Raven Meeting House, Cold Mountain Institute
I’d say it’s almost become a hunger in me to seek the company of people who communicate as deeply as we did in the growth-movement era of the 1970s.
The best workshop I did then was a three-month encounter group at Cold Mountain Institute, now Hollyhock.
If anything we today have gone back in time, our communication today being as superficial as the Anything Goes 1920s.
Because we don’t know how the other person feels or what they deeply want and because we don’t inquire, we can’t always make enlightened decisions.
In my view, we only use a small percentage of the communicational spectrum today
Our superficiality has been carefully planned in some instances and is the result of technology in other instances.
The growth movement, as I tell the story, was clobbered by the Recession of the early 1980s. No one had money after that to do serious growth work or support circuit riders (1) or growth centers. And that Recession we now see was planned by a cabal wanting by any means to bring the public into servitude. (2)
The recovery from that recession was jobless. Hundreds of thousands of people were shed from jobs with no care given to their long-term survival. “Downsizing,” we called it. Workers had been replaced by machines, with no social responsibility for their wellness thereafter.
One writer summed up the moral bankruptcy of the socially-injurious automation of those days:
“Stop finding yourself, pal: It’s time to get back to work — if you still have a job, that is.” (3)
The same writer offered this pessimistic appraisal of the need of the moment:
“Thinking seriously about the important role of the individual in the corporation, as we began to do in the late 1980s, was a useful and overdue exercise. But after that short-lived burst of introspection, coming hard on the heels of the materialistic excesses of the past decade, business leaders appear to be driven again. Driven to fight off the demons of recession, inefficiency and global competition and to swing the pendulum back to career-obssessed workaholism. Business is hell, so let’s get on with it.” (4)
“[A recent full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal … reads:] “He who hesitates is lunch.” (5)
And we did stop finding ourselves and got a job, so to speak. We turned our backs on the growth movement to keep bread on the table. And the growth movement disappeared.
The second hit to communication came from the spread of technologies that take us out of the real world and anchor our satisfaction in the virtual world. We’re becoming socially shallow, superficial – or at least I am. Hardest to pull ourselves away from is our cellphones.
The upshot is that nowadays we don’t communicate very deeply. We don’t bond with each other. We don’t get to know each other. Our minds accept easy explanations for each other’s behavior. We’re satisfied with the intimacy that comes from quarreling or withholding.
We left behind a really healthy community of well-functioning communicators.
And I want it back.
I’m willing to do my share of the work to get it back. Let me start today.
(Concluded in Part 2, below.)
Footnotes
(1) Circuit riders are workshop leaders who went from growth center to growth center offering their workshops or programs. There were some brilliant circuit riders, the best of them being John Enright. But all were good.
(2) Chemtrails, fluoride, EMP, weather warfare, pharmaceuticals, pandemics, toxic vaccines, on and on the list of attacks on the public goes.
(2) David Olive, “The New Hard Line,” Report on Business Magazine, October, 1991, 153
(4) Ibid., 156.
(4) Ibid., 15.