Personal Experience with Utopian Concepts

[write4change]

These are thoughts in considering the Zeitgeist movement. I felt it was too long for a comment and would not be seen by those who were interested in just the concepts of cooperative living.

There has never been a time when I have not been fascinated by the idea of cooperative living. I began mine with reading Little Women and Little Men which portrays it as a sort of extended family experience. When I was told by a teacher that Alcott's father was a commune leader under the auspices of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started my research.

I still carry a small book of Emerson around in my purse. It fits in the palm of my hand and I have always vibrated with his vision as had my grandparents who quoted him all the time. How could someone so wise and so learned combined with other like minded people fail?

In the late 60s and early 70s in the Northern California area I joined several. Never for longer than 60 days. Mostly little ones of sharing work and expenses. Some partial with skills and food. And one big one for a final excruciating experience.

What I believe is true of all of them for failing even the old ones is the ongoing fight for leadership. There is always this drive for top down hierarchal power. My personal experience was that the women do all the work and the men do all the talking. The more educated the men the more complicated the simplest project.

I once watched 4 men and a major pick up truck with chains spend most of an entire day trying to remove a two foot in diameter tree stump. They trashed the yard, created a mud mess, repeatedly broke the chains, and practically destroyed the bumper and the pickup. This place at this time had a $35,000 Caterpillar like tractor. At the end of the day an older Hispanic woman wove the chains around the stump got on the tractor and pulled out the stump in about 5 minutes.

The men had a great time. They bond doing things side by side. (Women bond talking face to face.) Had they been successful, this would have been one of their war stories for all time. How I Beat the Tree Stump.

Emerson provided the money for the project. He did not want to live and work there. He did want it to be self sufficient. Granted work then was continuous and hard. Alcott's father if you read through the lines wanted to be the on site supervisor,do all of the talking and none of the work. The others wanted total equality and thus, everything that needed doing was an argument. Self sufficiency never occurred. Emerson got fed up and refused to supply any more money and everyone just left. This is typical of most small communes.

I lived in one in the north beach area of San Francisco where it was a bunch of young well paid entrance level professionals in the 70s who wanted to live in luxury and its perks and still save money. Getting in one of the old Victorian type town houses with six bedrooms and three baths, library, music room, and garden walk able to a lot of cool places, But there was never a willingness to spend the money for a really good housekeeper. The guys were really irresponsible. They wanted to eat but not really cook or clean. They always had mothers or maids to pick up after them and with women on the scene, it felt just like home. Dividing up chores by the week or month was always a stress scene. There was huge selfishness on the part of the guys who ate far more and resented paying a fair share for common food. The guys wanted their money to bond with other guys and scoring other women. The women wanted the money so they could put a down payment on their own home. So no matter how good it looked, the stress of actual living there undid the place. The communal pot (taxes) was always to be starved but the services and benefits desired (civilization) were most prevalent to those who had the balls to just take it. Women at that time were low on audacity levels.

In American history, the Utopian movements that had any kind of longevity were usually tied together in a common religious belief; like the shakers and the Amish. The Amish succeeded because the big farms remained private property worked by extended families with right of inheritance. But it is not all peace and love. James Mitchner's work The Novel tells the story of two Amish brothers who fought for 40 years since the day of their father's death til one of their own. Their fight destroyed families and communities. Only at the end of the book do you find out what they were fighting about because no one but the brothers really knew. They had a fight over their father's funeral as to whether or not it was permitted by their laws to wear suspenders. It comes as stunning revelation at the end of this book. You are amazed at the stupidity that has just been displayed and then you remember Einstein's quote about the infinite stupidity of mankind. This is hard to deal with in commune's without a huge bond of commitment.

At Stanford, I belonged to a group of young people who were all attached to the big faculty student relationships of the social science department. For a couple of years, these people did cooperative shopping when there was no thought of an internet. What we did was meet every three months as one big group for a whole day of everybody bring something festival and we tested food products and arranged to buy them direct. Because of the nature of California especially then you could drive to another totally different climate in one hour or so. Some of us went to wineries and bought wine for three months for 50 people. Some of us bought whole wheels of Jarlsberg cheese. Bought live pigs, chickens, sheep at from the farmers. Had him arrange to deliver them to local butchers. Bought extra and gave them to the butcher for butchering ours. Divided everything up among us that was staples. Alternated small groups going to farmers market on a weekly basis--they did not come to the cities then. Sharing the tasks.

My closest friends of my life were 4 other single mothers with children. Boy, were we outsiders then. We were all going to nursing school with really tuff hours. Had Friday afternoons off and we went from house to house cleaning each one. Trust me, this is an intimate experience. One would do the laundry, one the dusting and vacuuming. One cleaning and cooking in the kitchen and one in the yard. We did a lot of screaming, crying, cursing, and laughing while we did it. We finished up at the pizza parlor. Both a cleansing and energizing ritual. As far as I know this broke down only when we all graduated and had to move on. It was time consuming in some ways but I would do all this again if I found other people willing to do the same. That memory feels exactly like another dimension in time.

1972 was Stanford's last graduating nursing class. They shut it down during the height of the nursing shortage. 1968 was the implementation of medicare. Cal poly also shut down. That could be another diary.

The huge failure was Synanon. A take over of one city block manufacturing center on Army Steet in the Mission District of San Franciso. About three hundred people living together. Equal division of addicts, thugs, and felons with nuns, young business men and women, some older really wealthy patrons. Playing The Game which it was really called. To join you gave over your paycheck and got colored tokens to use in the communal store and cafeteria. You must weekly play the game at least once of shouting and cursing the truth at one another. Dietrich's vision was top down hierarchal; he would take all the money and gifts but really gave nothing back. It was his power trip. Came down almost at once when sex became a male right.

