Imagine a World, more on the fall of the Empire

Imagine waking up with your loved ones and walking outside to gardens between your home and other's homes.   Picking your breakfast of berries right off the bush in front of your house and walking  a few blocks to the a collective workshop where you do the work you most love to do in the world for as long as you feel like doing it.  Once done, you join friends and family in the gardens, singing, playing, and eating your fill of food.  Later you go off to another workshop where you do different work, or you teach a group of children how to restore a building, or empty compost, or make dinner for your household...all in a place that once was considered concrete jungle.

I believe in this vision, of people living in harmony with one another and the earth, while living from their passions, getting their needs met and doing the healing work that it takes on a personal level as well as a global level to live this vision.  I've spent the last twelve years studying intentional communities (ICs), living in numerous ICs for up to two years at time, visiting others (upwards of 60 I'd guess), doing a lot of communication and personal liberation work and facilitation of others in intentional communities and networks of like minded people, like Network for New Culture and Morehouse in the Philly area. What I've noticed is that for people to live lives of radical resource sharing and move beyond using money (which is in my opinion the only way we can get through what is happening on the planet and thrive physically) we have to  be able to get along.  Not only are the practical skills of gardening, building sustainable buildings, raising animals, and various other physical survival and thrive-al skills and talents needed, but we have got to learn to cooperate. 

How many ICs have failed because the people involved couldn't get along, couldn't find a win-win for everyone involved?  Its in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. I can't count the number of people who when I have told them about ICs say something like "Its a great idea, but I can't live that closely with other people, I need my space."  I think the answer is doing the personal liberation work to unpack the trauma and  repression that this society has heaped on us.  The best book I've read to date on this topic is Chellis Glendinning's, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization.  http://www.newsociety.com/Books/M/My-Name-is-Chellis-and-I-m-in-Recovery-from-Western-Civilization

Not only do we personally need to do this work, but to provide places in our communities and movements to do the work and hold the space for others.  For ICs, the best process I've seen for holding everyone in love while unpacking what is going on under the surface is the ZEGG Forum.  http://www.zegg-forum.org/what-is-zegg-forum.phtml.  ZEGG is an experimental community in Germany that found that when trying to do consensus, emotions would get in the way of coming to solutions that worked for everyone.  How many times have you seen this, one person controlling the process, most likely because of some childhood wound than anything actually going on in the group.  ZEGG found that when emotions came up in their consensus process, they could get through with more clarity and unity if they addressed the underlying issues first.  They stop the logistics meetings and do a Forum to bring transparency to the issues.  Once people are settled back into a space of love and unity, the deck is clear so to speak, they go on with decision making.  This takes longer in some ways, but its much much shorter to deal directly with what is happening with people's emotions, than spending years in meetings trying to avoid the elephants in the room.

This does two things, it clears the deck, but it also brings to light the shadows at play in the people involved, which helps to create more intimacy and trust while sometimes healing people's personal traumas.  To be clear, ZEGG forum isn't meant for healing people, but when shadow comes to light, integration happens.  I think there are better processes for doing the deep trauma release work, groups like Shalom Mountain have a process they do in their retreats, I used the clearing process from Mankind project to get in touch with a lot of my shadow, there  is Heart  of Now, Revaluation Counseling, and a multitude of other ways to do the more intense work.

Becoming personally liberated makes us easier to get along with and to get along with others, needing less space, which in turn means needing less stuff.  Imagine a world where people spend their free time enjoying other people instead of the TV, drinking, buying stuff, playing with the stuff they just bought, over eating, etc.  Right now for most Americans, though lonely, the thought of sharing themselves intimately with more than a handful of people (if any) creates so much anxiety and pain, they would rather go home and sit in front of the TV  or computer than do anything else.  The revolution is happening, its happening in the groups of people brave enough to try to get along with others, trying to cooperate, trying to find a way to love one another.  Anyone doing this work is supporting the vision of sustainability on this planet, because without learning to love one another, we can't have peace and share resources on the level that needs to happen to create true sustainability on the planet.