What I miss in today's world is a sense of community. To be in community is to be in touch in some deep way. With genuine communion comes the wonder and the awe of discovering each other in trust.
The search for community is heightened by the apparent alienation, unconnectedness, and superficiality of modern life. Throughout history, this search has been sustained by continuing hopes and frustrated by frequent failures. Energy for the quest has been provided by utopian activists, religious leaders, educational philosophers, political theorists, industrial reformers, and a wide variety of rehabilitative institutions.
The quest for a feeling of community has centered around three romantic or utopian hopes:
that life be more caring, that people have more concern, affection, and love for each other, and that the alienation in social life be reduced;
that life be more intimate, more like the family that we idealize but rarely achieve, and that closeness replace the unconnectedness that so many people experience in their normal lives;
that life have greater depth, that people matter to each other, and that this shared depth and meaning replace the superficiality and shallowness that is so characteristic of most social relations.
TORI theorists and practitioners have assumed that increasing the trust levels in the community would significantly increase the caring, intimacy, and depth of any community. We have tried a number of experiments in a variety of institutions. The TORI Community Experience was designed as an experiment to test this assumption and to try various ways of inducing trust and trust-related outcomes in a community.
Our experiences with community building began in 1965. The hypothesis was a very simple one. We assumed that if we trusted people to create their own community and could simply bring people together for a reasonable time and provide them with some space, food, and a relatively free and pleasant environment, they would create a fulfilling experience for themselves and would accomplish whatever goals they set. A decade of preliminary experiments had given us an idea of the practical problems that would arise and an awareness of the significant environmental variables that would determine the effectiveness of the overall experiment.
In the early years we provided a large hotel room, a carpeted gymnasium, a dance studio, or other open space that was as comfortable as we could make it. We charged a minimum fee ($35 for a weekend, a fee which included meals, materials, registration, and other incidentals) which paid for most of the expenses. We wanted a large enough group to simulate a "community" in a natural church, business, or school setting. We wanted at least 90 people, a group large enough to provide many of the self-management problems that congregations, companies, and neighborhood groups encounter. Size of the communities was limited to about 180, which we found to be the largest number that could communicate together easily without the use of an amplifying system. We provided a skilled volunteer who "convened" the community, provided leadership for the initial hours of group formation, helped solve some of the initial problems of housekeeping, and structured some non-verbal experiences which we had found to be useful in the initial stages of community life. We believed that such a "community-building experience" would be useful to professionals who would be creating school, church, business, and neighborhood communities.
Each participant was given a briefing sheet to be read in advance. This sheet indicated that the members of the community would be responsible for goal-setting, decision-making, community management, and the activities of the community. There would be some initial structure, but no rules, agenda, time limits, formal leadership, or curriculum —not even any furniture. At the beginning we suggested a schedule, from 8 P.M. to 11 P.M. on the opening Friday evening, a 9 A.M. to 11 P.M. session on Saturday, and a 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. session on Sunday. We wanted as long a time as we could get within the limitations of our "weekend" culture.
Our initial fears guided us to make the above decisions. We felt that we had to promise some structure in order to get enough people together to conduct the experiments. During the ten-year period between 1965 and 1975 we gradually reduced the structure as our fears were reduced and as we discovered more and more about the nature of community.
Leadership. In the initial stages of the experiment the conveners were probably useful. During the decade the amount of "convening" has gradually been reduced so that most of the community experiences now conducted in North America have no conveners at all. They are essentially leaderless gatherings of interested people who create experiences for themselves.
There was a tendency at first for informal leaders to emerge and take over the functions that would have been provided by appointed professionals. This transitional stage has been supplanted by a genuinely emergent environmental-quality level (VI) which is leaderless and residual in the processes of the community. About 12,000 participants have joined the weekend communities over the ten years, and a large number of these are now active in some way in the TORI international communities mentioned in the previous chapter.
Community composition. In the early stages the participants were adult men and women, with occasional college students attending the sessions. The groups were largely made up of the middle-class white population that attends the usual growth-center activities. Today many people come as families, with some communities being composed of about 50 per cent children. A much broader range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds exists in the communities. TORI weekend experiences have been held for children only, for women's groups, for the aged, for black participants and other minority groups, and for a wide range of special populations: executives, church congregations, drug patients, psychotics, disturbed children, and others. The impression now is strong that the experience is equally applicable to all persons of any culture.
