lived outside North America as an adult, I can’t really judge this statement, but it does make sense to me.  We have absolutely incredible freedom and opportunity in this country, but we don’t yet have the social support structures, the knowledge or the skills to fully take advantage of this great gift of freedom that we have.  Rather than using this freedom to love each other, we use it to build walls and oppress our neighbors.  I love the United States, but I also think that we are one of the most neurotic and repressed countries in the world.

Fortunately this is changing

I believe that we are right in the middle of one of the greatest evolutionary leaps in the history of civilization, and that it is a revolution in consciousness.  Evidence of this is the tremendous interest in “Law of Attraction” / “The Secret”, interest in mind-body phenomena, Fritjof Capra and the “new Physics”, increasing acceptance of alternative lifestyles, huge popularity of self-help gurus like Anthony Robbins, James Ray, Wayne Dyer, etc.  I find this a tremendously exciting time to be alive, because the awareness is gradually emerging that 90% of our suffering is self-imposed, and that we can live lives of greater consciousness, greater pleasure, greater love, and greater contribution.  It is possible for any of us who so choose, to live rich, loving, connected lives full or meaning and purpose.  Our individual and collective happiness has become intertwined.  The critical mass of consciousness around this fact has been reached, but we are still at the beginning of it, which means that any one of us who takes a stand now for a better life for ourselves and our communities is a leader in this movement and can have a very large impact.

George Fox said “walk cheerfully over the earth, answering that of God in every one”.  I love that.  It says it all.

Author: Marc | September 6th, 2008 | Tags: communes, Evolutionary Spirituality, intentional community, jerry jud, lafayette morehouse, living in a commune, living in an intentional community, Love is an intention, philadelphia intentional community, pleasure goals vs. production goals, Shalom Mountain, victor baranco | Category: Adventures in Community | Subscribe to comments | Please leave a comment! | Trackback URL