Community

Recently I was elected to the board of directors of my home owners association (HOA).  In my view, the HOA is a "team", and the purpose of the board of directors is simply to represent the team.  The board should not attempt to BE the team by creating (or enforcing) policy that the HOA has not authorized.  Within days of being elected, I discovered that some of the directors do not share my view.  I am not bothered terribly when I am criticized by a director for a stand that I have taken for the rights of the entire HOA.  However, I do have to work with the board.  The Different Drum—Community Making and Peace (© 1987) appeared to be exactly what I needed.

Although my sole reason for reading The Different Drum was to learn how to function as a director, as with every M. Scott Peck book that I have read, it changed my view of the world.

According to Peck, "If we are going to use the word [community] meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to 'rejoice together, mourn together,' and to 'delight in each other, make others' conditions our own.'"  Community is and must be:

• Inclusive (not exclusive)
• Realistic
• Contemplative
• A safe place
• A laboratory for personal disarmament
• A group that can fight gracefully
• A group of all leaders
• Have a group spirit (but NOT a competitive spirit!)

I quickly realized that I have probably never been part of any true community in the past.  Some groups that I was a part of (family, religion) never were communities at all.  Until I was well into my 50s, I would not have allowed any other group with which I was associated (school, employment) to include me as "community".

My best shot at community should have been my marriage.  Initially, my wife was much better than I at living authentically, realistically.  We were bound by the same religion, and she was sometimes quite open about voicing disagreement with our religious doctrine.  Because I was a black-and-white thinker, I was not so open...not even with my wife.  (Even when we both agreed on the error of a doctrine, we sometimes sharply disagreed on how it should affect our lives.)  Primarily, it was my own lack of realism that prevented us from becoming what Peck calls "a community of two".

I was well into my 50s when I finally gave myself permission to be real.  Now, finally, I have the potential to become a part of community.

Some interesting quotes from The Different Drum:

The world "radical" comes from the Latin radix, meaning "root"—the same word from which we get "radish."  The proper radical is one who tries to get to the root of things, not to be distracted by superficials, to see the woods for the trees.  It is good to be a radical.  Anyone who thinks deeply will be one.  In the dictionary the closest synonym to "radical" is "fundamentalist."  Which only makes sense.  Someone who gets down to the root of things is someone who gets down to the fundamentals.  (p. 25)

I dreamed that somewhere there would be a girl, a woman, a mate with whom I could be totally honest and open, and have a relationship in which the whole of me would be acceptable.  (p. 28)

Simply seek happiness, and you are not likely to find it.  Seek to create and love without regard to your happiness, and you will likely be happy much of the time.  Seeking joy in and of itself will not bring it to you.  Do the work of creating community, and you will obtain it—although never exactly according to your schedule.  Joy is an uncapturable yet utterly predictable side effect of genuine community.  (p. 40)

Most, to a greater or lesser degree, fail to individuate—to separate—ourselves from family, tribe, or caste.  ...  But in light of all we understand, this failure to individuate is a failure to grow up and become fully human.  For we are called to be individuals.  We are called to be unique and different.  (p. 54)

We are called to wholeness and simultaneously to recognition of our incompleteness; called to power and to acknowledge our weakness; called to both individuation and interdependence.  (p. 56)

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. ... Just because it is a safe place does not mean 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.  (p. 71)

Another of the essential characteristics of community is a total decentralization of authority.  ... Community is a group of all leaders.  ... Committees are virtually never communities.  (p. 72)

Competitiveness is always exclusive; genuine community is inclusive.  If community has enemies, it has begun to lose the spirit of community—if it ever had it in the first place.  (p. 74)

Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.  (p. 88)

The basic pretense of pseudocommunity is the denial of individual differences.  The members pretend—act as if—they all have the same belief in Jesus Christ, the same understanding of the Russians, even the same life history.  One of the characteristics of pseudocommunity is that people tend to speak in generalities.  "Divorce is a miserable experience," they will say.  Or "One has to trust one's own instincts."  Or "We need to accept that our parents did the best they could."  Or "Once you've found God, then you don't need to be afraid anymore."  Or "Jesus has saved us from our sins."  ...  Another characteristic of pseudocommunity is that the members will let one another get away with such blanket statements.  (p. 89)

