Cosmic Ideas To Build On

FIRE MOUNTAIN NATION
BUILDING A CREATIVE COMMUNITY
Cosmic Ideas To Build On
Frank Andres 8.8.16
© Copyright Frank W. Andres 2017. All Rights Reserved.

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Introduction
The Western part of the world has had its experiment during the 50s and 60s with suburban living…the opportunity for such an experiment was provided…was the economic consequence of… very cheap gasoline…25 cents a gallon. This experiment was a failure. The United States was the richest country on earth…it still is…suddenly it appeared that it could give its people the best of all lives…a manor in the countryside…sort of…with its own green acres… sort of… mechanical servants…sort of…a mansion of many rooms…one that people owned…sort of. The result was a residentia l hell that the hippies eventually rebelled against… an existence exemplified by an alienated gasoline frenzied continual drive to work, food, shopping, friends, church, and fun. It didn’t work. No one was fooled. This was not paradise. Then the century of oil was over. The metropolises are contracting again. It is time to try new things. Fire Mountain Nation was formed immediately after the birth of the Internet. Contrary to what most people think, the most important things about the Internet are not infrastructure, communication, chatting…the most important potentialities, possibilities it allows are related to changes that will be happening simultaneously on the ground…and these land based activities…as opposed to “cyber-activities”…are circling around creativity. In the history of man and womankind…usually after a period of exciting economic times come periods of golden culture. It happened in Greece with Socrates and Plato, in Italy with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, in England with the Beatles… and now the United States, in spite of possessing a society strangled by corporate monopoly, is in a position to grant unto theworld masterworks of science and art. And we need to put Americans to work…at higher wages….The Internet in some way must become the new “oil”…it must allow us to regain the peak of activity we enjoyed earlier…. this time with individuals liberated to use the God given talents that they possess…to work…and create… Corporations are great…they give us all we need…but existence is not enough…Joy and happiness comes from each of us using the abilities we have…to change the world…for the better…whether it is having a child…physical creativity…coming up with an idea…intellectual creativity…or taking that idea and building a new business, making great art…that is, taking these new ideas and impacting the world…cosmic creativity… But we cannot work alone as individuals. We need our brothers and sisters, we need the bonding and warmth of the primal band, we need to go back to the land….the 96 percent of our country’s territory that is not bathed in glass and steel.
What will our masterpiece workshops, our community work areas… look like? I have experimented. I have been thinking. This is what I have
come up with so far. My thinking has two parts…first, basic theological kinds of ideas…what is man and woman’s role in the cosmos?…What kind of community will facilitate, equip that idea? Second, we need a theory of communities based on anthropological ideas…that we shall consider in my next essay. Where, how shall our communities fit into the arc of man and woman’s evolution here on earth. What sort of work shop is consistent with our need for the beauty of the land and Nature?…How can we put people back to work…with the decline of oil as the engine of our lives…we need new ways for people to make a decent living….What sort of activities are consistent with the abilities that have evolved in our minds and limbs to survive in a hostile world?….How can we pay back to the world to compensate for the mess we have made of it…pay back somehow for the enormous successes we have made…How can we pay back to the Cosmos…for an existence so magical…so full of the power to create and leave our mark…a mark that eons of our species in the future can be proud of….This essay examines the first considerations. What is our place in the cosmos? Residential Creativity But first…some basic thinking…before we delve into cosmic ideas…I was reading a book: Oneida…From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table,by Ellen Wayland-Smith. The U.S. was a lonely place in 1800 after the Revolution. Settlement was only two hundred years old in the early 1800s…our cities were what we now would consider to be small towns, which were only a hundred years old at most. There were three million inhabitants plus about 600,000 slaves…We possessed established culture of our own…the farms were isolated…the cities squalid, filthy, rancid…our history books will not admit it…but indigenous peoples were actually in charge, participated in events way more than we recognize today…America was a wild, lonely, dangerous place…It was the frontier… In these forbidding circumstances, we did have friends