The biggest known historical failure is almost never taught. I began my education as an American History Major. I had 56 undergraduate semester units. It was a big surprise to me that I almost knew nothing about real history and have spent a lifetime discovering. To this day, I am amazed at how much is known in archeology that is still not taught but is there in front of our faces. Love the interview of the guy with all the small ancient artifacts no one wants to see or explain. (I am bad with names because of my brain injury. What sticks with me is deeply embedded knowledge. I was lucky to have an extensive education 30 years ago. I can build on it. The knowledge weaves but the names don't.)

The big historical failure was the Owens experiment. Owens was a wealthy owner, manufacturer, financier from England who bought a whole town outside of Philadelphia. The people he bought from all moved west. He obtained a complete town with stores, churches, schools, bookbinding, black smith, animals, livestock, 3,000 acres of productive land. He brought over ship loads of English people who needed a new start. These people had skills and experience. It was a complete failure in that no one really wanted to work in what they perceived to have no real stake in. Once here, they would rather go out to the frontier and cut their own homestead. The one thing Owen would not give up was owning the land so he could sell and get his money back.

Ironically, this has been repeated in Israel. The kibbutz's only survived with huge state subsidies. The third generation of those born on this land shared in this manner have been democratically slowly unwinding the legal ties that bind. There is a documentary about them. What sticks in my mind is a woman at 40 who is so pleased to at last own her own car. The kibbutz's were democratically created and democratically destroyed.

What is interesting about discussions in the Zeitgeist movement is the willingness to talk about allowing the 80% to coast on the 20%. There is recognition that about 20% of the population is driven to be productive or needs to work no matter what the others are doing. Zeitgeist actually says let them have their TV and games, leave them alone, and let them eat themselves to death. They believe like attracts like and that people choosing a looser lifestyle is dead end, serves no purpose, and thus will die a natural death. In such a situation they believe there is no desire to have children because there is no need for such interaction. These are people who do not want to be bothered by anything. These discussions are not written but orally explored as worse case scenarios.

The one group I know who succeeded was Murietta Hot Springs. These people formed a corporation and held shares according to the power to participate. The corporation owned the land. The share holders all had to have some money for the down payment and some skills that contributed to the community. The community was a non-profit retreat where people came to experience again living without TVS and Phones and radios. Regular schedules of interacting with nature and cleansing their bodies and minds. The share holders were also the employees of the corporation each having jobs contributing to the experience. All vegan cooking and teaching vegan cooking. Communal meals. Ritual using of the spas. Different kinds of body work and spiritual experience. Small homes or multifamily homes and at least in the beginning no children. No advertising. Word of mouth. In thing for celebrities to do. Highly successful for 30 years. Sold to another corporation of private resorts with each share holder receiving at least a million.

The last aspect of coming to community I tried was with my husband and other quite successful middle age adults. We joined Scott Peck of the Road Less Traveled community foundation. He began leading and training people how to come to community. Hundred's of thousands were poured into it. Another failure for the exact same reason. I never attended a weekend session where we did not spend the first half with five males jocking for leadership positions. It was truly a sophisticated form of mental masturbation. As far as I can see, we all pretended to have come to community so we could all get back to our "normal" lives.

This is my first thread. I have no idea about the rightness or the wrongness of it. I have the skin of an alligator and will take all comments as constructive criticism. This is my first chance to see how or if people will respond.

Part of my reason for coming here is to make decisions about how to take action. I believe the issue of manifesting money is not difficult if done in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons. I think I could begin again if we were not having a physical calamity. That is what I am really trying to determine. It is logical if you knew the earth was going semi crack up--- to blow as much up as possible first. Only those who have the gold and something gold holders want survive. If this has happened before, they always choose wrong.

I have already wasted a million plus dollars trying to do it my way. Like Owens and a failure for the same reason. This time I lack money but still have the skills and knowledge it would take to survive. I think groups of around 36 could go off to some places and make it. I think like minded people could survive in the Postman scenario but not in Mad Maxx which will go back to the stone age.

If I get some response here, I would set up a scenario type game to play based on a reality I knew of.

Those of you who got this far, have my appreciation.

[bluestflame]

just glad you were able to retrieve your post , and thanks for sharing it ~☼~

[jeannacav]

Very interesting post, write4change,

I became hopeful for a completely different society when Alex Collier described Vissases's statement that he couldn't understand why anyone should pay to live on a planet they were born on.
Many of my neurons reset at that moment.

I too spent much of my life wanting to be part of a collective group.
I never got as far along as you did, but I did get far along enough to see that this kind of thing is at best tricky and usually just a failure.

After contemplating this completely out-of-the-box statement, I wanted to think about this topic again. (I gave up even thinking about it in the 90's)
Alex adds that on the Andromedan planet he was on, nobody needed anything and everything was available to anyone; and the children, as part of learning what there is to learn, made things in schools and provided the technological items necessary to the citizens.

It is intriguing to hear that on another planet people live in a communal manner without the usual ills that seem so natural here on this planet.


I do not have answers either.
Yet, I am enjoying going back to this intriguing subject.


So, for me, at least now, I have come to understand that the real problem is money or making a "value" judgment on something.
Being compensated for your time is the basis of a slave state and if we are going to move ahead, we must simply contribute from our passions and assume it will all fall into place.

I think we will have to re-train ourselves away from greed, because greed must be the natural expression of a slave who never has enough.


