Why do intentional communities fail? It is clear to me, and I'll guess no one will see it as I do. But......

Why do intentional communities fail?  It is clear to me, and I'll guess no one will see it as I do.  But I see it through a life of studying, and practicing in this domain.  They fail because they have never pursued the absurd notion that the purpose of community is not to serve the members, but rather, out of burning love, empathy, compassion... solidarity, the  purpose of the community is to serve and save the world, starting with the neediest (Blue line). They always pursue a combination of work and fun / Pleasure (green line), missing that Joy is the fruit of Loving,  and Joy to those few who know it, absolutely trumps fun/pleasure, every breath. Joy/Meaning, is the only infinite motivator. I'm doing my own next level pondering and reflection on this. This probably unintelligible graph is reflective of some of the pondering I'm doing:

"James, you are the greatest skier, technically, I have ever seen," said a lifelong Utah Rockies resident, a fellow executive, to me in 1996. Possibly he meant it, possibly.....

"James, you are the greatest skier, technically, I have ever seen," said a lifelong Utah Rockies resident, a fellow executive, to me in 1996.  Possibly he meant it, possibly there was some objective truth to it.  "You are technically the greatest strategic, new, organization creator, leader, I have ever seen," has said no one, but I say it now. Lol.  Yes, I do.  I was and am unknown as a skier or such a leader.  And I have zero track record  the last 15 years in not for profit work to substantiate this.  But although unknown, in fact, my 25 years in industry was a string of small to medium, impossible successes, the turn-around or creation of groups that produced the impossible, with explosive joy, in impossibly short timeframes against impossible odds.  MLK Jr, and Gandhi were of the type.  My estimate is that were they alive today they would have no more success than I have in the not-for-profit realm.  I think the people of Soul, of Heart they were able to work with, such folks no longer exist in the toxic climate of 2017 earth.

My vision, mission, work, life, every breath: In Solidarity Serving the neediest from the Soul..., Loving.

My vision, mission, work, life, every breath:
In Solidarity
Serving the neediest
from the Soul..., Loving.

Trump's advantage, and the only advantage he needs, is the unwillingness of the Liberals to fully see the horror he is unleashing.

Trump's advantage, and the only advantage he needs, is the unwillingness of the Liberals to fully see the horror he is unleashing.

No one wants to be the revolution (pic below): Oh how I wish the solution was law, policy, architecture, renewable energy, protest, protecting, resistance, camps, meetings, decolinization, the Lakota way, the Christian religion.... Those are so easily......

No one wants to be the revolution (pic below):

Oh how I wish the solution was law, policy, architecture, renewable energy, protest, protecting, resistance, camps, meetings, decolinization, the Lakota way, the organized religion, party,  a leader, democracy, socialism, Sanders.... Those are so easily doable, so fun.

But they have never been the answer. They will never be the answer, though they would in many cases be ubiquitous if we ever seriously pursued the answer. We can't get there from there. We can't avoid getting there from where the answer is, the religiously loving, by whatever name or no name at all, practiced with every breath by the large masses of human beings.

We will work to change anything and everything so that there is a future for our children, everything, except the only thing that can save them... changing ourselves, Being the Revolution. To be the change the world needs to see, as Gandhi rightly said.  No one will even seriously consider being the revolution. So sad. Except when I rarely get distracted, I can't think of anything else, I can't try to do anything else. It is what I will try and do. It is the only thing of hope that any of us can try and do. We will try anything and everything else until  there is no time, no hope, left. Oh well. Kathy Green: " They say that change is like heaven, a beautiful idea, but no one wants to go first."

No one wants to be the revolution (pic below): Oh how I wish the solution was law, policy, architecture, renewable energy, protest, protecting, resistance, camps, meetings, decolinization, the Lakota way, the Christian religion.... Those are so easily.....

No one wants to be the revolution (pic below): Oh how I wish the solution was law, policy, architecture, renewable energy, protest, protecting, resistance, camps, meetings, decolinization, the Lakota way, the Christian religion.... Those are so easily doable, so fun. But they have never been the answer. They will never be the answer, though they would be ubiquitous if we ever seriously pursued the answer. We can't get there from there. We can't avoid getting there from where the answer is, the religion of loving by whatever name or no name at all, practiced with every breath by the large masses of human beings. We will change anything and everything So that there is a future for our children, everything, except the only thing that can save them... Changing ourselves, Being the Revolution. To be the change the world needs to see, as Gandhi rightly said. We will change everything but ourselves, the only thing that could give creation a future.  No one will even seriously consider being the revolution. So sad. Except when I rarely get distracted, I can't think of anything else, I can try to do anything else. Oh well.