who lived at a distance usually, whom we might meet face to face in the churches, markets, the pubs….The thought of a family sort of community where face to face encounter was more frequent and satisfying…was appealing… especially for Christians who were forced to flee to the colonies because of their religion to begin with…who comprised the majority of those living north of New York…These pious ones prized the original relationships among the first saints and apostles of the Church…by Church, we mean the Catholic Church and its progeny…They prized the relationships that existed during the first years of the Church which were in actuality part of the Jewish culture…seemed to replicate the essence of the primal band inherited in an evolutionary manner from our ape forebearers…

Primitive tribes throughout the millennia were generally pools of family genetics, in which strengths could be developed, then tested in clashes with neighbors and predators….Thus, evolution in the past has been more of a group, family combative sort of working out of strengths and weakness…more than it was a contest among individuals….Throughout the history of primal man and woman, communities “living” together, in a more or less intimate manner, with an inborn sense of shared physiology…rather than isolated individuals inhabiting a general geographical area, has been the norm….such groupings were essential for the survival of the species in the past…It stands to reason that groups similar to these primal ones, although necessarily different in their sharing an affinal, loving, creative connection… rather than a strict physiological one,… can be beneficial as we attempt to build a vibrant workplace and culture in this new world of the Internet. My friend, Shea O’Leary, a computer whiz, and I, a philosopher, mostly…established a website in 1995. I was working and living in the small town of Oakley, California, in a remote suburb some 40 miles from the City of San Francisco. Shea was living with his family in Walnut Creek twenty miles away…He had our server at his residence. I immediately started to form a community in Oakley. I was a manager at a Jack in the Box in the town…the owners were concerned about teenagers roaming the streets and causing problems in and near our restaurant. The owners had had no success dealing with the kids in a forceful manner…so I decided to try and become friends…I found that the teenagers roaming the streets were playing hooky from school. Most of them seemed to be intelligent…We assumed that they were bored with their classes…We found out later that many were intimidated by bullies, others were frustrated by the drug and alcoholic abuse that made the schools less than an optimal learning environments. The first thing I did was ask kids to write a poem…Well, they seldom did that…what they give me instead was the first sentences of a story…lyrics for a song…written pieces about what they would like to do, places they
would like to see…For good efforts, I gave them a small amount of money…one or two dollars at the most…to validate their accomplishments….in our society things have worth, it seems, only if someone is willing to pay money for them….I quickly learned that these kids were not alone…they were not individuals roaming the streets…they came from neighborhoods nearby and there were natural groupings that existed within the neighborhoods…like gangs, I suppose, but these kids were intelligent and hung out together for semi-creative reasons. Many kids in school are bored…some try to relieve their boredom with violence and causing damage….As I say, we found that boredom was not the major reason thesekids were in the streets. The kids I encountered were hungry for intellectual interaction with others and ways to develop and gain recognition for creative impulses that they had… So these groups of young people were not residential groupings perse…yet they lived in proximity with each other in this small city…

Oakley was incorporated in the early years of this century…. when I met them they were spending a lot of time at each others’ houses….Once I helped to start the creative, learning juices running…most of the kids completed high school, went to a community college, and most have now graduated from a four-year college. So I deserve great credit for what I accomplished…no…actually, I did very little…it is a measure of the unsatisfactory environment in many of our schools that I did very few things and was able to produce tremendous results…The kids once motivated…in fact…did everything themselves. At the beginning, in 1995, we gave the kids “rooms” on our site…cyber
“spaces” in which they could display anything they desired to…written messages, music collages, collages of visual images….photos of themselves skate boarding, “hanging” together…We understood that this “room” sort of thing…could be scaled up to include other people…eventually this idea was elaborated by others…became “Facebook”… however, our concentration has always been upon creativity…upon “content”….not infrastructure….

