2020-02-26 - The Different Drum by M. Scott Peck ================================================ The Different Drum by M. Scott Peck =================================== Introduction ============ In and through community lies the salvation of the world. Nothing is more important. Yet it is virtually impossible to describe community meaningfully to someone who has never experienced it--and most of us have never had an experience of true community. The problem is analogous to an attempt to describe the taste of artichokes to someone who has never eaten one. I am dubious, however, as to how far we can move toward global community--which is the only way to achieve international peace--until we learn the basic principles of community in our own individual lives and personal spheres of influence. Community neither comes naturally nor is it purchased cheaply. Demanding rules must both be learned and followed. But there are rules! Chapter 1, Stumbling into community =================================== The word "radical" comes from the Latin radix, meaning "root"--the same word from which we get "radish." The proper radical is one who tries to get to the root of things, not to be distracted by superficials, to see the woods for the trees. It is good to be a radical. Anyone who thinks DEEPLY will be one. In the dictionary the closest synonym to "radical" is "fundamentalist." Which only makes sense. Someone who gets down to the root of things is someone who gets down to the fundamentals. Yet in our North American culture these words have come to have opposite meanings... While on one hand we bandy about the word "community" in such a shallow, meaningless way, many of us simultaneously long for the "good old days" when frontier neighbors gathered together to build one another's barns. [Or for the archaic revival of tribal lifestyles.] We mourn the LOSS of community. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through our young United States, and in 1835 he published what is still considered the classical work on the American character. In his Democracy in America, he described those "habits of the heart," or mores, that gave citizens of the United States a unique new culture. The one characteristic that impressed him most was our individualism. De Tocqueville admired this character trait immensely. He very clearly warned, however, that unless our individualism was continually and strongly balanced by other habits, it would inevitably lead to fragmentation of American society and social isolation of its citizens. ----- Simply seek happiness, and you are not likely to find it. Seek to create and love without regard for your happiness, and you will likely be happy much of the time. Seeking joy in and of itself will not bring it to you. Do the work of creating community, and you will obtain it--although never exactly according to your schedule. Joy is an uncapturable yet utterly predictable side effect of genuine community. Chapter 2, Individuals and the fallacy of rugged individualism ============================================================== Christian theologians have reached a well-nigh universal conclusion: God loves variety. ... we never truly learn to think for ourselves or dare to be out of step with the stereotypes. But in light of all we understand, this failure to individuate is a failure to grow up and become fully human. For we are called to be individuals. We are called to be unique and different. We are also called to power. In this individuation process we must learn how to take responsibility for ourselves. We need to develop a sense of autonomy and self-determination. Furthermore, we are called to wholeness. We should use what gifts or talents we are given to develop ourselves as fully as possible. ... If we are to grow, we must work on the weak spots that prevent growth. We are beckoned toward that self-sufficiency, that wholeness required for independence of thought and action. But all this is only one side of the story. ... the reality is that we can never be completely whole in and of ourselves. We cannot be all things to ourselves and to others. We cannot be perfect. ... the reality is that there is a point beyond which our sense of self-determination not only becomes inaccurate and prideful but increasingly self-defeating. Yet the reality is that we are inevitably social creatures who desperately need each other not merely for sustenance, not merely for company, but for any meaning to our lives whatsoever. These, then, are the paradoxical seeds from which community can grow. So we are called to wholeness and simultaneously to recognition of our incompleteness; called to power AND to acknowledge our weakness; called to both individuation AND interdependence. Thus the problem--indeed, the total failure--of the "ethic" of rugged individualism is that it runs with only one side of the paradox, incorporates only half of our humanity. It recognizes that we are called to individuation, power, and wholeness. But it denies entirely the other part of the human story: that we can never fully get there and that we are, of necessity in our uniqueness, weak and imperfect creatures who need each other. This denial can be sustained only by pretense. Because we cannot ever be totally adequate, self-sufficient, independent beings, the ideal of rugged individualism encourages us to fake it. It encourages us to hide our weaknesses and failures. It teaches us to be utterly ashamed of our limitations. It drives us to attempt to be superwomen and supermen not only in the eyes of others but also in our own. It pushes us day in and day out to look as if we "had it all together," as if we were without needs and in total control of our lives. It relentlessly demands that we keep up appearances. It also relentlessly isolates us from each other. And it makes genuine community impossible. Trapped in our tradition of rugged individualism, we are an extraordinarily lonely people. So lonely, in fact, that many cannot even acknowledge their loneliness to themselves, much less to others. Look at the sad, frozen faces all around you and search in vain for the souls hidden behind masks of makeup, masks of pretense, masks of composure. ... We are desperately in need of a new ethic of "soft individualism," an understanding of individualism which teaches that we cannot be truly ourselves until we are able to share freely the things we most have in common: our weaknesses, our incompleteness, our imperfection, our inadequacy, our sins, our lack of wholeness and self-sufficiency. ... It is the kind of individualism that acknowledges our interdependence not merely in the intellectual catchwords of the day but in the very depths of our hearts. It is the kind of individualism that makes real community possible. Chapter 3, The true meaning of community ======================================== If we are going to use the word meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own." We can define or adequately explain only those things that are smaller than we are. ... And there are certain questions about electricity, despite its known physical laws, that even the most advanced electrical engineer cannot answer. That is because electricity is something larger than we are. [But part of us, our nervous system, utilizes electricity. That would seem to make electricity a sub-set of what we are.] There are many such "things": God, goodness, love, evil, death, consciousness, for instance. Being so large, they are many-faceted, and the best we can do is describe or define one facet at a time. Even so, we never seem quite able to plumb their depths fully. Sooner or later we inevitably run into a core of mystery. Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. The facets of community are interconnected, profoundly interrelated. No one could exist without the other. They create each other, make each other possible. What follows, then, is but one scheme for isolating and naming the most salient characteristics of a true community. * Inclusivity, commitment, and consensus * Realism * Contemplation * A safe place * A laboratory for personal disarmament * A group that can fight gracefully * A group of all leaders * A spirit Inclusivity, commitment, and consensus -------------------------------------- The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Inclusiveness is not an absolute. Long-term communities must invariably struggle over the degree to which they are going to be inclusive. ... Communities do not ask "How can we justify taking this person in?" Instead the question is "It it at all justifiable to keep this person out?" Commitment--the willingness to coexist--is crucial. ... Exclusivity appears in two forms: excluding others and excluding yourself. If you conclude under your breath, "Well, this group just isn't for me--they're too much this or too much that--and I'm just going to quietly pick up my marbles and go home," it would be as destructive to community as it would be to a marriage... Community, like marriage, requires that we hang in there when the going gets a little rough. ... Our individualism must be counterbalanced by commitment. Decisions in genuine community are arrived at through consensus, in a process that is not unlike a community of jurors, for whom consensual decision making is mandated. Realism ------- We are accustomed to think of group behavior as often primitive. "Mob psychology" is properly a vernacular expression. There is, in fact, more than a quantum leap between an ordinary group and a community; they are entirely different phenomena. And a real community is, by definition, immune to mob psychology because of its encouragement of individuality, its inclusion of a variety of points of view. Mob psychology cannot occur in an environment in which individuals are free to speak their minds and buck the trend. An important aspect of the realism of community deserves mention: humility. While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the "soft" individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each others' gifts, and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness others share their brokenness, and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection. Be fully aware of human variety, and you will recognize the interdependence of humanity. As a group of people do these things--as they become a community--they become more and more humble, not only as individuals but also as a group--and hence more realistic. From which kind of group would you expect a wise, realistic decision: an arrogant one, or a humble one? Contemplation ------------- Among the reasons that a community is humble and hence realistic is that it is contemplative. It examines itself. It is self-aware. "Know thyself" is a sure rule for humility. The spirit of community once achieved is not then something forever obtained. It is not something that can be bottled or preserved in aspic. It is repeatedly lost. No community can expect to be in perpetual good health. What a genuine community does do, however, because it is a contemplative body, is recognize its ill health when it occurs and quickly take appropriate action to heal itself. A safe place ------------ Once a group has achieved community, the single most common thing members express is: "I feel safe here." It is a rare feeling. Almost all of us have spent nearly all of our lives feeling only partially safe, if at all. Seldom, if ever, in any kind of group, have we felt wholly accepted and acceptable. So another of the characteristics of community is that it is healing and converting. Yet I have deliberately not listed that characteristic by itself, lest the subtlety of it be misunderstood. For the fact is that most of our human attempts to heal and convert prevent community. Human beings have within them a natural yearning and thrust toward health and wholeness and holiness. (All three words are derived from the same root.) ... But put a human being in a truly safe place, where those defenses and resistances are no longer necessary, and the thrust toward health is liberated. When we are safe, there is a natural tendency for us to heal and convert ourselves. Experienced psychotherapists usually come to recognize this truth. ... With experience, however, they realize that they do not have the power to heal. But they also learn that it is within their power to listen to the patient, to accept her or him, to establish a "therapeutic relationship." So they focus not so much on healing as on making their relationship a safe place where the patient is likely to heal themself. A laboratory for personal disarmament ------------------------------------- Vulnerability is a two-way street. Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the capacity to be affected by the wounds of others, to be wounded by their wounds. [A laboratory can be defined as a place designed to be safe for experiments.] So it is in community: it is a safe place to experiment with new types of behavior. An experiment is designed to give us new EXPERIENCE from which we can extract new wisdom. So it is that in experimenting with personally disarming themselves, the members of a true community experientially discover the rules of peacemaking and learn its virtues. It is a personal experience so powerful that it can become the driving force behind the quest for peace on a global scale. A group that can fight gracefully --------------------------------- In genuine community there are no sides. It is not always easy, but by the time they reach community the members have learned how to give up cliques and factions. They have learned how to listen to each other and how not to reject each other. Sometimes consensus in community is reached with miraculous rapidity. But at other times it is arrived at only after lengthy struggle. Just because it is a safe place does not mean community is a place without conflict. It is, however, a place where conflict can be resolved without physical or emotional bloodshed and with wisdom as well as grace. A community is a group that can fight gracefully. That this is so is hardly accidental. For community is an amphitheater where the gladiators have laid down their weapons and their armor, where they have become skilled at listening and understanding, where they respect each others' gifts and accept each others' limitations, where they celebrate their differences and bind each others' wounds, where they are committed to a struggling together rather than against each other. It is a most unusual battleground indeed. But that is also why it is an unusually effective ground for conflict resolution. ... there is a fantasy abroad. Simply stated, it goes like this: "If we can resolve our conflicts, then someday we shall be able to live together in community." Could it be that we have it totally backward? And the real dream should be: "If we can live together in community, then someday we shall be able to resolve our conflicts"? A group of all leaders ---------------------- Communities have sometimes been referred to as leaderless groups. It is more accurate, however, to say that a community is a group of all leaders. Because it is a safe place, compulsive leaders feel free in community--often for the first time in their lives--to NOT lead. And the customarily shy and reserved feel free to step forth with their latent gifts of leadership. The result is that a community is an ideal decision-making body. The expression "A camel is a horse created by a committee" does not mean that group decisions are inevitable clumsy and imperfect; it does mean that committees are virtually never communities. The flow of leadership in community is routine. It is a phenomenon that has profound implications for anyone who would seek to improve organizational decision making--in business, government, or elsewhere. But it is not a quick trick or fix. Community must be built first. Traditional hierarchical patterns have to be at least temporarily set aside. Some kind of control must be relinquished. A spirit -------- Competitiveness is always exclusive; genuine community is inclusive. If community has enemies, it has begun to lose the spirit of community--if it ever had it in the first place. The spirit of true community is the spirit of peace. Nor will one question that it is a spirit of peace that prevails when a group enters community. An utterly new quietness descends on the group. People seem to speak more quietly; yet, strangely, their voices seem to carry better through the room. There are periods of silence, but it is never an uneasy silence. Indeed, the silence is welcomed. It feels tranquil. Nothing is frantic anymore. The chaos is over. It is as if noise had been replaced by music. The people listen and can hear. It is peaceful. The "atmosphere" of love and peace is so palpable that almost every community member experiences it as a spirit. Hence, even the agnostic and atheist members will generally report a community-building workshop as a spiritual experience. The wisdom of a true community often seems miraculous. This wisdom can perhaps be explained in purely secular terms as a result of the freedom of expression, the pluralistic talents, the consensual decision making that occur in community. There are times, however, when this wisdom seems to my religious eye to be more a matter of divine spirit and possible divine intervention. This is one of the reasons why the feeling of joy is such a frequent concomitant of the spirit of community. The members feel that they have been temporarily--at least partially--transported out of the mundane world of ordinary preoccupations. For the moment it as if heaven and earth had somehow met. Chapter 4, The genesis of community =================================== Crisis and community -------------------- Genuine communities of a sort frequently develop in response to crisis. Strangers in the waiting room of an intensive-care ward suddenly come to share each other's hopes and fears and joys and griefs as their loved ones lie across the hall on the "critical list." On a larger scale, in the course of a minute a distant earthquake causes buildings to crumble and crush thousands of people to death in Mexico City. Suddenly rich and poor alike are working together night and day to rescue the injured and care for the homeless. Meanwhile men and women of all nations open their pocketbooks and their hearts to a people they have never seen, much less met, in a sudden consciousness of our common humanity. The problem is that once the crisis is over, so--virtually always--is the community. The collective spirit goes out of the people as they return to their ordinary individual lives, and community is lost. There is a dreadful form of psychiatric disorder that compels its victims to lead destructively histrionic lives. The far more common curse, however, is for us human beings to fail to live our lives with a proper sense of drama. Here those people with an active religious bent have another advantage. Secular people have plain ups and downs in their lives, while we religious get to have "spiritual crises." It is much more dignified, or so it would seem, to have a spiritual crisis than a depression. It is also often the more appropriate way of looking at things. But, in fact, all psychological problems can be seen as crises of the human spirit. In my practice of psychotherapy, more often than not I have to work quite hard to teach people a sense of their own importance and dramatic significance. We do not have to manufacture crises in our lives; we have merely to recognize that they exist. [Or...] We can keep pretending that this is not so. We can continue refusing to face the crisis until the day when we individually and collectively destroy ourselves and our planet. We can avoid community until the end. Or we can wake up to the drama of our lives and begin to take the steps necessary to save them. Community by design ------------------- I began to conduct "community-building workshops" with frequency. I have been able to reach a number of conclusions with such a degree of certainty that I know them to be facts. The most basic are these: * The process by which a group of human beings becomes a community is a lawful process. Whenever a group functions in accord with certain quite clear laws or rules it will become a genuine community. * The words "communicate" and "community," although verb and noun, come from the same root. The principles of good communication are the basic principles of community-building. And because people do not naturally know how to communicate, because humans have not yet learned how to talk with each other, they remain ignorant of the laws or rules of genuine community. * In certain situations people may unconsciously stumble onto the rules of communication or community. That is what occurred in the communities I have already described. Since the process is unconscious, however, people do not consciously learn these rules as a result and therefore immediately forget how to practice them. * The rules of communication and community building can be simply taught and learned with relative ease. This conscious learning allows people to remember the rules and practice them at a later date. * Learning can be passive or experiential. Experiential learning is more demanding but infinitely more effective. As with other things, the rules of communication and community are best learned experientially. * The vast majority of people are capable of learning the rules of communication and community-building and are willing to follow them. In other words, if they know what they are doing, virtually any group of people can form themselves into a genuine community. Chapter 5, Stages of community making ===================================== Communities, like individuals, are unique. Still we all share the human condition. So it is that groups assembled deliberately to form themselves into community routinely go through certain stages in the process. These stages, in order, are: * Pseudocommunity -- Forming * Chaos -- Storming * Emptiness -- Norming * Community -- Performing I do not insist that community development occur by formula. But in the process of community-making by design, this is the natural, usual order of things. Pseudocommunity --------------- The first response of a group seeking to form a community is most often to try to fake it. The members attempt to be an instant community by being extremely pleasant with one another and avoiding all disagreement. This attempt--this pretense of community-is what I term "pseudocommunity." It never works. The essential dynamic of pseudocommunity is conflict-avoidance. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding, true community is conflict-resolving. What is diagnostic of pseudocommunity is the minimization, the lack of acknowledgment, or the ignoring of individual differences. Another characteristic of pseudocommunity is that the members will let one another get away with such blanket statements. ... To avoid the risk of conflict they keep their feelings to themselves and even nod in agreement, as if a speaker has uttered some universal truth. Indeed, the pressure to skirt any kind of disagreement may be so great that even the very experienced communicators in the group--who know perfectly well that speaking in generalities is destructive to genuine communication--may be inhibited from challenging what they know is wrong. [To nip pseudocommunity in the bud] Often all that is required is to challenge the platitudes or generalizations. Once individual differences are not only allowed but encouraged to surface in some such way, the group almost immediately moves to the second stage of community development: chaos. Chaos ----- The chaos always centers around well-intentioned but misguided attempts to heal and convert. Chaos is not just a state, it is an essential part of the process of community building. Consequently, unlike pseudocommunity, it does not simply go away as soon as the group becomes aware of it. In the stage of chaos individual differences are, unlike those in pseudocommunity, right out in the open. Only now, instead of trying to hide or ignore them, the group is attempting to obliterate them. The stage of chaos is a time of fighting and struggle. But that is not its essence. Frequently, fully developed communities will be required to fight and struggle. Only they have learned to do so effectively. The struggle during chaos is chaotic. It is not merely noisy, it is uncreative, unconstructive. If anything, chaos, like pseudocommunity, is boring, as members continually swat at each other to little or no effect. The struggle is going nowhere, accomplishing nothing. It is no fun. Since chaos is unpleasant, it is common for the members of a group in this stage to attack not only each other but also their leader. "We wouldn't be squabbling like this if we had effective leadership," they will say. "We deserve more direction than you've been giving us..." In response to the perceived vacuum of leadership during the chaotic stage of community development, it is common for one or more members of the group to attempt to replace the designated leader. The problem with the emergence of such "secondary leaders" is not their emergence but their proposed solutions. What they are proposing, one way or another, is virtually always an "escape into organization." It is true that organizing is a solution to chaos. Indeed, that is the primary reason for organization: to minimize chaos. The trouble is, however, that organization and community are also incompatible. I am not an anarchist. But an organization is able to nurture a measure of community within itself only to the extent that it is willing to risk or tolerate a certain lack of structure. As long as the goal is community-building, organization as an attempted solution to chaos is an unworkable solution. The proper resolution of chaos is not easy. Emptiness --------- "There are only two ways out of chaos," I will explain to a group after it has spent a sufficient period of time squabbling and getting nowhere. "One is into organization--but organization is never community. The only other way is into and through emptiness." It is no accident that groups are not generally eager to pick up on my suggestion of emptiness. People are smart, and often in the dimmer recesses of their consciousness they know more than they want to know. As soon as I mention "emptiness," they have a presentiment of what is to come. And they are in no hurry to accept it. When the members of a group finally ask me to