Robert Augustus Masters - Authentic Community

A new article from Robert Masters is always a good thing - here he looks at finding the balance between individual and group needs in a community in a way that both are supported.

Authentic Community

February 28th, 2011 | By Robert Augustus Masters

We desperately need authentic community, not just as an appealing concept or occasional gathering of kindred spirits, but as a living reality firmly grounded in post-tribal, cult-transcending wakefulness, integrity, intimacy, and practicality.

There is of course considerable personal and cultural resistance to this (but not necessarily to its surrogates!), resistance that must be thoroughly explored and understood before trying to establish such community. This resistance is rooted not only in the struggle between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group, but also in the often spectacular failures of so many so-called communities and “growth” centers over the past 40 or so years. Later I’ll say more about these failures, but for now let’s look more deeply at individual versus group needs, beginning with the necessity of having a clearly and strongly established sense of personal autonomy.

Read the whole article.

Here are a few of the ideas Robert mentions in this piece:

• If we don’t have enough autonomy, we’ll too easily be pulled by our craving to belong to any group that provides us with a sufficiently strong sense of belonging — and if we have too much autonomy (which manifests as an exaggerated, too protective independence) or are overly invested in it, we’ll keep ourselves cut off from community, including the kind that could truly be beneficial for us.
• And more than healthy autonomy is necessary: We also need to be at home with deep connection, communion, intimacy.
  
• Strong boundaries don’t have to be rigid or impermeable. Without such boundaries, such a clearly embodied capacity to protect and honor our integrity of being, we will confuse connection with fusion, integrity with allegiance, surrender with submission, and intimacy with romance. .
• A capacity for in-depth relational (or interpersonal) intimacy is essential if we are to effectively function in a community.
  
• Without ... separation, intimacy becomes little more than fusion, exaggerated cohesion, a cult of two, a “we” estranged both from “I” and the collective “us” of humanity.
  
• And the capacity for intrapersonal (or occurring within the individual) intimacy is also essential if we are to effectively function in a community.

This is a big one for me - this idea touches deeply on how we "do" spirituality in this culture (and especially in integral circles).

• [W]e choose relationship with our every quality — and I mean “our” in both a singular and collective sense — rather than separation. Intimacy then becomes more our passion than does conventional transcendence, and relationship becomes not something to outgrow, but rather something to fully embody and live, especially as we realize, right to our core, that everything — everything! — exists through relationship.

He goes on to outline how and why so many spiritual communities in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even now fail and self-destruct in dysfunctionl chaos - Think the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (now known as Osho since his 1990 death), think Jonestown, think Adi Da, think Leary and Alpert at Harvard before the fall . . . . the list could go on for days.

Tags: Robert Augustus Masters, Authentic Community, Psychology, interpersonal, introspection, community, boundaries, Masters Center for Transformation, autonomy, cults, relationship, relational, intrapersonal