I'm aware, but not too familiar. I think we need to be creating communities right here as well.

One thing about Auroville, I don't believe there is going to be any mass flocking to intentioned communities as long as they basically tell you what to do, and my impression is Auroville does. Also any group that doesn't confront usury, capitalism, and overpopulation and extravagant living is dodging the real issues. Just my opinion.

Join others dedicated to the cause of peace in a plan to live in a LARGE, rural, largely self sufficient, humanistic, communitarian socialistic cooperative: non income sharing. A VERY different plan www.abundancethroughsharing.org

Greetings Chris

I wondered if you were familiar with the community of Auroville ????

http://www.auroville.org/av_brief.htm

It has a very interesting history and dynamic.

The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity – in diversity. Today Auroville is recognised as the first and only internationally endorsed ongoing experiment in human unity and transformation of consciousness, also concerned with - and practically researching into - sustainable living and the future cultural, environmental, social and spiritual needs of mankind.

a warm smile

silent lotus

" May your voice be loving enough to silence your own fears." ..... silent lotus
www.silentlotus.net

You don't think I'm going to let you off the hook that easy do you? HA! Actually I'm glad you said what you did, you would not be the only one to miss what was there. I've since gone back and bolded, noted, and put in an arrow to item no. 3 in the
important details list. First members do not absolutely have to share a room and number two, people can build and own whatever they want as it relates to vocation or avocation and even sell it if they leave.

I may be wrong, but I think this very act of surviving individually as we do, is actually contributing to "what is".

Join others dedicated to the cause of peace in a plan to live in a LARGE, rural, largely self sufficient, humanistic, communitarian socialistic cooperative: non income sharing. A VERY different plan www.abundancethroughsharing.org

I agree with what you are saying however to be most powerful I think it needs to be backed up with how we live. And to me that means communally m cooperatively in some fashion or another with those who share our most important beliefs. In other words, capitalism is simply not compassionate. Note that I am not advocating communism
or even state run socialism, per se.

Join others dedicated to the cause of peace in a plan to live in a LARGE, rural, largely self sufficient, humanistic, communitarian socialistic cooperative: non income sharing. A VERY different plan www.abundancethroughsharing.org

OK all the other tactics help, but compassion will naturally bring peace. Complete compassion for all of life. Humans, animals, and all of nature. Never let a life-form suffer or be cold or hungry. Then we will have peace. It has been said that in eternity we are all a part of one family.

The world will be healed when people begin to think in these terms: "Your pain is my pain"
God bless you and all whom you love
Tokashoni

One reason why it may be so hard to visualize getting there is that there are sooooo many people with different views involved. There are soooo many people doing so many different things to get there. One group focuses on the fiat money and debt relief, another group focuses on clean water...and so on. Whether we are aware of it or not, all aspects of creating new and better for our lives and blessed Mother Earth are already in action in some form, just like your proposed community ideas.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete" ~Buckminister Fuller

If we each focus on what excites us and join like minded people we will make it through these wild and abrupt changes more efficiently. Each individual act builds like bricks on a building, one at a time and in strength!

Your web site has wonderful ideas! Keep going! I, myself could not live in just one room! I am an artist and like space and privacy for my work! LOL But a community garden! AHHHHH bliss to me and I would be out there daily!!!!! Yea babe!
Thank you, Chris!

hey*Chris,

Yes i*have seen your proposal, and yes it will work for many and in my*view it is now in the first developing stages, which are mind*set for those interested, i*have seen this direction growing in the populace of the USA and the world for some time now, it will come into being as more of the individual ways of accumulating and spending wealth fail to support the family structure of living life and especially a reasonable and graceful structure of dying.

This will place a demand on groups to band together to care for the needs of their community, one affect you will see in the very near future is collective estate type complexes which build up around the huge Super houses being built now, these will be seen as communities which support each other, made up of family and friends, it is already happening on an individual basis, and will grow into areas of collective control as more restrictions are place on the individual home owner.

Gated communities are actually a first step in developing this process, they are of course generally done for all the wrong reasons but what*is important in the long term is that they are setting a condition which will allow the appropriate mind set to evolve into the structure which they create, its a matter of death and world conditions to place those with the willingness to change into the positions to do so.

