by Dieter Duhm
On this path we encountered a virtual entity, the original matrix of community that exists in the implicate order of creation. We called it the prehistoric utopia. The idea that there was a primordial cosmic pattern for human community, applicable to all peoples, was fascinating. It also opened a new gate for us. Through the psychic abilities of my partner, Sabine Lichtenfels, we came to concrete visions for implementing the global Healing Biotopes plan. We understood how desperately the disregarded fellow inhabitants of our property, the animals, tiny creatures, and invisible spirits, need to be integrated into the work. Everywhere that we start a garden and build houses we encounter small co-creatures such as snails, worms, beetles, which along with us generate a positive or negative energy field. A functioning community pays attention to establishing a good living environment together with all fellow creatures, small and big. Eike Braunroth, creator of the peace gardens, demonstrated through his research the extent to which all of our fellow beings, even the smallest ones, seek human advice and abide by it.3 Even the snails follow advice about which parts of the garden are reserved for them and which they should leave alone. Unfortunately his pioneering work has not yet entered public consciousness. It needs to be integrated by the new centers. We have allocated a research area, which we humorously call the “Metaphysical Hectare” for this area of study (see Chapter 25).
Over the years one gets to know the particular relevance of certain animals or plants as energy and information carriers within the system. Questions of animal husbandry, even of meat consumption, then appear in ever new contexts. After four years of keeping fish we remain unwilling to catch a single one to eat. This is the kind of difficulty we find in things that we would previously have carried out habitually. We are in development and are far from finished. We advise all newly forming groups to refrain from taking fundamental decisions prematurely and from adopting dogmas that easily lead to fanaticism and intolerance. The topics that need attention are often so complex that it is not possible to come to quick answers. Life is constantly revealing itself to us. “First it comes always differently, and second never as you think.”4
Prehistoric Utopia
The prehistoric utopia is the universal timeless model of human community and society – its universal pattern or its original matrix. In our project a special area of research, guided by Sabine Lichtenfels, is the investigation into the cultures and vestiges of prehistoric peoples through for example the temples on Malta and Gozo (see her books Traumsteine5 [Dream Stones] and Temple of Love6) and the well-preserved stone circle of Almendres near Évora in Portugal. In collaboration with the geomancer Marko Pogačnik, Sabine Lichtenfels discovered and described the pattern of this stone circle and received a series of astonishing messages. She writes…
This information also slumbers as primordial experience in all human beings living now. Here lies your origin, from which you yourself emerge and which you have all forgotten. This memory was and is systematically assailed, for it is the seed for creating new, nonviolent cultures. This is not at all wanted by those presently in power. Here lies the code for a possible future, which has long been sleeping in your cells as information and dream. Today the Earth is dominated by an informational matrix that systematically deactivates such impulses. This is why it is so difficult to bore one’s way to this memory.7
We soon recognized that the systems recorded here were beyond the knowledge of our sociologists or psychoanalysts. We were obviously dealing with a far more comprehensive form of human society than our own, one deeply anchored in the overarching order of Earth, nature, and cosmos; of incarnated and non-incarnated forms of life. The stone circle of Almendres arose in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE. According to the research conducted by Sabine Lichtenfels we have reason to believe that this was a time when human and animal were not afraid of one another for they belonged to the same family of life, they communicated with one another and therefore had no impulse to kill each other. The creators of the stone circle were in touch with cosmic and invisible realms. The sociology of this culture is a matter pure mystery science. The appearance of an eagle or a snake, where a swarm of bees settles, where ants make their pathways and rats their subterranean cities has particular meanings. We have learned a great deal and continue learning. As we recall this original knowledge, we break fresh ground for a new cohabitation on our planet.
I do not think that all new centers need to start with this kind of mystery knowledge, but I assume that they will all enter this continent of consciousness once they have become attentive to the mysteries of life, once their inhabitants open their hearts and learn to trust. It is not only small communities - all of humanity is on the way to realizing the prehistoric utopia. This is not a return to the past but the awakening to a prehistoric knowledge, which lies as a legacy in our cells and awaits manifestation in our time.
