Open Enlightenment

Cool stuff!

Best line from Vinay:

“Gaskin was a very interesting guy, I met him one time and he was really quite shiny”.

Thanks for the video Alan, I’m looking forward to seeing where you go with this project.

And in response to another thread, I hope you stick with the video format. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s eyes are bleeding from all the reading, so it does makes a nice change.

Thanks chaps!

Wow! Thank you so much for this video.

Toward the end, Vinay says “it’s not quite like a commune, it’s not quite like an ashram, it’s a something else… You’re gonna need a new word for it… The social agreement you’re describing is much more: ‘join in the dance rather than join in the club’… It’s like a studio. The studio provides the environment where the dance can be conducted. People learn the steps by doing, by intuition. There isn’t the sense that the leading of the dance is the guru authority function. It’s an embedding of an enlightened way of life in a very unenlightened world, in a way that’s sensitive to the Western way of doing things. ”

I’ve transcribed this bit because it could easily be a vision statement (perhaps in language that we’ve been missing all along) for what my collaborators and I have been working on for a few years at the Art Monastery Project.

We’re transforming a medieval monastery in Italy into some combination of international art production center, monastery, eco-efficient intentional community and startup corporation. As such we’re also very interested in many of the things you touch on in this conversation:
• exploring how/whether to import eastern structures for spiritual progress into the west
• building structures that allow householders—who we call “artmonks”—to learn meditation in whatever tradition they’re interested in and practice it (either as part of the long-term community or as visitors).
• finding ways to interface with the current economic system while not being limited by it (“insulation from the ordinary economy”)
• separating spiritual authority (“conductor”) and municipal authority (“mayor”)
• exploring ways of sharing (e.g. governance, three bureaucracies of sharing)
• learning from other models (e.g. cohousing, holacracy)

While our focus is on that portion of the householder population whose work is primarily “artistic” (trained musicians, dancers, visual artists, etc.), we’re also strong advocates of the view that “everyone is an artist.”

@Alan, I look forward to hearing about your progress as you explore these issues further.

@Nathan: that’s a beautiful monastery you’ve got there! I’d love to know what successes/failures you’ve had and any tips you might like to share.

Hi Alan,

I’ve been thinking about the subtle but persistent pull towards ossification, dogma, and orthodoxy in communities.

For example, there now is a DADA *Museum* in Zurich, Switzerland.

Now, conservative tendencies do have important functions. So how are you going to keep them from co-opting the project, while still enjoying their benefits, such as keeping things down to earth?

Cheers,
Florian

huh. wow. I guess I should have been keeping better track of what you were up to this summer, and i would have caught this sooner. Vinay strikes me an extremely intelligent and cogent thinker on a huge number of subjects. I though this before I knew he was a half step away from our circle of concerns, and doubly so now. yay, synchronicity.

I’m not surprised considering the number of synchronicities I’ve enjoyed visiting your site…

@Alan, here are some of our challenges and triumphs as a community. Of course, for every failure there are a dozen good excuses, and there are a dozen ways each of our successes is holding us back.

Off the top of my head…

Successes we’ve had as a community:
• Making mistakes and learning from them
• Organically realizing the importance of process and the need for governance
• Honoring the local cultural/historical tradition
• Finding a business model that is roughly in line with our mission
• Moving from survival to a humble form of thriving

Failures:
• Submitting to the endless flow of distractions from our goal
• Compromising our art-making and our contemplation to fit the immediate situation (“We could meditate… or we could fundraise for 15 more minutes!”)
• Getting perhaps too comfortable in “startup”/crisis mode
• “Spiritual authority” is non-existant or ad hoc

It’s an interesting way of thinking about things. Perhaps a more in depth weaknesses/dreams/strengths/distractions analysis is in order.

I keep running into cool people from The Farm doing interesting things in many different spheres. I appreciate that he talks about cohousing directly (you may want to put that as a keyword somewhere on this page, as many people are looking for that). Thanks for capturing and broadcasting this wisdom, distilling the essence of spiritual, connected community.

@Raines, were you with Sustainabilaville at BM ’07? Great to see you here!