This essay was found among Jack's unpublished manuscripts. It provides a picture of both his experience and his vision of trust communities.
TORI stands for the four variables that we think are primary in building a community experience: Trust, Openness, Realization and Interdependence. T is meant to stand for trust of self so that you can be who you are; O is meant to stand for opennness and honesty so that you can show who you are to the community; R stands for realizing, which is meant to be that you do what you want to do; I stands for interdependence; that is, that you will join what is going on.
Realizing has somewhat the same meaning as is used by the Middle Easterners in talking about a realized being. So the four processes that are central in TORI are being what you are rather than presenting yourself as a role, showing who you really are in honesty and openness rather than protecting and camouflaging yourself as we often do in social situations, realizing what you want to do rather than what you feel you ought to do and being interdependent and joining in depth what is going on in the community. These terms have some special meanings for community members. I will share these as we move along I would like to describe some meanings that the TORI communities have for members and then give illustrations of what happens in the communities that are held with this theory in mind.
I created the TORI communities as an effort to build community in depth. I was excited by my earlier experiences at Bethel, Maine, in the National Training Laboratories. I was a T-group leader for many years, beginning in 1950, the early days of the experience. In the first years, we held four-week experiences. T-groups lasted pretty much all of the time for all of the days of the four weeks. Often the group would take an hour in the morning, from eleven to twelve, to have someone talk about theory based on the experience. Some of the groups would take an hour or two in the afternoon to have some structured experiences which illustrated the general principles of the theory. Pretty much all of the rest of the time would be dedicated to the group experience.
The T-group was a group of about sixteen members who sat around a table and created their own experiences. As a T-group leader, my function was to call attention to occasional processes that were going on and, by calling attention to these processes, encourage members of the group to express their views as to what was going on and their feelings about these processes. People were encouraged to "be in the here and now" rather than the "there and then." Being in the here and now was often a new experience for people—for executives, ministers, professors, government workers, military leaders, whoever attended. T-groups were extremely well-responded to by members. Almost everyone in the group would fall in love with almost everyone else. People learned a great deal about their own reactions and carried these learnings back to their "home" situation where they tried out new behaviors.
The primary and most powerful experiences at Bethel occurred in T-groups. I was so excited by this that I wanted to create some new ways of doing T-groups. I tried doing it in college classrooms at the University of Colorado and at Michigan State University. I tried doing the community building in weekend experiences at various places around North America, Australia, South Africa, England and wherever else we might try it. I was especially interested in the application of the theory to community building. We tried communities that had from 80 to 150 members. We limited the communities to 150, finding that this was the largest number we could accommodate without loudspeaker systems. People could huddle together in the middle of the floor and talk in groups of 150 with comfort. We soon found people were able to achieve a high degree of intimacy, very similar to that achieved in a smaller group of sixteen. We wanted to have a number of experiences so that we could try everything we could think of and find the most effective ways of building community in depth.
Because we were appealing to people who could not afford the prices of specialized training in large cities, we made the experience available for about $35.00 for meals. We found floor space that was carpeted and that was large enough to make it easy for people to move around, run, subgroup or do whatever else seemed useful in the space. We found that rooms that were about 100 feet in length and about 30 feet in width were relatively easy to find and were large enough to serve our purposes We found that we lost about 500 to 1,000 dollars each weekend. We had saved quite a bit of money from my consulting days within industry and used most all of this to experiment with the TORI communities. People were charged $35.00 for the meals in the experience and were allowed to come free if they said they couldn't afford the $35.00. We had something like 30,000 people that went through these experiences. The responses we received from people were so exciting that we decided to go ahead with this for several years. I will describe some of the things that we learned about.the nature of community when experienced in this way.
1. A spiritual experience. The community would meet for the weekend, coming after dinner on Friday night, and leaving on Sunday evening about five or six o'clock. This way, people did not have to miss time from work. Also, the length of the session was sufficient to create something in depth.
Most significant to us was that we soon found that this experience of being in touch with each other was clearly a spiritual experience. This aspect of the experience was recognized by many people so that in many of the communities we would find a number of ministers and a number of people who were planning to go into the ministry. The membership also included a number of very dedicated, spiritual people who had deep values that were stirred by the in-depth experiences in these communities.
I remember vividly one community of 150 people in Canada, a group which included about 35 nuns from a Catholic organization. The sisters wore civilian clothes so we were not able to tell which members of the community were nuns unless an occasional sister talked about her experience. The nuns often described, at the end of the experience, the whole being-together as a deeply spiritual and enriching experience. This was such a common response of people that we were excited by this finding.
