Last Updated on August 5, 2015
Since childhood I have had the memory (or “a vision of the future”, if that’s easier to understand) of people living in relatively small intentional communities. I say small relative to the large cities which have become increasingly the normal way of life in the past few hundred years. We might be looking at anything from a few hundred people through to perhaps 50,000 people. I know that the late mystic referred to as OSHO said that research indicated that 50,000 people was about the limitfor a comminity whereby all the benefits of a large number of people coming togather would be experienced AND people would still have conscious connection to and awareness of one another. I think Sri Aurobindo may have come to a similar number in his vision of spiritual community, but I’d have to look into it to be certain. My vision from childhood was of communities much smaller than 50,000, yet these smaller communities would then be sub-communities of a larger collective. That larger collective may well grow to the order of 50,000 people, or so.
Having lived with this vision/future memory for much of my life, I sometimes ponder on what the significance of such communities might be. The following is a brief exploration of some of what comes to mind.
One obvious and rather significant consequence of living in smaller communities is that people cease living under the vale of anonymity that is such an inherent aspect of life in a large city. Here are the common definitions of anonymous of which I am most specifically referring to the first and third:
Having an unknown or unacknowledged name: an anonymous author.
Having an unknown or withheld authorship or agency: an anonymous letter; an anonymous phone call.
Having no distinctive character or recognition factor.
It is my observation that prolonged collective social anonymity oftentimes leads to people living within a chronic state of animosity. Animosity both toward oneself and other people, either covertly or in more obvious ways. In large city environments where intimate community for the average person is typically lacking it is too easy to live a life devoid of a deep heart-felt sense of love and empathy–empathy for one’s own being, for other people, and for life itself.
Being anonymous within the social fabric of one’s society also tends a person towards a state of chronic self-centredness, which gives rise to a long list of pathological conditions. It is my observation that it is typical for this self-centredness to manifest as either a state of prolonged indulgence in self-pity and various feelings of insignificance, or it may manifest as a state of self-aggrandizement, egotistical behaviour, and narcissism. Both are forms of obsessive and pathological behaviour, specifically we have the behaviour of being self-obsessed and the pathology of being self-destructive. A person may experience both of these states (self-pity and self-aggrandizement), switching between one or the other, or even experiencing them simultaneously. Both have their roots in a distorted sense of self-esteem and a psyche founded on only a partial or limited sense of self-identity. In ancient Hawaiian Huna it is understood that we, Human Beings, are Divine Beings, and that as Divine Beings our only true need is a mirror. The reason we have no needs except this one is that we, by nature, are unconscious of what we are unconscious of.
Put another way, so long as our attention is fixated on the manifest–which is quite normal when our Being is incarnating into a body, as is the case for human beings–we become unconscious of the non-manifest. Our own Divine nature primarily (for now) resides in the non-manifest, until such time as we are fully self-realised. Until that point of self-realisation we are to a greater or lesser degree unconscious of own true nature, and we are unconscious that this is so. Hence a mirror is required. That mirror is provided through the “world” we perceive around us. Most especially through other people, and even more especially through those particular people we attract into our immediate perception and subsequent experience. That mirror arises through relationship, be that our relationship to our self and our own self-image, or relationship to other people, or relationship to life itself and the many aspects of Life.
Simply put, the absence of intimate community within large cities mirrors to us the absence of intimate communion the people in that city have with themselves and their own true nature. When we move away from living an incognito existence, with our true identity veiled by the vast numbers of seemingly random and unassociated people that move through of world, we move away from being dissociated from our own essence. We also move away from living a life of chronic victimhood and not taking full responsibility for our own experience. It is all the more easy to blame someone else (some perhaps equally anonymous “other”) for our painful experience of life when we never really have to intimately connect with, resonate with, and go into deeper relationship with that other. This other can take the form of something ambiguous such as the economy, my childhood, or the government, through to something more explicit such as my neighbour, my brother, or my boss. Whatever the case may be, when Man does not live in a social environment in which collective social intimacy is the norm it becomes very easy, and potentially unavoidable, to live a life based on projecting one’s unconsciousness onto other people, whoever those other people might happen to be from one moment or situation to the next.
In the above situation the mirror life so readily provides us with, ends up only reflecting our unconscious and distorted perceptions of Self. It in fact reflects much more, yet ordinary Man has not the eyes (until awake) to see more. We then can’t help but live life with an unconscious and distorted perception of everyone else aswel. This is the basis of karmic relationship and karmic participation with life. On the other hand, when we live in a community of people where there is a natural degree of intimacy between the various members of that community, projection of our unconsciousness becomes a much less viable solution to avoiding the pain we are harboring and the stories about life which no longer serve us. Simply put, we have to face ourselves. Most especially we are forced to face ourselves in the face of those around us. We each keep ourselves and each other in check. Just as it is difficult for a child to unconsciously cause itself harm (e.g. by lighting matches in its bedroom and burning itself) when a parent or caregiver is regularly and consistently checking in on the child, it is also difficult for people in general to live in harmful and self-centred states when a community of people are regularly and consistently checking in on them through day-to-day conscious social interaction.
As I write this it is becoming apparent that the operative word here is conscious. People within large cities do have degrees of community around them, such as a community of co-workers, a community of fellow students in college, and so forth, but these communities are typically lacking in conscious interaction. Rarely, if at all, do the members of that community expose, let alone life from, their Authentic Self. Typically no member of the community is even conscious of his or her Authentic Self. It remains unconscious and hence the people within that community interact unconsciously, all mirroring the each others’ unconsciousness.
What I referred to as an intentional community in the opening paragraph I could also refer to as a conscious community. I suspect that with the increasing number of people waking up to (or experiencing the emergence of) their own true nature in the world today, we are also going to see an increase in the formation of intimate, conscious, and (I would say) spiritually intentional communities. My own observation is that this is exactly what’s happening. Many of these communities are arising beyond the boarders of the cities, whereby the people establish another way of living and relating that they felt was not possible within the inherent unconsciousness of a city environment. There are, however, many of these communities arising within the confines of existing cities. They are perhaps less obvious to the average observer–with a sprawling city as their backdrop (as opposed to a rural and more natural environment)–although they are just as significant for those concerned, and for humanity as a whole. Examples, both big and small, of such communities are those that form around particular spiritual teachers, yoga centers, permaculture-based urban garden projects, religious affiliations (those of a more progressive and less unconscious kind), alternative schools, artistic communities, and so forth.
It is through conscious communities, particularly those of a kind that encourage their members into great awareness of and participation with Nature (that of the Earth and Man’s true nature), that the emergence of global spiritual awakening and collective- and self-responsibility is occurring today in a very powerful way.
What are the ways in which you are creating greater conscious community in your world?
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