explain what I mean by emptiness, I tell them simply that they need to empty themselves of barriers to communication. And I am able to use their behavior during chaos to point out to them specific things--feelings, assumptions, ideas, and motives--that have so filled their minds as to make them impervious as billiard balls. The process of emptying themselves of these barriers is the key to the transition from "rugged" to "soft" individualism. The most common barriers are: * Expectations and Preconceptions * Prejudice * Ideology, Theology, and Solutions * The Need to Heal, Convert, Fix, or Solve * The Need to Control Expectations and Preconceptions ------------------------------- Community-building is an adventure, a going into the unknown. People are routinely terrified of the emptiness of the unknown. Consequently they fill their minds with generally false expectations of what the experience will be like. In fact, we humans seldom go into any situation without preconceptions. We then try to make the experience conform to our expectations. Occasionally this is useful behavior, but usually (and always in regard to community-building) it is destructive. Prejudices ---------- Prejudice, which is probably more often unconscious than conscious, comes in two forms. One is the judgments we make about people without any experience of them whatsoever... Even more common are the judgments we make about people on the basis of very brief, limited experience. One reason to distrust instant community is that community-building requires time--the time to have sufficient experience to become conscious of our prejudices and then to empty ourselves of them. Ideology, Theology, and Solutions --------------------------------- It is not only such ideological and theological rigidities that we need to discard, it is any idea that assumes the status of "the one and only right way." In speaking of this emptying process, however, I do not mean to imply we should utterly forsake our sometimes hard-won sentiments and understandings. A community-building workshop in Virginia several years ago offered an example of the distinction between emptying and obliteration. The group was the most dedicated band of converters I have ever encountered. Everyone wanted to talk about God; everyone had a different idea of God; and everyone was certain she or he knew exactly who God was. It didn't take us long to get into chaos of magnificent proportions. But thirty-six hours later, after the group had made its miraculous transition from chaos to community, I told them, "It's fascinating. Today you are still talking just as much about God as you were yesterday. In that respect you haven't changed. What has happened, however, is the way in which you talk. Yesterday each of you was talking as if you had God in your back pocket. Today you are all talking about God with humility and a sense of humor." The Need to Heal, Convert, Fix, or Solve ---------------------------------------- During the stage of chaos, when the members of a group attempt to heal or convert each other, they believe they are being loving. And they are truly surprised by the chaos that results. After all, isn't it the loving thing to do to relieve your neighbor of her suffering or help him to see the light? Actually, however, almost all these attempts to convert and heal are not only naive and ineffective but quite self-centered and self-serving. It hurts me when my friend is in pain. If I can do something to get rid of this pain I will feel better. My most basic motive when I strive to heal is to feel good myself. But there are several problems here. One is that my cure is usually not my friend's. Indeed, offering someone my cure usually only makes that person feel worse. So it was that all the advice that Job's friends gave him in his time of affliction served only to make him more miserable. The fact of the matter is that often the most loving thing we can do when a friend is in pain is to SHARE that pain--to be there even when we have nothing to offer except our presence and even when being there is painful to ourselves. The same is true with the attempt to convert. The Need to Control ------------------- The need to control--to ensure the desired outcome--is at least partially rooted in the fear of failure. For me to empty myself of my overcontrolling tendencies I must continually empty myself of this fear. I must be willing to fail. Just as the physical death of some individuals is rapid and gentle while for others agonizing and protracted, so it is for the emotional surrender of groups. Whether sudden or gradual, however, all the groups in my experience have eventually succeeded in completing, accomplishing, this death. They have all made it through emptiness, through the time of sacrifice, into community. This is an extraordinary testament to the human spirit. What it means is that given the right circumstances and knowledge of the rules, on a certain but very real level we human beings are able to die for each other. Community --------- When its death has been completed, open and empty, the group enters community. In this final stage a soft quietness descends. It is a kind of peace. The room is bathed in peace. Then, quietly, a member begins to talk about herself. She is being very vulnerable. She is speaking of the deepest part of herself. The group hangs on each word. No one realized she was capable of such eloquence. When she is finished there is a hush. It goes on a long time. But it does not seem long. There is no uneasiness in this silence. Slowly, out of the silence, another member begins to talk. He too is speaking very deeply, very personally, about himself. He is not trying to heal or convert the first person. He's not even trying to respond to her. It's not she but he who is the subject. Yet the other members of the group do not sense he has ignored her. What they feel is that it is as if he is laying himself down next to her on an altar. The silence returns. A third member speaks. Perhaps it will be to respond to the previous speaker, but there will be in this response no attempt to heal or convert. It may be a joke, but it will not be at anyone's expense. It may be a short poem that is almost magically appropriate. It could be anything soft and gentle, but again it will be a gift. Then the next member speaks. And as it goes on, there will be a great deal of sadness and grief expressed; but there will also be much laughter and joy. There will be tears in abundance. Sometimes they will be tears of sadness, sometimes of joy. Sometimes, simultaneously, they will be tears of both. And then something almost more singular happens. An extraordinary amount of healing and converting begins to occur--now that no one is trying to convert or heal. And community has been born. Or the task of community may be the difficult one of deciding whether it will or will not maintain itself. This decision usually should not be made quickly. In the joy of the moment members may make commitments that they shortly discover they are unable to fulfill. The consequences of long-term commitment are major and should not be taken lightly. Because I have spoken so glowingly of its virtues, it worries me that some might conclude that life in community is easier or more comfortable than ordinary existence. It is not. But it is certainly more lively, more intense. The agony is actually greater, but so is the joy. [Intensity junkies?] It is like falling in love. When they enter community, people in a very real sense do fall in love with one another en masse. They not only feel like touching and hugging each other, they feel like hugging everyone all at once. During the highest moments the energy level is supernatural. It is ecstatic. Great power, however, can sometimes hold potential danger. The danger of the power of true community is never the creation of mob psychology but of group sexuality. It is only natural when a group of people fall in love with one another that enormous sexual energy should be released. Usually this is not harmful, but it is wise for communities to be aware of their great potential sexuality in order that it does not get out of hand. It may need to be suppressed. It should not, however, be repressed. And it is wise to remember that the experience of other forms of love, "phila" and "agape" (brother or sister love, and divine love) can be even deeper and more rewarding than simple erotic or romantic bonding. The sexuality of community is an expression of its joy, and its energy can be channeled to useful and creative purpose. Chapter 7, Community maintenance ================================ [Entropy happens.] To remain such, therefore, a community must forever attend to its own health. While external service may be its ultimate task, self-scrutiny and the other efforts required for self-maintenance must remain its first