Last Updated 4.5.23 This page has also been updated and superseded by this page. The page below will give you some history on the decades-long development of our eco-community models.
We operate as a cooperative that shares our cooperative benefits based on work merit and responsibility levels.
"Fully enjoying life now while also being fully prepared to adapt to what is coming" is our unofficial slogan.
Here are some of the ways we achieve this.
The four types of Universe communities allow members can live in our centers in community, in intentional self-created local co-housing or, they can live independently in their own local housing and still participate in activities and events within our local communities. (At our centers for any community housing that may be available, sometimes full or partial work exchanges are available to qualified individuals.)
Mutual benefits within the community can range from sharing preparedness information and resources, bulk discount buying, sharing tools and equipment, sharing specific technical skills (medical, legal, etc.,) or sharing common tasks such as cooking, cleaning, maintenance, community gardening, etc. Members choose their level of involvement. It can be at the level of simple shared mutual buying or other benefits or a deeper level of commitment and participation in co-creating our vision.
Members pay monthly dues based on the number of benefits each member receives and shares within the community, i.e., bulk buying, discounts on community events, etc. All initial memberships are provisional for three months up to one year (based upon the type of membership,) and until existing members vote on the granting of full membership rights to provisional members.
Because commitments and contribution are essential to the success in all authentic communities new members are required to make community service and support commitments appropriate to the level of the community membership that they have chosen. If they hold full-time positions within the community they will also share in the communities income based on their work merit and responsibility.
Our Core Values, Principles, and Practices:
We use current science to understand reality objectively, and then we use this reality-congruent knowledge to create the most optimal and practical reality-grounded approaches to living and solving the challenges of life. This inherently makes us a community of continuous learning and ongoing member education as the prime launch point and central hub from which the success of all our other values and actions spring or come into being.
Our community's core guiding operational values, principles, and action practices are based upon the new Universe Evolutionary Worldview and are called the Universe Principles of Sustainability. This new worldview and its science-based action and attitudinal principles present a new way to see and be and enhance justice in the world. The links below will take you to the action and attitudinal parts of the Universe Principles of Sustainability. When you read these principles, you will also see many of our community's core values expressed in each principle.
To see the Big Picture core action principles of a Universe Community member, click here.
To see the Big Picture foundational attitudes and perspectives of a Universe Community member, click here.
To see more about how to co-create a sustainable prosperity revolution, click here.)
For an advanced-level overview of the new Universe Evolutionary Worldview and the principles of progressive evolution that create the core principles behind our Universe community vision, click here.
For more information on the key qualities or tools a self-organizing individual possesses, click here.
For an excellent and more detailed summary description of the non-evolution science values, attitudes, and behavioral characteristics of mature and developed Universe Community members and leaders, see the book Spiral Dynamics, Mastering values, leadership, and change by Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan. See the two sections that describe the "yellow meme" individual and the "turquoise meme" individual.
Our Similarities to Other Intentional Communities
Most intentional community agendas focus on personal development and happiness or personal healing or all of these things simultaneously. While Universe communities also contain these essential elements that are parts of any healthy community they are more secondary goals in our community. Our primary focus is first on our member learning and then on teaching others how to create:
a.) a sustainable prosperity based on evolution science,
b.) a safe, just, and secure civilization and,
c.) thriving and meaning-filled individual lives and communities, and all of which above,
d.) align with and forward the progressive evolution of life and the universe.
More than anything else, one could easily say that at our core, we are a lifelong learning and teaching intentional community focused on our primary focus above. Our most valuable current exchange with the macro culture is our educational services relating to the new Universe Evolutionary Worldview, the principles of sustainable prosperity, and our work in teaching and promoting the Job One for Humanity climate change solutions.
Our Model for Ethical Income Creation and Productivity Exchange with Outside Communities:
Every individual, group, and community must exchange energy and productivity with others to keep from violating the second law of thermodynamics, a basic driver throughout evolution. Universe communities, primarily educational, achieve the goal of ethical income creation and productivity exchange with outside communities by offering classes on and offline. These classes are created for members of the local universe community as well as individuals, businesses, communities, and even governmental organizations outside that particular local universe community.