Thank you for this thread.
(I have become busy again and I may not be able to contribute more for a while, but I do like thinking about these things.)

jeanna

[truthseekerdan]

Interesting thread thank you, write4change!

When the power of unconditional love will overcome the need of money and self gratitude, the world will be a different place.
In the current paradigm most of humanity is not ready to come together as One due to its low consciousness level.
However, I'm positive that soon a change and a shift to a new paradigm will raise the humanity's consciousness to new higher levels where many things will be possible again.

Namaste ~ Dan

[write4change]

jeanna,

I read your reply a couple of times. I will try to address the issues directly that you kind of allude to.

One of the reasons why I am sure man wrote the bible is because it would bore a creator to death. Creating is a rush and it is also a deep satisfaction. On a simple level as a woman who gives birth screaming, crying, and cursing as soon as that baby is out and the monstrous contractions stop--we want to see what we have wrought. There is still pain and things to be done. They do not matter let me see what has evolved here. Unfortunately, for men they never get that experience or the one of being pregnant. I understand a lot of women love it. I hate it. There is never a time I don't feel like there is something else taking over my body. The only way it works well is to surrender to the process.

My pleasure in the child is seeing the world new again. Consciously experiencing what it is like to see and do for the first time. I am not into here follow this pattern I am teaching. I am not into honor thy father and mother and obey. I am just part of the process. But many people are because they were raised that way and their parents were raised that way etc. Most people do what they were taught until it stops working for them.

Anthropology says man was developed as he is today at least 100,000 years ago. Nothing changed until about 40,000 years ago. The why and how of that is still hotly contested. In taking the most likely theory---man had out of body experiences from eating hallucinogenic plants and that made him contemplate all kinds of things and art, music, cooperative strategic hunting, and concepts of god were born. The concepts of god gave man, not I think women, the desire to say we praise you, we bless you, we adore you. etc. I think women would on their own think god was moving on and too busy with his newest creations to hang around listening being praised and blessed. god craved experience not the same old same old.

Men are literally not surrendered to labor. They are into male bonding. They only do what women can't. All the hard tedious labor rather it is curing leather for clothes, grinding corn for meals, or raising teepees is women's work. Women do all the work involved in sustaining the tribe and thus have always had cooperative groups to get all the work done. Women's work in hunter gathering tribes cannot be completed individually. A skilled hunter can support a family with food but he cannot provide the shelter, childcare, take turns stuff that making clothes and all the other things require.

The hunt is dangerous etc. but it is fun. A lot of vets in the right setting will admit they never felt more alive than when they were in combat and their war buddies were buddies for life. No aspect of life is it now possible to be Jeremiah Johnson. You can look at him as the apex of time when all natural resources were available essentially for free but you still had to be skilled and knowledgeable to reap them. This is the only time on this planet that you could live an essentially stimulated and sensuous life with so little effort. Up until 1950, almost all forms of home entertainment or friendly socializing had to be created.

Meanwhile, the one place on the planet that was able to sustain the garden of Eden for about 4,000 years were the islands of Oceania. They didn't need clothes and they didn't have to work very hard to eat. They had a stable spiritual society until they were captured by the western man. Easter Island is an exception to the norm. As long as things were working for them, they did not change.

Is the one thing we can count on change? If it is, is that a big attribute of god. If god is constantly cocreating to reexperience the how and why of it like looking thru the eyes of his new creation would he just plop everyone down on a perfect planet and say enjoy? And if that always came with the gift of life, is it his responsibility to have to continually slap our hands to stop us from messing up his creation.

Looking historically we were given a beautiful delicate planet that fulfilled all our needs. No one messed it up but us. It got this way collectively and it can only be redeemed collectively. There is no avoiding you are part of the problem or part of the solution.

From following all the interviews and knowledge presented here, I am convinced that we still have all we need to solve our problems. The immensity of the problems now mean they can only be solved collectively. That begins on the simplest terms of every one starting to discuss what are you willing to give in order to survive? The 33 answer is that the stupid should perish and if you don't have the gold or the moxy or the knowledge or the skill to save yourself and your family you are stupid and deserve this to happen to you.

Those people who are visiting planets with no needs have yet to tell us how they got that way. Or if they sustained this throughout their evolution how they stayed that way. In Carl Sagan's book Contact the first question is how did your planet survive evolution?

There is no theology that encompasses god to me. god is the universe known and unknowable. one of the reasons for believing in god is being in awe of the intricate complex immensity of the universe. god in my understanding would not create without a plan. but like having any kind of children that you allow to be themselves--life is what happens when you were making your plans. so god like the many of us has surrendered to the ride of life.

I am sure there is both joy and blackness over all the good we have done and all the bad we have created. sitting down doing nothing is making a choice. Assume---the old ass out of u and me is possible. I may have waited too long out of my own personal disappointments to survive a catastrophe in the physical sense. then again necessity is the mother of invention. what better place than here to find new thoughts, new feelings, new understandings, and new inspiration? I can feel my vibrations working up, gearing up--it is a much better place than my apathy of the last ten years.

thank you so much for taking the time to write and giving me the impetus to write back.

[write4change]

Dan,

I hear you but I think any shift that takes place has to be consciously participated in. If the Ra material is any kind of validity--only 20% of us are worth harvesting. LOL

I had a guide tell me this planet resists love harder than they ever resist war.

It is difficult to give what you have never received or experienced. Lots of people will say they don't even believe in love. That sex is just another function like eating and sleeping. These are habitual patterns of thought that have to be broken.

I have gotten to the place where I trust almost no one. To change I have to reach out and open my heart--to essentially strangers. And I have to do it first. The only filter I am using is this site's stated purpose and mission.

