Paradise Prototype : Establishing Order

Why to create community, what kind of community and how to ensure success.

1. Intention
2. Understanding the Movement
3. Failure Analysis
4. Community vs. Smart Cities
5. Expanding the Vision
6. Listening to the Land

1. Intention

Dear Reader,

The purpose of this document is to begin understanding phases of community development, understand what it is to self initiate in a prototype of paradise, and to consider our ability to scale and create ripple impact. The information presented in 2,3, and 4 are inspired by a call in October 2020 between Daniel Schmachtenberger, another private party and myself, which includes personal insights and external references. If inspired, add notes and comments as this is a growing and collaborative document.

Sincerely,
Marly Benedicto

2. Understanding the Movement

“Moving into the phase of civil unrest at the end of a phase of an empire makes cities a shit place to be.” -DS

The confluence of Pandemic and civil unrest, along with supply chain instability make very high population centers much less desirable. With the capacity for remote work opening up, people are empowered to live in alternative locations while still retaining equal access to job opportunities that were previously only available in major cities. There has been a growing desire for people to live in community as it’s clear that loneliness is the biggest driver of depression and addiction.

A 2019 study done by Cigna showed that 3 out of 5 Americans (61%) report feeling lonely. In 2020 the CDC reported that symptoms of depression and anxiety increased considerably due to the COVID pandemic.

“The reason we live in nuclear family homes, and that’s a totally weird thing throughout all of history but it’s a totally ubiquitous thing in the developed world and nobody lives in communities, is because when people have the optionality to not deal with one another they take it. When people are poor they live in communities because they need one another. Farmers have more community with one another. But as soon as people have the money to not need each other, they don’t have the binding energy to make it through the cleaving energy of conflict. Part of the thing that allows people to make it through the difficult times is not having an easy option out. Poor people actually do better at intentional communities than wealthier people because of the optionality dynamics, and yet to buy land and have people who are generative you need certain people who have the dynamics that lead to wealth and they almost exclusively suck at making meaningful compromises and sacrifices of that type that they’ve never been encultured to do.” — DS

Having visited and lived among dynamic communities across the island these past 12 months, I’ve learned a lot as a witness, mediator and community member. Living on an Island asks for accountability, compassion, kindness, patience and simplicity.

It’s an instructive study to look at the history of global ecovillages and intentional communities and study why they fail. If a community understands the fail cases, then it will learn how to build a civilization that doesn’t fail. This is where to start, as it will allow the community to iterate on other things such as permaculture, ecology, free love, parenting techniques, technology or whatever else is their shared central vision.

3. Failure Analysis

The major analysis is broken into 5 categories.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

How the decisions are made around who is allowed to live there, and who is asked to leave. Examples would be changes due to divorce and new partners, parents and children.

Conflict Resolution

What is shared vs what is individual. What should be in the HOA. How to deal with the conflict so it doesn’t continue to be an issue.

Governance

Governance issues associated with the collective Governance Structure.

Wealth and equality (the single biggest factor)

The pains of wealth and equality are much more pronounced when you live in the same space and the power differential.

Sex and Relationships

It’s one thing when you divorce and your partner goes off with a new spouse, but another when that new spouse is your neighbor. This becomes conflict resolution. Polyamory, monogamy, love embodied, heightened sensitivity and energetic boundaries.

Further Study: The Continuum Concept: In Search Of Happiness Lost (Classics in Human Development)

4. Community Vs. Smart City

What are we working towards? Let’s understand the difference between a community, a closed loop community (low tech), and a closed loop (smart) city. While there are different levels of consideration, they are essentially the same thing at a smaller or larger fractal scale.

Smart Community

Bringing every major aspect of civilization together into a single project: Agriculture, production, waste management, physical tech, social tech — humans living together. The smallest scale in which you’re dealing with all verticals interacting.

This is a smart place to begin any initiative, and ideally document progress with failure analysis in mind to serve as a prototype for future communities.

Low-tech Closed Loop Community.

