Core Values & Communal Critical Mass
Doug Hamilton
Eroding Core Values and Loss of Communal Critical Mass
One session of papers at the 2018 Communal Studies Association annual conference was on ‘the end of community’ with three in depth papers given on three different communal groups. One of the groups was a 19th Century group something like the contemporary spiritual practice transcendental meditationist community in Fairfield, Iowa is today and the others were of more secular communal groups of the earlier 20th Century and late 19th.
The commonality in their three narratives was what came as diffusion of their core values in time as there came along arrivals of newer outsiders in membership and fewer of generations born to the older founding generation would stay on in community. These trends were supplanting to founding generations then in time. Hence, the loss in perspective of foundational core communal values over time as those values came to not be so well spoken to (championed) or lived in the groups.
Evidently as a capable reenforcement of core foundational values diminished in time within each group example there came in a mundane to the workload of sustaining ‘community’ as resources of energy and altruistic goodwill ebbed and dried. The cohesion of a communal life energy generally went down, people would leave, people stopped coming. Each group then arriving to the point whence their assets of what had been built up to facilitate their core values are then auctioned off. The sale.
Within the examples in these papers was the group of 19th Century Zoar separatists, something like the community in Fairfield, Iowa transcendentalism there seems to be a template for how it goes with spiritual practice groups: Diminution of the cheering of core values, administrative rigidity setting in, loss of people, loss of altruism towards the community, loss of donors, loss of critical mass, financial crisis, and finally an auction of assets attendant to the dispersal of community.
A long declining arc of the Dome meditation attendance numbers in what is the Fairfield, Iowa meditating community seems far along on this path.
In the TM community it is said: “The Past is a lesser state of evolution.” But, financial planners warn cautioning otherwise, “Past performance is no guarantee of future returns” . Toward Fairfield, Iowa becoming something else like a historic site to visit, according to these histories evidently things may not look the same as what we may see now as community.
Already are heard grumblings in the TM community from what is a governing remote elder International 'Council of Rajas' that the meditating Domes in Fairfield, Iowa are too expensive to maintain. While at the same time the meditating University in Fairfield being without endowment requires active and substantial donor cohorts every year to make budget for what all they should like to do to keep on with.
Within prospects of a current (post-founder) leading in communal core values the enduring hopeful of a re-developing community are constrained in reality by budget and human resource right now. This is known and those who remain are working as they can with it to stay relevant. While the complexion of the core group that is remaining in community quite evidently is not what it once was in youth, may providential blessings from a ‘superradiance in the Nature of the Unified Field’ support a magnanimous prosperity to the continued journey of their meditating community.