priority. Every living organism exists in tension. For there to be life there must be tension. At the level of physiology, the process of this ongoing tension is referred to as homeostasis. We humans hunger for genuine community and will work hard to maintain it precisely because it is the way to live most fully, most vibrantly. Being the most alive of entities, true communities must consequently pay the price of experiencing even more tension than other organizations. The parameters over which tension will most frequently be experienced as communities struggle to maintain themselves are: * Size * Structure * Authority * Inclusivity * Intensity * Commitment * Individuality * Task definition * Ritual Another crucial issue was worked out in the first two years. It was natural for the early members to probe each other and interpret each other's lives. But gradually the group discovered that some degree of chaos was the invariable result. All by itself it came to the wisdom that attempts to heal or convert were generally more destructive than supportive. As it had come to define itself as a group that did not party, so it defined itself quite quickly as "not a therapy group." "We are just, merely and only, a support group," it would tell new members. "It is our purpose to love, not to heal." Since its virtues are so great, the maintenance of genuine community over as long a time as possible is an ideal. However, it is an ideal on general principle, which means it is not necessarily virtuous for each and every community to attempt to be immortal. Communities, like individual human beings, are organisms with different life spans, some of which, as we shall see, are more proper than others. The longevity of a community is no more adequate a measure of its success than the length of an individual human life attests to its fulfillment. We human beings have often been referred to as social animals. But we are not yet community creatures. We are impelled to relate with each other for our survival. But we do not yet relate with the inclusivity, realism, self-awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community. It is clearly no longer enough to be simply social animals, babbling together at cocktail parties and brawling with each other in business and over boundaries. It is our task--our essential, central, crucial task--to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures. It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed. Chapter 8, Human nature ======================= Perhaps the first step then, toward community on a grander scale lies in the acceptance of the fact that we are not, nor can we ever be, all the same. Because each of us is unique, inevitably we live in a pluralistic society, and we take pride in the United States as a pluralistic society. For the fact of the matter is that we Americans live together only in RELATIVE peace. The relationship in this country between blacks and whites and groups of various ethnic and national origins is generally uneasy at best. The wealthy and the poor are seldom enamored of each other. Through community the problem of pluralism ceases to be a problem. Community is a true alchemical process that transforms the dross of our differences into golden harmony. To understand more deeply how this happens, we must also understand at the most radical level just why we human beings are so different and, at the very same time, just what it is that we all have in common. We must answer the question What is human nature? To most people a myth is a tall tale, a story that is not true or real. Increasingly, however, psychologists are coming to realize that myths are myths precisely because they are true. Myths are found in one form or another in culture after culture, age after age. The reason for their permanence and universality is precisely that they are embodiments of great truths. Dragons are creatures of myth. Long before the fire-breathing fantasies of today's comic books and television cartoons, Christian monks throughout Europe were illuminating manuscripts with painstaking illustrations of dragons. So were Taoist monks in China. And Buddhist monks in Japan. And Hindus in India. And Muslims in Arabia. Why? Why dragons? Why should these mythical beasts be so extraordinarily ecumenical and international? The reason is that dragons are symbols of human beings. And as mythical symbols, they say something very important about the basic truths of human nature. We are snakes with wings, worms that can fly. Reptilelike, we slink close to the ground and are mixed in the mud of our animal nature and the muck of our cultural prejudices. Yet, like birds, we are also of the spirit, capable of soaring in the heavens, transcending, at least for moments, our narrow-mindedness and sinful proclivities. So it is that I sometimes tell my patients that part of their task is to come to terms with their dragonhood, to decide whether they want most to exercise the more slothful or more spiritual aspects of their nature. Even the simplest of myths is multifaceted, because, like dragons, we are multifaceted beings. Indeed, this is the very reason for myths. Our nature is so multifaceted and paradoxical that it cannot be captured in words that represent single, simple categories. Myths are required to contain and embrace the richness of human nature. Because it is multifaceted and complex, simplistic definitions of human nature not only fail to do its richness justice, they are extremely dangerous. Any falsity is dangerous, and the misapprehension of human nature particularly so, since such misapprehensions is one of the foundations of war. The reality of human nature is that we are--and always will be--profoundly different, for the most salient feature of human nature lies in its capacity to be molded by culture and experience in extremely variable ways. Human nature is flexible; it is indeed capable of change. But such a phrase fails to do justice to the glory of human nature. Far better is the phrase "the capacity for transformation." It is the capacity for transformation that is the most essential characteristic of human nature. And again paradoxically, this capacity is both the basic cause of war and the basic cure for war. Since human nature is so subtle and many-faceted, it cannot be captured in a single definition. This capacity we have to change--to transform--ourselves is so extraordinary that at other times when asked "What is human nature?" I facetiously respond that there is no such thing. And nowhere is our capacity for transformation more evident than through the successive stages of psychological growth from infancy, through adolescence, to adulthood. So it is not easy for us to change. But it is possible. And it is our glory as human beings. Chapter 9, Patterns of transformation ===================================== The key to community is the acceptance--in fact, the celebration--of our individual and cultural differences. This does not mean, however, that as we struggle toward world community we need to consider all individuals or all cultures and societies equally good or mature. It is simply not true. Thus we need labor under no compulsion to feel the same degree of attraction to each and everyone--or the same degree of taste for every culture. So Gale Webbe wrote in his classic work on the deeper aspects of spiritual growth that the further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves and the fewer and fewer people one likes. This is because when we have become sufficiently adept at recognizing our own flaws so as to cure them, we naturally become adept at recognizing the flaws in others. We may not like the people because of these flaws or immaturities, but the further we ourselves grow, the more we become able to accept--to love--them, flaws and all. Over the course of a decade of practicing psychotherapy a strange pattern began to emerge. If people who were religious came to me in pain and trouble, and if they became engaged in the therapeutic process so as to go the whole route, they frequently left therapy as atheists, agnostics, or at least skeptics. On the other hand, if atheists, agnostics, or skeptics came to me in pain or difficulty and became fully engaged, they frequently left therapy as deeply religious people. Same therapy, same therapist, successful but utterly different outcomes from a religious point of view. Again it didn't compute--until I realized that we are not all in the same place spiritually. With that realization came another: there is a pattern of progression through identifiable stages in human spiritual life. But here I will talk about those stages only in general, for individuals are unique and do not always fit neatly into any psychological or spiritual pigeonhole. With that caveat, let me list my own understanding of these stages and the names I have chosen