Life-cycle within Communal Spiritual Groups

[Doug Hamilton]

This short quote following does a good
job of succinctly discerning these variables for spiritual communal
groups:

"When religion grows in age,
faith turns into dogma, and
experience is replaced by book-
knowledge, virtue by adherence
to rules, devotion by ritual,
meditation by metaphysical
speculation. The time is then
ripe for a rediscovery of truth
and a fresh attempt to give it
expression in life."
(Lama Govinda)

[Doug Hamilton]

That (Govinda's description) is a life-cycle in essence of spiritual
or religious groups.
This one (Miller's) is the life-cycle of succession in people.  Both
have their story-lines.

“The first generation has an idea and lives for that idea. The second
generation perpetuates that idea for the sake of their fathers, but
their hearts are not in it. The third generation openly rebels
against the task of mere perpetuation of the institutions founded by
their grandfathers-it is always the same with people.”
-F. William Miller, Main Amana pharmacist, 1933

excerpting from:
The Amana People
The History of a Religious Community
by Peter Hoehnle

[Doug Hamilton]

"When a theory is transformed into an ideology, it begins to destroy the self and self-knowledge. Originally born of feeling, it pretends to float above and around feeling. Above sensation. It organizes experience according to itself, without touching experience. By virtue of being itself, it is supposed to know. To invoke the name o the ideology is to confer truthfulness. No one can tell it anything new. Experience ceases to surprise it, inform it, transform it. It is annoyed by any detail of truth, now it denies any truth which does not fit into its scheme. Begun as a way to restore one's sense of reality, now it attempts to discipline real people, to remake natural beings after its own image. All that is fails to explain it records as its enemy. Begun as a theory of liberation, it is threatened by new theories of liberation; it builds a prison for the mind." 

Susan Griffin, "The Way of Ideology"