Environmental design. A circular, octagonal, or nearly square space creates a centering flow, and a high-interaction seems to be a critical factor in a successful community development. This flow is enhanced when there is no furniture to interfere with free and spontaneous physical movement; when members are visible to each other at most times; when there is some kind of visual boundary that defines the community space; when interaction is continuous and not broken by formal coffee breaks or evening departures for sleeping in other quarters; and when the significant happenings in the community life occur in an area that is perceptually and physically central to the community. The community then takes form, flows, develops rhythms and patterns, assumes an identity, and is experienced by members as a living organism.
This is a finding of considerable importance to community planners and designers. Community forms when the central flow of activities is visible to most of the members and when members interact with each other in the normal course of events during the day. If carpets are available for only part of the space, for example, we find it useful to place carpets in the central rectangle of the room, leaving walking space on all four sides. Members interact in the center of the room while sitting in various free-form clusters and then interact again as they move along the visible walking spaces on the side of the room. Community gathering places are best when there are few competing attractions such as swimming pools, beaches, bars, and shopping areas. After a certain point in community-building, the people are more attractive than the alternatives. Especially in early stages, competing attractions drain energy into divergent and competing paths.
Time variables. When the emphasis is upon environmental design and leaderless emergence, time is a critical variable, especially when few of the community members have had experience with true leaderlessness. The 24 hours of intense interaction which the weekend affords is about a minimum time for the community to form into a trusting and whole organism. The communities have discovered that periods from 5 to 17 days are much more satisfying and that the greater time periods allow for fulfilling and transcendent happenings that do not usually occur in the minimal three-day period.
Focus upon natural life processes. Participants join the community to do whatever they wish, to enjoy each other as fully as they can, to make the community experience as fulfilling as they can. We do not code the experience as anything other than "life" itself. Any classification of the experience creates expectations and tends to limit the experience. People in our culture are too ready to use techniques to produce effects, rather than to encounter and fully enter life as it happens by allowing the natural processes of interaction to occur.
Continuity of activity. The building of community in this setting tends to happen as a continuous flow. There are no schedules, no coffee breaks, mealtimes, or rest periods. Most of the weekend experiences have been held in places where it is possible for participants to bring sleeping bags and stay in community for the total period. This "marathon" format has been especially powerful in creating connectedness among persons and reinforcing the "community" feeling.
Heightening of feelings and energy. One dramatic aspect of the design is the heightening of all aspects of the experience. This emerges as the participants sense and grasp their freedom. Initial fears diminish. Persons begin to discover each other. Interaction in depth occurs. Then people begin to share pain, anger, joy boredom, alienation, excitement, warmth, love ecstasy, and all of the realness of experience. When they are not directed or channeled by leaders or techniques, things happen with more spontaneity, are somehow "writ larger" and felt more intensely than in the usual workshop, growth experience, or encounter group. The experiences and interactions have a greater ring of naturalness and authenticity than in the usual technique-induced group experience, role playing, or simulation.
Development of unique differentiation. No script is followed and no one acts out a self-fulfilling program. The development of the community takes whatever form the processes take. Individual members will at times try to move the community in directions that meet the particular member's wants, expectations, or theories. Out of the interaction that takes place each community develops a uniqueness. Having participated as a member in more than 200 such communities, I am impressed with their great differences as they have grown up, flowered, and reached some kind of fulfillment in the three-day weekend.
The global environment has a transcending influence upon the subsystems. For ten years beginning in 1937 I taught university classes and did individual therapy, always concentrating on the individual person, the intrapersonal dynamics of the learner and the client, and the effects of teaching and therapy upon personal living. During the next twenty years I worked with groups, looking at events from the standpoint of group dynamics and becoming aware of how powerfully group environments affected participants. During the next ten years I experimented with the community and came to realize how powerful the larger environment of the community was relative to group and personal dynamics.
