I first encountered the word communitas in the writings of Peter Limberg, the steward of The Stoa. I was intrigued by the idea and my interest grew. It was something that I wanted to experience.

Wikipedia does not have a lot to say about communitas, but it is a start.

Communitas is a Latin noun commonly referring either to an unstructured community in which people are equal, or to the very spirit of community. It also has special significance as a loanword in cultural anthropology and the social sciences. Victor Turner, who defined the anthropological usage of communitas, was interested in the interplay between what he called social 'structure' and 'antistructure'; Liminality and Communitas are both components of antistructure.

Communitas refers to an unstructured state in which all members of a community are equal, allowing them to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. Communitas is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together. This term is used to distinguish the modality of social relationship from an area of common living. There is more than one distinction between structure and communitas. The most familiar is the difference of secular and sacred. Every social position has something sacred about it. This sacred component is acquired during rites of passages, through the changing of positions. Part of this sacredness is achieved through the transient humility learned in these phases, this allows people to reach a higher position.

I searched the journal entries of Peter Limberg for additional thoughts on communitas.

Spiritual Awakening 

April 9, 2020

I mention this mainly because I do not want to be alone. I do not want to be judged. I want to be loved. I want communitas.

Crying Together

April 24, 2020

Being lonely. Build a relationship with it, and continue to be public about your loneliness. Not in an egoic way, but in a way that courts communitas.

Caveh Zahedi

May 12, 2020

Being consistently truthful together is a prerequisite towards the new world, and we cannot get around this. It can be a wicked game though, and it can cause us pain. But with the right disposition, it will filter out the noise and brings us closer to something that feels like a home. Home is where communitas is, afterall, and that is where beauty is found. 

Making Love

May 19, 2020

We are in a meta-crisis, and our ever-present existential risks are not going to go away, regardless of how much fantasy we consume. Do you want a cult or do you want communitas? The former is where you will find a guarantee, the latter is where we will find a home. Our choice is also a collective one, so let us choose wisely.

Philosophical Coffee Shop

June 11, 2020

The embodied tribes I am referring to will be composed of sovereign individuals, ones who are individuated. Ones who are in the right relationship with all of their subpersonalities and who are not at risk of becoming enmeshed. That is when communitas can emerge, and when dialogos can truly do what it needs to do. I have no idea how to engineer something like this, but I sense the daemon knows, and I sense it has something to do with the emerging wisdom gyms. The idea is that these wisdom gyms will help us attain the sovereignty needed in order for communitas to form. I think both sovereignty and communitas  can emerge in online platforms like the Stoa and Rebel Wisdom, and in in-person spaces like the philosophical coffee shop. I also sense it is not wise to be too smart about how these emerge. I am just going to listen.

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

June 16, 2020

We started by taking turns talking about what currently excites us about the Stoa and how we think it could become more beautiful. Building community was the common thought for beautifying the Stoa. I feel this and I think beauty is found in communitas, but “community” is different from communitas, and I do not want to make the same mistakes that most “communities” make. I see most communities get hijacked by groupthink, or colonized by some aggressive and unapologetic memetic tribe. It also was gestured that the Stoa should be run by the collective intelligence. I get deeply annoyed at the suggestion of handing over the keys over to the collective intelligence, especially at this stage.

Glimpses of Communitas

August 29, 2020

It is not about losing ourselves in each other, it is about finding ourselves with each other. The Stoa was always an invitation to communitas. I do not have any fucking answers, you probably do not either, but maybe together we can stumble our way to each other's hearts. 

Do Wisdom Gyms Need Wisdom Trainers?

September 15, 2020

...this “wisdom gym” thing... The idea though, is this: to have an ecology of practices, full of transformational psychotechnologies, that we can practice together. Hopefully this engenders sovereign individuals, who can get into communitas with each other.

The Sangha Whisperer

September 18, 2020

The next Buddha is the sangha… The way I am holding this phrase is in the expanded way: we cannot rely on waiting for an enlightened saviour. Instead we need to get into the right relationship with each other, in a deeply embodied way, aka communitas, in order to figure out how to address our individual and collective challenges.

Chess Player

October 11th, 2020

I do not want to be alone, at the heart of it, and I do not want to be lonely. I do not want people to leave me, and stop loving me. I do not want to be unlovable, which I felt like I was for such a long period in my life, and it really sucked. I do not know if you feel what I am feeling right now, but I sense some of you do. It is open right now, this lonely heart, of this ridiculous steward, and his eyes are getting a little wet… We are all lonely sometimes, and that is okay. The inner boy or girl we forgot long ago, keeps failing their way to communitas, again and again. I am optimistic though, because I am here now, lonely with you.

Communitas > Enlightenment

October 17, 2020

I wrote about the “next Buddha is the sangha” phrase before, and maybe the “next Christ is communitas,” and maybe these are not metaphors from different traditions pointing at the same thing. I sense the right move is to arrive at communitas first, then maybe we get into enlightenment together. My working theory is that communitas screens out two types of people: co-dependents and sociopaths. You need a “minimum viable sovereignty” to get into communitas, so if you have a lot of demanding shadow issues, the group will just collapse around that. This is dangerous because this will lead to some weird enmeshment shit. 