An E ride of going with the flow! LOL

[Annie]

This is a wonderful post Write4change.Thank you for sharing it.Coming from South Africa,and spending a lot of my formative years in a rural farming community I have seen first hand how communal living can work,but not in an unstructured way.As you acknowledged there will always be a jostling for power at the top.One of the main reasons for the breakdown in communal settlements in first world countries is the way we are raised to think as individuals and believe in the greatness of ourselves usually before that of the group.A lot of this is due to the fact that we no longer have to struggle just to survive.Our lives no longer depend on the communal system working effectively for the greater good of the whole,but I have to admit that even in the smallest of African villages it is the woman who go out and tend the fields with their babies strapped to their backs while the men sit in front of their huts pondering the meaning of life...or bonding

[truthseekerdan]

Posted by write4change (here)
Dan,

I hear you but I think any shift that takes place has to be consciously participated in. If the Ra material is any kind of validity--only 20% of us are worth harvesting. LOL

I had a guide tell me this planet resists love harder than they ever resist war.

It is difficult to give what you have never received or experienced. Lots of people will say they don't even believe in love. That sex is just another function like eating and sleeping. These are habitual patterns of thought that have to be broken.

I have gotten to the place where I trust almost no one. To change I have to reach out and open my heart--to essentially strangers. And I have to do it first. The only filter I am using is this site's stated purpose and mission.

An E ride of going with the flow! LOL

Hello to you write4change -- indeed it seems difficult to accept a change if we stay 'locked in the mind' which is the current state that most of us are in; however, this habit must be broken. Each one of us needs to understand that in order to see a change in the world, it has to start with the self first. Like a wise man said: "We must be the change you wish to see in the world".

What we believe produces experience and when we experience our existence only through what we believe, we may have inadvertently imagined uncertainty, which in turn has created fear. When we fully understand this, we begin to understand our inner domain and our whole reality begins to change. We start to realize that our happiness is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of our happiness.

Love (not talking about sex here ) in our life is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of our love. Compassion is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of our compassion, et cetera. If we did not have this understanding before, we probably only imagined certain things must occur in order for us to live a more meaningful life.

Love and blessings to you and yours,

Dan

[TWINNICK]

Posted by write4change (here)
These are thoughts in considering the Zeitgeist movement. I felt it was too long for a comment and would not be seen by those who were interested in just the concepts of cooperative living.

There has never been a time when I have not been fascinated by the idea of cooperative living. I began mine with reading Little Women and Little Men which portrays it as a sort of extended family experience. When I was told by a teacher that Alcott's father was a commune leader under the auspices of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started my research.

I still carry a small book of Emerson around in my purse. It fits in the palm of my hand and I have always vibrated with his vision as had my grandparents who quoted him all the time. How could someone so wise and so learned combined with other like minded people fail?

In the late 60s and early 70s in the Northern California area I joined several. Never for longer than 60 days. Mostly little ones of sharing work and expenses. Some partial with skills and food. And one big one for a final excruciating experience.

What I believe is true of all of them for failing even the old ones is the ongoing fight for leadership. There is always this drive for top down hierarchal power. My personal experience was that the women do all the work and the men do all the talking. The more educated the men the more complicated the simplest project.

I once watched 4 men and a major pick up truck with chains spend most of an entire day trying to remove a two foot in diameter tree stump. They trashed the yard, created a mud mess, repeatedly broke the chains, and practically destroyed the bumper and the pickup. This place at this time had a $35,000 Caterpillar like tractor. At the end of the day an older Hispanic woman wove the chains around the stump got on the tractor and pulled out the stump in about 5 minutes.

The men had a great time. They bond doing things side by side. (Women bond talking face to face.) Had they been successful, this would have been one of their war stories for all time. How I Beat the Tree Stump.

Emerson provided the money for the project. He did not want to live and work there. He did want it to be self sufficient. Granted work then was continuous and hard. Alcott's father if you read through the lines wanted to be the on site supervisor,do all of the talking and none of the work. The others wanted total equality and thus, everything that needed doing was an argument. Self sufficiency never occurred. Emerson got fed up and refused to supply any more money and everyone just left. This is typical of most small communes.

I lived in one in the north beach area of San Francisco where it was a bunch of young well paid entrance level professionals in the 70s who wanted to live in luxury and its perks and still save money. Getting in one of the old Victorian type town houses with six bedrooms and three baths, library, music room, and garden walk able to a lot of cool places, But there was never a willingness to spend the money for a really good housekeeper. The guys were really irresponsible. They wanted to eat but not really cook or clean. They always had mothers or maids to pick up after them and with women on the scene, it felt just like home. Dividing up chores by the week or month was always a stress scene. There was huge selfishness on the part of the guys who ate far more and resented paying a fair share for common food. The guys wanted their money to bond with other guys and scoring other women. The women wanted the money so they could put a down payment on their own home. So no matter how good it looked, the stress of actual living there undid the place. The communal pot (taxes) was always to be starved but the services and benefits desired (civilization) were most prevalent to those who had the balls to just take it. Women at that time were low on audacity levels.

In American history, the Utopian movements that had any kind of longevity were usually tied together in a common religious belief; like the shakers and the Amish. The Amish succeeded because the big farms remained private property worked by extended families with right of inheritance. But it is not all peace and love. James Mitchner's work The Novel tells the story of two Amish brothers who fought for 40 years since the day of their father's death til one of their own. Their fight destroyed families and communities. Only at the end of the book do you find out what they were fighting about because no one but the brothers really knew. They had a fight over their father's funeral as to whether or not it was permitted by their laws to wear suspenders. It comes as stunning revelation at the end of this book. You are amazed at the stupidity that has just been displayed and then you remember Einstein's quote about the infinite stupidity of mankind. This is hard to deal with in commune's without a huge bond of commitment.

