We need to f****** be really really clear about virtually all prior attempts at communities that were highly moral, sustainable, and created really joyful moral Souls. Many have tried and virtually all have failed. You......

We need to f****** be really really clear about virtually all prior attempts at communities that were highly moral, sustainable, and created really joyful moral Souls. Many have tried and virtually all have failed. You and I {Dave?} discussed several weeks ago I believe my understanding that denial of self worked for Gandhi but it is massively suboptimal. Maybe I had that conversation with someone else. We are not designed to be primarily creatures of avoidance. It becomes a fetish. This is the problem with religion. It tells us what not to do as we practice it. We don't work like that. We have to fill ourselves. When we don't fill ourselves with the right stuff we try to fill ourselves with the wrong stuff. We are essentially creatures of greed but in this culture unenlightened agreed, ignorant greed, mistaken greed. All hope depends upon being creatures of enlightened agreed, learning the Exquisite superiority of the experience of Joy, which comes only from selfless devotion to creation, and the comprable grotesque inferiority of pleasure, intoxication. Forever people have sought to set up intentional communities, to be moral, and they have all failed for the reason I have just vaguely outlined. I'm certain of this. I'm not trying to gain your agreement but I definitely hope you hear what I'm saying. The great athlete in any sport does not become so by avoiding television, by avoiding being lazy, by avoiding time spent away from training. With few if any exceptions they learn to love the sport, to love the pursuit, to Greeley have that Pursuit take over their lives. And the work you and I are talking about must be understood as the work of trying to save the few individual souls in the world that can be saved, in the same way the few seeds that fall in this desert might be cultivated to Life. By whatever words. Communities, practices, associations, must all every single breath be devoted to that end and yet always groups that set out in this direction lose sight of that, their own growth becomes the purpose, and it becomes one big circle jerk. Always. A fetish. A club. Spiritual masturbation. We don't have time to do this again. The work of the soul, the DNA given soul, of a plant, a mouse, and elephant, or human, the soul is devoted to the well-being of the collective. Not so the head and flesh. Everything depends upon rediscovering the taste for joy and thereby developing our skill to keep the soul in charge for the joy that it generates and keeping, for the greed of it, the head and the flesh under the control of soul. This has been my fuel, my rock, for 15 years now, and with different words it is the same with all of the few individuals throughout history that I Revere.