Then in the year 2000, I gave tape recorders to a few of the kids and the groups immediately became organized on their own, each with an official leader and a kid to take care of the recorder…as well as other officials with designated responsibilities… well, as I have said, I quickly realized that these kids were in neighborhood groups already…Immediately many things on the website became audio…radio type programs with skits, music collections and collages, and spoken stories…Then a few months later one group grabbed a parent’s camcorder .and the rest is history….videos became the medium of preference for every sort of display of creative burst…. It quickly became apparent that we needed to be an official “tribe” or something of that sort….not official in any legal manner, but in our thinking about ourselves….a section of the website was set aside to showcase the best stories, music and videos that the kids had made. During fifteen years, the kids spent time in each other houses, with mothers overseeing activities, purveying food, offering places to crash if needed. There were “meetings”occasionally of several of the groups at once…with one respected fellowselected to be the leader of the groups…to be in charge of the meetings. At its apex, there were about 50 kids involved, including five females… one who worked with one of the guy groups, a girl who wrote books independently, and two girls who resided and worked on projects with their aunt as a team… they set up a video filming space in their residence. The “community” has been suspended for about six years now…there is interest in trying different ways to work together again if the Internet evolves to the place where some money can be made. In the meantime, I have a list of new people who would be interested in such a community, with an array of possible ways to interact within it….Like the Oneida community, we are looking for a secure means of income for our Nation…I suppose individuals will have their own means of income…but the Nation has to be a viable business on its own…with its own resources…before we can make major commitments, before we can call ourselves a Nation. We are absolutely certain that the evolution of the Web will provide this someday…and major changes have occurred during the last 16 months…our product is on all sorts
of platforms now and our blog is getting one thousand hits a week….and we are finally selling product for money now…after all these years….
All of this is a pipe dream in a way….the reality is…there is still just Shea and me…the kids are there in spirit…but they have gone on their
way…But there is one truth that promises that our dreams can become a reality…Creativity gives one joy and happiness. Physical creativity, that is, having children obviously does. However, creating ideas works, too…and then is a cosmic way, transforming ideas into products, impacting the world around us with inventions, books, music, movies, education, research…creating intellectual and “cosmic” children also fills our lives with joy and happiness….It appears that community interaction can be a very efficient way to promote creativity…let us consider some ideas about such community creativity in the paragraphs below.

The Creative Community and the Primal BandIdeas are important when one establishes a residential community. When I worked with my kids, my major aim was to encourage kids roaming the streets to start attending school again. I thought that this would be a difficult task…As it turned out, it was easy. These kids were smart…they had nothing against learning. I thought that perhaps the problem was that they were bored. But I wasn’t certain. So I started an “idea factory”on the web site. I asked the kids to list ways that schools could be more fun, more worthwhile to attend. What I received instead was a litany of woes associated with high school nowadays: bullying, alcoholism, drug use, sexual pressure from other kids. Generally, what they were learning…and how it was taught…was not the source of the problem….It was the environment created by other students that made the learning experience toxic. I wasn’t certain what to do. So I asked the kids to write me a poem. If they accomplished this task, I would give them a dollar or two regardless of the quality of the work. Well, they didn’t write me a poem in most cases as Ihave said before, instead they wrote a first paragraph or two of a story, lyrics for a song, part of a skit. Then I would follow up by asking for more of the same…more of what they were inclined to give…in exchange for a monetary award that would validate their work. When we start the community up next time, the ideas behind its creation will have to be different. My kids aren’t roaming the streets any more. And there are people who are interested in joining who are past the age of matriculation…although it is never too late to go back to school…and one can never have enough. No, this time we need grown up reasons for living together…for