For a related notion, let me relate some things about sangha, as I tend to think it’s a good model for the kind of community that is likely shaped to fit the present situation.
“Sangha” is a Sanskrit word usually translated as “community”. It has a couple different meanings within Buddhism. One is mission focused: everyone is a member of the ideal sangha that transcends any particular space and time who has, in various definitions, taken the three refuges, taken the precepts, achieved stream entry, or is otherwise somehow on The Path. Another is location focused: “sangha” can refer to the specific community in a particular monastery, order, lineage, practice center, etc. of people who are “committed” or “serious” in one of the ways just enumerated. There are some others but those are the ones that seem relevant here.
Some things might look on the outside like sangha but might not be. For example, I facilitate a weekly meditation meetup at the REACH. It’s not really a sangha, though, because lots of people casually drop in who may or may not have committed themselves to liberation from suffering, they just want a place to practice or to hang out with some cool people or something else. And that’s fine; the point of a group like this is to be accessible in a way a sangha is not because although a sangha may be welcoming (the local one to which I belong certainly tries to be), many people bounce off sanghas because, I theorize, they aren’t ready to make the kind of commitment that really being part of one asks of you.*
*Because sangha will ask for commitment, even if you just try to be a “casual”—there’s not really a way to do the equivalent of hiding in the pews in the back. And it’s not the way you can’t hide in an Evangelical Christian group where you will be pointedly asked about your seriousness and shunned if you aren’t committed. Rather it’s like the practice pervades everything around the sangha and if you get too close to it and want to maintain distance you’ll feel very out-of-place.
And there’s the opposite situation, where a sangha may be real but not look much like it to outsiders. Sometimes this is just two friends coming together who are fellow stream winners who create sangha through their every interaction with each other, but to an outsider they might just look like good friends and not see the deeper connection to practice pervading their relationship.
The point being, sangha is something special, valuable, with real but somewhat fuzzy borders, and a strong commitment to a “mission”.
Now, our community (the one Ray is talking about here) hasn’t existed for long enough that we’ve had time to come to agreement on just what the criteria for inclusion are (or, put another way, exactly how we would phrase what the mission is, though I like what Ray says above), but whatever it is we can use this as the foundation of our community. I’ve seen in my time in Berkeley that, in my estimation, the mission is strong and powerfully creates a center of gravity that pulls in people sufficiently aligned with it and pushes out people who are not, usually not by force but because they simply get pulled away by other interests because although they might care about the mission some, they don’t care about it so much to make it a top priority in their life. This to me makes it like a sangha, but rather than a community committed to enlightenment it’s a community committed to long-term flourishing.
To me this suggests a couple things about how to build what Ray has called the village:
Keep the mission strong. The mission is the thing that holds the village together.
Leave the village open. The mission is both lighthouse and craggy shore that draws some people in and keeps other people out of the metaphorical harbor of the village because threading the currents to the harbor’s mouth is just hard enough that it keeps out anyone who doesn’t deeply care about the mission but not so hard as to keep out anyone who is serious.
Fix up the village. Right now the village is like a shanty town built around a small fort. Things in the fort are okay, but it’s a remote outpost far from home, requires frequently resupply from the outside, and the shanty town is better than living rough and more a place than anything else nearby the fort, but that’s about it. I believe most of the problems are not a consequence of keeping the mission strong or leaving the village open, but of not caring for the village.
This is an interesting take on it, and it resonated more strongly that I was expecting. It matches my personal experience (i.e it was not hard to notice little opportunities to incrementally increase my commitment to the mission, and if I was less interested, I might have drifted away instead).
But my impression is this is not true for everyone. One clearcut thing is that there’s a certain threshold of agency and self-efficacy that someone needs to have demonstrated before I feel comfortable inviting them to mission-centric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are people who have “mixed competencies”, where they’ve gotten good at some things but not others, and they want to be able to help the mission, and there are subtle and not-so-subtle social forces that push them away.
And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems important to acknowledge.
A major prompt for this post was reading Sarah’s the Craft is Not The Community post, where my impression is that she hadn’t run into rationality-community projects that actually seemed outward facing and valuable (and perhaps had run into a few projects that seemed to think themselves as being outward facing, but didn’t actually seem that valuable).
It was weird to me that Sarah’s social graph resulted in that experience.
This whole post was basically a reaction to that, where it seemed to me a) that I do in fact run into orgs trying to make real world results happen, b) my experience with the village has always been “helps you get ready for the Mission but isn’t the Mission.”
But my impression is this is not true for everyone. One clearcut thing is that there’s a certain threshold of agency and self-efficacy that someone needs to have demonstrated before I feel comfortable inviting them to mission-centric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are people who have “mixed competencies”, where they’ve gotten good at some things but others, and they want to be able to help the mission, and there are subtle and not-so-subtle social forces that push them away.
And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems important to acknowledge.
I think there’s something proper in the function of a sangha (and by extension, our community) that it discourages those who don’t have, as you put it, the “agency and self-efficacy” to properly engage in the mission, and also pushes out those who are only half in it, such that what I can imagine as “mixed competencies” results in them not staying despite the fact that they could have stayed if they had been more committed and willing to make space for themselves in a place that was willing to tolerate them but not usher them in.
Of course, it feels a bit weird because in sangha that’s directly tied to the purpose of the community and can be done skillfully as part of transmitting the dharma, whereas in our community this seems at cross-purposes with the mission and can feel to some like defecting on paying the cost to train and develop the people it needs. Probably this is part of what sets apart sangha from other forms of community: it’s shape is directly tied to its function, and is a natural extension of the mission, where elsewhere other shapes could be adopted because the mission does not directly suggest one.