Recapturing Lovely......

Recapturing Lovely.

Is there only one notion of lovey, of beautiful?

The old tale, Emperor and the Nightingale, address is this question. The story is as old as time, no?

Unless we have been insanely pursuing a mistaken notion of lovely, beautiful, where is the Hope?

But if we have been insanely pursuing a wrong notion of beauty, of lovely, then there is profound hope.

Standing Rock, the camp established to protect the Waters of the Missouri River, was aesthetically, visually, beautiful in the fall. During the winter months it was visually and physically quite materially ugly, hellish even. Inches of mud. Below zero nights and days. Ice everywhere, everywhere, everywhere... perfectly suited to breaking bones and skulls. Muddy dark army tents for meals. The world's largest police state glaring over us every moment with snipers on Hills, helicopters, planes, with folks relishing the idea of killing us.

But now a month after the camps are shut down by the police state, there is a regular stream of posts from those who are expressing their longing for being back at the camp. They are profoundly distressed at being back in what civilization prefers: safety, ease, Comfort, opulence, leisure.

What's going on?

Standing Rock was nearly everything that our society considers ugly. But to many who were there, far from all, but to many, it was and is beautiful, the epitome of lovely.

Whether or not we can put words to it, there was Supreme beauty, supreme loveliness, at Standing Rock in at least two ways.

1. There was the Supreme beauty of the opportunity to radically serve our fellow humans, indeed, all of creation. That's why many of us were there. To try and serve by putting ourselves in the way of the total Destruction of everything as well as we knew how. Exquisitely lovely.

2. It was an exquisitely beautiful, lovely, way of life, really, the only way of life. Huh? Yes. In truth. Though almost none of us in society can see it, it was a way of life, a way of living, that starved that which is killing us, the corporate capitalist consumerist state of things. It is killing us. It will finish the job in months unless we in huge masses move to a way of living that starves it.

3. And it was the, objectively iffy, way of life lived by many of us there. Huh? Yes. Every form of healthy tissue in every organism is designed to feel ultimate reward by using every single second to serve the well-being of the larger Collective. I know of no objective science or thought that can understand it any other way. That is, except for the life-form cancer. Think about it.

Yes, there were many many many Slackers at Standing Rock. But those in whom you would see Joy from sunup to sundown in the midst of the hellish conditions, in those you would find that they thrived on ways of serving, mostly small, from Sun up until the time they went to bed. Cutting wood for others, shoveling snow for others, cooking meals for others, washing dishes and pots for others, deliberately being a source of spiritual kindness, and uplift, for others. Tending the fire real in the fire pit, and ultimately in the heart.  Among these people you could cut the joy with a knife. Few had experienced such Joy, such piece of heart, such loveliness, such beauty, ever before, or since.

Did those of us at Standing Rock do this perfectly? No. But with few if any exceptions we lived on the land, on our mother earth, in a way that even 7 or 10 billion people doing so could do so for eons. This as opposed to the way that we worship in our sick culture, which probably can't sustain even the Next Generation.

We all understand this in our heads, don't we?

But some of us at Standing Rock, whether or not we realized it, we understood it in our hearts, our souls. And we knew it as heaven. We saw, what to almost all eyes was material ugliness personified, but instead we saw ultimate Beauty. The beauty of a sustainable Earth forever.

Not to be critical or disparaging. Nearly all attempts at sustainability thus far has started with an assumption, we need to maintain our consumerist preferences but do so without destroying Earth. Inheriting this is a notion of beauty.

What is the ultimate Beauty is in a thermal Mass, Earth bearing structure, with virtually none of the trappings that we have been taught are essential in this culture, that can support people whose lives are made up of every breath serving their sisters and brothers out of love, that's their entertainment, that's their amusement? What is that Community, including the structures, were as Perpetual as the Earth and stone piled on top of them? What if even to build they cost maybe $3,000 per person? That is, extremely affordable.