working in close proximity to each other. It is just that when I was in college I had noticed that students tended to form residential communities of their own…fraternities and sororities are the obvious ways…I was in a fraternity myself…The truth is that students did not organize fraternities and sororities themselves, these were “pre-fab” environments… But in the dorms, students tended to organize by floors, on their own… then in junior and senior years, students tended to move off campus and live in groups…almost like families…in houses. I noticed that these arrangements were similar to primal bands…also when I studied the development of institutions such as the Church, Government Bureaucracy, the Corporation, the University, I found that many institutions began as groups of people inprimal band sort of combinations. So I was interested in forming a group of friends, like most people do, although this group might actually do things together… maybe make things…rather than just visit each other in a social fashion. Oneida and Community Theory. When coming up with ideas for community creative activity, it was natural for American colonists in the northern colonies…and then U.S. citizens… to think conceptually in a theological, in a cosmic manner to begin with…because of the religious origins of these areas. They felt that activities on earth should be in tune with the operations of the heavens above. In the early nineteenth century, at a time that is now called the Second Great Awakening, John Humphrey Noyes decided that people should form family-like groups, tribes, similar to what the earliest apostles and Jesus’ mother, Mary, had formed. Surprisingly, he attracted a fairly sizable group of people, who settled in Putney, a hundred miles away from Manhattan, that eventually grew to be around 300 strong…and lasted in its earliest form… which included many social and sexual experiments…for thirty years. They had been forced to move from Putney to Oneida fairly quickly; however, the sexual experimentation continued for over two decades after that move…Their outlandish sexual behavior finally attracted enough attention from surrounding towns that an uproar led to a purge of its activities in 1870.

After this time, the group seemed to just shrug its shoulders, and continue on without the sexual experimentation…continued to evolve in more “earthly” that is business-oriented, ways… although the irony is not lost that theological underpinnings in this case had led to a way of life at first that could not have been more “earthly.”From sexual enlightenment, the Oneida group moved into a more
economic enlightenment…which included more human sympathetic work places, feminism, and sharing profits…the group eventually made a fortune making silverware…that is, cutlery made of fine silver.Let us look at the theological foundation for this community and then
look at Fire Mountain nation’s philosophy, its “cosmic” theological ideas…and see if ideas might be formed from a consideration of their experience…to guide the building of a creative community in this modern age. Oneida and Free Love Well, when one thinks of utopian communities, especially ones that end up residing in remote pastures away from urban life, one usually ends up thinking of hippies, drugs and especially sex. In most cases, such evolution leads to disaster. In the case of Oneida, the turn toward do-se-do intimacy led
to a surprisingly peaceful, creative thirty years of living together…before they were forced to change their ways by those outside the community…The community lasted long thereafter…until the first decade of the twentieth century. The evolution of Oneida into the pathways of sexual adventure are described in Wayland-Smith’s words: “The initial forays into multiple sexual partners were tentative and,
surprisingly, did not originate in Noyes’s quarter. It was George Cragin who wrote a letter to Harriet Noyes declaring his love for her as a sister in Christ; Harriet, divulging the letter to Noyes, admitted her attraction to Cragin. Noyes called a meeting of the two couples during which not only did Harriet and George Cragin avow their love for each other, but Mary Cragin and John
Humphrey Noyes did likewise. As recorded in Mary Cragin’s journal, ‘Afterthese arrivals we considered ourselves engaged to each other, expecting to live in all conformity to the laws of this world until the time arrives for the consummation of our union.’” Well, as is true in most cases like this, Platonic love can quickly become an exercise in creating children, which complicates a community within and
in its relations with those without. It was not long before the community had several couples declaring sacred intimate love…and soon the group of about 50 individuals was forced by outraged towns people to leave their first home in Putney… and head for the pastures of Oneida, a town named for the Indiantribe whose territory they would be living in, a hundred miles to the north and west of Putney.