Underlying attempts to heal and convert is not so much the motive of love as the motive to make everyone normal—and the motive to win, as the members fight over whose norm might prevail.  (p. 91)

Organization and community are...incompatible.  ...an organization is able to nurture a measure of community within itself only to the extent that it is willing to risk or tolerate a certain lack of structure.  (p. 93)

Fighting is far better than pretending you are not divided.  (p. 94)

One reason to distrust instant community is that community-building requires time—the time to have sufficient experience to become conscious of our prejudices and then to empty ourselves of them.  (p. 96)

My most basic motive when I strive to heal is to feel good about myself.  But there are several problems here.  One is that my cure is usually not my friend's.  Indeed, offering someone my cure usually only makes that person feel worse.  (p. 97)

An extraordinary amount of healing and converting begins to occur—now that no one is trying to convert or heal.  And community has been born.  (p. 103-4)

Myths are myths precisely because they are true.  Myths are found in one form or another in culture after culture, age after age.  The reason for their permanence and universality is precisely that they are embodiments of great truths.  (p. 171)

All myths are about human nature, one way or another.  (p. 172)

Since we believed that the Germans were "just like us," the only way we could account for their atrocious behavior was to assume that somehow they had been enslaved by the madman Hitler, the evil ruler.  Erich Fromm's seminal work, Escape from Freedom, was so important precisely because it exposed this illusion.  In it, Fromm compellingly demonstrated that insofar as they had become enslaved, it was because the German people had sold out to Hitler.  (p. 173)

Perhaps because it would be a much simpler world if we were all alike, it is the tendency of human beings in all cultures to err dreadfully on the side of severely underestimating our differences.  (p. 176)

The reality of human nature is that we are—and always will be—profoundly different, for the most salient feature of human nature lies in its capacity to be molded by culture and experience in extremely variable ways.  (p. 178)

What distinguishes us humans most from other creatures is not our opposing thumb or our magnificent larynx or our huge cerebral cortex, it is our dramatic relative lack of instincts—inherited, performed patterns of behavior that give other creatures a much more fixed and predetermined nature than we have as humans.  (p. 179)

Psychotherapists, who are in the business of "adult-making," know that many people who look like adults are really emotional children in adult clothing.  That is not because their patients are necessarily more immature than the average person.  To the contrary, those who genuinely assume the humble but honorable role of patient do so precisely because they are the ones who are being called out of immaturity.  ... True adults are those of us who have learned to continually develop and exercise their capacity for transformation.  (p. 181)

I would define the idealist as one who believes in the capacity for transformation of human nature.  ...  It is the idealists who are the realistic ones.  (p. 183)

The personality—whether that of an individual or a nation—inherently resists change.  Patients come to psychotherapy, on way or another, asking to change.  But from the moment therapy begins, they start acting as if change was the last thing they wanted and often will fight it tooth and nail.  Psychotherapy, designed to liberate, shines the light of truth upon ourselves.  The truth will set you free—but first it will make you damn mad—is an adage that reflects this resistance.  (p. 184)

Our political and spiritual leadership has declined in inverse proportion to the increasing amounts of money and effort we have expended to manipulate other countries.  (p. 185)

Gale Webbe wrote in his classic work on the deeper aspects of spiritual growth that the further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves and the fewer and fewer people one likes.  (p. 186)

One of the two greatest sins of our sinful Christian Church has been its discouragement, through the ages, of doubt.  (p. 200)

Erich Fromm once defined socialization as the process of "learning to like to do what we have to do."  It is what happens when we learn to feel natural about going to the bathroom in the toilet.  (p. 202)

Aldous Huxley labeled mysticism "the perennial philosophy" because the mystical way of thinking and being has existed in all cultures and all times since the dawn of recorded history.  (p. 202-3)

The number of people entering the mystical stage of development and transcending ordinary culture seems to have increased a thousandfold in the course of a mere generation or two.  (p. 205)

