By Evan Hodkins

Sample article, published in The Alchemist, Late Summer 2002.

Community, even when intently devoted to harmony, routinely degenerates into a splintered collection of untamed egos, each ardently peddling their precious agendas in the form of dogmas, goals or style.

The ego specializes in divisiveness-it is angered when expectations go unmet, or sulky and self-piteous when slighted. As C. S. Lewis observed, the true slogan of hell is - "I have my rights!" There are casualties within groups. Discord is the soup of the day. Paradise gets fractured. And, sooner or later--just wait your turn--everybody will be stabbed in the back, slandered, demeaned! Community is guaranteed heartbreak.

Jung likened democracy, the very heartbeat of American society, to a chronically sublimated battle, or prolonged civil war. It was, he thought, a modest attempt to add a dash of creativity to the circus of political aggression. Politics, more than anything, is the enshrinement of the ego on a collective scale. Power, employed capriciously, can ruthlessly slice the gizzard out of any cooperative enterprise.

Community intensifies frictional entanglements and fosters the proliferation of peevishness. It exponentially amplifies karmic misfortunes. It's a magic theater, replete with endless reflectivity, wherein the undigested aspects of our personal shadow is conveniently deposited, as if by dreaming, upon an unsuspecting other. Meanwhile, one projection engenders a counter-projection, as the favor is returned in kind. Prickly, jagged, reprehensible stuff - you won't get this kind of unpalatable feed-back just anywhere!

Colliding egos eventually cancel each other out. The rancor of one member insures the annihilation of another. Once crushed, however, we all sneak sullenly away from the School of Heartbreak, into the Wasteland of Despair, to pout in isolation and lick our wounds. Community handily scores another fatality as we fatefully resign ourselves to terminal hermit-hood.

How will we ever, in the words of W. H. Auden, learn "to love our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart?" Speaking esoterically--community is the unwitting instrument of the ego's demise, the agent of un-selfing, the slaughter-house for narcissistic agendas, providing an efficient means for the thorough pulverization of any residual conceits. Ironically, it is precisely our justifiable abhorrence of community that, in fact, awakens our considerable craving for something more. Once magnificently splayed by the banal bickerings and petty acrimony of your average community, we are then rendered perfectly heart-broken candidates for true communitas.

According to anthropologist Victor Turner, each instance of genuine communitas is preceded by a devastating experience of liminality. Liminality is the in-between place, where you are neither here nor there-everything familiar is stripped from you. Liminality is sometimes the anticipatable result of natural calamities, like earthquakes, floods or violent catastrophes. Divorce can also level you and so can grief. Shattered, humbled, vulnerable, empty, we are rendered exquisitely susceptible to the consolations of group energy. The dark angel touches our hearts and communitas is birthed in decimation. Sometimes liminality is purposefully administered through a communally supported ritual process. The neophyte, often a haughty adolescent, is stripped naked and ceremoniously insulted, or confronted by overwhelming ordeals. These are the methods of effacement. The affliction of cockiness is expertly eradicated, as the intractable novice is deemed malleable to communal existence.

In the School of Heartbreak, community is alchemized into communitas, as the isolated tenderfoot is massaged into mature, heart-opened, expansiveness. But what are the characteristics of persons participating in communitas? We are graduates of the School of Heartbreak. Our brokenness leaves us perfectly porous and delicately tenderized by the agony of our time spent in community, especially if we don't go cheap for bitterness. We are not afraid of our own emptiness and find the experience to be terribly voluptuous. It makes us spacious and receptive and supplies us with "the intimacy of the ten-thousand things." When we are empty, there is room for another. Then, we are never lonely.

In communitas, we are certifiable bozos on the same bus. Our suffering is shared and universal. We are not disjointed entities engaging in self-piteous dramas. The mutuality of our suffering unites us in compassion. We are dedicated "nectar collectors." Like good Quakers, we wade into silence and trust the Inner Light. We dwell pleasantly in felt togetherness, and repeatedly visit the Deep Heart of infinite possibilities through meditation, prayer, silence, dreams and vision. We are thoroughly nourished, non-beggarly beings, staggered constantly by an overwhelming sense of gratitude. We count on spirit to elucidate our condition. We are faithfully furnished with visions of creative alternatives for the future. We are infinitely encouraged by this irresistible nectar as spirit quickens us with invitations to embeautiment. This shared wisdom innervates us with enthusiasm as we dwell majestically at the veritable edge of the great evolutionary adventure.

In communitas, we take orders from the rhythm of life. We are calibrated by dance, drumming, ritual, song, and the utter perfection of authentic rivering. We are lived by the Tao. We practice attunement, resonance and delight in energetic exchange. We bask in each other's glory. We have taken "bozo-sattva" vows. We wake up each morning, asking spirit to guide us in the anonymous "blissipline" (NOT discipline) of love-mischief. We no longer deliver altruistic service, which has a tendency to exhaust us, causing us to suffer from terminal seriosity. We are dedicated practitioners of levitational tomfoolery. We travel light. Our work is happy work.

We are restored by the peaceful communion of shared breath, and the deep gaze of silent revelry. Nothing fancy here. We have merely to look into one another's eyes and know the sweet peace reflected in the languid pools of ocular magic. We splash in the ocean of God's love. It is plentiful and surrounds us. We are God-intoxicated people. You can tell just by looking.

The School of Heartbreak painstakingly prepares us for the Circle of Radiance, the place of communitas, where our lives are unmistakingly shaped by the Deep Heart of true fellowship. No one goes to heaven alone...joy is a matter of spillover. And, communitas is the one sure sign in this world that joy cannot be stopped.

To order a sample copy, contact the School of Alchemy

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