What is Free Community?
Inspired by Rudolf Steiner's “Awakening To Community”, lecture 6

What are the conditions that must prevail for building a 'free community'?
Intellectualism divides and isolates people.
Community can not be built with abstract words.
Rationalistic, intellectualistic sermonizing divides and isolates people.
One can think and develop logic alone;... in fact, one can do it better by being with oneself.
When engaged in purely logical thinking,.. one feels a need to withdraw from the world and people.
Human nature must become more conscious,... but that is not the same as becoming more intellectualistic.
The intellectual element does not give people anything that could unite them.

Community Building Elements: I. Commonality
1. Common Folk Community
There is one kind of community that everyone over the entire globe is aware of.
Folk groups are conceived in relation to the language they speak.
Common language is the foundation of a first, primitive building of community.
2. Common Life Memories
You find yourself, later in life, in the company of companions of your childhood.
A communal experiencing happens with the recollection of common memories of youthful life.
3. Common Cosmic Memories
Before we descended to earth, we lived through a cosmic lifetime in a spiritual world.
Ceremonial acts and words used in rituals are reflections, pictures of a pre-earthly existence.
The shared experience of the ritual brings the cosmic memories to the surface of the subconscious.
The community creating power of rituals is the shared memory of spiritual experiences.

Community Building Elements: II. Human Awakening
Another force to foster community is wakefulness. A dreaming person is alone with their dreams.
1. Awaken In Encounter With Nature
We awaken to everyday life in the encounter with the natural world.
We awaken through the impact of nature,... through its light and tones and warmth.
We awaken in the encounter with the natural external aspects of other human beings.
2. Awaken In Encounter With Soul-Spirit Of Another.
In everyday life we do not encounter what is going on in the depths of another’s soul or spirit.
We awaken at a higher level in the encounter with the soul-spirit of another.
This is where the first true understanding of 'free community' sets in.
3. Idealism Creates Strength For Awakening
The strength needed to achieve awakening can be created by instilling true idealism in communities.
True idealism is to consciously lift to the ideal level, what has been seen, learned and understood on the earthly level.
Ideals are not left as abstract thought, but the ideal is endowed with a higher life as we live into it.

Community Building Elements: III. Awakening To Free Community
1. Presence Of Spiritual Being
A feeling of reverence should imbue a room when we assemble.
Our hearts, souls and attitude must invoke the presence of a spiritual being in a room where conversation is carried on.
We must attune our speaking, feeling, thinking, and impulses of will such that we feel a spiritual being listening.
2. Community Of Spirit
The ties that make for folk community are not present in the same way for people who have developed 'freedom'.
A real community spirit is attracted by our common experiencing when we engage in spiritual study together.
Ideals becomes real when people join in 'tasks together' and experience awakening in the encounter with their fellows.
The awakenings undergo a development,... and take place in ever new ways as people go on meeting and growing together.
By taking ideas into an awakened soul, rather than a soul asleep to higher things, the true spirit of community descends.
3. Founding Free Communities
'Free communities' will spring up as an outcome of true awareness.
The forming of 'free communities' occurs when one learns to awaken in the encounter with another.
Ever fresh awakenings through those with whom one finds oneself, holds such groups together.
4. Union Of Free Communities
A loose union of 'free communities' could work out ways of living together united only by a common ideal.
We should keep our discussions objective and impersonal in trying to reach clarity on what form our community should take.
Instead of dragging in spiritual theories in an artificial, nebulous way, take life's ordinary concerns as a starting point.
Avoid sentimental dragging in of all sorts of matters, and instead fill our hearts with 'free impulses', conceived in full clarity.

'Free spirit community' arising from 'free individuals'.
A sense of real relationship between persons and a spiritual impulse to joint activity.