If one talks to many middle aged persons, they will find a huge consensus for the idea of family and friends to band together with their wealth into an area that shares their ideals and hopes for the future, as the world warms and nature demands the respect due her that reality will have to become part of our reality. And of course the youth of today are more connected to their peer groups and friends then they are family, this will and is bringing many of them into a collective mind set of supporting the greater good.

my personal focus is upon moving the greater whole toward the creation of the greater good, as there are many paths for this to take i*see my contribution at this stage to help in the development of the mind*set, for this must become a global reality before any major accomplishments will go forward on a large scale that involves both people and government, of course the actions you desire are part of setting the stage for plans to evolve, as people like to see results before committing themselves to new ideas.

i*tend to state the “what*is” very well in order to nudge the What*If into a more prominent state of being, as we already know enough about the what*will be from past and present experience.

BL*M

I basically agree with you, I just can't envision how we would get there, hence the specific intentional community proposal.

Join others dedicated to the cause of peace in a plan to live in a LARGE, rural, largely self sufficient, humanistic, communitarian socialistic cooperative: non income sharing. A VERY different plan www.abundancethroughsharing.org

In all of this discussion, there is much truth and observation.

I feel the earth CAN support all its present population. If you look at the United States, the shore lines and cities are the most populated. There are so many wide open spaces for people to live, if the idea was not to live in condensed areas. If people worked more locally for most all their food needs, through back yard organic gardens or organic community gardens, there would be more than enough. The same with managing water resources. For this to work, the community must want it to work.

Our present style of a few producing for the many is out of balance, as discussed above. How much of our money for food actually goes into shipping, preserving, and refrigeration? How much goes to middle men?

When we restrict our food sources to the few and far away, we also restrict our own ability to provide for ourselves, inexpensively, and it forces us to create other jobs to fill in the need for moneys to pay for overprice shipped stale food. The spiral goes up out of control.

An example; when we sometimes view China, and their shipping to us all this small plastic stuff, we can see this very thought it action. We really do not need all that plastic stuff (hamberger toys, suvenirs!) yet for fair trade we engage this. And then we complain about it and look at the plastic in our landfills.... China's main need is food sources from others and if they were to work on their basic local supply of food, and sustainable farming, they would not need so much of our foriegn trade....visa versa!

This is the major contributing concept to our unsustainable world is that EVERYONE must work! Everyone must have a job, a career, that makes money. This produces such overcomsumption and a push for people to have to buy so that someone has a wage! When I hear the news about adjusting some business for the greater good (like polution control, etc.), it tends to fail for the "loss of jobs & wages" become more of the focus!

Also there has been an increase in taxation on all afronts, some are little tiny taxes, always taking one cent or two cents, but every where we turn, some tax is chipping off a piece for their cause. This accumalative causes great stress to the wage-earner and household. No matter where we turn it is already too deep and getting deeper. This creates the enslavement we are now experiencing.

Time to jump forward, produce more & most locally, reduce personal overhead through realistic home prices, rents, and simpler financing of civic services.

Why is it that when you get through "buying" your home ...you paid three times the cost (if financed) This ugly truth creates the escolating home prices so someone can make a small gain in their investment. Otherwise there would be little price escolation. Why should there be? Mother Earth never charges rent, or morgages, humans do...with free land!

To reduce the worlds consumption, we must look at why we choose to support everyone having to have a "job"!

Time to jump forward in big steps to change our view of our style of life, from the job perspective, first. We could very well live in the lap of luxury if we skip trying to fix the small pieces of the puzzle that only contribute to the same fear of "not enough", wages, mini taxes from many sources. Many of these could be supported through community envolvement!

Jobs tend to take most of our day away, we come home to eat and rest, then go to bed. We have little time to talk with others, or to participte in community building (like gardens, or building playgrounds for children, etc) that gives us pride. Giving up our life for a job also alienates us to meeting our "strange and unique" neighbors! So when we rest at home watching TV, they can feed us any illusion about "terror", "horror", etc that they want. This broadcast also gives the stagnant ideas of like kind.

If we had a 2 hour a day job that paid our bills, then a community committment of a few hours to build community interest, the changes would be sustantial and sustainable. We would be meeting people, interacting, finding pride in our share of the work. We would not need so many taxes and people would replace the need, with their community actions.

To Jump Forward will create chaos at first and collapse huge messy corporations that produce little that we really need. Yet the outcome would make us all happier. We could then manage our resources with enough for all.

I would add a stronger word about this problem to Chris's reply. Sustainable organic methods CAN meet our food requirements - but not at the current population level. Estimates I've seen indicate that, in order to sustain our current population, up to 80% of our population will have to be engaged in providing food, either by growing it, preserving it, or preparing it, and we all know THAT's not going to happen!

