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What Is A Comprehensive Center For Sustainable Living?
From Divine Remenbrance Winter 2006
Shah Sufi Sayed Dayemullah, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti and Sheikh Din have given us guidelines and spiritually-centered models from which to build a new society using a grassroots approach. These Teachers have all advocated economic self-reliance and local community building as a means to provide basic necessities for everyone. These teachings have been codified by Sheikh Din under the title of Progressive Development. The purpose of these teachings is to help students achieve self-realization and to serve humanity. Progressive Development holds that without a spiritual goal as the nucleus of any action, there can be no progress. Mental and physical accomplishments will, in time, result in their own negation because everything is finite and therefore subject to the cycle of birth and death. As such, they only represent change, but not progress. Only spirit is eternal and capable of fulfilling our longing for infinite peace and happiness. Moving toward the Divine is the only true progress. As such, Progressive Development also entails spiritual practices. Some of these practices are also social, political and economic practices whose intention is to develop the infrastructure to meet the basic needs of humanity, without compromising the earth and the life of other species. The purpose of collective institutions, including the government, is not to dominate us, but to meet our physical and psychological needs so that we may have the time and the opportunity to reach our highest potential. Progressive Development, as it relates to the collective welfare, promotes the principles of maximum utilization and rational distribution of resources for the benefit of all. It supports rural revitalization and economic democracy as the means by which local people can meet their basic needs in a cooperative manner. Today, as global capitalism ravages natural resources in a wasteful manner, pollution threatens the very climate upon which our food sources depend, and huge profits are made from the misery and suffering of others, the wisdom of Progressive Development becomes more apparent. An essential element in the start of a local, self-reliant economy is what Baba Anandamurti called the Master Unit. Somewhat like a monastery after the fall of Rome, it serves to keep the spiritual community organized during social transformation. Its main purpose, however, is to provide resources and services for the larger community when jobs become scarce and basic needs can not be met by growing numbers of people. These resources might be free plants, free seeds, care of orphans and the poor, education and health care services. Dayempur Farm is a Master Unit. In the more contemporary terminology of Sheikh Din, it is called a Comprehensive Center for Sustainable Living. To build a Comprehensive Center for Sustainable Living requires that we develop knowledge and skills in the following areas:
What is a "local economy" according to Progressive Development? It is an economy that does not depend upon outside corporations and capital to develop jobs. Rather, it is based upon the cooperation of local people to maximize local resources that we ourselves possess. A local economy should not be based upon the profit motive. Rather, the primary motive is to meet basic needs. This is economics from a spiritual perspective. It entails putting systems in place that can provide ongoing material security so that we may have the scope to pursue our higher nature as human beings. Capitalism and Communism, on the other hand, are materialist economic systems. Their goal is to amass as much wealth as possible, either for individuals or for corporate or state elites. Progressive Development is a vision for the next stage in human evolution. Currently, multinational corporations and the federal government control our local economy. We shop at national and international chain stores. The national government controls Shawnee Forest and farm subsidies. Large corporations control the coal mines. International grain companies control the crops our farmers produce. It is a sobering reality that less than 3% of farmers in Southern Illinois produce food that we can actually eat. Because of economic globalization, when local planners think of development, they think of how to lure money from outside the area. What they do not consider, however, is that when capital comes into an area from outside, its goal is to take profit from the area. This profit is value subtracted from our local resources either in the form of money, labor or the local environment. Jobs are created and money does come in, but in actuality more goes out. This weakens us as a region and makes us more vulnerable to forces outside our control. This predicament is intensifying as the fissures in the global and national economic infrastructures become more pronounced. Today, the external systems upon which we rely to keep us fed and alive are becoming ominously less dependable. According to Progressive Development, the goal of a local economy is to: - Develop local self-reliance in job creation (100% employment of local people) - Meet the basic needs of all: food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education and security - Keep money and resources local - Build economic growth on sustainable agricultural practices - Build local businesses around pre-harvest and post-harvest goods and services - Create cooperative enterprises in which workers are also owners Southern Illinois is a rural area. This is a blessing, because we can grow most of our basic needs on the land. We can create jobs in the pre-harvest and post-harvest sectors. We can provide the capital and the labor to develop local farms. We can provide the market for our own products and services, if we organize ourselves to do so. As a Comprehensive Center for Sustainable Living, it is the goal of Dayempur Farm to aid the development of a sustainable, self-reliant local economy. As such, we need to view the farm as a laboratory for Southern Illinoisans to develop the building blocks of this economy. Much work has already been done at Dayempur to develop sustainable systems for meeting basic needs. The question now is: "What do we, as a Sufi community, do next?" Currently, our knowledge remains incomplete and systems underdeveloped. We have a garden, but it meets only 20% of our food needs. We have an orchard, but it bears little fruit. We have an herb garden, but we do not harvest it in a maximum way to meet our food and medicinal needs. We have constructed shelters, but we haven't perfected our approach to energy efficiency or the use of local resources as building materials. Simply, we need more help to accomplish our goal in a timely manner. We need to open ourselves to the larger community. We need to encourage outside experts and volunteers to help us build this laboratory by: - Working with us in an open-handed partnership to build an economic infrastructure to meet local basic needs - Designing and implementing a community-focused agricultural base - Setting up experiments and models based on sustainable living principles - Serving as volunteers and apprentices - Volunteering labor to develop the gardens, orchards, land, water, renewable energy, structures, etc. We need to turn our management areas into learning centers so that people from within our Community and from the larger community can help develop essential knowledge and skills to create a sustainable local economy. The Volunteer Program set up this past year has been a great success. It will enter a new phase next year. While nature's timetable will still require an influx of volunteers to work in the garden or on special projects, we want volunteers to be able to choose specific areas in which they would like to work. As such, volunteers will be trained by area managers and become part of the team by giving input to goals and projects within specified learning centers. During the next year, we will create the Master Plan for Dayempur that will set two and five year goals for the Farm. Volunteers will be encouraged to join us in this work and in so doing, help to make Dayempur Farm a Comprehensive Center for Sustainable Living for the benefit of all. |