In another community in Minneapolis, Sunday morning was so beautiful that the whole community decided to go out for a walk in the park from about 8:30 Sunday morning until about 10:00. When we all gathered back in the community, one of the young women in the group had purchased a lollipop in a little store in the park, and she brought the lollipop back to the community. When we gathered together, we were so impressed with looking at each other and being deeply in tune that no one talked for quite a while. Finally, the young lady said, "This feels like a religious experience. I want to offer this lollipop for each of us who wishes to lick it as it is passed around. This will be an experience with the sacrament, and I know it will bring us closer together." This turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. It is my memory that everyone in the community of about 140 took a lick of the all-day sucker except one woman, who apologized briefly. She raised the lollipop in a salute to the community, and we went on with the experience. There was such a deep awareness of the love and togetherness in the community that we all silently, talking only occasionally, had a deeply spiritual experience and a feeling of loving togetherness.
2. Silence. One thing we discovered early in the community experiences was that silence was extremely important. A generalization we came to make was that "things will go better the longer people keep from talking." The effect of silence and nonverbal experiences are so profound that, in the early days of the communities, we would induce silence as a means of co-creating community. Although the nature of the TORI experience was that it be created by all of the community without preplans or rules as to what we should do, in the early years, I would give a structured experience on Friday night in the first three hours of the community to kind of get things going. As we had more experience, and as I became more trusting, I discontinued the Friday-night structured experiences and allowed the community to create whatever it wanted from the very beginning.
One structured experience I created was a nonverbal one. For instance, I would ask people to lie on the floor on their backs for a while, keeping silent and keeping their eyes closed. We would do a few things, perhaps chant, then, after a moment or two, when people got a chance to experience the quiet and the carpeted floor, I would ask people to get up and move around still with their eyes closed and without making sounds and get acquainted with people. They could get acquainted by touching hands, touching faces, hugging, whatever they wished to do while as long as they kept their eyes closed end did not make any verbal communications Then I would ask people to find a partner and sit with the partner some place on the floor. When everyone in the community had found a partner, we would move on to another experience.
If we had an even number of people in the community, I would not join the experience, but if we had an uneven number, I would take the last person or some other person as a partner so that we would all wind up in twosomes. While people still had their eyes closed and were not making sounds, I would ask them to sit and touch each other in some way and sense whet was going on with the other person. After waiting a few moments, I would ask one of the people in the group to start by describing his or her feelings about the partner. Often, I would suggest that people choose partners they didn’t know; that is, if they were able to recognize the partner, they were to move on to somebody else. This newness tended to enrich the depth of the experience.
After each person had described his or her feelings about the other person and had described the feelings perceived in the other person, they would open their eyes together and then continue the discussion of how they felt. This was often a moving experience because people did not know with whom they were interacting and often had never experienced an in-depth interaction with someone whom they had never seen before,
People can have a great variety of experiences in groups without using words. Silence deepened the experience. Defensiveness and negative impressions often occur as a result of the way people talk. If people are allowed to be silent, they often exhibit more warmth and positiveness than they do if they talk. This process, in itself, is a valuable learning. One thing people learn in such an experience is to be less defensive when they talk.
A seemingly infinite number of prepared experiences allow people to relate without words. One of the most informative is the so-called "trust walk." People simply pair off; one person becomes the experiencer and the other person in the dyad is the one who takes care of the experiencer. The experiencers walk around with eyes closed for twenty minutes or so while their partners protect them from walking into anything dangerous and guide them if the road is complicated. This experience is valuable in creating new awareness of the effects of trust. Fears are many, and the awareness of these fears and how one handles them is an important learning in community building.
3. Touching. Under certain conditions, people feel closer to others when they touch them if they are allowed to choose when and who they touch, if the touching is done in caring ways.
People can touch, of course, in as many different ways as they can talk. It is useful for a person to do a trust walk with eight or ten different people under different conditions. A person who is doing the touching can be controlling, impersonal, annoying, intrusive, dominating, macho or can be caring, loving, considerate, allowing, gentle, approving. Touching and nonverbal communication can be powerful experiences. In my years of conducting community experiences, I have had two couples who met when choosing each other to go on a trust walk and later decided to get married. I've had letters from both of the couples thanking me for introducing them to each other. People discover themselves and each other in the process of touching.
One most powerful way of building a community in depth is to have the 150 people move together in the center of the floor so that they can be comfortably touching while we conduct the community meeting. Caring touching is often very moving, and the community comes to enjoy these contacts. Touching in community meetings can be both loving and spiritual in nature.
Using a volunteer from the audience, I often give demonstrations on ways of touching people, touching their faces, touching their arms, touching their bodies, touching their hands. Once I chose an older, very unattractive Asian gentleman to help me with my demonstration. I asked him to close his eyes and lie on his back and relax and let me touch him I deliberately touched him with much love, gentleness, trust and caring. He was so moved by this experience that he began to cry, thus setting off the rest of the community, several of whom began to cry also. Shedding large, visible tears in public can be a close-bringing experience. We all fell in love with this gentleman. It was the opening experience in this particular community, and it led to considerable depth and caring before we were finished with the three days. In general, people learn by doing something, not by watching it demonstrated. In this case, I believe that seeing the gentleman so noticeably moved by an unusual experience was something that triggered many reactions. I suspect that he had never been touched like this by another man and possibly not by a woman. Trust and fear are so widespread in our lives that it is quite noticeable to have distinct changes in trust level in an in-depth community experience.