to give them: * STAGE I: Chaotic, antisocial * STAGE II: Formal, institutional * STAGE III: Skeptic, individual * STAGE IV: Mystic, communal Most all young children and perhaps one in five adults fall into Stage I. It is essentially a stage of undeveloped spirituality. I call it because those adults who are in it seem generally incapable of loving others. Although they may pretend to be loving (and think of themselves that way), their relationships with their fellow human beings are all essentially manipulative and self-serving. They really don't give a hoot about anyone else. I call the stage chaotic because these people are basically unprincipled. Being unprincipled, there is nothing that governs them except their own will. And since the will from moment to moment can go this way or that, there is a lack of integrity to their being. "Mysticism," a much-maligned word, is not an easy one to define. It takes many forms. Yet through the ages, mystics of every shade of religious belief have spoken of unity, of an underlying connectedness between things: between men and women, between us and the other creatures and even inanimate matter as well, a fitting together according to an ordinarily invisible fabric underlying the cosmos. Mysticism also obviously has to do with mystery. Mystics acknowledge the enormity of the unknown, but rather than being frightened by it, they seek to penetrate ever deeper into it that they may understand more--even with the realization that the more they understand, the greater the mystery will become. While Stage IV men and women will enter religion in order to approach mystery, people in Stage II, to a considerable extent, enter religion in order to escape from it. The process of spiritual development I have described is highly analogous to the development of community. Stage I people are frequently pretenders; they pretend they are loving and pious, covering up their lack of principles. The first, primitive stage of group formation--pseudocommunity--is similarly characterized by pretense. Stage II people have begun the work of submitting themselves to principle--the law. But they do not yet understand the spirit of the law. Consequently they are legalistic, parochial, and dogmatic. They are threatened by anyone who thinks differently from them, and so regard it as their responsibility to convert or save the other 90 to 99 percent of humanity who are not "true believers." It is this same style of functioning that characterizes the second stage of the community process in which the group members, rather than accepting one another try vehemently to fix one another. The chaos that results is not unlike that existing among the various feuding denominations or seen within or between the world's different religions. Stage III, a phase of questioning, is analogous to the crucial stage of emptiness in community formation. In reaching for community the members of a group must question themselves. "Is my particular theology so certain--so true and complete--as to justify my conclusion that these people are not saved?" they may ask. Or "Could I have swallowed the party line in thinking that all religious people are fanatics?" Indeed, such questioning is the required beginning of the emptying process. Conversely, individuals remain stuck in Stage III precisely because they do not doubt deeply enough. They must begin to doubt even their own doubt. Does this mean, then, that a true community is a group of all Stage IV people? Paradoxically the answer is yes and no. It is no because the individual members are hardly capable of growing so rapidly as to totally discard their customary styles of thinking when they return from the group to their usual worlds. But it is yes because in community the members have learned how to behave in a Stage IV manner in relation to one another. In other words, out of love and commitment to the whole, virtually all of us are capable of transcending our backgrounds and limitations. So it is that genuine community is so much more than the sum of its parts. It is, in truth, a mystical body. Aldous Huxley labeled mysticism "the perennial philosophy" because the mystical way of thinking and being has existed in all cultures and all times since the dawn of recorded history. Although a small minority, mystics of all religions the world over have demonstrated an amazing commonality, unity. Unique though they might be in their individual personhood, they have largely escaped free from--transcended--those human differences that are cultural. Chapter 10, Emptiness ===================== Meditation can probably best be defined as the process by which we can empty our minds. But why? It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. So it is that the moment we become empty something comes into our emptiness. The virtue of meditation is that whatever comes into emptiness is beyond our control. It is the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new. And it is only from the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new that we learn. Throughout the ages mystics have also been known as "contemplatives." Contemplation and meditation are intimately related. Contemplation is a process by which we think about--mull over and reflect upon--the unexpected things that happen to us in our moments of meditation and emptiness. True contemplation, therefore, requires meditation. It requires that we stop thinking before we are truly able to think with any originality. However, I use the word "contemplative" in the broader sense to refer to a life style rich in reflection, meditation, and prayer. It is a life style dedicated to maximum awareness. In fact, it is not even necessary to believe in God. For God, should you so choose, substitute the word "life." If you continually ask questions of life and are continually willing to be open and empty enough to hear life's answer and to ponder the meaning, you will be a contemplative. True communities are invariably contemplative: they are self-aware. It is one of the primary characteristics of community. The ultimate purpose of emptiness, then, is to make room. [Room for] the different, the unexpected, the new, the better. Most important... the Stranger, the other person. We cannot even let the other person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness. The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind, and it is therefore impossible ever to KNOW that you are doing the right thing (since knowing is a function of consciousness). However, if your will is steadfastly to the good, and if you are willing to suffer FULLY when the good is ambiguous, your unconscious will always be one step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. In other words, you will do the right thing even though you will not have the consolation of knowing at the time that it is the right thing. Those who seek certainty, or who claim certainty in their knowledge, cannot tolerate ambiguity. The word "ambiguous" means "uncertain" or "doubtful," or "capable of being understood in more than one way." And because that means not knowing--perhaps not ever being able to know--we have great trouble with ambiguity in our culture. It is not until we move into Stage IV of our spiritual growth that we even begin to become comfortable with ambiguity. We start to realize that not everything is "black or white," that there are multiple dimensions to things, often with contradictory meanings. So it is that mystics of all cultures and religions speak in terms of paradox--not in terms of "either/or" but in terms of "both/and." The capacity to accept ambiguity and to think paradoxically is both one of the qualities of emptiness and one of the requirements for peacemaking. Chapter 11, Vulnerability ========================= Openness requires of us vulnerability--the ability, even the willingness, to be wounded. ... The point is that if you were deliberately to put your arm into a grinding piece of machinery, you would be an utter idiot. You would be damaged for naught. But if you attempt to live your life without ever being hurt, you won't be able to live at all, except perhaps in a very softly padded cell. There is no way that we can live a rich life unless we are willing to suffer repeatedly, experiencing depression and despair, fear and anxiety, grief and sadness, anger and the agony of forgiving, confusion and doubt, criticism and rejection. A life lacking these emotional upheavals will not only be useless to ourselves, it will be useless to others. We cannot heal without being willing to be hurt. Chapter 12, Integration and integrity ===================================== We psychologists use a verb that is the opposite of the verb "to integrate": "to compartmentalize." By it we refer to the remarkable capacity we human beings have to take matters that are properly related to each other and