At Stanford, I belonged to a group of young people who were all attached to the big faculty student relationships of the social science department. For a couple of years, these people did cooperative shopping when there was no thought of an internet. What we did was meet every three months as one big group for a whole day of everybody bring something festival and we tested food products and arranged to buy them direct. Because of the nature of California especially then you could drive to another totally different climate in one hour or so. Some of us went to wineries and bought wine for three months for 50 people. Some of us bought whole wheels of Jarlsberg cheese. Bought live pigs, chickens, sheep at from the farmers. Had him arrange to deliver them to local butchers. Bought extra and gave them to the butcher for butchering ours. Divided everything up among us that was staples. Alternated small groups going to farmers market on a weekly basis--they did not come to the cities then. Sharing the tasks.

My closest friends of my life were 4 other single mothers with children. Boy, were we outsiders then. We were all going to nursing school with really tuff hours. Had Friday afternoons off and we went from house to house cleaning each one. Trust me, this is an intimate experience. One would do the laundry, one the dusting and vacuuming. One cleaning and cooking in the kitchen and one in the yard. We did a lot of screaming, crying, cursing, and laughing while we did it. We finished up at the pizza parlor. Both a cleansing and energizing ritual. As far as I know this broke down only when we all graduated and had to move on. It was time consuming in some ways but I would do all this again if I found other people willing to do the same. That memory feels exactly like another dimension in time.

1972 was Stanford's last graduating nursing class. They shut it down during the height of the nursing shortage. 1968 was the implementation of medicare. Cal poly also shut down. That could be another diary.

The huge failure was Synanon. A take over of one city block manufacturing center on Army Steet in the Mission District of San Franciso. About three hundred people living together. Equal division of addicts, thugs, and felons with nuns, young business men and women, some older really wealthy patrons. Playing The Game which it was really called. To join you gave over your paycheck and got colored tokens to use in the communal store and cafeteria. You must weekly play the game at least once of shouting and cursing the truth at one another. Dietrich's vision was top down hierarchal; he would take all the money and gifts but really gave nothing back. It was his power trip. Came down almost at once when sex became a male right.

The biggest known historical failure is almost never taught. I began my education as an American History Major. I had 56 undergraduate semester units. It was a big surprise to me that I almost knew nothing about real history and have spent a lifetime discovering. To this day, I am amazed at how much is known in archeology that is still not taught but is there in front of our faces. Love the interview of the guy with all the small ancient artifacts no one wants to see or explain. (I am bad with names because of my brain injury. What sticks with me is deeply embedded knowledge. I was lucky to have an extensive education 30 years ago. I can build on it. The knowledge weaves but the names don't.)

The big historical failure was the Owens experiment. Owens was a wealthy owner, manufacturer, financier from England who bought a whole town outside of Philadelphia. The people he bought from all moved west. He obtained a complete town with stores, churches, schools, bookbinding, black smith, animals, livestock, 3,000 acres of productive land. He brought over ship loads of English people who needed a new start. These people had skills and experience. It was a complete failure in that no one really wanted to work in what they perceived to have no real stake in. Once here, they would rather go out to the frontier and cut their own homestead. The one thing Owen would not give up was owning the land so he could sell and get his money back.

Ironically, this has been repeated in Israel. The kibbutz's only survived with huge state subsidies. The third generation of those born on this land shared in this manner have been democratically slowly unwinding the legal ties that bind. There is a documentary about them. What sticks in my mind is a woman at 40 who is so pleased to at last own her own car. The kibbutz's were democratically created and democratically destroyed.

What is interesting about discussions in the Zeitgeist movement is the willingness to talk about allowing the 80% to coast on the 20%. There is recognition that about 20% of the population is driven to be productive or needs to work no matter what the others are doing. Zeitgeist actually says let them have their TV and games, leave them alone, and let them eat themselves to death. They believe like attracts like and that people choosing a looser lifestyle is dead end, serves no purpose, and thus will die a natural death. In such a situation they believe there is no desire to have children because there is no need for such interaction. These are people who do not want to be bothered by anything. These discussions are not written but orally explored as worse case scenarios.

The one group I know who succeeded was Murietta Hot Springs. These people formed a corporation and held shares according to the power to participate. The corporation owned the land. The share holders all had to have some money for the down payment and some skills that contributed to the community. The community was a non-profit retreat where people came to experience again living without TVS and Phones and radios. Regular schedules of interacting with nature and cleansing their bodies and minds. The share holders were also the employees of the corporation each having jobs contributing to the experience. All vegan cooking and teaching vegan cooking. Communal meals. Ritual using of the spas. Different kinds of body work and spiritual experience. Small homes or multifamily homes and at least in the beginning no children. No advertising. Word of mouth. In thing for celebrities to do. Highly successful for 30 years. Sold to another corporation of private resorts with each share holder receiving at least a million.

The last aspect of coming to community I tried was with my husband and other quite successful middle age adults. We joined Scott Peck of the Road Less Traveled community foundation. He began leading and training people how to come to community. Hundred's of thousands were poured into it. Another failure for the exact same reason. I never attended a weekend session where we did not spend the first half with five males jocking for leadership positions. It was truly a sophisticated form of mental masturbation. As far as I can see, we all pretended to have come to community so we could all get back to our "normal" lives.