The classes focus on teaching the Universe Evolutionary Worldview and how to use its principles and tools. These classes also teach essential art-of-living skills, which are not normally taught in today's homes or educational institutions. Click here to see more about these essential art-of-living skills. Each local universe community sets its own prices for the costs of the classes and services it provides to community members and individuals, and organizations outside the community.
Our Personal Development Models:
For a good basic understanding of how we view the basics of the positive and natural development of human beings and cultural collectives, first see the Spiral Dynamics model of cultural value and meme development by Don Beck.
For a deeper understanding of how we view the basics of the full possibilities of individual and collective socio-emotional and cognitive development, also see in particular:
1.) Measuring Hidden Dimensions: the Art and Science of Fully Engaging Adults by Otto Laske. (For the socio-emotional side for understanding possible and potential socio-emotional human development levels.)
2.) Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems Foundations of Requisite Organization also by Otto Laske. (For the cognitive side of understanding the levels of possible and potential cognitive and dialectical meta-systemic human development.)
3.) The integral human potential developmental models of Ken Wilber.
4.) Finally, click here to see the master list of the integral and practical art-of-living skills that are or will be taught. These additional skills are aligned with the new Universe Evolutionary Worldview and our sustainable prosperity mission to help Universe community members reach their full socio-emotional, cognitive, and life skills developmental potentials.
Our Health and Wellness Perspectives:
We believe in creating both a healthy interior and exterior environment. Our sustainable prosperity actions and Universe Principles describe how we create exterior environmental health. To create interior personal health, we support harmful chemical-free good nutrition, physical fitness, stress management, relationship quality, as well as exploring some humanistic or spiritual exploration for deeper meaning depending on one is of a spiritual nature.
Our Community Thinking and Decision-Making Systems:
Universe Communities use, teach and integrate the following four modern, postmodern, and evolutionary thinking systems:
a.) rational/analytical used in scientific experimentation,
b.) systems thinking and
c.) meta-systemic dialectical thinking.
d.) integral multi-perspectivalism
Our Community Decision-Making Structure: (This section is not longer applicable as we are evolving a new form of full democratic engagement here.)
We use a simple majority consensus method of decision-making for many issues within the community. For issues involving evolving our foundational goals and vision, we require a 3/4 supermajority of non-provisional members. T
Our Ethical, Behavioral, and "Constitutional" Structure:
Every community needs a basic constitutional structure based on sound principles and an accurate understanding of reality. For this minimal essential structure, we have developed and discovered many evolutionary principles, created a formalized code of ethics and conduct from them as well as constructed many other guiding models for creating and maintaining healthy individual and collective boundaries and for the means and ways in which we will achieve our goals.
Members of our community first study the particular codes of conduct which are most appropriate to their level of development and responsibility within our community. After that, they carefully study and evaluate the codes of conduct and then make personal commitments to live these codes (and, in some cases, our values and ideals,) to the best of their abilities. The willingness of community members to make clear and open personal commitments to the community vision, value standards, and acceptable behaviors is one of the most important factors that creates and empowers the community culture, particularly in the areas of its effectiveness, empathetic cohesion, and authenticity.
Click here for the full codes of ethics and conduct for Universe Community members.
Members of our community have real responsibilities, and as members make real commitments to the community, Click here to learn about those responsibilities. The community also has responsibilities and commitments to its members.
Click here for a list of traditional, modern, post-modern, and evolutionary virtues promoted in Universe Communities. Universe Communities are a dynamic incubator for the balanced development of virtue within an evolutionary context.
For our position paper on healthy sexuality among community members, click here.
For more of our other administrative principles and position papers in our community, see our extensive FAQ by clicking here.
If you are familiar with software technology, in many ways, you could say that the Universe community treats the Universe Evolutionary Worldview as the structural "kernel" of our Universe community's open-source core principles and structure.