Wolf-Dieter Storl, the inspired Austrian nature researcher, has immersed himself deeply in the mysteries of nature and into ancient ways of experiencing it. He has described the prehistoric utopia from his own experience. Storl offers insights into the mysteries of healing which were known to our ancestors and are carried into our time by authentic shamans.8 The “medicine men” of the original native tribes are shamans; they possess “medicine,” a supernatural, numinous faculty that enables them to heal others. Herbal medicine also contains secrets that will lead us to a new understanding of the prehistoric utopia. These relate directly to the inner connections between humans and the beings of nature, which have been lost in our culture; we need to see just how relevant this is to contemporary society. Even if not all of us can step into the animistic realm we can acknowledge the message it carries – that we live in a world of soul in which everything is in mysterious resonance. This applies even to the smallest of daily affairs. If when I walk through a meadow and step on the flowers, am I aware that bees need these flowers and that we need the bees because if they perish so too will we?
The Autonomous Individual and Grassroots Democracy
A functioning community needs independent human beings, not opportunist followers. The term community still carries the bad reputation of conformity, of “leveling down,” and collectivism. The wish to belong to a community leads many people to renounce their own opinion and conscience in order to secure acceptance by the group. They do not dare to object when authority figures make wrong decisions. This is the situation within political parties, criminal gangs, and fascist mass movements. In the dark times of history the law of community-building was “collectivism over individuality” and this still broadly applies within the parliaments of Western “democracies” today.
Community and the individual need not contradict one another; they complement one another. It is as a grave error to think that developing a community must be at the expense of the free individual. Exactly the opposite is true. A functioning community needs people that think independently. Only then can a strong communitarian self develop. Functioning community is based on trust. So long as the participants are the mouthpieces of a guru they cannot trust one another because they do not get to know each other. Trust among human beings is based not only on an emotional, but also on intellectual, spiritual, and ethical ground. The truth and autonomy of individual participants contributes to this intellectual and spiritual basis. Each human being has his own essential qualities. The community can only function humanely when it accepts and supports the distinctiveness of its individual participants. Then, the communitarian “super-self” can arise, which supersedes individual competence.
To get a healthy community off the ground the participants need to free themselves from the hypnotic spell of normality and to become the person they “actually” are. There is a profound difference between the “actual” (authentic, entelechial) human being and the role someone plays in order to cope with the conflicts of his existence. Everyone has – consciously or unconsciously – adopted a mask to ensure his or her own survival under the conditions of the globalized l
ie. On entering community this role is challenged until it can fully be deconstructed. This kind of self-revelation and transparency is a prerequisite for developing an emancipatory community, for people can only trust one another when they meet without masks. The individual must learn to become “himself” in order to become a member of a true human community. Those who enter a community make an existential decision; the change from an independent to a communitarian identity is profound. We are only at the beginning of communitarian development; it will fundamentally change the society of the future from the ground up.
There has been a lot of debate about grassroots democracy since the students’ movement in the last century. Grassroots democracy was an anti-authoritarian counter to the patterns of leadership in conventional society. It set out to dissolve authoritarian structures; all group members were to be granted the same rights of participation. While the psychological underground of the participants was still dominated by competition and authority struggles, the result was mostly hopeless chaos. Humanity needs to develop the capacity for democracy and this requires the transformation of the inner world. The adoption of grassroots democracy is appropriate when all participants are able to take on responsibility for the group. This requires people that follow their conscience and are ready to place the common interest above their own. When this is in place grassroots democracy develops naturally as a basic form of living and working together. In the event that a group member does not agree with the established consensus and provides genuine arguments, the group will confer until that member can agree or until the decision is corrected. Sometimes this prolongs the decision-making process but it also bolsters the basis of trust within the group.
So we see that autonomous individuals, capable of placing the common interest above their own are necessary to both functioning communities and to grassroots democracy. These are people able to participate in decision-making processes through their own thinking; they do not subordinate themselves to any given ideology, public opinion, or mainstream belief. To date people such as these have been rare. In the Marxist movement one had to say what Marx said. In Pune one had to say what Bhagwan said. At Friedrichshof one had to say what Otto Muehl said. In the Christian Democratic Union (the German conservative political party) one must think as Angela Merkel thinks and in intellectual circles it is commendable to mimic the thoughts of Der Spiegel magazine. This is the collectivist structure of the old era, in which no autonomous human beings, no reliable partners arise, only followers whose judgment is barely reliable. It was less the fault of the gurus than the followers’ longing for contact and togetherness that moved them to give up on their own thinking. Grassroots democracy cannot arise in this way; only unreflective collectivism. The anti-authoritarian movement arose in reaction to this mindless following and it threw out all the babies with the bathwater in its wholesale rejection of organized leadership. However the fact of the matter is that there are natural authority figures in every community. These are people trusted by others and/or those who distinguish themselves through special expertise. It is to be expected that their contributions will also carry a particular weight in grassroots democracy.