4. Appreciating differences. We have held several TORI community experiences in Hawaii. These are almost always multi-racial with great differences in nationality, skin color, wealth, education, etc. This diversity, in itself, can be a powerful experience.
It is very moving to see people of different races mixing and touching end loving each other in a large community. Although I have been in many kinds of experiences and communities, I think my experiences in Hawaii were the only times that I have seen such diversity in such close contact. An important part of community building is learning to appreciate, see and love the differences we find among people. Hawaii is a special place and provided an opportunity for us to do three or four beautiful TORI community experiences.
5. Intense involvement in community activities. One characteristic of a vital community is the intensity of interest in doing what the community is doing. One problem we have faced in trying to invent new community forms is that only a few people are truly interested in what’s going on, and a large group are watchers waiting for the meeting to end.
Once, in Winnipeg, we had a beautiful community meeting that was notable in terms of depth involvement. The group met on Friday evening end had a particularly good experience. They met several times on Saturday, becoming deeply involved in all kinds of small group activities. On Sunday .morning, the group decided to meet as a total community. Early on Sunday morning, about 8:30, people got up and prepared finger food. The food was placed in appetizing ways on two long tables in the corner of the large room We agreed, in the first moments of our community meeting, to allow individuals to go up anytime they wished and get something to eat and that, because our time was limited, we would not take any specific time for lunch. The discussion became immensely involving. People cried, laughed, shouted. Several people spoke in the large group of having made very powerful decisions about their lives during the Friday and Saturday meetings. These announcements and issues were so dramatic and said with such feeling that everyone was deeply moved. Each of us got deeply involved in the life options of other people in the community, particularly those who shared so deeply during the day. When someone announced that it was 5:00 and time to leave, everyone seemed quite shocked by the way the time had passed. One member then noticed that no one in the group had found time or had the interest to go to the tables and get some finger food. This revelation caused quite a bit of amusement; everyone agreed that they had seen no one go up to the tables to eat. We laughingly thought this was a very accurate measure of the depth of involvement in the community. I've seen some intense involvement, but I don't remember seeing a large community go all day without eating.
6. Going barefoot. I'm not quite sure what it is about bare feet that is community building. Bare feet are probably symbolic of informality, lack of structure and freedom. Notes to TORI participants now include the strong suggestion that people wear informal clothing and that they not wear shoes or belts or other kinds of constraining attire. After her first TORI, one woman who had a lovely apartment and frequent guests started announcing to her guests that she would like everyone who came into her apartment to leave their shoes at the door and go barefoot during the time they were visiting in her home. She reported this to be a very powerful experience for everyone. It is difficult to stand on ceremony if you are walking around in bare feet.
Once, in Colorado, I gave a speech to an annual meeting of the state association of the Future Homemakers of America This was a group of home economics majors, several hundred of whom were young women studying home economics in high school. Perhaps fifty or so of the audience were home economics counselors and advisors to the chapters in the state. During my speech, in an effort to warm up the audience and to achieve some informality and casualness, I suddenly asked everyone in the audience to kick off their left shoes. This caused no end of amusement end changed the atmosphere in the conference considerably. There was no question but what the young women enjoyed the experience of kicking a shoe off and enjoyed the freedom of not wearing one for the rest of the meeting. After the meeting, I found that several of the advisors were quite angry with me, saying that they had worked very hard during the years to get their students to act like "young ladies," including keeping their shoes on at all times! Going barefoot is symbolic; it is a move in the direction of intimacy and informality; it helps to create the impulses toward community. A friend of mine who used to give demonstrations of community building would often start her community experience by having people pair off, take off their shoes and give each other a foot massage. I was very much impressed with her ability to get people to join in the community. I enjoyed the foot rub that I received and the one that I gave. I also, of course, tried this in one of my community TORI experiences.
7. Groups of six or twelve. Something magical and useful happens when forming groups of six. We have corroborated a fact that other experimenters have found—a group of six is a magic number. Groups of seven or eight are too large. Groups of three, four or five are too small. Six is a very manageable group. In groups of six, people always talk, even in a short time. People experience the group as intimate. I have tried this with a large audience of 5,000 people. I have asked them to turn row-to-row and join three people to three other people very quickly and then I've asked them to take four minutes to discuss a very simple question that is very clearly presented from the stage. After the four minutes are over, I ask people to raise their hands if they were not able to talk in their subgroup. In trying this with various sized audiences, I have never found a person raising his or her hand if the subgroup consisted of six individuals. For contrast, I have tried this with groups of eight or seven and would have as many as 60 or 70 hands raised indicating that they were unable to talk in the group. When I asked those who did not talk why, they said the group was just too large. A group of seven or eight or nine seems quite large whereas a group of six seems very small and intimate. I have been in audiences and with demonstrations in which I have seen people break the audience into groups of eight, and have a great deal of trouble getting participation. This is a simple fact that everyone who works with large groups can appreciate.