This is my first thread. I have no idea about the rightness or the wrongness of it. I have the skin of an alligator and will take all comments as constructive criticism. This is my first chance to see how or if people will respond.

Part of my reason for coming here is to make decisions about how to take action. I believe the issue of manifesting money is not difficult if done in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons. I think I could begin again if we were not having a physical calamity. That is what I am really trying to determine. It is logical if you knew the earth was going semi crack up--- to blow as much up as possible first. Only those who have the gold and something gold holders want survive. If this has happened before, they always choose wrong.

I have already wasted a million plus dollars trying to do it my way. Like Owens and a failure for the same reason. This time I lack money but still have the skills and knowledge it would take to survive. I think groups of around 36 could go off to some places and make it. I think like minded people could survive in the Postman scenario but not in Mad Maxx which will go back to the stone age.

If I get some response here, I would set up a scenario type game to play based on a reality I knew of.

Those of you who got this far, have my appreciation.

And this is why I like living alone.

Great post by the way but I can't see myself putting up with all the BS and drama's.

I like peace and quiet and solitude, and minimal testosterone LOL.

..Nick..

[doodah]

Dear write4change,

Thank you for this thread. There's nothing like actually going out there and experiencing it!

I've spent some time visiting around to a few intentional communities, looking for a home, so to speak and I've been very disappointed - but I've also had a wakeup call, I think, a reality check. It seems to me now that wherever you go, people still have the same problems and they bring their problems, their baggage so to speak, into those intentional communities.

I've yet to find a community composed of "whole" people, "healed" people who have done their personal work, understand themselves deeply, and are working toward actualizing a higher spiritual state. I've yet to find that combined with the willingness to do the hard work of self sufficiency. I guess I've discovered I'm looking for both aspects. Self-realized people don't care about power, they care about getting things done that need to be done, and understand that solutions can come from ANYBODY. As long as everyone is working toward the same goal, leadership can be fluid; structure can be the structure that WORKs. There are so many things that just don't matter, artificial divisions that are piffle and nonsense. I'm still running into men who won't let me make the campfire! How absurd is that? It doesn't really matter who does what - everyone needs to have many skills - as long as there are some common goals and genuine values motivating everyone at very deep levels. Those things matter... like living in harmony with the planet!

I agree with Nick! At this point it's a lot easier and more fun to live alone, except there are truly times when it would be nice to have many hands to do the work! That's why I'd kind of like to live in a village, in my own hut, separate but together in common purpose. Dream on, I guess...

Good luck to us all!

[doodah]

oops, forgot to say... "structure can be the structure the WORKS" harmoniously. I didn't mean TPTB kind of "works", where it only works for themselves and everyone else be damned. Nothing on this planet is working very well at the moment; there are too many sick and unhappy people, plants, animals, environments, etc., sure signs that it ISN'T working right.

[9eagle9]

What Nick Said.

Cept I add in estrogen drama's too. And I have encountered the same thing over and over in loose spiritual communities where people didn't live on site but were supposed to work towards making the community work. The retail, gardening, healing end of it. This was mostly women, the men were shunted off into a corner with their thumb up their @55, everyone was for, some reason, afraid to ask the men to do or contribute anything yet let all this resent towards them build. Because they wouldn't let them do anything. ...lol.

And the women struggled to compete. Who was better psychic, better healer, most popular, more spiritual, backstabbing, gossip. Because I have no problems speaking up it was somehow unofficially decided I was community mediator.

These are things I mediated.

"She's stealing my power." She put a curse on me. "She's using black magick in the herb garden"

I left. And I opened my own lodge. Everyone was all gung ho about having a lodge in the country where everyone would contribute.

First order of business was erect sweat lodge.

This turned into > Hey lets us know when the sweat lodge is ready and we'll show up.

Food? I have to bring a dish to pass? What I can't run up the electric bill. Aren't you paying for it out of all our donations.

What donations? If you scream about bringing a pot of potato salad I should expect you are donating?

Closed my doors real fast. I wasn't their parent's house. This wasn't my idea of community either. Waiting on people hand and foot and resolving their paranoia. They aren't integrated in themselves to oneness let alone be shunted into a crowd of other un-integrated people.

If anyone has any ideas I am all ears but I'm basically out here in seclusion to get away from Communities...lol. Drama comes from testosterone and estrogen equally, I'm fair about that anyway although everyone maintains its just because I'm evil because I won't play the game.

However someone may wish to google Holocracy.

Let me know what you think.

[jeannacav]

What I think will change this kind of problem is the total lack of money and working for a living.

I think we do not know how to do this at all and I would like to see the resources of the planets where this works first, but it is a hunch I have that this is workable when we are not slaves any more.

I saw one community before I moved from Massachusetts.
This was interesting because you had to make your own living and create your own building in order to live there, so in this way the reliance on the group as a financial net was not there.
and in a way the posturing for power was not as evident either. (I never lived there so this part could be wrong.)
This was a long standing home community for many people.
It was a great place for vegetarian farmers and natural builders who had a day-gig.

I remember they told us they arrived at every decision by consensus.
It means everyone agreed to the final decision = unanimous.
I think that is amazing.

For what it is worth,

jeanna

[NancyV]

Thanks for sharing write4change! I'm enjoying everyone's perspective and experiences.

I have had a few experiences with communal type living and had done a lot of reading on intentional communities, Utopian ideals, etc. when I was in my mid teens in the 60's. I actually thought it would be possible and a good idea, but I had to come to the conclusion that it was not workable. The problem is not men, nor is it women, it's human nature. Men and women just deal with the hierarchical and territorial tendencies differently.