All of this sex had a theological underpinning, of course…there was even science…a “physics” of sorts, as well as other disciplines….Noyes believed that sexual energy is part of a community’s life force…and if it were blocked, then all sorts of perversions could follow such as prostitution, masturbation, and obscenity. This was a non-theological argument, more of an anthropological one, based on public knowledge of primitive tribes and rapes. A more theological argument was based on what Noyes called “sticky love.” Noyes felt that in heaven, spirits were completely united together without one laying claim on another. It could only be good to attempt toduplicate this total union of spirits here on earth. Free love soon led to the concept of genetic engineering or, in their terminology, a concept of “perfectability” towards a society wherein laws and moral codes would not be necessary to guide a community…If true spirits were united completely and produced offspring of a superior spiritual nature, then individuals in the society would automatically do the right things…Thatis, in this instance…free love led to a program of eugenics. In 1869 they performed an eugenics experiment, whereby the highest spiritual members of the community would cross-breed to produce a new race of super-Perfectionists. One no longer sought to be a super-saint or perfect-saint…from now on it was an attribute in one’s blood. The “I” and the Oneida Community In conceiving of our Fire Mountain community, there are aspects of the
Oneida community which are problematic if they are to be an example for us to follow. Indeed, they were successful. They are living proof that the human soul is searching for soul mates to be close to…or at least closer than typical urban or suburban life offers. Still the free love seems to have gone too far. It was damaging to relationships both within the community and
without. There is some question as to what they were all about…thetheological script seems to have been way too important…more of an excuse for their friendship than an enabling concept. We will examine more aspects of this community in the next blog entry that considers the Oneida community as an anthropological and then as a creative unit…here we shall look at theological underpinnings..comparing the ideas of the Oneida community with ours…our theological ideas are spelled out in the penultimate chapter in my book Man and the Cosmos.
In my conception of things, we go back to when plants became animals…and we notice that it happened quickly with little change in DNA. Plankton which formerly were floating passively in the ocean, suddenly began to move towards food, away from harm. This led me to hypothesize that one particle was added to the organism..an “I” particle. The difference between vegetable and animal is consciousness…the addition of an “I”. I speculated how this might have happened…the major speculation surprisingly is that it is likely that every atom in the universe possesses an “I” and that when electrons are removed, it allows that “I” to be “exposed”…that is why we are not aware of their presence in general…along with the fact that the next level of discovery in physics, including finding an “I”, lies at a level of smallness that is too small for our present instruments to describe…let alone measure…we examine the nuclei of atoms now only by smashing them to
pieces and looking at the pieces…in the process we lose much….in the process we may be losing ourselves…our real selves…
Well, without going into my theory in detail, let us examine the ideas of the Oneida community in the light of my thinking…we shall present ideas from my theology as required as we go along. The “I” and Connectiveness In my notion of things, “I”s are enticed to participate in plant life because of “connections.” The cosmos possesses “light”…this is the cosmos we are familiar with…Yet there is much dark matter and dark energy… that is, invisible matter and energy, that actually comprises 97 percent of things…notjust “out there”…97 percent of what resides in this room. If you are an “I”…a spark of consciousness that has always existed and will continue to exist forever…you could easily be assigned to an existence that might be very dark…very much alone. Perhaps if you came to earth and resided within
plant life…connections can occur….A particle is comprised of an axis around which energy revolves very quickly…the outer reaches of this particle energy package demarcates a wave…so there are two levels of activity in the particle…the particle spins randomly around the particle axis…which creates a wave “packet”…the surface of which exhibits a wave…the wave is inscribed…“out-scribed” on the surface of the packet…this wave can be amenable to connection with other particles…or not…Perhaps residing within plant life, and connecting with one other particle very deeply, completely, will alter the wave surface and render the particle amenable to combination with other particles when it leaves the plant life and returns to reside in the cosmos….This propensity, ability to “couple” with other particles might result in a
much greater felicity of existence throughout eternity… Noyes’s conception, on the other hand, is of a heaven, a cosmos,
