 
To: Bill Eichman 
Cc: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
Subject: Re: possibilities of university 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 16 Sep 92 04:35:09 EDT."
              
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 92 15:14:49 -0400
Message-Id: <2214.716670889@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU>
From: Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU


Dear Bill, :-)

>Once again, thanks to Jon Slenk for hosting this virtual salon.

Right!

>Well, you claim to one of the few who escaped the pressures of
>ordinary life, so this shouldn't apply to you, but things like school
>loans, credit card debt, rent, a vehicle, clothes for the workplace, and
>the 9 to 5 grind and the 24 hour a day demands placed on the salaryman
>make up the bulk of ordinary life pressures. 
> ...
>So, are you saying that those millions of young people who are
>filled with vision and activism while in college, but who 'give up' and
>become working drones a few years after graduation, that is, those who
>don't want the monastic life--- are essentially non-entities, and are
>entitled to no place in community life?

Of course not, it's just that so far all of my efforts have gone
in the direction of avoiding these situations entirely, rather than
working out of them. For that reason I have little to say directly
to once-very-visibly-eager visionaries who are in an ordinary situation 
(although of course I am glad to hear from them. But we've been talking 
ideals).

>Do you really want to criticize me for wanting to build communities
>that contain enough of both worlds, the modern and the thoreauvian, to
>provide a home for a couple of hundred thousand more of the 99+%?

No, not at all! I'm counting on them being there, as part of the world
I live in! But I can't be blamed for plugging asceticism, both social
and material, can I? :-)

>One of the things I've talked about is the possibility of networking
>together many dozens of different types of communities, which are
>seperate entities, but which have agreements and links which allow them
>to trade products, exchange members, and provide support for each other.

You took the words right off my keyboard.

>I'd be interesting in figuring out whether we can build any types of
>links between the types of communities you want to build, and the types
>of communities I want to build.

Friendships among the members.

>>Again and again I'm reminded of the Kilgore Trout short story which is a
>>dialogue between two pieces of yeast, aware only that they are suffocating in
>>their own shit, and unaware that it is carbon dioxide and that they are
>>making champagne.
>
>So, what you're telling me is that here on earth we're all like yeast
>organisms, dying in our own excrement, and possibly making champagne.
>Who is the godlike being that gets to drink this champagne? (as we might
>be thought of as godlike beings to the champagne yeast, who die for our
>palates in the specially created environment of the fermenting cask)

I suppose either ourselves in later life, able to use the beautiful,
unconnected fragments of what we had built earlier in an unsuccessful
attempt to realize our youthful ideals, in order to realize our more elderly
ideals. Or, later generations who read the documentation we leave behind.

>I'm reminded of a scene attributed to Maslow. Teaching a class of grad
>students, he asked them (paraphrased), "Who here are going to write
>the great books, and create the great ideas, of the future??" No-one
>replied; they all sat mute. "If not you, then who?", Maslow asked...

Inventor Jacob Rabinowitz: "You are the cream of your generation."

Voice from Back of Room: "God help the skim milk!"

>>>It's hard to believe what the pressures will be like when you're in your 
>>>early twenties.
>>
>>Oh, this must be more of this "ordinary life" business I didn't understand
>>earlier ... :-) I keep my life is so free of pressure that some people find 
>>it tiring -- usually when I'm shedding their friends' responsibilities and
>>entanglements that they want to lay on me just like they do everybody else
>>in normal social situations.

Apologies ... no-one is interested in cocky implications about how cool I am
-- that paragraph should have ended at the smiley. I thought I had edited it
from there after typing the rest for my own amusement. Again, apologies.

>>of daily life, of course, but that's taken for granted!) "There are a 
>>thousand hacking at the branches of evil for one who is hacking at the root."
>
>If you're going to hack at the root, you need a bigger axe, and greater
>skill, than those who only chop at branches. 

I disagree. I think that the point of this quotation -- and certainly the
point that I was getting at -- is that location of one's efforts is 
everything: if the fundamentals can be changed, everything will follow.

>What methods have you found
>to be effective?

Applied metaphysics. A serious study of philosophy has reduced the number of
things I find to be really interesting.

Finding answers for questions such as "what is meaning, what is the true nature
of man" -- you know, stuff like that -- tends to eliminate interest in
activities based on false notions or which imply mistaken goals.

I'm dangerously close to being tongue-in-cheek here, but I'm still quite 
serious: fundamentals are such questions as the above, and a focused 
understanding of them will tend to focus the rest of life. Depending on your
taste, they need not be abstract: questions such as How should I relate
to those close to me? and What do I really need? and What should the sphere
of my influence be? -- of a more practical nature, have a similar effect.

Of course, so put, this is familiar to everybody, but I bring it up as
an explication of my quotation. To say that the root of evil should be
chopped at is not a call to extraordinary effort, but a reminder of the
fundamental importance of -- fundamentals. Thoreauvianism, in this context,
is a call to tremendous mistrust of everyone and every institution around you,
which influence you to hold all sorts of conflicting ideals and goals, and
is a call towards obsessive simplification of life so that you might live
very close to the fundamentals that you search for.

(If you have a different understanding, let's not argue -- your understanding
is absolutely correct!)

>>As I've indicated before, all of my practical plans are built around the
>>idea of isolating the elements of the final vision and learning how to
>>make them work one at a time, always as the side emphasis of a (fairly)
>>normal group community such as we know can work. At some future date
>>when the participants are ready, we take our knowledge from the
>>string of group house-experiences and throw it all together at once.
>
>Maybe you could paint out a scenario for me, of what this means and how
>it works??

One could live in a sequence of group houses, which are very ordinary, but
for two exceptions: 1) each house has some special experimental emphasis,
e.g. in the current Ashram it is "let's build a creative community" in
future it might be "let's have a vegetable garden and make it as productive
and efficient as possible" or "let's take this situation to encourage each
other to pursue spirituality and have semi-regular meditation sessions" or 
"let's all take the situation to encourage each other wrt our small businesses
on the side" or what have you, and 2) each house is always packed with 
"ringers" -- the most extraordinary people that can be found from anywhere in
the country. During all this time, ideas are tossed around which are much
more radical than the ones which are actually being implemented; connections
are made, etc. etc. Eventually there will be such a large community of
people connected in one way or another to these houses and the people in them,
and so much practical knowledge will have been gained, that the time will
be ripe and a group of people will very naturally combine in a situation
that is more complex and permanent than any of the previous, and will 
implement most of the previous "experiments" as done deals. 

I hope that's clearer.

Tom

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