I am now moving toward looking at the larger economic and social environment at the national and world levels, and realizing how this transcends the sub-systems that are included in this larger environment. Each individual can create his or her own environment, largely by having an impact upon the system at an interpersonal level. The larger the environmental system, the less effect the individual can have upon it, though individuals can and do have significant effect upon larger systems.
For instance, the competitive economic system has a powerful and transcending effect upon all social systems in the United States, influencing values, opinions, attitudes, behavior, and feelings of persons and institutions impacted within the system. Attempts to create cooperative groups and communities meet with powerful resistive forces. Any enduring change in individuals and systems in the United States must in some way impact the total global environment.
It is possible for people to create communities that have caring, intimacy, and depth, and that differ dramatically in these characteristics from the institutions we encounter in our daily lives. Our fear/distrust assumptions allow us to see most communities as frightening and unchangeable. When the trust levels change significantly and we make new assumptions, the effects upon our community living are startling. We can create ongoing communities that will significantly reduce the alienation, unconnectedness, and superficiality of modern life. Our fears of large groups have little basis in reality, and we can remove them as major barriers to the achievement of a new society.
Trust level, though amazingly resistant to change, can be changed in significant amounts. Changes in the culture will come through significant and enduring changes in trust level. The TORI community experience can be a powerful instrument for massive social change. The efforts up to now have been low-key and highly experimental, but I have seen enough to know that this way of being in community is a non-manipulative and non-interventive way of achieving social change.
Holistic living is a more enduring route to community living than are more restrictive ways of being. As powerful and dramatic as are the short term effects, the restrictive and interventive ways of living are less effective than holistic, unrestricted, "natural" ways of being. Some programs are, in part, based upon restrictive and essentially remedial training: process intervention, feeling expression, assertiveness, fight training, meditation, primal release, positive thinking, catharsis, and the like. The training and social action of the future will probably be naturalistic and holistic rather than truncated. Some segmented training has de-wholizing side effects.
Natural and whole behavior is unconstrained and spontaneous. Educational and social-action systems based upon the creation of constraints are likely to have corruptive side effects and have little permanent, organic value. Legal, moral, and educational systems built upon taboos and prohibitions have proven to be rather ineffective. The list of such taboos is long and frightening: dancing, stealing, treason, discourtesy, speeding, spitting, nudity, littering, loitering, and laughing too loudly. Because social systems built upon emergent trust are more effective than systems built upon prohibitions, the TORI community experiences are as constraint-free as is possible in our culture. As persons learn to live in such an environment, and the longer they live in one, they become more gentle, loving, considerate, caring, cooperative, neighborly, non-violent, and, of course, trusting, which is the beginning of it all. Isn't it ironic—but gratifying—to learn, as we have, that people will do naturally and spontaneously what legalists and moralists—all of the "prohibitors"—try to get them to do by means of constraint-training?
Physical touching is a very powerful and trust-producing way of relating in community. Have you noticed how tactile animals are, how they enjoy touching? We caress and fondle babies, but for the adult human animal, touching has somehow become a fear-laden and prohibited way of relating. All TORI communities discover the joyful and authentic aspects of touching. Humans have a strong and often-thwarted need to have physical contact—a kind of "skin hunger". Touching can be many things: a way of avoiding talk or eye contact; a ritual greeting; a displaced form of sexual stimulation; a form of manipulation; a form of play; or a meaningless gesture. After a few days of authentic interaction in a TORI community, touching becomes a powerful, authentic, and intimate way of expressing gentleness, caring, love, and intimacy.
Ministers and active lay members of various religious groups have been active, interested, and supportive members of most of the TORI community experiences. Religion at its best performs an integrative function in life. Perhaps the single most significant contribution of the TORI experiences has been a similar integrative, wholizing process. One minister said after his first TORI experience, following twenty years in the ministry: "This is the first time that I have had a genuine religious experience." Certainly a central, perhaps definitive, aspect of the religious experience for most people is the awakening of a deep trust of self, of God, and of the processes of nature.
Seeing the congregation for the first time as a "community" and realizing the many implications of this new viewpoint, several ministers have returned to their local churches and experimented with what they learned. Sometimes a three-day weekend is sufficient for a person to see the significant implications for a new ministry. Some have returned for several weekend experiences, and many have attended community sessions of five to eight days or longer.
