I wish to thank you, Gabriel for your late August podcast in which you shared information from our conversation about past problems encountered by kins domain community start-ups. What you shared was accurate but limited by the podcast time frame. I am an ex-public school teacher having extensively studied elements of learning. Audio information like podcasts is conversational in style and difficult for most people to review as needed and to contemplate deeply during and after listening. While the podcast is valuable in providing exposure to ideas, the topic of community and kins domain dreams is extremely complex and important to this group. I would like to address it here in greater depth.
Since 2007 I've personally known of 28 kins domain start up efforts in America, Canada, western Europe, Australia, South America and Africa (including my own effort). All of the 28 got as far as buying land or offering domains on land already owned. None of those was in eastern Europe and of those 28 only two remain (both in America). A few of those 26 founders still own the land but have abandoned the community dream and several have bitter memories of the effort. Other start-ups may have been initiated that I don't know about. The following information is based only on the 28 I have personally known about and spoken with.
12 of the 26 abandoned community start-ups were stopped early by local government restrictions. This occurred in several countries. The remaining 14 failed (often explosively) from interpersonal conflicts. Some of the 12 that were stopped by government regulations were already experiencing similar interpersonal conflicts. Even the two community efforts that are still semi-active are not yet truly successful. One of these is Vedrica in Idaho. At the time of this writing they are involved in a bitter court battle where some of the group are trying to evict the others so they can sell the land, pay off the debt and make a good profit. Everyone has received their eviction notices and all that remains on their land is one family and one individual who are tackling a steep learning curve of legal procedures and working hard to save all or part of the land. It's an all-consuming task for them. Our community, Charisma, is the other of the two remaining community start-ups and we have also failed in the sense that, of five member families who joined us in three years, only my husband and I remain. One family stayed for two years before deciding they weren't ready or able to build a dream. One man stayed only six weeks. The others didn't make it past six months. However, we have not abandoned our dream, but rather we have gained important knowledge and awareness from the experiences of our first 3 years and from many conversations with both sides of the conflicts of the other 27 community group start-ups.
Most of the participants of these generally explosive community endings are still sensitive about the experience and their losses, but there is much to learn from these apparent failures. In fact, I claim that they offer the gift of success for all who seek the wisdom in these demonstrations. From them and our own community experiences we learned much about community function, its flaws and most importantly, how the modern social dependency on community shuts down many people's ability to connect with both our own true nature and the nature of Earth.
It was a great gift to us when the last family left Charisma, although it was sad at the time. I took down my community website over three years ago as a result of what I learned from our experience and the conversations with English speaking members of the other 27 groups. Our website was very effective at stimulating interest and visits, but without exception everyone who visited or joined us came for the wrong reasons -- for the same reasons that caused the 26 failures and the 2 near failures. The people came for their "dream" community as their top priority, and in doing so brought the same destructive thought patterns with them that destroyed the priority dreams of each of the participants of those 28 defunct start-ups. Those community dreams needed destroyed as ours did.
When the last of our community members left, Ben and I shifted our focus from dreaming of and connecting with community, to building our domain paradise garden lifestyle and connecting with the nature of our domain. Results of that priority shift were big, to say the least. We began seeing more deeply into Nature and quickly discovered that doing so corresponds with becoming more conscious of one's own true nature and connecting with one's true inner power wielded through thought energy. The effects of that became apparent fairly quickly.
--Our thinking speed began to noticeably increase and still is increasing (though I am no where near Anastasia's speed of thought).
--Our work became enjoyable no matter how hard it was.
--We began noticing a deeper awareness of nature's elements and activity.
--Many of nature's subtle purposes became visible to one or both of us.
--We noticed subtle and not-so-subtle responses from nature and fell deep into love with not only the elements of nature but with previously untouched levels of self.
--I fell so deep into love that I could never voluntarily leave this domain no matter who my neighbors are or how they dream. Even leaving to go to town for a day is more and more unpleasant. My trips are fewer and fewer and I'm so excited to get back here and feel that deep wave of welcome and love as I near my domain. Its a welcome that has nothing to do with the presence or absence of community members around me and could never even be compared to that.
--In alignment with this deep love that we hold in our thoughts and feel in the nature of our domain, we joyfully cleaned up the messes from our early years that we'd left here and there, and those left on the abandoned domains.
--Through these ongoing changes (transformations) in our attention and focus we've become far more self aware, more conscious of life energy, and our thoughts are free-er.
--Four years of that has radically changed our relations with self and therefore others.
--This growth and healing process has totally re-organized our priorities, our thinking patterns and our interactions with life.
--Both our bodies and minds have been healing from a lifetime of unconscious neglect and anti-rational thought patterns.
