I love what you’re saying about Christ as the center. I have the village technology, 3 principles, 4 premises, they help any community live in peace if just one person is following them. but the center really matters. I can’t say what it “should” be, but I’ll say that if the center is relationships or relationship health, that falls apart faster than anything.
Yes! I just bought a copy of your book for a fellow village weaver that I wanted to share your very helpful first principles.
My sense is that typically the "center' is something transcendent, closed, and exclusive. Transcendent ideals can't ever be proven wrong or break a promise.
For some intentional groups, it might be a shared "Vision" of stewarding a land or a mission. In Buddhism, there's the taking refuge in the Three Jewels or the Bodhisattva Vows.
I want to know if it's contradictory or just paradoxically really, really hard to have a sharp cohering "center" that's also open and not globally exclusive.
Most open groups have really weak centers and lack of coherence.
Whereas, can see Christian churches with its exclusivity creates a closed coherence that's very strong and can unify a community together.
But is it possible to have an open center with also a strong central coherence?
I saw something once that missionary work and the work of spreading the gospel is encouraged particularly *because* it is alienating of others outside the group and gives the visceral experience that safety is only available within the group. It’s a way to make sure kids get a bad impression of the larger world, making them more likely to stay in the group.
What’s at the center of our little village is the now-moment experience of being together. It’s very different from centering the relationships as abstractions. It’s transcendent and open tho. It’s immediately accessible to a wide range of people without them needing to share beliefs.
When a mutual belief is the center it’s necessarily alienating of those who don’t share the belief, and confusing when it seems we share beliefs but we are coming from very different premises.
A center can also take precedent over the now-moment experience and then we are back in the toxic masculinity of the system getting resources at the expense of human experience. That was my experience with “Christ” at the center. What was actually at the center was control, and it cost us a lot of peace.
I think there is also a crisis of faith where we’ve become convinced that majority must rule because holistic coherence is “unrealistic,” and even when it’s on the table, we don’t stay with the negotiation long enough, we compromise before we get there and this is how marginalization persists.
@Hannah, bit of feedback for you if I may. I am tracking Peter and I am having a hard time finding the book mentioned above. I see very interesting courses around understanding men but still not finding your main website. Even google has the "other" Hannah Taylor the one who teaches southern cooking, but i assume this is not you :-)
Thank you Marco! It’s true I’m not doing a lot of online book promo. You can buy it on Amazon and I appreciate you highlighting that it’s hard to find!
From my experiences I found that there is something spiritual that holds a group of people together that often went unstated. It loosely revolved around individuals having a sincere desire to get along and be of service and be in support of each other. I think that a large part of the success of a community is in finding the people who will practice this lived desire and crafting a specific mission together. I highly recommend “Creating A Life Together” by Diana Leafe Christian that is a very practical guide to creating a community. https://newsociety.com/book/creating-a-life-together/
This resonates, and a big yes to more of these kinds of experiments.
I’ve also been exploring what creates the “village field” before there is a village: what practices, relational capacities, and living systems allow real coherence to emerge. We’re currently researching this through Regenera, where Phase 1 is a three-month community experiment in Denmark, a living laboratory for regenerative culture.
I feel inspired reading that many of you are experienced Circlers, and I imagine collective emergence sits close to the center of your work with community building. I’d be very curious to hear what you’re learning at this intersection of collective emergence and community building.
In my experience, collective emergence opens a space where something genuinely new becomes possible; when we learn to listen to what wants to emerge, rather than defaulting to problem-solving mode.
At the same time, it asks us to develop living structures that can actually hold that emergence in practice.
I’ve been writing about some of our findings so far, and would love to exchange field notes.
In Gaiaville (gaiaville.dk) located in Odense, Denmark, we are in a very similar process. We have built some common facilities that allows us to host retreats and create bridgehouses (temporary communities of practice) but we are looking for the community to expand and deepen before building the additional physical infrastructure that would be needed to support a residential community.
Peter, you may nor may not remember me from Monastic Academy. This is a landmark article that you have written, which I am sharing widely. I am in a group of 5 in deep we-space seeking a co-living situation that would be relationally/spiritually focused, and you have opened my eyes to what needs to be done. This is a proect-in-the-works that I will cover on my "Creating utopia" substack. Looking forward to further reports from DC, I lived there for a while was part of a burner community called GlowHouse
good clarification, yup that's online Zoom based via Relateful, Tuesdays 8:30 - 9:30pm EST. Although who knows the Nectary may host some informal circles in DC in evenings, we have an amazing crew
I love what you’re saying about Christ as the center. I have the village technology, 3 principles, 4 premises, they help any community live in peace if just one person is following them. but the center really matters. I can’t say what it “should” be, but I’ll say that if the center is relationships or relationship health, that falls apart faster than anything.