The worst experience was when my 2nd husband and I invited 4 families to live on our 50 acres in Oregon. We were a part of a group who followed an Indian guru, so we all had the same thoughts that we were special... saved.... you know, the typical self righteous "we're right and everyone else is ignorant" mantra. LOL..

People were supposed to help in exchange for their rent free living space. We all lived in separate buildings so that was not a problem, but I was irked when some of them did very little compared to what my husband and I did. When I asked some of them to do things they would get annoyed at times. There was a lot to do since we had planted an acre garden and had 5 horses.

I finally realized that living with others in cooperation and harmony was not possible for ME, and I didn't think it would work for many other people either. Certainly men are very different from women and I would not change them at all. I love men the way they are. I actually have more problems with women because I prefer how much more straight forward and uncomplicated many men are and I also feel that they are generally more trustworthy.

If you are a loner or introvert, as I am, then you don't really WANT to cooperate with other people. You just want to do things your own way when you want to and not be responsible to or for others. Of course I always took great care of my children and husband-children. Men love to have women cater to them and I don't mind treating them like a king. It's a little game I play. If you play the game right you always get your way without too many arguments. I never expected or wanted my husband to do housework, laundry, dishes or much of anything in that realm, unless they wanted to and did it on their own without urging. Then if I really needed their help they were always willing and happy to help. It's not that I am a passive woman, in fact I can be rather aggressive and opinionated, but I do know how to treat men and I know what they need from a woman in order to feel valued and cherished.

So I gave up any thoughts of living in some sort of ideal Utopian cooperative community and I think it's basically naive to think it will work. I've never seen it work for long. People need to feel in control of their own lives, which is why communism and socialism do not work well. Even if a community looks like it's working I bet if you lived there you would see a lot of resentment beneath the surface. It's difficult enough to live in a single family without adding other families into the formula.

Nancy

[write4change]

Hi, you all, I was surprised to find this revived. I want to first start with my failures.

With the first Gulf War in 1990, I began having huge internal feelings that everyone was soon going to hit a brick wall and how could I get my family to survive? We had moved from LA to Las Vegas in 1988, we were part of the first wave. We sold our LA house for $450,000 dollars all cash and bought for $243,000 cash a fully furnished model in The Lakes of Las Vegas, the first man made lake there. It was an architecturally award winning house. Of all our houses, it was my daughter's favorite.

It was two story with high ceiling living room and very expensive to heat and cool. I wanted a sitting room in the master bedroom and a deck leading out of it, a solarium facing the lake. We did all the right things by the book to get it approved by a severe homeowner's association. The first thing we learned was how badly these houses were built and ours as a model had to be one of the best. To put these houses up fast and cheap, they were essentially make of Styrofoam and chicken wire. When the mortgage is done most of these homes will be too--planned disposable housing. In order to build we had to steel pier. The other thing I wanted was insulation. I am facing west with new addition and the sun is hugely intense from 10 AM to 7 PM in the summer. And the law says you only have to insulate to R 13. I insulated the entire addition to R 32 everywhere and special double pained insulate windows. The result was instantaneousness dropping of my air conditioning bill by at lest 500 a month. This is 1988 gives you some idea how draining all those Las Vegas houses are to the environment.

We truly did not realize when we were planning this that we would block the view of the single story next to us belonging to an old retired couple. Since they were only one they could not mount any kind of protest at the homeowner's meeting. We never attended and hired people to do all this.
Trust me, the undying enmity of one person can make your life miserable. But had I known I would have done it anyway, thinking in the grand scheme of things it was not a big deal and they would get over it. They had three free sides to their house and our extention only meant they could not see across the lake when they were in the breakfast nook.

My husband had represented as a tax attorney CPA some major players for over 30 years. He had commuted to Vegas from LA all that time spending 3 days there and 4 days in LA. We decided to reverse it when our five year old daughter attended a birthday party for one of her classmates in Bell Aire. You drove thru two sets of gates. The party was in the pool house which was 5,000 sq feet. I never saw the main house. You should have seen the goodie bag! My daughter is just gleeful. She says to me Mommy, I am going to marry Eric, the birthday boy. So I say well he certainly has your attention---why do want to marry him. And she says because he's filthy rich. I do not speak that way--not only is he rich--but filthy rich. At five we take our daughter to her first visit to a psychiatrist because she is "dieting." She does not have an ounce of fat on her body. According to the pediatrician she is in the low quartile of her age and height for weight. She would flex her knee and pat her calf and it wiggled which was proof to her she was fat. We were sending her to a preschool that cost 8500 per year not counting temple dues in Beverly Hills. I could write a book about what I observed that first year. I was born poor white trailer trash, and this was not the way I wanted my daughter raised and I could already see peer pressure was going to have a much bigger influence than I. Thus, the move to Las Vegas.

From private to public school, they wanted to skip my daughter three grades which I knew she emotionally could not handle. I said no and the next year enrolled her back into Jewish private school where she was once again average.

I take her to a sleep over with a girlfriend who has a maid, chauffeur, and housekeeper and parents who are almost never home and around the world. I again learn to feel sorry for the poor little rich girls. When I come to pick her up, I hear screaming and carrying on and I run up the huge double ended stairway to the kids room where she has her own bath and bedroom size closet with electric rotating shelves. In the bathroom, both girls have wet wash clothes and are slapping each other with them. One is saying I am the richest and the other is saying I am the prettiest. I cannot believe this and I start my speech of peace and harmony and universal souls. And I say, you never see other women cat fighting like this way and they look at me and say Chrystal and Alexis--Dallas--do this all the time.

