Again, like all the disciplines, the discipline of cooperative community cuts into an addictive habit: that of living separately as “householders” in our separate family “castles”, and thus avoiding making ourselves vulnerable to the influence of and agreements with others that is a necessary part of such a cooperative arrangement. But again, like all the other disciplines, once the adaptation has been made to this new habit, great energy and attention are released for the Greater Purpose.

Energy and attention are not only bound at the individual level. The nature of the government or State in which we live, the news and politics of the times, and the actual state of the world, all bind our attention, generally in a very negative way. The establishment of local cooperative communities is the beginning of a process which, when, carried out on a global scale, begins to relieve world tensions and relieve everyone of the anxiety that comes from the fear of global threat or annihilation:

Fundamentally, there is only bad “news” in the ordinary, ego-based, un-Enlightened, chaotic world. Instead of waiting for . . . whatever it is that you wait for all the time — you must, yourself, become involved in intimate, cooperative community with other human beings. In a responsible, mutually dependent, cooperative, tolerant, peaceful, and intimate relationship with other human beings, you must create and protect the basics of a truly human culture and of a truly intimate daily human society. … The principal characteristics that stand at the root of any civilization are those of cooperative, human-scale community itself. …those characteristics are … cooperation, interrelatedness, interdependence, non-competitiveness, true (or positive, rather than merely insipid) harmlessness, and positive (or ego-transcending, and other-serving, rather than merely self-negating) self-sacrifice.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Eleutherios