The Scholars' Fairfield Tour Thanks so much for helping with this. In a very limited amount of time it worked on them. They got it: the incredible scope and gravity of what we have here. It is way Utopian what we have here and from the tour they were bowled over by the scope of it.
In the next couple of days over at the conference with them other attendees at the conference were coming up remarking having heard how great the tour of Fairfield was from those people who came over to Fairfield. Incidentally, the guy who was of the founders of The Farm, back in the 1960’s to present, came to me the next day remarking he had ‘no idea’ of the size of it here. This guy lectures all over the world. The Auburn and the U. Kansas professors too. The others too. It worked. In a very short tour we got it to them. Bravo. Thanks for helping with it. Kind Regards, About this group: In the group I see there is a professor from U. of Kansas who for decades has written books or edited journals on intentional communities in America and elsewhere. Also author, lecturer and widely published, one of the early founders of The Farm in Tennessee and other interested academics visiting too. There is a chair of university humanities department also, etc., coming in the group. These are social scientists, historians and educators. http://www.communalstudies. org/annualconference http://www.communalstudies.org/annualconference ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Eroding Core Values and Loss of Communal Critical Mass One session of papers at the Communal Studies 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 our own in Fairfield 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 once 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 ‘shakti’ generally went down, people leave, people stop coming. Each group then arriving to 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 Zoar separatists, something like our own in transcendentalism, seems something of a template for how it goes with spiritual practice groups as our own: 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, Ia. meditating community seems far along on this path. In TM community it is said: “The Past is a lesser state of evolution.” But, planners warn cautioning us otherwise, “Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns” . Towards 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 we are hearing grumblings in TM from what is an elder International Council of Rajas that the Domes in Fairfield, Iowa are too expensive to maintain. While at the same time the University 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 prospect in communal core values the hopeful in re-developing community are constrained in reality by budget and human resource right now. The complexion of the core group remaining quite evidently is not what it once was in youth. May providential blessings from the superradiance in the Nature of the Unified Field support a magnanimous prosperity to our continued journey here in community. Jai Guru Dev, # ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : The Communal Studies Association. http://www.communalstudies.org/ http://www.communalstudies.org/ This year’s conference is being hosted nearby Fairfield. Over at Bishop Hill, a historic village in Illinois, Oct 5 & 6. An annual scholarly conference w/ academics who study groups like ours. Intentional communities past and present. Historic or contemporary. Typically the conference is two days of papers being delivered by social scientists, historians, historic preservationists. People can come and attend for one day as they may wish. There is a whole program but the sessions with the papers can be attended without doing the whole conference. There are categories for different level attendees. One day attendance is $65. Student and grad student rates too.. Link: http://www.communalstudies. org/registration-2018 http://www.communalstudies.org/registration-2018 Conference page: http://www.communalstudies. org/annualconference http://www.communalstudies.org/annualconference This is my tenth year attending. I find most any of the papers presented to be interesting. I put the CSA conference on my calendar every year now. Because this year’s conference is so near at hand I would urge any scholarly types to come over and sit in, even for a day. Kind Regards,
