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Self-Sustaining Entheogenic Community

Migrated topic.
I think there must be many many unexplored, uninhabited, ferile islands and if one were to build a community on it no one would ever notice or mind.

Ideal would be a group of small uninhabited islands close to eachother and close to either inhabited mainland or to another inhabited island(group) in order to get supplies.
The ideal climate would be a near-the-equator- climate with sunny summer weather all year round( for optimal vedgetable and fruit growth )

Ocean water could be made salt-free freshwater with certain filtration installations and 1 part can then be pumped into circulation to deliver water to the farmlands, while another part can be filtered further to be circulated as drinkable tapwater/shower water.

To insure hygene a small sewer system should be made. The main sewer pipe could lead into a large, deep, underground reservoir.On top of this sewage-well should be a gas-filtration system to filter and purify Methane-gas vapors comming off of the sewage. The Methane gas could either be used to operate certain machinery or be sold in order to buy other supplies or both.

The remaining methane-less sewage could be stored in tanks to serve as plant fertiliser.

Electricity could be generated by using either wind energy, solar heat energy, ocean tide generator dams or a combination of those.
With irrigrated cropfields, some chicken(eggs), a clinic with medicinal herbs, a sewer system, electricity and drinkable tapwater I think 30 people could be well able to live self-sustained for the rest of their lives.


Once we have achieved those goals we can start putting our attention and effort into other things.
Could you imagine the large Entheogenic garden complex with the large, beautyfull temple building at the center? Overlooking the island and the ocean from a high, elevated point on the island.


Now if you'll excuse me I'll continue my search for archipels of small, uninhabited islands where such a community could be realised. =)
 
I think this is an utopic idea. If someone finds out about it, the law will confiscate everything.
Therefore it has to be somewhere very far away from ordinary western civilization.

Without all the comfort and all the glory of the cities? I don't think this would be a good life to live.
 
Comfort breeds laziness and the glory of cities is a poor imitation of the landscape that has been here for millennia. I can agree that it is a hard life, but it is in no way a bad life to live. As always, to each his own.

SKA, its great to see your continual work on this idea. These thoughts are always refreshing to read.
One thing I might mention...some of the tech mentioned is somewhat advanced and might be unnecessary. Even with 30 people to support, machinery might be more burden than help.

An island entheo commune almost sounds too perfect. :)
 
thnx for sharing your thoughts Eden.
I'm going to have to find out how much acres of crops is needed to support a household of 1 or 2 people all year round.
The best way would be to seek contact with selfsustaining farmers.

As of yet I've no idea how much kilos of vegetables, fruits, eggs, fish and flesh one would have to produce every 3 months or so to keep 1 person alive and healthy all year round. If every household had a basement with cool and dry foodstorage rooms and a number of freezers, we could harvest a large load of vegetables, fish, meat and fruits and store it in our freezers so we can survive from that the next 3 months.

Once again i know nothing of farming so I think one of these days I'm gunna head out to the country side, find a true farmer and see if we can have a chat. =)
 
Always in the attempt the simplify, freezers can possibly be done away with. Meats can be smoked, fruits and veggies dried or canned. A cool-ish underground would suffice.

I'm not sure of the logistics and space needed for rice farming, but this would make the food situation extremely simple.
 
I intend to keep the community Life simple, as opposed to the life here in modern, bureaucratic society, but at the same time I hope to live as efficient and waste the least amount of food possible.

I guess if some people in the community choose to live so primitve as to do away with freezers and fridges I guess they are free to do so in their houses and on their land.

I know I'm going to invest in some household and farming equipment and machines to make my household and farming less time-consuming and labour-intensive. Freezing food would allow me to survive alot longer from 1 large, single harvest, so in the mean time I've alot more time to grow and harvest new crops before my frozen supply runs out. Also Washing machines could help me wash my clothes alot more efficiently and alot less time consuming. Also imagine a pipeline irrigration system that runs around your farm, connected to an electric pump which is connected to a water reservoir. A couple of simple timer switches could allow you to let this system automatically water your crops on programmed times dayly. Being able to switch some electrical lights on in and around my house wouldn't be bad either. And all the house and farm keeping time that would save me I could invest in making Music, Graphical Art,studying and practicing Entheogenesis, learning all kinds of crafts, Learning languages, studying cultures..etc For all kinds of developments.

There are many durable, eco-friendly ways of generating a plentyfull supply of electricity for a small farming community. Off course those that don't want electricity in their households are welcome to live in this community too. A friend of mine showed me the demonstration movie of a device that generates more energy that you'll have to put in it and it runs continuously. It was some kind of advancement of Tesla coils that allowed infinite free energy to be generated. I'll post the link to the movie once I've found it.

There could simply be households with electricity and households without electricity.
People should be free to make their own personal decisions and tolerate the fact that people are different. Like those that eat Meat and those that don't should tolerate eachother's differences too.

One of the most important principles of the community oughta be "To each their own"
Room and tolerance for interpersonal differences.
 
I would like to learn more about how Santo Daime enabled themselves to build the entheogenic jungle community Céu do Mapiá.
For those that don't know; Santo Daime is an Ayahuasca church organisation and Céu do Mapiá is a piece of land in the jungle they bought and built a community on.

It'd be interresting to learn from them, concerning the founding of a community.
 
