Chapter 43

INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624

You might think that communes are something that became extinct back in the sixties and seventies. Actually, many people live communally today — in intentional communities, group marriages, co-ops, ashrams, eco-villages, co-housing groups, and even survivalist and radical religious colonies. Communal living is an excellent choice for people who enjoy deep, intimate companionship with more than one person. It is often very difficult to form and maintain a healthy, mutually satisfying and beneficial relationship with the random assortment of personalities that comprise a typical family. An intentional community can be looked at as a “chosen family,” in the sense that it is made up of people who came together intentionally, based on commonalities other than biological (or adoptive) accident. An intentional community differs from a family in one important respect: no one in it will ever legitimately feel “stuck” with it. Thus, communal living can supply people whose conventional family relationships are dysfunctional or nonexistent with the best a family has to offer — a circle of connected, loving co-experiencers with whom to share life.

www.ic.org — www.gaia.org — www.polyamory.org (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20231003080011/https://polyamory.org/) — www.cooperative.org — www.alignment.org — www.cohousing.org

There can be practical advantages to communal living. Often, a member of an expense-sharing group can live more cheaply than a single person can. People who live in group housing are freer to travel, as there are always others around to water the plants, take in the mail, pay the bills, keep those who stay behind company, and so on. Most important, an intentional community is a social network: the chances are good that someone will usually be available to go out for lunch, share a movie, look over a final draft, taste the seasoning, listen to a cool idea, join in a magnificent undertaking, take a walk at sunset, practice a sport or hobby, fall in love with, or learn from and teach something to. Last but not least, maintenance chores are always more pleasant, and less demanding, when shared.

Obviously, communal living can never be as private as a person’s own home. However, parameters can be set to maximize the possibility that adequate privacy will be available for those who sometimes require it. People who need a lot of privacy probably do not belong in a communal setting; people who thrive on human interaction probably do. Communal living is a remarkably viable means of enriching our lives with interpersonal adventure and fun. As a group, we have the resources — practical and personal — to actualize the very best of what we can imagine; after all, as a group we will know more than we could individually. The sharing and maximizing of resources will greatly improve our quality of life, as well as helping to heal our planet. Instead of owning many of any one product, we will own less but share a wider range of items. Communal living can be a potent and powerful medium for a free, creative, experimental, sustainable, ecological, and fulfilling way of life.

By pooling our money, creativity, skills, assets, ideas, and resources — and thereby supplying our basic needs through communal energies — we find both an abundance of all things available to us all, and an optimization in the efficiency of their use. For example, by sharing the use of automobiles and making a communal dinner each evening: one car can serve numerous people, thus requiring fewer of them; and not only does everyone get a wholesome, nutritious meal each night, but they also only have to cook and clean up once a month or less, and then only as part of a team. I believe that together we will achieve things we never, in our secular lives, would have dreamed of — for example: operating large natural shops, bakeries, and the production of tinctures, teas, and organic herbs; writing and performing music; publishing books; creating a seed bank; producing videos; setting up radio stations; promoting eco-tourism; setting up a health center; and much more. The possibilities are endless — such as operating a natural, organic food restaurant where everyone contributes their energy and equally shares in the returns, while at the same time providing a service to the community as a valuable foundation of our lifestyle: coming out of the usury-based money orientation, which is the antithesis of sharing and breeds fear of loss and distrust, and moving into a money-less society.

We will be changing the program from moment to moment — from the secular, insecure world of getting-for-self, to a world of “love as service done.” We put our sharing words and actions into the morphogenetic field for playback, and are automatically lifted to the higher consciousness of “all for one, and one for all.” The aberrations in our relationships and in our society come from the conditioning each of us has experienced in this and/or other lifetimes — not to mention the brainwashing of an upside-down society by the media, the corrupt government, and the powerful, selfish multinationals in their greedy rat race. Positive conditioning, by the right environment, will create a new breed of peaceful, secure, loving beings. The big error is competition, which makes each the enemy of every other, and the backward, ungodly usury money system, which programs people to be in a fearful, getting-for-self consciousness — thus the unnatural fear of lack, and the self-defeating abnormality of judging one another and ourselves, when in truth we are all subject to the perverse collective consciousness, programmed predominantly in duality, which the status-quo communications media perpetuate. This limited consciousness has blocked us from being able to transcend into the knowing of our oneness with the all-knowing, omnipotent, omnipresent Universal Mind, which fills all space in a universe of symbiotic perfection.

To learn more about intentional communities around the world, I recommend you start by reading a few books on the subject, visiting a few communities, and going to the websites below.

Utopian Eco-Village Network Federation: www.uevn.org (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260622033035/http://www.uevn.org/). Comunidad Los Visionarios: www.LosVisionarios.org.