Even more important than food, though, is potable water. First, we abdicated our responsibility to provide for our need for water by paying people to put it in pipes and deliver it to our homes, and then take away the used water. Now that those who would privatize water have a vested (read: financial) interest in maintaining the necessity of finding, "purifying," and storing our drinking water, and "managing" waste water, peace is the LAST thing they want! They are much more interested in the safety of their profit privilege, and the hoarding that results is the least gruesome symptom of this mass paranoia.

Water is a gift from the Mother, and in theory, there is abundant water for all. But the notion of ownership along with overpopulation give rise to limitations on the availability of resources and sustain the status quo.

Editor, propeace.net

Bruce,

I think you state the "what is" very well. However don't we have to at least have a starting point or idea of what the other would look like? Have your looked at our website proposal ? I'm not staying it is right for everyone, but might it not be an answer for some of us?

Chris

Join others dedicated to the cause of peace in a plan to live in a LARGE, rural, largely self sufficient, humanistic, communitarian socialistic cooperative: non income sharing. A VERY different plan www.abundancethroughsharing.org

The current global system functions under a specific set of underlying principles, which support the ills of social degradation, and without these principles it is feared the system would collapse.

The over all condition of doing business as usual is one of a perpetual R.A.I.D.

Most economical, political and business related activity no matter how well intentioned, fundamentally relies on the R.ape, A.buse, I.ndecency and Destruction of resources, individuals and groups to succeed.

The American Dream is in fact a grand illusion based upon the oppression of the many to support the grand delusion that the 80% of have not's will some how be able to one day R.A.I.D. the 19% of the have’s in order to join the 1% of the elite R.A.I.D.E.R.S. in their life style of R.ape, A.buse, I.ndecency and D.estruction of E.luding R.ational S.crutiny.

It is a system design to succeed upon the continual struggle and failure of the under class of people who support it.

Planned Obsolenscence of Global Human and Planetary Potential.

A conflict and violence based economy of thought and preparation for the future conflicts to come, which are solely created, supported and supplied by the system which designs them.

* * *
Solution: Simply base all action and reaction on the creation and distribution of Unity, Strength, and Peaceful Change, guided by the people it directly affects.

©Bruce Larson*Moore

12+13=Peace on Earth

Those are really interesting facts you share, thank you. And yes, the clouds are gathering it appears.

As for organic agriculture meeting our needs, you might be right, but I still feel we must try, we must head in that direction.

As for the land grab, yes it is on as you say, but that is why I would argue we must create communes of the type we propose. They could be Christian or Pagan or have any other focus or rallying point, but we must provide a means for us to survive and survive well on very little money.

www.abundancethroughsharing.org

You are correct. However, modern farming methods are dependent on fossil fuels and natural gas, and are rapidly depleting the soils, killing the microorganisms which produce nitrogen. But sustainable organic methods cannot meet the world poulation's food requiremments, aven if we had the will and acted with foresight. 40% of American produce is imported, mostly from South America, which employs vast farms using the same destructive methods, and chemicals banned in this country to boot (Dow has to sell their crap somewhere).
On the domestic side, 90% of America's vegetables, and 50% of its fruit, are grown in California and Arizona. Trucking veggies 4,000 miles to the East Coast is fine with cheap oil, but when prices (inevitably) sky-rocket, we will not quickly return the Northeast to tillable farmland -- it has been converted to the "higher" (for the free market) use of single-family residences. We have abandones the values of our forebears, of balance, frugality and respect, for a false faith in government, corporations and technology. Americans debate global warming because they do not want to be accountable for their 3.2 cars per family gluttony. We waste food, treat it as cheap.

The lost values which you recount are what we Christians call "sin." The growing realization of our collective failure will not lead to an abolition of land ownership, but a bloody rush to grab for self -- thus the bogus pretense for the Iraq War, which is really about a military-industrial presence in the gulf for American greed-meisters. The reality is ugly, but like global warming and unsustainable debt, the truth will rudely interpose itself into our nation's cognitive dissonance.

well said Chris, much of what you write about and perhaps are seeking, is now taking place in China, on the surface it seems to be following the western lead, but this is only a temporary illusion, which will serve its purpose well, the west has little concept of how and why eastern culture deals with change, and may well be very surprised when they finally see the results of what is now taking place.

Those who turn a blind eye to the creation of World*Peace, are blinding themselves and others to the single sustainable solution to all the ills of society, for without peace everything one may accomplish is nothing more than a very expensive Band-Aid.

Peace is The*Way Forward, thus more peace is the solution.

BL*M