Become a true friend
A Visionary Society Deep Pledge
This is a Session within the Topic relationship
 

A Pledge is reflection on how you lead your life
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Take this Pledge
Become a True Friend
 
Taking this Pledge is not available until you have responded to all Pledge Challenges

Taking a Pledge is agreeing to simple, basic thoughtfulness in a social or personal category. It is a new kind of Hippocratic Oath - a dynamic, active way to think about and decide on how you lead your life.

– Taking the Pledge does not mean that you agree with each (or any) perspectives.
– Decide on each Pledge Challenge separately.
– Deactivate the Pledge itself at any time.
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“Without any formal scheme or written laws,
we have agreed to regard ourselves as one family.” (Oneida community)
Overview
Friendship is bringing together two souls for the elaboration of the good. True friends recognize the truth of each other – not just who they are at present, but what is best in them and what they may achieve. They work together to establish their most beautiful vision, first in ideas, then in actual life.
 
 
Mystery
What makes a relationship lasting? Is it possible to really know another person? Can true love ever come to an end? What kind of relationship answers our longing for 'I love you'? Is true friendship possible?
Quest Path
Relationship is not optional. It is the only thing that can save us from total isolation. But most relationships are temporary, flawed, or failed. Resolving the mystery of relationship is a vocation of any sensitive human being. Step by step, one insight after another, we engage in a process of personal and social transformation. None of these steps are easy. Join us. It is a lifelong process, but in each chapter of our lives we are building the friendships that will form the nucleus of a different kind of society
How it works
The Pledge is composed of a number of Challenges. Explore and vote on each one. Although no Challenge can ever be entirely completed, you may indicate if you have decided to engage in the process.
Everyone must find out for themselves, but we can help each other along. Please RSVP if you would like to join those in your community exploring this Pledge together (this function to be activated soon). We will let you know when a meeting is scheduled.
Once you engage in all Challenges you may then decide to take the relationship Pledge. A small number of people in any community who are truly involved in relationship will form the nucleus of a new community.
Challenges - Preparation

Explore each perspective and vote on it.
Which do you support? How can you help others and make the community better? 
"Relationship is not possible where there is greed, ambition and hope"
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Pledge: Become a True Friend


Relationship is not possible where there is greed, ambition and hope

Relationship is not possible where there is greed, ambition and hope. Love comes only when the mind is quiet…If you have no love, you cannot resolve any social problem. You can go into politics, exhibit faith, try to reform the poor, write books or poems, but you are a dead human being.

Life is a movement in relationship. Relationship is not possible where there is self-seeking. Self-seeking includes fear, greed, envy, jealousy, ambition, despair and hope. Using another person as the means for your own happiness creates conflict and confusion. An image of someone – thoughts, experiences, hope – is not relationship. Only the person who understands the whole structure and process of society, and is freeing himself from it, has character, and he alone can flower in goodness.

If you have no love, you cannot resolve any social problem. You can go into politics, exhibit faith, try to reform the poor, write books or poems, but you are a dead human being. Any form of compulsion, however subtle, does not bring beauty or compassion. There must be freedom, freedom from compulsion. Love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered. This is communion.

When the means of my happiness is a living person, then the conflict and confusion, the antagonism and pain are far greater. If relationship is based on mere usage, is there any relationship, except the most superficial, between the user and the used? If I use you for my happiness, am I really related to you? Relationship implies communion with another on different levels; and is there communion with another when he is only a tool, a means of my happiness? In thus using another, am I not really seeking self-isolation, in which I think I shall by happy? This self-isolation I call relationship; but actually there is no communion in this process. Communion can exist only where there is no fear; and there is gnawing fear and pain where there is usage and so dependence. As nothing can live in isolation, the attempts of the mind to isolate itself lead to its own frustration and misery.



 
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"Apprehend and affirm others as a whole"
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Pledge: Become a True Friend


Apprehend and affirm others as a whole

“You is more than It knows. You does more, and more happens to it, than It knows. No deception reaches this far: here is the cradle of actual life.”
“I do not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometime and Somewhere. I can place him there and have to do this again and again, but immediately he becomes as He or a She, an It, and no longer remains my You.”
“The You encounters me by grace – it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, it is my essential deed. The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it....I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter.”

 
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Challenges - Action

Explore each perspective and vote on it.
Which do you support? How can you help others and make the community better? 
 
 


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Invitation Card

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and to anyone who might support it.

Offer a true welcome for an idea you believe in!
 
Deep Challenges are normally available at a later stage of participation.

They are presented here provisionally for collaborative development.