wherein spirits, “I”s, form communities of “good angels,” that is, there is a community in the cosmos that mirrors good communities on earth…thus, in his conception of things, it is imperative that there exist on earth mechanisms whereby the flow of love is enabled…In my conception of things…congruity and compatibility of oscillating waves must be channeled as to allow aggregation of “I”s… Noyes’s conception of heaven led to his conception of “sticky” love…a conception wherein marriage is a bad thing in that it promotes a “hard knot of individual selfishness.”…These secret, wayward desires of impulses,harbored by each of God’s frail creatures, seemed to him to subvert the collective good. Marriage, in his conception, was encouraged so as to conform with society’s expectations. However, within marriage, too close interaction and inordinate passion was discouraged…One’s feeling toward another should be defuse and spread among all the brothers and sisters. As Wayland-Smith writes: “We must go back to the Christian mystics and their vision of the godhead as one and indivisible, a unity in which all partial or surface identities are dissolved….” to find thinking like this….To use Noyes’s terminology, the more perfectly people are in communication with the sources of the vital heat, and the more they are enveloped in the genialmagnetism of social life, the less food, raiment and shelter they will need. When the electrical flow of God’s love flows from one to the other, it will be accumulated… forming “one glowing sphere: like a battery of the most cosmic kind…powerful enough to overcome death itself.” “I” and “I” In my theory of the “I”, the connectiveness of “I”s is paramount. The existence of dark matter and dark energy means that close connection among particles in the cosmos is not possible for most. Life offers a pathway toward the Light as it were. When an “I” is in charge of an animal’s life, it communicates with other particles moving past it in neurons… by means of oscillations on particle surfaces as they whiz by. Somehow the “I”, which is an ion, is not allowed to combine with the ions in the neurons whizzing by…even though as an ion, itself, it should by nature be anxiously inclined to do so. Anthropomorphism may be warranted in narrative such as this…as “I”s are entities with will, love, personality…just as a person has. Life offers connection with other disenfranchised “I”s though affection…that is, Love… what, where is Love in this conception of things?…Ions run in neurons and a charge, that is power, Will, is generated in a forward direction…From physics we know that magnetism, a power of attraction, is generated perpendicularlyn to this flow of charge…this magnetism could be the source of Love… If an “I” is able to “work” with others in a nice manner… oscillations on its particle surface begin to change and become more amenable to association in theLight world after the death of the plant organism. Most treasured would be a “tight” association with one favored “I” that would ensure not only inhabitance in the Light but eternal bonding into almost one “I” with that certain “I” after both have left the plant world. Thus in my conception,“sticky” love, that is marriage or other close bonding is not a bad thing but may be an essential first step before affection can be extended to other “I”s. On the other hand, biologists point out, that most sexual interactions in
Nature are momentary…therefore, it could be that sexual intercourse by itselfmight be sufficient for complete bonding to occur..if that is the case, then Noyes’s conception of things may be correct…that sex among all animals serves a cosmic purpose as well as a procreation earth plant purpose…thus, within a community…more sex the better. To summarize…In Noyes’s conception of things, sexual interaction among all members in a community is a desirable thing, but “sticky” exclusive love with one person damages the prospects of living eternally with
a larger group…thus one’s prospects of residing in heaven eternally is diminished. In my conception, one tight most cohesive bond is required and other less close bonds can be added…perhaps all will end up in a molecule together…but the essential unit in the cosmic molecule is the unit of two…thus these “couples” may continue into larger constructs. So is Mother Theresa in trouble?…in spite of Pope Francis’s canonization? Perhaps one’s impact upon humanity in general is taken in consideration somehow in the change of the surface oscillations of the particle packet. Somehow, however, one suspects that a “philandering” particle has reduced his or her chances of residing in favorable circumstances eternally. By the way, there doesn’t seem to be any sex eternally anyway …this seems to be exclusively a plant thing…and not all plants and microbes…imbibe in it…however, it is possible that particles, if closely “attached” are zapping each other every 2 seconds or so…in a quasi-sexual sort of frenzy…this would explain why there seem to be few objections to
spending an eternity with one other “I”… It does not seem to me that sexual intercourse is the deciding connection among organisms to change the propensity for particles to combine eternally…after all, sexual intercourse is a plant chemical activity…it