put them in separate, airtight mental compartments where they don't rub up against each other and cause us any pain. Integrity is never painless. It requires that we let matters rub up against each other, that we fully experience the tension of conflicting needs, demands, and interests, that we even be emotionally torn apart by them. Since integrity is never painless, so community is never painless. Community continually urges both itself and its individual members painfully, yet joyously, into ever deeper levels of integrity. Five years later still, early in my psychiatry training, I was taught: "What the patient does not say is more important than what he or she does say." My favorite light-bulb joke is "How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?" The answer: "Two: one to change the light bulb and one to NOT change the light bulb." Lest this seem silly rather than profound to the Western one-dimensional mind, let me say that I do not consider that this is simply "my" book. I have written it only because other people have NOT written it: publishers, editors, booksellers, farmers, carpenters, and others--all of whose labor was required to enable me to perform this particular labor. Behavior is the key. [Written like a true psychiatrist.] There are atheists who behave like Christian saints and properly professing Christians who behave like criminals--who are criminals. No one knew this any better than Jesus, who instructed us: "By their fruits you shall know them." A consequence of this reality is that, while all forms of thinking should be tolerated, some forms of behavior should not be. ... the attempt to exclude individuals because of their beliefs, however silly or primitive, is always destructive to community. Chapter 13, Community and communication ======================================= Communication takes many forms: written and oral or verbal and nonverbal. Similarly, there are many standards by which we can judge the effectiveness of communication. Is it clear or unclear, verbose or precise, thorough or limited, prosaic or poetic? These are just a few of the parameters for such judgment. There is one standard, however, that takes precedence over all others: does communication lead to greater or lesser understanding among human beings? If communication improves the quality of the relationship between two or more people, we must judge it from an overall standpoint to be effective. On the other hand, if it creates confusion, misunderstanding, distortions, suspicion, or antipathy in human relations, we must conclude it to be ineffective... The overall purpose of human communication is--or should be--reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls and barriers of misunderstanding that unduly separate us human beings from one another. But the principal purpose of effective communication needs to be borne in mind. If it is not, the communication becomes task-avoiding. The rules of community-making are the rules for effective communication. The essence of what occurs in a community-building workshop, for instance, is that the participants learn these rules. Since communication is the bedrock of all human relationships, the principles of community have profound application to any situation in which two or more people are gathered together. Not only are there basic equations between community, communication, and peace but also between them and the concepts of integration and integrity. Chapter 14, Dimensions of the arms race ======================================= Unfortunately, the arms race is very much an institution. It has buildings, bricks and mortar, and real estate aplenty. When I was in the army, one of its basic training centers, Fort Leonard Wood, was the fourth-largest city in Missouri. As for budget, the arms race has the largest in the world... to which the citizens of the United States contribute approximately a third. It is not only big business, it is the biggest business, employing tens of millions of men and women. Recently I had the opportunity to reread a book written in 1961 by the political scientist Mulford Sibley, Unilateral Initiatives and Disarmament. We speak of "future shock" and "megatrends" and bemoan the rapidity of social change. Yet every word of Sibley's book is as appropriate to the situation today as it was when written. As far as the arms race is concerned, NOTHING HAS CHANGED. There is something about this lack of change that not only smacks of institutionalization but also inherently smells foul, even malicious. It is a quality of institutions that they tend to perpetuate themselves regardless of their appropriateness. The arms race is not just going to go away. If it is ever going to end, it is going to do so only by being ACTIVELY TORN DOWN. Peacemaking, therefore, requires a call to action. Ultimately all that is required for peace is that we overcome our lethargy and resistance to change. To do that, however, we much encounter our first enemy: this sense of helplessness. The strongest and most insidious root of the arms race is the extraordinary lack of concern about it. This apathy in response to gross insanity is itself multirooted, but perhaps the most significant factor involved is the general sense of helplessness among us. ----- The root of helplessness that I believe to be the strongest is ignorance or lack of knowledge. People feel most helpless in the face of the arms race, I suspect, simply because they do not understand it. And because they do not understand it, they cannot see the way out. It is not well understood by most psychologists and theologians because they lack the knowledge of politics and economics. Worst of all, it is even less understood by the politicians and business people who are primarily "in charge" of it because they don't understand the psychology or theology involved. And, finally, none of them has much understanding because most of them lack the knowledge of community. With that knowledge, combined with an understanding of the many interrelated factors that perpetuate the arms race, we need no longer feel helpless. There is a way out. Narcissism is the psychological side of our survival instinct, and we could not survive without it. Yet an unbridled narcissism--what Erich Fromm called malignant narcissism--is the principle precursor of either group or individual evil. How to discern between healthy and unhealthy nationalism is a critical task in our shrinking world. For the reality is that there are some places on the globe where the development of nationalism needs to be encouraged while simultaneously there are others where further development of nationalism needs to be vigorously discouraged. The key to the discernment between healthy and unhealthy nationalism clearly, then, centers around this issue of identity development, in which the notion of the self--the "I-entity"--as a separate entity is an illusion. We are all, in reality, interdependent. Ultimately we are called out of a national narcissism and away from purely local identities toward a primary identity with humanity and a state of global community. Still, one must possess something before it can be given up. We cannot begin the work of forsaking our identity until we have developed one in the first place. So it is that the proper pattern for the development of nations is, first, growth into nationalism, then growth out of and beyond nationalism. The discernment between healthy and unhealthy nationalism, therefore, requires that we have an accurate sense of where a nation is in its historical course of development. Beyond that, the tests for healthy as opposed to unhealthy nationalism as much the same as those to distinguish between good and bad thinking: What is missing? How integrated is it? How much has the person consciously tried to include all the relative variables into her or his thinking? [Basically, critical thinking skills.] Chapter 15, The Christian church in the United States ===================================================== The arms race is against everything that Christianity supposedly stands for. It stands for nationalism; Jesus practiced internationalism. The arms race stands for hatred and enmity; Jesus preached forgiveness. It stands for pride; Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." It is supported by the weapons manufacturers and the bellicose; Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Its central dynamic is the search for invulnerability; Jesus exemplified vulnerability. Why then has the Christian Church not fought against the arms race from the beginning? What happened to Jesus? How could the Church so easily have lost Jesus' legacy of community and fallen away from his commandment that we love one another? The answer is fear. To be a true Christian one must live dangerously. The battle against evil is dangerous. By what failure of