The Next Sage Is the Stoa

October 23, 2020

I see this “next Christ is communitas” thing as something different, because it is about love. You can become enlightened, or whatever the Buddhistics want to call it, but that is a different thing than getting into communitas. This whole communitas thing is about falling in love with a group, without becoming a cult, and then collectively benefitting from the collective wisdom… In that “Communitas > Enlightenment” entry, I argued that we if had to choose, we probably should put our efforts into getting into communitas first, instead of getting into enlightenment. Despite getting pushback about being uncharitable to Buddhism, nobody has disabused me of this argument yet. Given this the next sage is the Stoa thing, I sense the order of operations needs a rejigging. First comes wisdom, then communitas, then (for lack of a better term) enlightenment… I am going to stop shitting myself here: I have no idea what is the correct order of operations.  

If You Are Not Playing Your Own Game, You Are Playing Somebody Else’s Game

October 25, 2020

To recap, Wilber had four facets of transformation, which he called: waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up. And like a conceptually inconsiderate Stoic cowboy, I went ahead and added two new categories: communing up and wising up, to refer to communitas and wisdom via phronesis. 

Becoming a Spiritual Bouncer

October 28, 2020

...a sense of community is different from communitas. Ideally I’d like to see both form here, but if I had to choose what to prioritize, I prioritize communitas. And this steward will surely make mistakes, and piss people off in pursuing this, and may invoke some collective shadow-play in the process, which is probably a good thing.

Liminal Being

November 9, 2020

There was a period in my life when I was alone often, and it made me lonely, but this loneliness did become an acquired taste, and I do enjoy being alone. I am a simple man really, but a lot does go on in my mind, and it can keep me preoccupied. I am never bored. There is a weird mix going on with me: I actually like being lonely, but at the same time I long for communitas. I am having an energetic reaction to this sense of community that is forming at The Stoa. A sense of community is different from communitas, and I am not in the mood right now to engage in conceptual boundary-work, but there is a phenomenological difference.

Maybe the End of The Stoa Party

December 20th, 2020

Was The Stoa built on false premises? Well, during its first few months, when I was increasingly becoming untethered from reality, I thought this place was going to be the place. I thought it was the place where the meaning crisis was going to be solved, where communitas would be rediscovered, and where I would finally find my people. Sometimes you've got to build on false premises, or else you won’t build at all. I do feel like a perennial loner though, and this feels sad to write, but loneliness has become an acquired taste for me. I also happen to be good at social dynamics, and bringing people together, and many people have said to me that I am the man for the job, whatever this job is.

Ignore and Prosper or: Openly Yearning and Slowly Earning

January 1st, 2021

Yearning is one thing, earning is another. I do not just want any tribe. I want the most beautiful tribe, and if I have to live boldly, and turn my life into an artwork to find them, then so be it. Yearning for communitas is the first step, which I have done, now earning communitas is the next thing on the agenda, and one has to show up for that, in the right way. A lot of people hold themselves back from showing up, because they do not believe in themselves. This is tragic of course. There is another segment of people though, who do believe in themselves, but hold themselves back because they are afraid of being called egoic, or seen as narcissistic, or whatever.

The Stoa Game Plan

February 5th, 2021

The Stoa does not tell you what metamodernism is, it shows you what metamodernism is. Similarly, The Stoa does not talk about how to do Game B, The Stoa does Game B… Communitas is the key of course. Each relationship has a culture, and you want to have the agency and skill to craft these relationships so they are not in service towards ego. I sense a “protean tribalism” needs to emerge for this, which is to say developing the capacity to get into communitas with many people before jumping into some commune-type setting with one group of people.

Spiritual Bypassing, Psychotherapy Bypassing, and Self-Help Bypassing

April 30th, 2021

Perhaps, right this moment, the wise thing for you to do is… Craft communitas…

For the first half of my adult life, I had a profound experience of community as a member of my church. But I lost my Christian faith at midlife when I realized that I was actually part of a benign cult. From experience, I know the difference between community and cult. I know the harms and benefits of a cult. Nevertheless, I missed the strong sense of community that I experienced for twenty-five years.

For the next twenty years I self-identified as an agnostic and a secular humanist. But I found neither community nor cult for my new identity. Something was still missing.

In 2012 I retired and moved from Calgary, Alberta to an area generally known as Lakeside. Today I live in Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico. Lakeside resonated strongly with me when I vacationed here in 2006. It still does. It is a wonderful experience to feel at home in the geographical community in which one lives. But I have not found communitas at Lakeside.

In 2019 I followed Gregg Henriques into the Game B community and discovered Peter Limberg and The Stoa. I love Peter’s journal entries. I enjoy Stoa sessions on YouTube. Occasionally I go to live sessions. I feel that I am part of the marvelous Stoa community. But, personally, I have not experienced communitas at The Stoa.

Through The Stoa I discovered Collective Presencing, a book which greatly impacted me. I attended an eight week study followed by a six week study of the CP book. A community is developing around the work of Ria Baeck and Collective Presencing. I think that is great. But, personally, I have not experienced communitas there.

I joined several adjacent Game B communities on Discord - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis with John Vervaeke, Future Thinkers Community, Game ~B, Rebel Wisdom, The Bridge, Noetic Nomads and The CoffeeHouse Academy. I like the idea of a platform that is an alternative to Facebook. I like the people these Discord servers attract. But I find what is being built to be very messy, not beautiful like The Stoa. I do not, personally, feel part of those communities and I have not experienced communitas there.

I joined several Mighty Networks groups -  GameB Home, Emerge, Sacred Ground and Emergent Commons. Generally, I like what is being built on the Mighty Networks platform more than what I see on Discord. But I have not experienced communitas. Emergent Commons is quite new and, for me, feels the most promising. I hope to find some others wanting to follow Peter Limbergs admonition: Perhaps, right this moment, the wise thing for you to do is… Craft communitas…