TORI practitioners make several different approaches to the building of the church community. One is to give a TORI weekend experience to the total congregation or to the majority of the congregation. It is best not to do this until the congregation agrees to volunteer for the experience and has worked through whatever mixed feelings they have about attending. We have done this many times with large congregations and have found it highly effective. It is preferable that the minister and other key people in the congregation have had a positive prior experience with a TORI community, understand the theory well, and are TORI-oriented themselves. It is particularly important that these people be relatively trusting, open, spontaneous, and expressive people.
There are some problems. Many ministers, church educators, and church officials find it difficult to be personal, to get out of role. Ministers have been well trained to "take a ministerial role", with all that this implies: to participate formally in ceremonies and rituals, to take a caring stance in time of death or tragedy, to be a bulwark of strength for members in time of fear, and to put aside personal concerns in favor of ministering to the needs of others. Often it is difficult to find (and be) the real person of the minister under the role facade. But the church and the ministry are changing radically, and many church leaders are moving in the same direction as trust theory.
The union between the church and TORI is often a felicitous one. The emphasis upon honesty and candor, and the appreciation of the significance of the integrity of motive and inner life, both form useful bridges between the church and TORI. Many churches stress the importance of ought behavior and of authority-based behavior. The values of obedience, self-denial, and punishment are often implicit or explicit in the teachings of some churches and church leaders, and these are difficult to reconcile with TORI theory and practice. The continuing dialogue between religious leaders and TORI practitioners is spirited and vigorous. We are learning much about church settings and the nature of the religious experience.
A significant bridge lies in the expression of love and warmth. Our unresolved fears keep us from expression of love and warmth, regardless of our religious beliefs. Many deeply religious people find it difficult to give physical or even verbal expression to deep caring and love. The TORI community experience has helped many of these people to understand their fears and fear-based inhibitions and has helped them to discover ways of expressing the caring that they feel—to express this for their families and for members of their congregations.
Another bridge lies in the interests of both religious and TORI communities in prayer, meditation, mystical experiences, transcendence, death and aging, healing, inner peace, and other aspects of experience that are often associated with the church. I see the current revival of interest in these phenomena in our society as a healthy and promising sign. The relation of trust formation to these experiences is obvious, and it is profound.
The TORI community is a powerful medium for a personal-growth experience and for the learning of human-relations, as well as managerial skills and attitudes. After having participated in, observed and led training and growth activities since 1951 in a wide variety of settings, and after having seen my own growth and that of others in the TORI communities, I have come to believe that the TORI community is the most powerful medium for personal growth and human-relations training now available. It is a highly experimental form and changing rapidly, with great promise for evolving into newer forms as our culture changes. It is very much in the culture and is evolving with it.
The TORI community has many characteristics that enhance the learning processes. It is an ideal training environment for several reasons:
Many educational systems are experimenting with learning communities of various sizes. Schools are taking more experiential, holistic, and community approaches to the learning process. The leaderless learning community has many obvious advantages. Because the community learns to use the resources of each member, teachers are not required. Learners assess their own needs, define the problems, suggest solutions, define the help that is needed, learn to seek relevant information, and learn to translate impulses and feelings into actions and problems solutions.
The community sets up an atmosphere that encourages risk, experimentation, choice, reliance upon individual resources, trust of self, courage to follow inner directions, free expression of feelings and differences, integration of emotionality into work and problem solving, spontaneous and open behavior, want-determined action, and interdependence.
When the TORI community is used as a medium for education, the essence of education becomes a process of creative, joint inquiry, learning of emergent knowledge and skills, rather than a teaching-learning process. The locus of thought, action, and responsibility is in the learner rather than in the teacher. The motivation to learn comes from sources inside the learner and the process, and from intrinsic rewards and punishments within the very processes of interaction. The curriculum comes from the learner and the requirements of the process of inquiry, rather than from sources external to the learner.