In the two years, we live there I watch the clear skies turn to smog and junk like Mexico City which also is totally surrounded by mountains and has an inverted system. I watch all the golf courses go up which is worse on water than a man made lake. I watch the Hoover damn and lake drop a foot a year.

My husbands knows and has friends who are really friends with Steve Winn who has just announced his plans for the Mirage with huge water usage and waste. He is going to put dolphins in the desert. I get 5 minutes with him at a break in the big basketball game. I beg him to reconsider and give him a quick thematic presentation of what he could do with sand and the environment and imagination by switching from an Oasis in the desert to Xanadu of mysticism. He essentially laughs in my face. One of their big R and D was spending three million to produce a neon sign that was black in the daytime and white at night.

They bring in rare and exotic plants from all over the world to put a mini jungle in the entrance inside the Mirage. They refused to do silk plants etc even though they were advised that natural plants would not make it. They did it any way. The plants all died. And they had to rush the silk ones by bringing over the Japanese to make them on the premises. I do not know how the dolphins felt about living in the desert and totally away from the sea unlike SeaWorld which is bad enough. For them the sun no longer exists.

I have now been married for seven years as the trophy wife never really understanding what that means before. Making the story now quick and simple. My husband buys the oldest casino on the strip without asking permission of the jewish casino mafia feeling he has worked for them so long thinking he has earned his chance. Wrong. I tell him he is breaking the cardinal rule of business because he knows nothing about a casino. He bought it out of probate because two of the three partners were dead and the heirs could come to no agreement so the court put it up for sale. It is preapproved for demolition and for reconstruction and already pre leased. My husband says it is not a casino but a real estate deal. I say a casino is a casino is a casino. I was right and he was wrong. First, thing that happened was all previous approval withdrawn and we had to begin all over again. Suddenly, there is a WWII fuel storage facility underground that no one ever knew about before. We spend 50,000 a month on a gaming attorney alone. We are going to go bankrupt with this. At the last moment, my husband sells at a considerable loss to a New York syndicate who is fronting for the current mayor.

To survive this mess, I convince my husband to at least buy us a house in San Antonio where I originated and where my public education was good enough to stand up to Stanford. There is no income tax, homesteading is still inviolate, and while we are going to have to live on 30% of what his income was in San Antonio that 30% put us in the upper 2% bracket.

I have to go out for a while and what I see is that stories are better broken down in sequels. So I will leave this for a while and then tell my Texas tall tale. I think people from foreign countries may find this more interesting than Americans.

[9eagle9]

OMG that's incredible...

[doodah]

9eagle9: This wasn't my idea of community either... They aren't integrated in themselves to oneness let alone be shunted into a crowd of other un-integrated people.

Exactly. So how do we find integrated people who want to form community? Shall we do an experiment? Start another thread, make up a questionnaire, and see what responses we get? I'd be rather curious, myself... Here are some questions I'd ask:
1. Do you have any experience handling farm animals? If not, are you willing to learn? (This would eliminate the "Oooo the goats are too smelly" types.)
2. Are you willing to teach others everything you know how to do? (This would weed out those who cling too much to the idea that their knowledge makes them superior.)
3. Do you have confidence that if the world imploded and you were the only one left, you'd be able to make quite a good run at making it on your own? (Very important question, I think. This is not about who's the toughest but who might be the most creative problem solvers.)

This is kind of fun... anyone else want to contribute questions?

[write4change]

Doodah,

I think this is a good idea and would make a good parallel thread. It would also do faster what I am trying to do here. I have decided to keep this thread going to some extant. Because experience does count for something. I spent over a million dollars learning this. I believe as it progresses you will see why. Because if you just start at the beginning thinking commitment, understanding, sufficient funds, etc. will allow you to succeed--it is because you do not know why other people failed.

Had I known the depths of the Owens project, I probably would have gone ahead but there are things that i would have done differently because I was warned.

On a simple one to one level this is looking at the macro level of assessing and collecting taxes for the mutual good of society/civilization.

And your last question is about the most important.

After I lay out all my failures, I will then draw a scenario that was actually possible and my experience with it on the net. Now I know it was a good thing not to have started that one. And I will also offer two other scenarios that are completely different that I don't know so much about. When I get there. We will break off into three threads of creation and let people discuss and ad their ideas. At least that is my plan for now. If nothing else, it gives us more stuff from new people to replace the Charles material if he is gone.

One of the things we might discuss is closing the threads just so the 33 cannot see how really creative and focused we can become. But I guess that is also an illusion as nothing on the net is really secret in any way. LOL

Thanks for joining me here and go for the animal one I will write some animal stories periodically because I have lots about how we learn from animals.

[truthseekerdan]

For those interested please read below:

With his scientific and business background Ivan Stein from Los Angeles is a grounded but still very spiritual person. He envisions the potential dangers that might occur on Earth around December 2012 and tells us how to prepare for this major shift. He also reveals some details about a project of creating a big sustainable community that might also be a raw model for the future society. This is certainly a video to watch for all conscious human beings.

www.projecttristar.net

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sB5-WY6e_2M

[write4change]

A synthesis of the above posted obstacles:

1. People who want to join communes on a whole want as much as possible with giving as little as possible. People who can make it independently do so.

2. These people are also seeking relief from responsibility or making judgment that directly impact themselves. They always want a fall back of some one else to blame.

3. These people are not whole integrated people and we already know that a half a person plus a half a person does not make one whole person but still equals two broken people.

4. It is better to be alone than endure high drama screwed up relationships.

check, check, check, check We are all in agreement of the fundamentals of failure.

Next up continuing the story of my failures.