just seems to me that there is overlap in plant and cosmic concerns….and the focus of this overlap is the concept of “intimacy,” which is a plant, earthly, animal, organism concern…an overlap concerning plant “intimacy” and the cosmic concern involving the close association of “I”s…that is, the central concern involving ”I” and “I”…and the focus of this intimacy is upon the female organ. “Intimacy” does not seem to have much to do with the male organ at all. If a male just places his palm upon the female organ, there seems to be more contact between his “I” and hers, than if they stood before each other and talked…even kissed…there are like many walls separating the
face-to-face interaction…To witness this…merely ascertain the interaction ofmost married couples who are together every moment…at least in each other’s thoughts anyway…it seems to be an association based more on habit and understood sharing of family duties than there is evidenced extremely close bonding of “I”s continual consideration and expression of fondness towards the other…such “accustomed” closeness may not actually be enough to guarantee eternal linkage of “I”s. On the other hand, many animals meet
once in their lives have sexual intercourse and that experience may be enough for eternal conjugation. The visual apprehension of the female body and especially her organ are important to male response and success in the sexual endeavor…Yet is it not the taking off of clothes as a symbol that is most important in this interaction…the sighting of the organ is not as important as the revelation of the organ itself…that is it is the offering of complete intimacy to her mate that is most important psychologically here…so a partner’s hand on the female
organ may be more important to intimacy than the sex act itself…the sex act is dominated by selfishness, particularly on the male’s part, when sharing of intimacy gives way to friction and attention is directed away from the object of his love…towards personal pleasure…Thus the sexual act seems to be related more to selfishness on the part of each person than it does to cosmic aspects of communication. It may be more fruitful for cosmic purposes for the female organ to be immediately available under a dress for the male’s hand to be placed over the organ as often as possible each hour…than is any verbal expression or other physical extension of affection.

Fire Mountain Nation
So we have considered two different ideas, two different theologies regarding creating a community of people during two periods in history
where close interaction can be a benefit in their confrontation of the environment around them. In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. was in the throes of early economic development…a period of great energy and hope…it was a time when the past, the Middle Ages, old ways of looking atthings were being questioned…pushed aside in the rush towards the new. In a time of uncertainty…in a time of increased communication among people, it was a fond hope that there would be islands of love and help, especially in the dangerous western frontier territories where few friends lived nearby. Today we are flooded with interactions with others with digital devices…yet the U.S. and the Western world in general have now moved past a time of great economic robustness that seemed to offer a bright future…things don’t seem as promising now…In retrospect, we can see that the twentieth century was a very materialistic time in the United States with people living in
alienated suburbs. Now we need a new “new” …we need real loving and caring…We need to learn to live with fewer possessions…possessions didn’t really make us happier anyway….The attraction of community now is that it can provide love and support…it can encourage, allow, foster our natural creative abilities wherein the Internet, theoretically at least, can offer means for distribution of our gifts… And in a time that the U.S. needs new industry, new avenues for employment…people in communities can perform research,provide entertainment and encourage the participation of superintelligent people who in a recent corporate dominated past …have not participated as
much as they could have… But in this essay I am looking at how people shall conduct themselves within these communities…it was focused on the theological underpinnings for relationships among people in such communities…The next essay will be devoted to what they might be able to do together. I think it is obvious that free-love is not usually a enabling strategy in an utopian creativesociety…although it must be said that Oneida community existed for thirty years with around 300 individuals…with participants living in various degrees of monogamous and free-love adventures. Yet when the public around them revolted and they were forced to stop extramarital affairs, the
community continued its work for decades longer…In the case of Fire Mountain Nation…the emphasis will be on strong one-to-one relationships with affinal, loving ties among all in the community…This should provide the proper basis for a secure, minimally contentious interaction among all with attention directed towards joy and happiness…and helping the community
prosper financially and contribute to the Nation’s effort to build a bright, creative future.