Christian doctrine did Christianity become largely empty ritual and no longer a way of life? But I can with certainty answer it in relation to the Church in the United States today. For it has become apparent to me that the vast majority of churchgoing Christians in America are heretics. The leading--indeed, traditional--heresy of the day I call pseudodocetism. It is this predominant heresy that intellectually allows the Church to fail to teach its followers to follow Jesus. The majority of American Christians have had enough catechism or confirmation classes to know the paradoxical Christian doctrine that Jesus is both human and divine. What is meant by pseudodocetism, however, is that they then put 99.5 percent of their money on his divinity and 0.5 percent on his humanity. It is a most comfortable disproportion. It puts Jesus way up there in the clouds, seated at the right hand of the Father, in all his glory, 99.5 percent divine, and it leaves us way down here on earth scratching out a very ordinary existence according to worldly rules, 99.5 percent human. Because that gulf is so great, American Christians are not seriously encouraged to attempt to bridge it. When Jesus said all those things about being the way and that we were to take up our cross and follow him, and that we were to be like him and might even do greater things that he did, he couldn't possibly have been serious, could he? I mean, he was divine, and we're just human. So it is, through the large-scale ignoring of Jesus' very real humanity, that we are allowed to worship him in name without the obligation of following in his footsteps. Pseudodocetism lets us off the hook. Chapter 16, The United States government ======================================== What politicians chiefly do in Washington, I came to learn, is fight. And they fight hard. They also fight dirty. And, finally, they mostly fight each other. What they fight about mainly is money in the form of budgets. A budget is a concretization of priorities. But... Most of it is to preserve or enlarge one's own slice of the budgetary pie at the expense of someone else's slice. Deals may be cut, but I have otherwise never saw a budget worked out cooperatively. Cooperation is not big in Washington. Nor is communication. The very first thing I was taught on the job was the number-one unwritten rule: "Be very careful whom you communicate with..." One of the few things that keeps our government even vaguely sane is the practice called leaking. One may think it generally occurs when a government official leaks some piece of information to the press. That, of course, does happen and is important, but actually the major part of leaking consists of leaks within the government itself--when an official from one department sneaks across the territorial boundaries to provide information to another department. Indeed, there is a special name for this kind of leaking: "whistle blowing." Within the system it is regarded as the most serious offense and its commission is dangerous. The penalties can be severe. Such is the overall pattern of communication within our government. As communication goes, so goes community. ... There is no community within the government. It is pervaded by an atmosphere of constant competitiveness, hostility, and distrust. "That's just the way the world works," the so-called realists would proclaim. Indeed, they would argue that it is downright constitutional. They [our founders] very deliberately built conflict into the system. No, the Constitution does not require us to have a government totally at war with itself, a government devoid of cooperation, staffed by the mindless at the bottom and the predators at the top. ... government executives behave as if their purpose in being together in Washington is to fight with each other. Yet that is not their purpose. Their task is to govern. And it could be presumed that their task could better be accomplished if they generally worked with rather than against one another. A group bogged down in a task-avoidance assumption--in this case fighting--is remarkably inefficient. Since the time of the Roosevelts we have developed a macho image of the president as a superman who can know everything, who can be almost everywhere at once, who can be single-handedly in total control of the entire ship of the state. An image is exactly what it is, and it is utterly unreal. No wonder that in 1980 we finally had to elect an actor to fill the role. The macho image of the president as a kind of superman has been created and maintained because the people have wanted it. We have wanted a Big Daddy who has all the answers, who will take care of the bully down the block, who will not only give us a safe and secure home but one that is luxurious and where we will be protected from all hard knocks. The American presidency is the reflection of the task-avoidance assumption of dependency, a creation of our own childhood fantasies. I look forward to the day when, asked at a press conference something such as "Mr. President [or Ms. President], what do you plan to do in El Salvador?," our Chief Executive will be able to respond: "Frankly, I don't yet know much about El Salvador. I've been studying it for several months, but it's a complicated situation down there. The people have a long history and a culture very different from our own. To the best of my knowledge their situation doesn't seem to be critical, so until we have a more complete understanding of things we won't plan to do anything in El Salvador." We are all confronted with the task of achieving maturity. Chapter 17, Empowerment ======================= We know there are rules for good communication. These rules work. Yet they are seldom either taught or practiced. Consequently most people, including government, business, and religious leaders, do not know how to relate to each other. The rules of communication are best taught and only learned through the practice of community-making. What to do now? Start communities. Start one in your church. Start one in your school. Start one in your neighborhood. Start your own community. It won't be easy. You'll be scared. You will often feel that you don't know what you're doing. You'll have a difficult time persuading people to join you. Many initially won't want to make the commitment, and those who are willing to [they] will be as scared as you. Once you get started it will be frustrating. There will be chaos. Most will consider dropping out, and some probably will. But hang in there. Push toward into emptiness. It will be painful. There will be anger, anxiety, depression, even despair. But keep going into the night. Don't stop halfway. It may seem like dying, but push on. And then suddenly you will find yourself in the clear air of the mountaintop, and you'll be laughing and crying and feeling more alive than you have in years--maybe more alive than you've ever been. But don't feel you have to do anything. Remember that being takes precedence over doing. But as you search for people to join you, there are two guidelines. One is to be wary of people who have a very big axe to grind. All of us have our little axes, and it is proper that we should have pet causes and projects. We do not have to give these up to form community, but we do have to have the capacity to lay them aside, "bracket" [contain] them or transcend them, when appropriate, in the interests of community. A person who lacks the maturity for such bracketing or transcending will not make a good candidate. The other guideline is to seek out people who are different from you. If you are a dove, try to find at least one hawk for your community. You need hawks. Since birds of a feather tend to flock together, it will not be easy to find women and men different from you. Only remember that genuine community is inclusive and that if you are a wealthy white Democrat, you have the most to learn from the poor, the blacks and Chicanos, and the Republicans. You need their gifts to be whole. Once your community is established, there is yet another guideline: remain inclusive. One of the things a calling to be an individual of integrity means is a calling to speak out, to be outspoken. We are called to overcome a psychology of helplessness, of reticence. If we see a lie, we are called to name it a lie. If we see insanity, we are called to name it as such. Don't avoid the subject of the arms race at a party just because it might be divisive. Yes, there are some who might find it upsetting, but perhaps they need to be upset. There are others who will respond to your outspokenness with gratitude for that leadership that gives them the courage to speak out in turn. author: Peck, M. Scott (Morgan Scott), 1936-2005 LOC: HT65 .P44 detail: tags: book,community,counterculture,non-fiction title: The Different Drum Tags ==== book community counterculture non-fiction