I still remember that first incredible morning when I greeted my domain and knew for the first time what a Space of Love feels like, and why Anastasia calls it that. Our Space of Love has grown and strengthened every year since. Let me put this in perspective. Our building projects have been very rewarding and exciting but that is not our Space of Love. Our little forest and living fence is growing, as well as our knowledge of native edible plants, seasonal variations, how to grow a vegetable garden without irrigation, knowledge and awareness of the native animals; but none of that seeded our Space of Love and isn't really even part of our Space of Love experience except perhaps as a rudimentary likeness. The Space of Love didn't enter our awareness and daily experience until we began to listen deeply to the nature of our domain and directly include it in our discussions, decisions and plans. The Space of Love grew from our conscious interactions with the living elements and the collective Nature of our shared domain and our co-created dream for that; rather than just the knowledge we had learned about it and the changes we put in place. That deep level of connection requires a focus and alignment of our thought, dream and energy. The Space of Love in which our domain functions, couldn't grow into our direct experience while our thoughts, dream and energy were focused on a 'community dream'. The Space of Love could grow only when we focused our thought and energy exclusively on creating the deeper layers of our kins domain dream. We had to learn how the various life forms of our domain feel and function in their individual service to our dream. That requires that my dream for me and those life forms is in harmony with each of their divine programs and capacities as well as those of our family. That, in turn, requires that I discern at least some of the details of those individual divine programs and capacities. That requires that I develop the skill of deep listening which additionally required that I allow trust of self to expand. THAT expansion was the beginning emergence of our Space of Love and fully supported and aided by the process of connecting deeply with the nature of our land.
Community will never be my total or primary goal again, because that's the cart before the horse! That's also what has destroyed the other start-ups and almost certainly is the root of the heavy community hopping in many of the Russian communities. I'll add more detail to that statement.
On one's private domain, one is the sovereign, free to dream and create however and whatever one wants, with full supports from the nature of one's domain, at least within the current capacity of those native elements. When one steps off their domain and into the surrounding community or diverts their thought energy to their ideal community, they no longer have that same power to create roles for their neighbors to perform for them. In such an effort one will only create resistance to their community dream. That's why so many are looking for "like minded" neighbors, to get around that resistance that we create automatically when we try to pigeon hole others into our personal dream. Invariably, when the primary dream is about the ideal community, resistance and control battles between the members ensue no matter how "like-minded" they appear to be. This always follows a similar pattern and I've watched it repeatedly and heard it described throughout the many research interviews I've conducted. If you've been part of an intentional community startup, you'll recognize this pattern. First, the member(s) begin to pleasantly and gently, in friendly conversation, attempt to "sell" to each other their personal ideal community dream, all the while wearing warm genuine smiles and trying to perform living according to their dream ideal.
But people don't give up their own dreams of community so easily. Then the interaction moves into semi-friendly discussions and eventually arguments about various elements of each member's ideal community dream. The smiles are not as prolific and the 'ideal' performances begin to wear thin. When that doesn't work to make one's community dream accepted as the collective one, and it won't; the parties begin bargaining -- trading off parts of their dream to secure the parts that are most important to them (I'll give up this if you'll give up that). This never solves the conflicts except temporarily. Blaming automatically follows and interactions escalate into various forms of aggression like pushing for rules or sanctions to limit and control each other. No one wants to be controlled, particularly kin's domaiin dreamers. Yet few people are willing to live long-term without controlling their neighbors in an intentional (dream) community, because each member is dreaming their own private version of "the ideal" community. The modern societal patterns leave us with no solutions to this conundrum except submit, attack and/or escape. Following our modern social programs, members begin taking sides and in short order one or several parties to the conflicts leaves the community. It's a conundrum, but one that can be resolved with new thinking patterns and priorities.
In his podcast Gabriel spoke of a statement Vladimir made about the American people. He said that we "don't get it" (the idea of kins domains). Vladimir is correct but it's not just America. Even Russia has a significant number of people who have taken on the modern anti-rational socialized programming (supporting and even requiring community hopping). People who have accepted this modern program (most of the planet) are dependent on others and on profit-based supply lines for nearly everything; both physical and nutritional supplies as well as emotional supply. Most have lost the ability to dream a future where they live consciously from their own thought energy and supplied by Nature's divine supply-lines through connection with the universe of natural divine function. Consequently our dreams of a paradise future are always built on the foundation of, and dependent on, supply lines that are exclusively sourced from others; in other words, their dreams are built on the foundation of "community". The problems with that are myriad but perhaps the main one is that what each individual currently needs from 'community' is based on their own personal configuration of inner emptiness and hungers.