Life in a learning community is a continuing, flowing process. All activities justify themselves as enriching to the moment, the process, and the goals. Classical education is seen as preparatory to later and more significant life, and thus requires constraint, goal-deferment, and discipline. In the learning community the goals are set by the learner as they emerge from the process, rather than being set by role, authority, or system. Rewards and punishments are informal, emergent, and intrinsic to the process of joint inquiry and interaction; they are not prescribed, formalized, extrinsic, or used as controls.
When we have used a TORI weekend community experience to help build a learning-community atmosphere, we have encouraged the participation of all involved in the process. We have included teachers, staff, administrators, maintenance and janitorial people, students, and school board members. At other times we have included parents, teachers, and students in a common experience. It is usually the adults who have the greatest problem in becoming personal, open, and want determined. Unless students have become too constricted from long participation in conventional classrooms, they tend to get into the community rather easily.
An educational learning community is most effective under the following conditions:
A significant motivation for people to join country clubs, professional associations, travel clubs, family YMCA's, and vacation groups comes from a search for greater depth, intimacy, and caring in their lives. This need may be very conscious and openly expressed, or it may arise from a vague disquiet and discomfort at the unconnectedness of life. Unfortunately, the groups which people choose to meet these needs seldom do so in fulfilling ways.
The importance of discovering a feeling of community in our lives is receiving increasing recognition. Life is a flow and a rhythm. There are moments and days when each person wants privacy and aloneness. There are other moments and days when every person wants intimacy and communion with others. All meaningful activity—play, work, worship, learning, creative art—can be enriched at times when done with others who care and who matter.
The creative artist likes to show his or her work to other creative artists. The chemist or engineer seeks professional meetings to share the joys of creativity with others who are important in his or her world —those who matter. Hearing a concert or viewing a sunset is often more fulfilling when shared with people one loves. The search for intimacy and community is pervasive.
My impression from the associations I have joined as a member and the many organizations with which I have consulted is that this feeling of community in-depth is all too rare. This is a serious gap, a cavity in our culture.
Our fears separate us and keep us from even the awareness of our need for each other. I have a vivid memory of a TORI community demonstration that I was asked to give in a large singles community. Naively, I had looked forward to this experience as one that would be warm and intimate, thinking that single people who had elected to live in community would be eager to respond to each other in depth. What I found was a large group of people who were desperately lonely, unable to touch each other physically, unable to express warmth either verbally or without words, unable to reach out on their own, and greatly dependent on the leader for initiation of activities and emotional support. At the same time, the individuals in the group seemed desperately interested in making contact in some way. My experience with most organizations differs only in degree from this one.
I have been asked many times to give demonstrations for many kinds of groups. There is usually a recognition that things would be better if "we learned to communicate with each other", or if "we were warmed up". There is usually a hope that all this can be done quickly, with a skilled leader performing his magic to help people connect in some better way. When I accept such an assignment and have only a few hours to work with the group I usually use some kinds of loosely structured, non-verbal experiences that all groups and all ages relate to easily. The experience is often so much better than anything else they have been doing in their attempt to make connections that they are exhilarated at first. Even a glimpse of what greater intimacy might be found is exciting and positive. But true intimacy is much more difficult to attain. I have not found quick and easy roads to caring and depth.
It is possible to change radically the environment of these recreational, social, and professional groups. It requires many changes: changes in design of meetings that are autocratic, cognitive, and depersonalized; design of more flexible and versatile furniture that allows for spontaneous and fluid groupings; revision of schedules that prevent spontaneous happenings and that lock people into plans made by others long before the events that people are participating in; changes in norms, habits, and policies of the group themselves.
Environment design for intimacy is a major issue for all organizations. It is possible to design organizations and activities in such a way as to enhance caring and warmth. It is possible to create meetings, vacations, clubs, and organizations that enhance intimacy and connectedness. It is my assumption that all people want to be more caring and connected—but that they don't know how to do so, and especially don't know how to create social forms that make it possible. Just as the function of communication cannot be assigned by a corporate president to a director of communications, it is unrealistic and escapist for a social/ professional organization to turn the issue of intimacy over to a social director or a cruise coordinator. Intimacy and caring are too central to the very core of the organizational being and purpose for delegation.