What if? A different world is possible.

How was more rich, the emperor that first preferred the Nightingale in nature, or second, the emperor that had learned to prefer the mechanical Nightingale?

Who was more rich, the emotionally healthiest of our native sisters and brothers that lived on this land 5000 years ago comma living the beauty, the loveliness, of creation? Or is it those of us in this culture today, the most highly medicated culture that there has ever been comma with a lower reported quality of life than many if not most Nations on Earth, and way below the materially modest country this was even back in the 1950s?

Another world is possible. The world called for in Oceti Infinity Communities ( http://oceti-infinity-communities.weebly.com/) is the world of beauty. It is the natural Nightingale. It is the last and only hope. By this name, by this effort, or by some other. It is the only hope. There is no time left.

If Trump and his cast of monsters do not hate, revile, abhor, hold in contempt, all of us that are not in their criminally Rich tiny Circle, if they really don't, how else can their behavior be explained? I was.....

If Trump and his cast of monsters do not hate, revile, abhor, hold in contempt, all of us that are not in their criminally Rich tiny Circle, if they really don't, how else can their behavior be explained? I was born and raised among them. They view us the way most of us view a cockroach. If the cockroach is in a glass aquarium we find it amusing and may even have an affection for it, may well feed it even. If it gets close to us most of us feel loathing and if to close, we kill it, and feel hatred toward it.

Isn't our cultural view regarding work the start of all our problems? I'm sure that it is. We fail to distinguish between meaningful work and.....

Isn't our cultural view regarding work the start of all our problems? I'm sure that it is. We fail to distinguish between meaningful work and meaningless work. We live the mistaken idea that all work is meaningless. Meaningless work is drudgery. But every bit of healthy tissue in every form of life is designed exactly for an unending, every breath, existence of meaningful work and presumably it is designed to find that the optimal experience. Certainly my own experience is that being engaged in meaningful work, totally devoted myself to that, totally absorbed, is the Supreme Human Experience.

To this a kind soul wrote:  I don't know. Is meaningless work drudgery? Doing the dishes is drudgery and so is cleaning the toilet but it must be done. And to do it when no one pays you to is an act of love.

My reply:  I only do dishes, and I have done a massive amount of dishes including this morning, I only do dishes when I see it as a way to serve a larger important good. I have chosen to avoid doing any meaningless work, work that I cannot see how it helps others in an important way, I have avoided this at all costs for close to 15 years now. Meaningless work is what almost all of us do to make a living, instead of making life for ourselves and others.

A useful dividing line to determine sanity vs. Insanity is whether the individual, or the group, Strongly tends to rigidly bias toward their own view, their own.....

A useful dividing line to determine sanity vs. Insanity is whether the individual, or the group, Strongly tends to rigidly bias toward their own view, their own set of information, over the information and or views outside of themself. The great Alfred Adler referred to this in terms of private logic vs common sense, as I recall. Or maybe he said private logic vs public logic. An intrinsic preference for my Truth, versus the truth. An example that occurs to me is David Nash, depicted accurately I suspect in the movie, A Beautiful Mind. David was a brilliant professor at Princeton. He had an extremely active mind. Created understandings of the world which he found compelling. They led to him to view that his children and wife were mortal enemies and on the verge of acting on that view he thought of something new. Maybe just because the views in his mind were detailed and compelling, maybe they weren't correct. He spent the rest of his life acting on that later conception, that not everything in his mind was correct, and he tried very hard to understand the truth as opposed to his own truth. Much more importantly there are few on the left in this country, there are few on the right in this country , that are much interested in the truth available to us all. They are interested in the portion of the truth that their respective groups find comfortable and are opposed to understanding the more comprehensive truth that could embrace all parties.

We through corporate capitalism, are our own Jailer, our own destroyers. The Unimaginable, the......

We through corporate capitalism, are our own Jailer, our own destroyers.  The Unimaginable, the unthinkable, is the truth in 2017. The global elites always have viewed we masses as a blight, a plague, except when it is useful to exploit us. Global warming, corporate capitalist destruction of 'our' environment, is the 'Gestapo,' the "Death squads," they need not pay for, WE pay for, they profit from. We through corporate capitalism, are our own Jailer, our own destroyers.