That personal thought configuration is built from each individual's unique collection of beliefs, experiences and inner awareness. These things form one's priority scale, which nearly always functions outside one's conscious direction when operating from programmed thought patterns (semi-conscious at best). The specific community performances that are needed to make one man feel 'accepted, loved and safe' will make another man feel pressured, devalued or controlled. When each of these two discover that the other is dreaming and even scheming in conflict with their personal 'paradise community' they feel stuck. They don't know how to stop dreaming of a perfect community that they believe will provide them with the feelings and experiences they crave (operating exactly the same as in social and substance addictions). Without healing of our modern chaotic, conflicted and needy state of mind, people will likely resort to one of of the programmed responses of attack, submit or escape. Any of those will weaken the community and destroy the members' dreams. Anastasia gave us the easiest and quickest path of mental and physical healing -- the process of building and connecting with the Nature of one's hectare, and with that Nature, co-creating a paradise garden lifestyle. She also said, "To attain the required understanding, Man needs to refrain from destroying His (God's) programme and to study for all he's worth and ascertain the purpose of everything on Earth." (Book 8.1, pg 223, black cover).
So, dear reader, if your *priority dream* is expressed by these words that we hear all the time, "I am interested in living in a community of like minded people who...", you will not find what you want at this time except as a temporary fantasy, like a temporary drug; requiring neighbors willing to submit to your priority community dream (don't count on it, at least not without battle and losses).
However, if your #1 top priority dream is similar to this one that a woman recently sent to us, "to live in close connection with nature, in harmony with the land and life of our domain, and build our kin domain dream for ourselves and our heirs," and if you keep that dream pure (meaning without distractions or conflict in your thought), then it WILL be fulfilled wherever you find the land that suits you. When people with similar priorities of this nature join together in nearby plots of land, each respecting his own and the others' sovereign priority dreams for their own domain, THEN we will see a community experience organically and irresistibly forming there. THAT community will far exceed what anyone can now imagine for an ideal community -- in the same way that our still-expanding Space of Love has far exceeded our imagination to a factor of infinity (and we're still in the infant stage of this incredible expanding awareness).
In no way am I saying that community is not important. I am saying that our modern priorities related to self and nature are not only seriously skewed, but are keeping us disconnected, limited, and distracted from Nature (God's thoughts) which is equivalent to disconnection from self and therefore others. In such a social program, community dreams are about getting the other community members to accept and play the roles that we imagine will end our unconsciously self-generated inner pain. In our modern societal structure we've developed control and manipulation programs for both self and others in order to mask and medicate the pain of disconnection from self, all the while hiding the fact that pain is self-generated.
As long as people dream the ideal community experience as the critical element needed for physical and emotional health, and on that belief push their kins domain dreams into secondary positions awaiting that "perfect community", that's how long we will ensure that the disconnection continues and the flawed programs remain active and strong. A group of people, each trying to create an ideal community as priority, will sooner or later discover they've created the "perfect storm" instead, with a host of disastrous conflicts arising to destroy the various individual community dreams. I've watched as 28 community efforts repeatedly demonstrated this.
We must set aside those anti-rational social programs of needing to find or create the perfect community before building a kins domain paradise garden. We must stop allowing the alluring social community and dependency programs to hold priority in our dreams and thought, and thus carry our powerful focus away from the very experiences that can heal those dependencies; i.e.,the deep connection with the Nature of one's domain. Only the personal experience of that co-creation with Nature (God's thoughts) can free our thought, and clean up the destruction left in our bodies and our thinking from a lifetime of distraction; of getting our fulfillment only through other people all the while believing we are inadequate for happiness without the 'proper' performances of others to enable our joy. Instead, we must get the horse before the cart.
The only force that can get us to the paradise garden community experience is our individual top priority dreams of creating a family paradise garden through the consciously wielded power (focus) of our own thought energy, which is the unparalleled force in all of space (book 6, pg. 148, black cover). Anastasia laid out the steps in book 4. She didn't tell us to find a community but said, "First, choose for yourself a place of your own you like best of all the pleasing spaces on the Earth. A place where you would like to live, and would like your children to live out their lives" (book 4, pg 179, black cover). Such a dream will never allow for community hopping, using the community or domain for emotional or commercial gain, or defending any thought pattern that would destroy our dream for our own and heirs' paradise lifestyle on our own forever domain. Then on pages 179-202 of book 4 Anastasia gave the steps for building a Space of Love ( with not a single word about dreaming a community). We know how and we do it!
What I've Learned About Community and Kins Domains.
1:Joyce-M:
at Charisma, becoming
one of Earth's most beautiful spots.
at Charisma, becoming
one of Earth's most beautiful spots.