Meditation can probably be best defined as the process by which we can empty our minds.  ...  The virtue of meditation is that whatever comes into emptiness is beyond our control.  It is the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new.  And it is only from the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new that we learn.  (p. 210)

If you continually ask questions of life and are continually willing to be open and empty enough to hear life's answer and to ponder the meaning, you will be a contemplative.  (p. 211)

Emptiness requires work.  It is an exercise of discipline and is always the most difficult part of the process that a group must undergo if it is to become a community.  Like any discipline, it can become easier if we make it a habit, as I have suggested Jesus did.  But even if habitual, it is still painful.  For emptiness always requires a negation of the self and the need to know, a sacrifice.  (p. 217)

Mystics of all cultures and religions speak in terms of paradox—not in terms of "either/or" but in terms of "both/and."  (p. 220)

Perhaps the best known and most telling of all Christian paradoxes was Jesus' statement:  "He that saves his life shall lose it; and he that loses his life, for my sake, shall find it."  By this Jesus did not mean that each and every one of us is called to be victim to bodily murder as he was.  He did mean, however, that death of the psychological self is required for salvation.  This same sacrifice of self is required for emptiness.  Such sacrifice usually does not mean actual physical death.  But it always means some kind of death—the death of an idea or ideology, or a traditionally held cultural view, or even at the very least simply an entrenched pattern of "black or white" or "either/or" thinking.  (p. 220-1)

All change is a kind of death, and all growth requires that we go through depression.  (p. 222)

What are the criteria for discerning religious integrity?  Truth in religion is characterized by inclusivity and paradox.  Falsity in religion can be detected by its one-sidedness and failure to integrate the whole.  (p. 240)

Heresy is destructive only when it dictates behavior.  As an idea alone it has no importance.  Behavior is the key.  ...  While all forms of thinking should be tolerated, some forms of behavior should not be.  ... There is no such thing as a belief or theology—no matter how false, incomplete, or heretical—that cannot be accepted in the inclusiveness of true community.  Conversely, the attempt to exclude individuals because of their beliefs, however silly or primitive, is always destructive to community.  (p. 245)

Our heritage of religious freedom is one of the greatest blessings of this nation.  The requirement for government to restrain itself from imposing a particular religious-belief system on its citizens is both a cornerstone of democracy and an evolutionary step in the history of civilization.  Yet if this separation also obliges citizens to refrain totally from seeking to express their religious views within political and economic spheres, it will inevitably lead to utterly "privatized" and superficial religious practice.  ...  No separation means the demise of religious freedom.  Total separation means the demise of genuine religion.  (p. 246)

"People want peace so much that governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."—Dwight D. Eisenhower, London Sunday Times, 1960  (p. 260)

This country refused to join the League of Nations and has done its best to emasculate the United Nations.  The reality is that, like Christianity, world government "has not been tried and found wanting but hasn't been tried at all."  ...  As Golda Meir once put it, "International government does not mean the end of nations any more than an orchestra means the end of violins."  (p. 274)

Eric Berne taught us something else about psychological games:  the only way to stop playing them is to stop.  (p. 277)

When he left office more than a quarter of a century ago, President Eisenhower warned us to beware of the military-industrial complex.  (p. 279)

People frequently fail to grow because they retreat from the pain of depression and are unwilling to do "the work of depression."  (p. 281)

Remember the early Christian theologian Origen, who said, "The Spirit stands for progress, and evil then, by definition is that which refuses progress."  (p. 281)

A will unsubmitted to anything higher than itself is, or will inevitably become, evil.  So it is that capitalism, in and of itself, has a profound tendency to "refuse progress".  (p. 284)

It is because it resists change that we say "pride goeth before the fall."  (p. 285)

In Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees.  To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril.  (p. 287)

Recently a man representing a potential source of funds attended a community-building training conference conducted by Foundation for Community Encouragement.  Toward the very end this man said with visible agony, "I feel torn apart.  On one hand this has been a most moving experience for me.  I have personally benefited from it more than I dreamed.  I am very glad that I came and surprisingly sad to be leaving.  But as I think about what has happened here, about the essence of the experience and what you are trying to do, I cannot help but conclude that it is really about nothing more than love.  And how on earth can I go back to my board of directors and sell them on love?"  That man's problem is ours and yours.  It is our task and yours to sell the world on love.  (p. 334)

Being in the Now on the Road

For most of my life, I believed that I was a spiritual person.  I was confident, because I was always striving to follow the religious principles that I was taught.  But I eventually began to notice that some people used the words "spiritual" and "spirituality" in a sense that was foreign to me.  I began to wonder if, perhaps, I was missing something.