New interest in holistic healing and organic health has encouraged attempts to build health-oriented communities. This is a very promising development: the focus upon wholeness, both in diagnosis and treatment, and on growth and development, rather than on remedial and corrective treatment, is encouraging.
New developments in holistic healing are spurring a revolution in medical and psychiatric practice. One phase that we know too little about is what are the obvious healing and growth-enhancing qualities of the communal experience itself. Too often the holistic communities are organized on EQ II to IV management principles. At worst, the community is managed and organized in autocratic and benevolent ways, relying upon esoteric techniques in the attempt to induce the healing and transcendent states that presumably accompany holistic health. Some of the best ones are holistic and organic in all significant ways.
We are moving toward a marriage of technique (in its best sense) and organizational management. My assumption is that the environment itself is the medium for healing, transcendence, and health. It is the atmosphere itself that enhances intuitive, caring, wholeness-oriented, transforming, and healing energy and communication. People who learn to relate to each other in these ways create the community for themselves. The healing is in the process itself. It is not a product produced by a process.
Historically there have been many efforts to build community around the joys and challenge of work. The assumption is that work can be honorable, redemptive, challenging, cooperative, humanistic, and self-rewarding. Working together on tasks that are cooperatively chosen or designed, with co-workers that care and that matter, under conditions that are planned and created by the co-workers themselves, can be an organic and wholizing experience.
Fortunately, there is great diversity in methods, aims, and format in the attempts to build work communities. Small companies are being formed on humanistic principles, following some theory about the optimal relationship between people and work. Some large corporations are making inventive changes in decentralization, job enlargement, flexible time schedules, cooperative planning, pilot plants, and radical experiments with new management.
Urban planners are devising ways of building cities that make work easy accessible, environmentally pleasant, and integrated into humanistic and holistic living. The modern back-to-nature movement fosters attempts to live close to the land, to re-discover the simple joys of selfchosen work, to mix work with the natural environment, and to feel creative and artistic about work.
The conditions that enhance the effectiveness of these attempts are several:
Rapidly changing values in our society-in-transition elicit support for many experiments in living arrangements. Communes, extended families, adult communities, multiple-family living, singles apartment complexes, retirement communities, nudist colonies, tight-security guarded neighborhoods, unmarried couples, open marriages, gay communities—many forms are emerging that provide diversity and choice.
The new diversity is fortunate. We know so little about living together and have made comfortable assumptions about the universal advantages of the simple monogamous marriage and the single-family dwelling. Our present culture encourages experimentation with many models. It is likely that we will create yet a greater diversity of life styles and a wider range of choice for people seeking high-trust living arrangements.
Creating an optimal blending of privacy and joining is a critical issue. I find rather promising several attempts to build a community of from 20 to 40 families, pre-planning the building of individual family homes, all arranged in some way around a large communal room for community meals, recreation, meetings, a communal school for the children and for the adults, and other community activities. Each family would have options of privacy when they wanted it and communal activities when they wished.
Communes of varying sizes have organized around work, religion, back-to-nature living, an ideology, or sociometric preference. More common in all areas of North America are groups of three to twenty people who purchase or rent a large home and try to enrich their living in a collective way.
In all these situations a common problem is concerned with some management issues: organizing for housework, sharing finances, preparing meals, making decisions, handling grievances, mediating disputes. It is my impression that most people who join in these communal activities have liberal/romantic hopes, with little awareness of the incongruities of managing behavior and the Environment Quality levels. They are seeking life that is appropriate to EQ Levels VI through X, but they employ familiar management patterns inherited from the autocratic/benevolent homes, factories, schools, and churches against which they are rebelling and from which they hope to escape. Hoping to achieve trust and transcend the worst of their fears, they sometimes resort to the same practices that have toxified their earlier environments: restrictive rules, penalties for infractions, linear scheduling, destructive secrecy, formalized contracts, role prescriptions, hierarchical structures, and other fear-based arrangements.
There are no easy solutions to these very practical problems. Several groups that are planning on living together are using TORI theory as a base and considering the EQ level analysis as useful for examining the environment they wish to create in the commune. These are advantages of creating a common theory and a common set of values, working through the critical differences that lead to unproductive tension, and preserving the differences that add zest and challenge.