The turmoil around the issue of grassroots democracy fades away as soon as we integrate the inner world into the work and people begin to be authentic in a circle of trust and solidarity. It is self-evident that one listens to the thoughts and arguments of others when one trusts them. If they are wrong, one simply tells them so. When the others are right, one corrects one’s own thoughts. I appeal to every young person: turn away from hypnoses and ideologies. Be who you are!
Why We Did Not Fall Apart Due to the Usual Conflicts
Sally Silverstone, a woman from the core group of the celebrated but thwarted Biosphere II project in Arizona (in the early 1990s), asked us why we had not fallen apart as a result of the usual group conflicts. What power has kept the Tamera community together? As described above, the establishment of transparency is indispensable to the cohesion of a group. The most important processes in the hot areas of sex, money, and power need to be brought into transparency. A group that wants to survive should agree on establishing this early on. It has to be decided by the group; it does not just arise on its own. Left to our own devices we only repeat the familiar forms of dissimulation and opaqueness. Transparency serves truth and trust. Perhaps this sounds banal; in reality it allows highly advanced human coexistence. To establish transparency we developed the aforementioned SD Forum. Whenever a group member has a personal issue he can come into the middle of the circle and make visible his concern as directly and vitally as possible. Those bearing witness have the task to follow attentively and possibly to give comments. Through this a new social consciousness came into being. One no longer judges another harshly when one has really seen him. Sympathy slowly grows, even among people who would otherwise have not perceived or even fought against one another. “To be seen is to be loved” was the maxim we deduced from our experiences of the SD forums. In this community milieu theater and art developed. These are opportunities for liberating ourselves from identification with the role of victim and for placing ourselves as actors in the play of life, which we ourselves produce from moment to moment.
From the early days of the project there were people who had a great vision of community that enabled them to stay on track during all the struggles. Bit by bit a field of trust develops around people such as these; they are beneficial for every community. The participants of a community need to share a high goal to be willing and able to realize truth and trust. Those who consciously participate in building a community will very soon reach the threshold of a critical decision as to whether to follow the principles of the “objective ethics.” Even if the social positioning of the participants is not clear, it should be agreed that everyone will adhere to the guidelines of the objective ethics. These are the rules of the Sacred Matrix.
Here we come to an important point in answer to Sally Silverstone’s question. We have, as far as possible, followed the rules of the Sacred Matrix and have thereby integrated ourselves within a higher system of life. A community following the behavioral guidelines of the Sacred Matrix (known intuitively by us all) is spiritually protected. It is critical to the survival of those communities directly confronted by paramilitary forces or other criminals, as for example groups in the Middle East, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico that they stand firm in the objective ethics. People committed to do this build strong trust among one another. This gives rise to an almost invincible power. We know how difficult it is for many groups to stay with the ethical guidelines under the trying conditions they face. They will succeed when their decisions are guided by the unifying field of a new planetary community.
Lastly I want to recall an aspect without which, in the long run, no community can stay together: the spiritual magnetic field. The group must know what it wants. It needs to have a mental and spiritual image, a concept that gives orientation to its work. From the beginning our project’s founding team had an ambitious image of the community of life in the Healing Biotope. Most of the participants were not yet familiar with this image so conflicts arose; quite a few people got angry and left the project. Conflict is inevitable, but it dissolves when the truth underlying the struggle prevails. One example of this in our case was the truth of free sexuality. There are indisputable realities that need to be accepted for permanent coexistence to be possible. It has been clear to us since the outset that love needs to be freed from malice, that we need to step into a new, nonviolent relation to animals and that we need a new system for water, food, and energy. Even though we lacked clarity at times, we knew our goal and could distinguish between the powers that were serving life and those destroying it. All members of a community should agree on taking a stand for life! Once this thought had crystallized we had a basis for staying together. Last but not least, as soon as free sexuality works, there is a joy of life and truth at the foundation of community, which cannot be gained in any other w
ay.
WORKS CITED
1. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, The I Ching; Or, Book of Changes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). Back to reading
2. John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (New York: Perennial Library / Harper & Row, 1990). Back to reading
3. Eike Braunroth, Heute Schon Eine Schnecke Geküsst? Kooperation Mit Der Natur (Frankeneck: Wega, 2002). Back to reading
4. Hermann Löns, Kraut Und Lot: Ein Buch Für Jäger U. Heger (Radebeul: Neumann, 1955). Back to reading
5. Sabine Lichtenfels, Traumsteine. Reise in Das Zeitalter Der Sinnlichen Erfüllung (Kreuzlingen: Hugendubel, 2000). Back to reading