About Our Members and Leaders:
We believe in qualified members and leaders with just the minimum hierarchy necessary to facilitate a healthy and efficient community environment. To become a member, leader, teacher, or facilitator in our community means that one is qualified for that level of membership/leadership and that they have earned those positions by the merit of their education and previous successful activities and experience.
Good leaders understand the area of their leadership, have successful experience in those areas, and, if great, have high cognitive development, socio-emotional development, and maturity. Two books that clearly define the qualities of high-caliber membership leadership that we seek and promote and that meet these criteria are:
1.) On the social-emotional side of membership or leadership; Measuring Hidden Dimensions: the Art and Science of Fully Engaging Adults by Otto Laske. (Our leaders strive to reach the S4/S5 socio-emotional/maturity levels of Laske's socio-emotional developmental model.)
2.) On the cognitive side of membership or leadership; Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems Foundations of Requisite Organization also by Otto Laske. (In addition to well-trained logical and systems thinking skills our leaders strive to reach the levels of full meta-systemic dialectical thinking as described by Laske's in his second book listed here.)
Our members and leaders are or are close to becoming world-centric or universe centric in cultural meme development. The yellow or turquoise meme in the Spiral Dynamics model of cultural value development.
If you are of a Spiritual Nature, We have a New form of Religion 2.0, a Science-Grounded, Personal Spirituality we Call Evolution Spirituaity:
Evolution Spirituality is "the trans-denominational, secular meta-religion of evolution." It is practiced as a personal spiritual form by some, but not all spiritual Universe community members. Depending upon their member makeup, some Universe Communities will have almost no Evolution Spirituality practices going on, while in other Universe Communities, it is their central focus. Each community determines its own level of interaction with Evolution Spirituality principles and practices. (Please note if you are not spiritually inclined, you can still participate fully in any Universe community.)
Here are some links that will give you more information on Evolution Spirituality:
a.) To see what we hold that constitutes authentic Evolution Spirituality practices, click here. You will be surprised how personal spirituality has evolved. (We even have both spiritual and secular versions of centering meditations which are practiced regularly within our community. These meditations are designed to help to remove biases, keep our members highly aware of the present, and optimized to respond as positively as possible to life's ongoing changes.)
b.) To understand what we mean by saying Evolution Spirituality is a personalizable new form of spirituality, click here.
c.) For an excellent and more detailed summary of the non-evolution science values, attitudes, and behavioral characteristics of mature and developed Universe Community members and leaders, click here to see Fower's Fourth Stage of Universalizing Faith.
d.) Click here for a detailed overview of all the key information on Evolution Spirituality.
e.) For information on how we keep this new personal spirituality from getting unsafe, check out our Spiritual Safeguards.
f.) One of our most valued tools that are used in this new form of personal, evolution-grounded spirituality is the principles contained within our Open Source Spirituality Manifesto.
g.) Evolution Spirituality is also an entirely new form of trans-denominational and omni-denominational meta-spirituality and meta-religion. To find out more about what meta-religion means, click here.
Creativity and Art and the Spiritual Side of the Universe Community:
Click here to see how we value the role and importance of individual and group creativity and art within our community vision.
Our Simple Economic Model
Wages are based on successfully applying the Universe Principles of Sustainability, work merit, quality, and responsibility level. No full-time staff member makes more than ten times what any other full-time staff member makes. The minimum full-time staff income level is always adequate to cover all necessary living basics, including medical, education, housing, food, recreation, and reserves.
The Universe Communities and New Technologies
To see how we use and safely integrate new technologies into our communities, click here.
Our Deepest Constitutional Ideals for All Universe Community Members as Evolutionaries, Planetary Citizens, and Universe Citizens:
What is a Planetary Evolutioneer, What is a Universe Citizen?
Universe Declaration of Responsibilities for Evolutionaries, Planetary Citizens, Universe Citizens, and Universe Community Members.
The links at the bottom of each page of this booklet allow you to go forward or back one page.