Certain things work well with groups of twelve, especially if you split the group into two—one group observing the other or one group massaging the feet of the other partner or some other way of group of twelve into groups of six. People enjoy talking and particularly if the situation is not threatening or fearful. Something about a large group is very frightening to most people.
8. The Qmicron factors. If you look at the list of seven factors in Table 1 that lead to and define trust, you will see a list of characteristics of a good community. I'd like to look now at these seven trust factors and see how they relate to our community-building learnings.
Our assumption, from long experience, is that TORI communities showed clear evidence of the fact that trust was the one significant variable that differentiated an effective community from a lukewarm one. During the twenty-five years when I either conducted or participated in TORI communities, I noticed that communities moved consistently in the direction of more trusting. Let's look at these seven definitions of trust and examine them in terms of TORI community experiences:
a. Collaborating. Notable in the TORI community is a sense of unity, of interdependence, of community, of being in love and of being in touch. Collaboration is the name of the game. Several times I have seen a TORI community decide to play some games outside in the park on a good day Each time the community has chosen or constructed a game that is "New Age" or "noncompetitive." There is a deep sensing that competition destroys the loving relationship that they are attempting to build. As our culture evolves, we will tend to move in the direction of New-Age games that simply involve having fun and not winning or losing. Being with each other in a group of any size is a powerful and moving experience. Often people in TORI communities have never really experienced a noncompetitive situation. Our capitalistic culture is so hooked on competing that moving away from competition might well be seen as unpatriotic or as un-American. It is very informative and impressive to see communities call a "community meeting" and have them all sit touching fairly close to the middle of the room so that there is a feeling of being in touch and being in tune.
b. Seeking. How quickly the norm gets established in a participative TORI community is amazing. We are here to try things out, to discover, to grow, to be open to new experience, to learn. People are much more apt to say "Let's try this out and see what happens" than to say "What do the experts say about this?" The norm is "We are here to learn, try things out, grow and take risks. We are open to new experience. We are on an adventure." To be taught or be trained is an activity that does not fit the norm of the TOR I group.
c. Flowing. In the leaderless TORI community, when people are learning to do what they want to do rather than what they ought to do, there is emergence, organic flow, self-regulation and natural activities; it feels like "getting into the flow" is a functional thing to do The dimension of experience is to tune into the flow and to go with it. People soon learn, in the TORI community, not to over-organize, manage or persuade other people. The premium is upon self-discovery, seeking, listening and trying out.
d. Honoring. The following activities are not productive or useful, particularly in the culture of TORI: comparing, blaming, judging, appraising, ranking, winning, praising, etc. It is more appropriate for members to go inside themselves and discover what they really would like to do with their lives and where they are really moving. The function of the community, then, is to celebrate the member, discover his or her passionate path and to co-create a passionate journey for the community. It feels quite appropriate in such an environment to use the language of "I honor the god in you and the god in me."
e. Proacting. People who are controlled by the rewarding and punishing actions of other people are reactive. Persons who are discovering their autogenic and passionate journeys are proactive. If I am proactive, I start the action here. I am likely to be tuned in to where I want to go and try to get there, I create my own life. If I am proactive, I don't try to interfere with your life or influence it or try to get you to change your journey; my interest is in my journey and in our journey if we collaborate and join in some significant way. This is the TORI manner.
f. Personing. The TORI community tends to become very personal and centered. People place a high premium upon showing who they are and what they want from life, being unique and empathic, being fully a person. This process of being a person is very different from the process of trying to satisfy the role prescriptions that you have chosen or that has been assigned to you.
g. Visioning. The TORI person is trusting, in the process of co-creating a new vision, a more cosmic view, a perception of the friendly universe, a seeking of a larger vision. As a TORI person, I move beyond appearance, opportunism, the quick fix and crisis management. I am in process of moving toward the capacity to see things whole and see things cosmic.
Trust and fear.
To be trusting and fearing is to be in the two primary processes of life. Tables 1 and 2 list the seven factors that are most definitive and descriptive of trusting and the seven factors that are most definitive and descriptive of the fearing processes.
Life growth is to move beyond fear, to transcend our fearing responses, to understand our fears and perhaps to enjoy them but not to let them guide or manage our lives.
Table 1
Collaborating
Seeking
Flowing
Honoring
Proacting
Personing
Visioning
Table 2
(note: table not found)