This blog is the first iteration of what has now become www.OneCommunityGlobal.org, please visit that site for all the most current details on this project.
One Community is formed and maintained based on a specific series of community building steps that lead to elevated states of connection, creativity, understanding, and ultimately genuine community. While easy to understand, moving through the stages can be an intense experience as people shed their judgements, expectations, need to fix other people, fear, and egos in favor of higher states of consciousness.
One Community is formed and maintained based on a specific series of community building steps that lead to elevated states of connection, creativity, understanding, and ultimately genuine community. While easy to understand, moving through the stages can be an intense experience as people shed their judgements, expectations, need to fix other people, fear, and egos in favor of higher states of consciousness.
The foremost authority, researcher and author on the topic of community building is Dr. Scott M. Peck who identified in his book, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, 4 clear stages to successful building of genuine community.
- Pseudocommunity: This is a stage where the members pretend to have a bon homie with one another, and cover up their differences, by acting as if the differences do not exist. Pseudocommunity can never directly lead to community, and it is the job of the person guiding the community building process to shorten this period as much as possible.
- Chaos: When pseudocommunity fails to work, the members start falling upon each other, giving vent to their mutual disagreements and differences. This is a period of chaos. It is a time when the people in the community realize that differences cannot simply be ignored. Chaos looks counterproductive but it is the first genuine step towards community building.
- Emptiness: After chaos comes emptiness. At this stage, the people learn to empty themselves of those ego related factors that are preventing their entry into community. Emptiness is a tough step because it involves the death of a part of the individual. But, Scott Peck argues, this death paves the way for the birth of a new creature, the Community.
- True community: Having worked through emptiness, the people in community are in complete empathy with one another. There is a great level of tacit understanding. People are able to relate to each other's feelings. Discussions, even when heated, never get sour, and motives are not questioned.
It is easy to see why we are committed to true community. This is the place where people shine the brightest and the most profound healing and growth emanate.
"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 men 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." ~ Peck ~
Maintaining community is a process of recognizing the stages and committing to always returning to genuine community. This process becomes easier and more fluid each time as stages of pseudo community and chaos become more recognizable and undesirable with time spent in genuine/true community. Even more profound is that with time, while the issues that can cause a genuine community to slip back into chaos become more and more complex, the rewards of higher states of consciousness and deeper and connection are also greater and greater.
"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."
I can attest to this "supernatural" and "ecstatic" feel because I have experienced this in large groups, working for an organization that taught communication and the Graves Values Levels, and in small groups consciously deciding to gather with the intent of keeping our hearts open and communicating and sharing from this place. The feeling and these moments have been some of the most profound in my life and one of the many reasons for the creation of One Community.