Yes! I just bought a copy of your book for a fellow village weaver that I wanted to share your very helpful first principles.
My sense is that typically the "center' is something transcendent, closed, and exclusive. Transcendent ideals can't ever be proven wrong or break a promise.
For some intentional groups, it might be a shared "Vision" of stewarding a land or a mission. In Buddhism, there's the taking refuge in the Three Jewels or the Bodhisattva Vows.
I want to know if it's contradictory or just paradoxically really, really hard to have a sharp cohering "center" that's also open and not globally exclusive.
Most open groups have really weak centers and lack of coherence.
Whereas, can see Christian churches with its exclusivity creates a closed coherence that's very strong and can unify a community together.
But is it possible to have an open center with also a strong central coherence?
I think that’s the question of the hour.
I saw something once that missionary work and the work of spreading the gospel is encouraged particularly *because* it is alienating of others outside the group and gives the visceral experience that safety is only available within the group. It’s a way to make sure kids get a bad impression of the larger world, making them more likely to stay in the group.
What’s at the center of our little village is the now-moment experience of being together. It’s very different from centering the relationships as abstractions. It’s transcendent and open tho. It’s immediately accessible to a wide range of people without them needing to share beliefs.
When a mutual belief is the center it’s necessarily alienating of those who don’t share the belief, and confusing when it seems we share beliefs but we are coming from very different premises.
A center can also take precedent over the now-moment experience and then we are back in the toxic masculinity of the system getting resources at the expense of human experience. That was my experience with “Christ” at the center. What was actually at the center was control, and it cost us a lot of peace.
I think there is also a crisis of faith where we’ve become convinced that majority must rule because holistic coherence is “unrealistic,” and even when it’s on the table, we don’t stay with the negotiation long enough, we compromise before we get there and this is how marginalization persists.
@Hannah, bit of feedback for you if I may. I am tracking Peter and I am having a hard time finding the book mentioned above. I see very interesting courses around understanding men but still not finding your main website. Even google has the "other" Hannah Taylor the one who teaches southern cooking, but i assume this is not you :-)
Thank you Marco! It’s true I’m not doing a lot of online book promo. You can buy it on Amazon and I appreciate you highlighting that it’s hard to find!
https://a.co/d/017Yoag4
From my experiences I found that there is something spiritual that holds a group of people together that often went unstated. It loosely revolved around individuals having a sincere desire to get along and be of service and be in support of each other. I think that a large part of the success of a community is in finding the people who will practice this lived desire and crafting a specific mission together. I highly recommend “Creating A Life Together” by Diana Leafe Christian that is a very practical guide to creating a community. https://newsociety.com/book/creating-a-life-together/
This resonates, and a big yes to more of these kinds of experiments.
I’ve also been exploring what creates the “village field” before there is a village: what practices, relational capacities, and living systems allow real coherence to emerge. We’re currently researching this through Regenera, where Phase 1 is a three-month community experiment in Denmark, a living laboratory for regenerative culture.
I feel inspired reading that many of you are experienced Circlers, and I imagine collective emergence sits close to the center of your work with community building. I’d be very curious to hear what you’re learning at this intersection of collective emergence and community building.
In my experience, collective emergence opens a space where something genuinely new becomes possible; when we learn to listen to what wants to emerge, rather than defaulting to problem-solving mode.
At the same time, it asks us to develop living structures that can actually hold that emergence in practice.
I’ve been writing about some of our findings so far, and would love to exchange field notes.
In Gaiaville (gaiaville.dk) located in Odense, Denmark, we are in a very similar process. We have built some common facilities that allows us to host retreats and create bridgehouses (temporary communities of practice) but we are looking for the community to expand and deepen before building the additional physical infrastructure that would be needed to support a residential community.
Thank you for the many fine insights <3
Peter, you may nor may not remember me from Monastic Academy. This is a landmark article that you have written, which I am sharing widely. I am in a group of 5 in deep we-space seeking a co-living situation that would be relationally/spiritually focused, and you have opened my eyes to what needs to be done. This is a proect-in-the-works that I will cover on my "Creating utopia" substack. Looking forward to further reports from DC, I lived there for a while was part of a burner community called GlowHouse
Just to be clear are the "Tuesday night circles through Relateful" in person (not zoom) at The Nectary?
good clarification, yup that's online Zoom based via Relateful, Tuesdays 8:30 - 9:30pm EST. Although who knows the Nectary may host some informal circles in DC in evenings, we have an amazing crew