For a related notion, let me relate some things about sangha, as I tend to think it’s a good model for the kind of community that is likely shaped to fit the present situation.
“Sangha” is a Sanskrit word usually translated as “community”. It has a couple different meanings within Buddhism. One is mission focused: everyone is a member of the ideal sangha that transcends any particular space and time who has, in various definitions, taken the three refuges, taken the precepts, achieved stream entry, or is otherwise somehow on The Path. Another is location focused: “sangha” can refer to the specific community in a particular monastery, order, lineage, practice center, etc. of people who are “committed” or “serious” in one of the ways just enumerated. There are some others but those are the ones that seem relevant here.
Some things might look on the outside like sangha but might not be. For example, I facilitate a weekly meditation meetup at the REACH. It’s not really a sangha, though, because lots of people casually drop in who may or may not have committed themselves to liberation from suffering, they just want a place to practice or to hang out with some cool people or something else. And that’s fine; the point of a group like this is to be accessible in a way a sangha is not because although a sangha may be welcoming (the local one to which I belong certainly tries to be), many people bounce off sanghas because, I theorize, they aren’t ready to make the kind of commitment that really being part of one asks of you.*
*Because sangha will ask for commitment, even if you just try to be a “casual”—there’s not really a way to do the equivalent of hiding in the pews in the back. And it’s not the way you can’t hide in an Evangelical Christian group where you will be pointedly asked about your seriousness and shunned if you aren’t committed. Rather it’s like the practice pervades everything around the sangha and if you get too close to it and want to maintain distance you’ll feel very out-of-place.
And there’s the opposite situation, where a sangha may be real but not look much like it to outsiders. Sometimes this is just two friends coming together who are fellow stream winners who create sangha through their every interaction with each other, but to an outsider they might just look like good friends and not see the deeper connection to practice pervading their relationship.
The point being, sangha is something special, valuable, with real but somewhat fuzzy borders, and a strong commitment to a “mission”.
Now, our community (the one Ray is talking about here) hasn’t existed for long enough that we’ve had time to come to agreement on just what the criteria for inclusion are (or, put another way, exactly how we would phrase what the mission is, though I like what Ray says above), but whatever it is we can use this as the foundation of our community. I’ve seen in my time in Berkeley that, in my estimation, the mission is strong and powerfully creates a center of gravity that pulls in people sufficiently aligned with it and pushes out people who are not, usually not by force but because they simply get pulled away by other interests because although they might care about the mission some, they don’t care about it so much to make it a top priority in their life. This to me makes it like a sangha, but rather than a community committed to enlightenment it’s a community committed to long-term flourishing.
To me this suggests a couple things about how to build what Ray has called the village:
Keep the mission strong. The mission is the thing that holds the village together.
Leave the village open. The mission is both lighthouse and craggy shore that draws some people in and keeps other people out of the metaphorical harbor of the village because threading the currents to the harbor’s mouth is just hard enough that it keeps out anyone who doesn’t deeply care about the mission but not so hard as to keep out anyone who is serious.
Fix up the village. Right now the village is like a shanty town built around a small fort. Things in the fort are okay, but it’s a remote outpost far from home, requires frequently resupply from the outside, and the shanty town is better than living rough and more a place than anything else nearby the fort, but that’s about it. I believe most of the problems are not a consequence of keeping the mission strong or leaving the village open, but of not caring for the village.
This is an interesting take on it, and it resonated more strongly that I was expecting. It matches my personal experience (i.e it was not hard to notice little opportunities to incrementally increase my commitment to the mission, and if I was less interested, I might have drifted away instead).
But my impression is this is not true for everyone. One clearcut thing is that there’s a certain threshold of agency and self-efficacy that someone needs to have demonstrated before I feel comfortable inviting them to mission-centric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are people who have “mixed competencies”, where they’ve gotten good at some things but not others, and they want to be able to help the mission, and there are subtle and not-so-subtle social forces that push them away.
And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems important to acknowledge.
A major prompt for this post was reading Sarah’s the Craft is Not The Community post, where my impression is that she hadn’t run into rationality-community projects that actually seemed outward facing and valuable (and perhaps had run into a few projects that seemed to think themselves as being outward facing, but didn’t actually seem that valuable).
It was weird to me that Sarah’s social graph resulted in that experience.
This whole post was basically a reaction to that, where it seemed to me a) that I do in fact run into orgs trying to make real world results happen, b) my experience with the village has always been “helps you get ready for the Mission but isn’t the Mission.”
I think there’s something proper in the function of a sangha (and by extension, our community) that it discourages those who don’t have, as you put it, the “agency and self-efficacy” to properly engage in the mission, and also pushes out those who are only half in it, such that what I can imagine as “mixed competencies” results in them not staying despite the fact that they could have stayed if they had been more committed and willing to make space for themselves in a place that was willing to tolerate them but not usher them in.
Of course, it feels a bit weird because in sangha that’s directly tied to the purpose of the community and can be done skillfully as part of transmitting the dharma, whereas in our community this seems at cross-purposes with the mission and can feel to some like defecting on paying the cost to train and develop the people it needs. Probably this is part of what sets apart sangha from other forms of community: it’s shape is directly tied to its function, and is a natural extension of the mission, where elsewhere other shapes could be adopted because the mission does not directly suggest one.