Right now I am in the process of reading "You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey from Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy" by James Blanchard Cisneros.  If this book had come into my possession several years ago, I almost surely would have destroyed it.  Since then I have become quite open-minded...willing to question anything that I believe.  Even so, had I read it only two years ago I likely would have dismissed it as not being based in "reality".

In the past two years I have read books (on "spirituality", and on "quantum mechanics") that have convinced me that much of what I have always "known" is false...simply my perception.

During the past week, as I read "You Have Chosen to Remember", any time I read something that seems a bit too far "out there", I ask myself, 'Am I trying to reject this idea because it is not possible?  Or, am I trying to reject it simply because I have never believed it?'  Sometimes I have had to struggle with myself.  But, in fact, the book is literally taking me on "A Journey from Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy".

This morning while reading in Chapter 8 ("Being in the Now") I read a section that especially impressed me.  I do not have to "buy into" any of the first seven chapters in order to understand the logic and wisdom of what I read in that section.

Here is that section, verbatim.  If it rings true to you (as it did to me), you will probably find that "You Have Chosen to Remember" can forever change your paradigm, by showing you that knowledge, peace of mind, and joy are nothing more than choices.

Being in the Now on the Road

"Have you ever noticed... anyone going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

The ego has taught us that if someone cuts us off in traffic, we should react with emotions such as annoyance, irritation, anger or even rage. The world considers these emotions to be natural and deserved responses. The world tells us that we have every right to be angry. It feels natural and right to react with anger because that is how we have been trained and what we are now used to. In fact, we often consider what is natural and what we're used to as basically the same thing. Yet, what we are used to and what is natural are usually two completely different things. Any time we react with anger, such a reaction occurs not because it is natural, but because it has become a bad habit. We have learned negative tendencies, have not corrected them and they have become bad habits that we now call our natural behaviors. We have repeated these bad habits over a period of time and they have now become "second nature" or natural tendencies. But many of the reactions we consider natural tendencies have, in truth, nothing to do with our true nature. When we were children, our parents, other family members and friends reacted this way. As a child this type of reaction was often common, first with our parents and family members, then with our peers. As adults, they probably still react this way, and now we have probably joined them in their thinking. At first, such reactions probably did not sit well with us, but as we heard our families react over and over in such a manner, sooner or later we got used to the behavior, and let it be until their behavior became ours.

I remember as a very young child, driving with my mother in Caracas, Venezuela. Sooner or later, someone would cut her off, or something would happen on the road that she simply did not agree with. Her response was typically a negative comment regarding the other driver's skills. I remember hearing my mother say things she would never say outside the car. Needless to say, the first time I really remember arguing with my mother was in the car. She complained about someone's driving and I immediately came to that person's defense and explained to my mother what she could have done to avoid the situation. Let's just say that taking criticism about her driving skills from a seven year old child did not win me any brownie points! On the other hand, she was happy because she thought that it was only a matter of time before I would become a successful defense attorney. So on and on it went. My mother complained, I defended the other drivers, she came back at me telling me why I was wrong, and I offered driving advice on how she might avoid such situations in the future. She would say that I should be defending her and not the other driver whom I did not even know. Anyway, on and on it went, drive after drive, until one day I got so tired of the whole game that I figured it would be best for me to just fall asleep, or just keep my opinions to myself.

The reactions of my mother, which most people consider natural and correct responses, offer people a certain level of comfort. For if it did not offer a certain level of comfort, why would people continue to react this way? Attacking a brother or sister only offers a certain level of comfort because we believe that when we do so, we are released from the negative emotions we ourselves offer. Yet, if we were to look within, we would see that whatever we offer a brother or sister remains with us. If, in a car, we offer anger, that anger, as much as we want to believe that it affects the other driver, affects us more. We think that we experience release and comfort by attacking a brother or sister, but this is only a false release, a false comfort.