Trust level is even more critical in communal living arrangements than in more formal organizations. Learning to trust is the process of learning to live together. Recognition that it is a learning problem, that the system needs to learn to be, just as a person needs to learn to be, is a base for development.
Building a true community is not an easy matter. Well-intentioned and fairly compatible people have seemingly just as many problems creating a satisfying community as do members of a business or school organization that come together for formal purposes that are, on the surface, unrelated to forming community. Seemingly, whatever the organizational form, institutional purpose, or formal task, the people processes are the critical factors, and they are common to all situations where people gather. Personal, open, want-determined, and interdependent behavior is functional and trust-inductive. Impersonal, strategic, manipulative, and controlling behavior is dysfunctional and fear-escalating.
In the preceding chapter we considered the TORI international community as an organization and as a pioneering model for voluntary organizations. It is useful to consider it now as a community.
There are five thousand people who participate occasionally in the activities of this community. Perhaps one thousand are continually active and consider themselves as more or less permanent members of the far-flung community.
Members feel a kinship with members in other geographic areas and often visit each other's homes, even though they may not have previously met personally. There is a common set of values and aspirations, centering around TORI theory and its many aspects and implications.
Although several groups of members live together in small communal arrangements, most interaction comes in shared vacations, meals, visits and weekends. In many of the more established communities there are communal holiday celebrations—Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, Easter, and other longer-than-weekend occasions when members can join each other with their families. Persons bring food to share, chip in for expenses on a volunteer basis, bring friends who wish to sample the TORI life, cook communal meals, invent communal games, and join in whatever activities happen during the celebration. One community has an unstructured game called a "TORI game". There are no rules. There is usually a ball, which one can roll, carry, throw, pass, ignore or kick. The point of the game is to have activity, shared process, group hugs, spontaneous play, and the joy of movement.
A growing body of folklore, stories, indigenous poetry and songs, group games, and even rituals are aspects of the community living. The emphasis is on non-structure, non-organization, and non-technique, and there are very few formalized rituals and traditions. The general feeling is one of spontaneity and freedom of flow.
The formal organization, TORI Associates, Inc., the tax-exempt corporation, has little relevance to the activities and events in the community, where most communal activities are at the EQ VI and VII levels. It is an impressive demonstration of how much deeply-caring community activity can go on without formal organization and without formal leadership or a management group. The communes that are beginning to form among members will probably develop on a firm basis of trust and common values, with people deciding to live together after they have learned how to be together in depth and intimacy.
The path for the community has not been without frustrations and problems. An appreciable number of people have wanted to institute more formal procedures, charge dues, create membership requirements, advertise the community meetings and charge fees for the community workshops, hire administrative and secretarial staff, pay fees for member services, and try other procedures that most members feel are low-trust. There are differences of opinion on what constitutes a life of optimal trust. The community is very accepting of differences of opinion and differing behaviors. Recurring issues revolve around such behavior as bringing pets to community weekends, chronic failure to share in costs, lack of participation in community meetings, differing patterns of relating to children, and a variety of practical issues that presumably come up in all communal and group activities. Most members feel that it is well to work through all feelings about these and other issues, prizing openness, acceptance of diversity, interdependence in depth, expression of diverse wants, and dealing forthrightly with any issue that any one member feels is important.
Some personal observations of mine are relevant. I am impressed with the changes and growth in the persons who have participated actively in the communities. People feel that they are growing and changing. I see an evolving body of practical theory that exists in the practices and behavior of people, a theory that is communicated in interaction rather than in books or even in words. This book is the first book about the theory. It is an effort to articulate some of the emerging learnings in the community, and is a communication primarily to the community members. It may also be useful and interesting to the growing number of people who write in to learn about the TORI community and who wish to participate in some way in the evolution of the theory and the practice.
My delay in writing a book about the theory has been due, in part, to my wish to see how satisfactory and effective the TORI international community is. I see it as one of the major tests of the practicality of the theory. Seeing it as dramatically successful, I now feel strong confidence that we have worked out several practical applications of the theory that are relevant to all phases of human interaction. Together with the several other applications of the theory reported in these pages, the strength of the international community is a solid and confidence-building evidence of the practicality of the theory.