Breakthrough at conference?
From: John Hunter (jayjay2ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 19:21:08 -0500
Maybe someone out there can help me on this.

I'm a relatively new member of an as-yet unlanded cohousing group. One 
of our founding members returned from the Colorado conference full of 
enthusiasm and inspiration. I wasn't aware just how full of it he was 
until he volunteered to close our Sunday meeting. As we all stood in a 
circle, solemly holding hands, he said that for him the climax of the  
conference was was the ritual or ceremony centered on Sufi dancing, 
which evidently caused a higher consciousness to sweep through the 
assembled multitude. He said that, at last, people had overcome their 
fear and had let the spirituality behind cohousing "come out."

He followed that with a group exercise (ritual?) in which we were 
instructed to close our eyes and generate white-light healing energy, 
let the energy sweep around the group and when it had gained maximum 
amplitude, cause it to fly out to help the wife of a former group 
member fight her cancer.

After the meeting I told him that it wasn't fear but rather an acute 
appreciation of its destructiveness that causes me to reject 
irrational, magical, and superstitious thinking. I said that no 
self-respecting atheist or agnostic would see white light, spiritual 
energy, and mind-over-matter faith healing as anything but half-baked 
religion. I remember, I told him, high school, when every assembly 
began with "Let us bow our heads in prayer," and how uncomfortable and 
defiant I felt being one of the unbowed few.

So what gives? Is cohousing a mundande, planned living arrangement or a 
crypto-religious movement? If it's the latter, I say it's spinach and I 
say the hell with it.

John Hunter
The Stepford Cohousing Community (a pseudonym, naturally).

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