I invite you to look within. Does this so-called release truly bring comfort? True comfort manifests itself as the state of peace. Does attacking a brother or sister, regardless of how much we think we are right, offer us true peace? Shouldn't comfort and peace of mind go hand in hand? Do these “comfortable” feelings come from actual comfort, or from habits and illusions of comfort?

The ego would have us believe that if we "give it" to another driver, this action will make us feel better. The ego teaches us that what we give we lose. Thus, if we give a negative emotional response to another driver, this negative emotion will leave us and somehow stay with the other driver, thus releasing us from the response. This, the ego says, will make us feel better and will make the other driver feel worse. Not only that, but the ego also wants us to believe that this negative emotion will somehow stay with the other driver for a long time to come, thus making us believe that we got the upper hand.

The Godself reminds us that what we give - we keep, that what we offer a brother or sister - we gift ourselves. There is no way we can offer a negative emotion without feeling it ourselves. What we offer a brother or sister must first flow through us. There is no such thing as letting another driver "have it" without feeling it in one way or another.

Now try to remember all those times you reacted with anger out of habit. You will probably not have to think too far back. Has this habit ever brought you true peace of mind? And if not, has it ever brought you comfort? So isn't this habit of anger, with which we are now comfortable, really just an illusion of comfort? Haven't we suffered in our cars long enough? Would you like to change your way of reacting? Would you like to know what true comfort feels like? There is a way, my friend, to find peace and comfort on the road.

I used to react with a lack of peace on the road. I admit that even today, I slip every now and then and mentally let a driver have it. But the difference is that I now catch myself being out of peace with myself much quicker, and as I catch myself I correct the situation in my mind and find true comfort and peace.

Living in Caracas, Venezuela presents many opportunities to choose peace on the road. If you haven't been there, imagine Los Angeles with half to a quarter of the available traffic lanes, no real street police enforcing laws and stop lights which, on a good day, are perceived by fellow drivers as yield signs. If it rains, people are better off walking to work, regardless of the distance. This is a city where, if a survey were conducted asking people to find the turn signal in their cars, at least 90 percent would fail!

We have discussed that anger might seem to be a logical, comfortable response - one that we are used to, a habit. We have also discussed that this so-called comfortable response has truly never brought us comfort, and if it hasn't brought us comfort, it definitely hasn't brought us peace. In fact, we have tried it the ego’s way over and over again, and what has it ever really brought us? Are you open to trying a new way? Good, because this has worked for me, and if it has worked for me then it can work for you.

Living in the Now: Four Steps to Choosing Peace on the Road

There are four steps that I have used and still use to obtain peace on the road. They are as follows:

• Learn to differentiate between the spiritual being driving and the action of cutting you off.
• Look at each driver on the road as the child of God and visualize someone you know, trust and love. I visualize Jesus, especially when I need His assistance with those who cut me off or drive recklessly.
• Pray for the safety and protection of every driver who cuts you off or is driving recklessly.
• Be a positive example on the road.

The first step toward choosing peace on the road is to learn to differentiate between the spiritual being driving and the action of cutting you off. We have all had bad days, or at least days we perceived as bad. We have all been late for a meeting, a date or work. We have all had plenty of excuses for not driving as carefully as we could every day. Having said this, would we like our lifetime to be judged based on one driving mistake, one careless act? Well, that is what we do when we call someone a jerk (or worse) for cutting us off. We judge that person's entire life by that one moment in time. We see this person as someone who has always been a jerk and will probably die a jerk. Not only do we punish this person for this one act, but we equally punish ourselves through our loss of peace. Little do we know what kind of day or week this person has had or what kind of situation that individual is currently experiencing.