A community may be closed loop low tech, but it’s unlikely to make its own biotech, airplanes and laptops. Right now not even a country makes its own laptops, it’s all dependent on the global supply chain which creates massive fragility.

Once the ball is rolling, this is an organic next step in understanding what the community excels in. Do you recognize that the community is a center for Spiritual Renaissance, or Rewilding Human behavior? Is there a collective desire to collaborate and provide these refined insights to other people?

Closed Loop City

As we move further into the digital age, Nation states will become weaker and weaker. There is an emergence of city states and bio regions like Taiwan and Singapore, and networks across them. These places have better governance. The small major city is much more like a city state model but large enough that it can do a closed loop materials economy with networks of interaction.

How can each community contribute their area of expertise to a new global network, with resources and efforts combined, resulting in a new coherent operating system?

5. Expanding the Vision

“If you want to prototype what the future of civilization is, but your model is dependent on the civilization that is still self terminating you have not yet made a minimum viable prototype. On the topic of minimum viable prototype, it can’t be fully dependent upon something that is still unsustainable. This is moving beyond a better quality of life and into a prototype.” -DS

Is the purpose of the community in creating a dope getaway on a tropical island… or is it working towards a private commune devoted towards a specific initiative… or is it developing a prototype with the vision and initiative to collaborate with a self organizing global sustainable network that is emerging? Ideally, it’s all of the above.

When we look at the past 20 years of the Smart City movement, it’s led majorly by men with a focus on how to rebuild cities that are highly web connected and doing data processing- machine learning, IOT and 5G. They don’t take into account holistic health and wellness (aka human evolution and awakening), ecological resilience, COVID, or supply chains and the grid shutting down.

“The smart city movement itself is stupid.” -DS

There is an opportunity for the feminine and clear-seeing voice to contribute to the emotional, spiritual and psychological needs for developing communities. As well as a grounded awareness of sustainable environmental practices that will ensure the symbiotic continuum of all life on earth.

An embodied study is the best way to understand systems of change from the inside out. I see these community initiatives as an opportunity to help ease the transition from a crumbling paradigm into the Golden Age. Where we create a global system of exchange that operates in order to assist, uplift and nourish each community. Working together harmoniously to restore peace and balance across all sentient life.

6. Listening to the Land

Being in discussion with multiple groups of people who have recently or are in the process of buying land, it seems as though there is a solid vision carried by many of these people. Reflecting on what’s been mirrored in my personal field, I believe Hawaii will pioneer three key areas.

Permaculture

• Immediate: Land Stewardship. Listening to the land, developing in harmony with what earth asks. Extending flow.
• Intermediate: Holistic Health. Rewilding the human to its natural state and instinct with time in nature and organic living foods. Deep healing to restore psychic/magic abilities.
• Intermediate : Food forests initiative on island and spearhead global initiative. Transform the mindset of agriculture, land development/ownership and poverty/scarcity consciousness. Heal Hunger.
• Long Term: Establish a ceremony of working respectfully with the land and scale agriculture to provide vibrant living foods to the global network. This will address the much needed financial healing that will fund technological advances on the island.

Ritual Arts

• Immediate : Anchor the ancient truths and timeless wisdom through symbolic expression in a renaissance of Spirituality. Document and distribute organically.
• Immediate : Encourage each to identify their own relationship with Spirit and Reality through indirect and channeled teachings and performance. Document and distribute organically.
• Long Term : Contribute to Healing separation from God story

Quantum Reality

• Immediate : Make science and spirituality relatable by uniting it with the arts.
• Immediate : Work to verify vibration as medicine to help transcend the present medical system. Specifically the voice and our innate ability to heal ourselves.
• Intermediate : Assist in collective awareness shift from Newtonian to Quantum reality- ultimate empowerment of one’s self.
• Long Term : Ground and teach updated theories of time and interdimensional travel in order to rewrite the history of man’s destruction/climate warming- specifically focus on environmentalism and our ability to transfer technology and information with these ever developing skills.