For all we know this person could be a great person who just happened to make an error in judgment while driving. We are always in the right place, at the right time. Thus, this person is offering us a gift, and this gift is the opportunity to remember and practice our perfection through the act of choosing peace on the road. As Plato once said, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

What a wonderful gift it is to be able to choose peace in such a situation. This child of God who has crossed our path is allowing us the opportunity to practice choosing peace. We have been taught the habit of choosing anger, and judging our brother or sister. This is a habit that will probably take time and practice to correct. Therefore, every opportunity that a brother or sister offers us is no more or no less than a beautiful gift. This individual is offering us the practice of choosing peace. There will come a time when we will no longer need to practice choosing peace, for we will be at peace and live in peace. Until that day comes, thank our brothers and sisters for their offerings, participation and assistance.

We, and our brothers and sisters, are the extension of God's love in action. When we see that in our brothers and sisters, we feel it. Every action, reaction and situation is an opportunity to remember this. There will come a day when instead of judging our brothers and sisters, we will thank them. There will come a day when, instead of reacting with anger, we will react with understanding. And there will come a day where, instead of seeing an error, we will see and meet the opportunity. That day is coming, for you have been led to this passage and in your heart you sense its truth. We have tried it our egos’ way long enough. We have tried judging our brothers and sisters. We have tried anger and seen error. Now our hearts remind us that there is another way of looking at this. There is another way of reacting. There is a way to find peace in our brother or sister's action. There is a way to find peace in our reactions. There is a way indeed.

The second step toward choosing peace on the road is to look at each driver as a child of God and visualize someone you know, trust, respect and love. I visualize Jesus driving certain cars on the road, especially the ones that cut me off or drive recklessly. At first, you might feel a little strange doing this but this might assist you in getting past the illusion that the spiritual being who just cut you off is a stranger. For how could you ever truly be mad at God’s child? There is nothing strange about a child of God, for you and he are one. You are a child of God; the stranger is a child of God. Both of you are part of the extension of God's love in action. Both of you have chosen this path, a path that will allow each of you to choose heaven or hell, peace or anxiety, forgiveness or judgment. Forgive his error and you will be released. Choose not to forgive, and you will add the weight of judgment to your heart.

To me, Jesus was and is a great teacher. He is the definition of love in action. In my heart, I know that He would want me to feel the same way about all my brothers and sisters. He would want me to see His perfection in everyone. He would want me to forgive and love my brothers and sisters no matter what, and to treat all my brothers and sisters as I would treat Him, and so I do. To me, Jesus is a child of God, and we are children of God. There is no difference between any of us, except for the fact that Jesus has remembered his perfection and we are in the process of remembering ours.

See who you will in the other car, but know this: that person is a mirror image of you. There is nothing that you wish for that person that you do not experience yourself. If you are angry with him, you will feel it within yourself. If you forgive, understand and have compassion for him, you will also feel that within. There is nothing you do to another that you don't do to yourself. You know this to be true because you have felt your own anger. Regardless of where and to whom you distribute it, you have felt its consequences.

The next time you become angry with another driver, feel what that does to you, not only to your outer self but also to your inner self. Feel the heavy fog roll through your heart, feel its denseness. Feel the tension in your body, the anxiety. Then listen to the sadness in your soul. Hear it for the first time asking you this one simple question: Why would anyone in their right mind do something like this to themselves over and over again? Ask yourself: "What am I doing to myself? What am I accomplishing?" Then, as the fog dissipates and the light begins to shine through, say this: "I simply choose not to do this to myself any longer! There is another way I can react. I will now choose to see God's child in my brother and sister!"

The third step toward choosing peace on the road is to pray for every driver who cuts you off or is driving recklessly. Replace the angry reaction that has brought you nothing but pain and sadness - with a prayer. Let that prayer come directly from your heart. Reach into your heart and pray that the individual gets home safely, that he or she has a great day, and that his or her kids and family are showered with love. With all your soul, pray for God to send angels to escort him or her home. Pray that they touch his or her heart so he or she might think of others and slow down. Pray that anything that is bothering him or her will be washed away through God's mercy. Do this for him or her and you will be set free. You will feel all that you have asked for them. What you will receive in return is a peace that will fill your drive anywhere you go.

The fourth step toward choosing peace on the road is to be a positive example for those on the road. It feels good and peaceful being a positive example, whether in life or on the road - there is no difference.