The Main choice first is to decide wether to buy a lot of land in a civilised, modern country, a considerable distance away from civilisation, in the cover of Nature(Woods, Hills, Lakes, Mountains, Plains..etc) or to seek an uninhabited archipel of fertile, small islands remote enough to be able to settle a community on without anyone ever noticing. I imagine there should still be plenty of such islands out there.
Perhaps there are rich people who would support my ideals and are willing to sponsor us without making demands. Maybe an extremely wealthy person that owns fertile, uninhabited land and supports our ideals? I wonder how I should go about finding such people and inspiring them with my ideals...

Another option that came to me was seeking contact with eco-organsations that own land, like nature reserves, and see if they would support my ideals and allow me and about 50 people to live in an eco-friendly village on the land of their nature reserve.

For now these options are the only ones I can think of to aquire land to live on in freedom.
In freedom means without prohibition laws, without local authorities snooping around and without local authorities/companies(what's the difference nowadays?) extorting all kinds of taxes and costs out of the people of the community. Preferably also without the chance of landlords/authorities selling nearby land or worse, Community land to companies that will build houses, skyscrapers, traintracks, highways..etc on it

Does anyone else here see other options to aquire such free, nature-rich, civilisation-less land?
 
Look at the 'free land' section of Steal This Wiki, an online updated version of Hoffman's book. I hear the USA has not yet claimed the portion of Antarctica that was set aside for it, though you'll need some $$$ to settle there! Greenpeace are 'squatting' it at the moment, apparently.

Good luck finding a wealthy benefactor... Leary managed it for a while, and it has happened throughout history, but I wouldn't pin too many hopes on that.

I made an autonomy booklist somewhere on this site, though I can't think where since the forum's been reorganised. There's also a thread I made called Practical Utopia, and one called Entheogenic Homeland or something.

There's a book called Heaven's Below that catalogues social experiments in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Why not just find a nice village to live in (in whatever country, the developing world if you can't afford to buy in the West), grow your own food and harvest your own utilities on your own little smallholding, and encourage friends to move to the same village to be your neighbours? Then be so nice to each other that the police don't get involved. Taxes are unavoidable, unless you want to chance a secret community... which I guess could survive if they can't see you on google maps and no loudmouthed ramblers ever happen upon you, but if you ever get found out that will be the end of your experiment, and you'll be found out as soon as you need to send children to school, unless you're going to bring them up in secret too? In the UK many gypsies suffer terribly from the stress of battling the government, and I hear they're changing the law to make it even harder for them. 'Eco-villages' (=people in tents in a field) struggle too. People have managed to live in underground houses secretly in the past but I've personally never heard of a whole community managing to hide their presence. It might be a lot easier in the USA/Canada/Australia/NZ where they have a lot more space.

There's a UK website called Diggers and Dreamers which aims to help connect people with projects such as your own. http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/ No idea whether it's a good one or not.
Also look into Community Land Trusts for ownership, there's a good website about that somewhere too (white and blue one).

Wilderness might be your best bet, if you can make it so they can't see you on google maps... but then you will need almost complete autonomy, and that's probably unrealistic. Growing your own medicine may be pushing it for a Westerner. In that scenario it would be easier to just join an existing indiginous tribe who have the necessary skills and land, if they'll have you, and you are prepared for potential future oppression.

Good luck Ska! Also, in my thread on what the 60s were really like someone gave a first hand experience of dropping out, and I think there's first-hand accounts in books like Shelter or Shelter 2.
 
Thx for thinking along ohayoco.

What kind of taxes or other money-costs do you think are inavoidable?
General income taxes would make little sense for a community that lives without the use of money. I've also been thinking about healthcare costs.
Since income taxes cover the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure, houses, schools, energy, transport..etc wouldn't it make sense to exclude us from those taxes since we don't make any use of these goods and services( given we provide our own)?
 
I briefly skimmed this thread, so forgive me if i speak of something that's already been mentioned.

To the original poster.....i plan on a month long visit to ceu do mapia in january (when i know some other daimista's making the trip). I too would very much like to see how a community like this lives and functions, along with participating in as many daime works as possible :d .

The bottom line is that (in my opinion)we all need to become less dependent upon large infrustructure in which we all depend on for the natural resources that we consume.The BP spill in the gulf was kind of the last straw for me, plus the idea of self sustaining communities has been on my mind for the last couple years as well.If you google "intentional communities", you will find a directory of of communities around the world, some of them were established 20+ yrs ago, and some of them are still trying to get off the ground, and most of the welcome visitors......if your interested in learning from them.

Along with my visit to ceu do mapia, which is partly due to the fact that i have been truly touched, and humbled by my introduction to this "religion",and learning how they live in mapia.....

.... I plan on doing an apprenticeship at a place called earthships, that is based out of new mexico. They build these beautiful self sustaining homes, all out of recycled material. They allow apprenticeship, to where you can work along side their crew, in order to learn from step A to Z, how to build one of these homes (takes about a month).I kind of see that as being the first step towards self sustainable living.Check these guy's out there is a 2 part video, on how they build these homes on youtube.
part 1 =

part 2 =

If you're interested in interning with them = Internships - Earthship Biotecture

Many communes might have failed in the past, but i'd like to think that we can learn where they went wrong. I also think the need to detach ourselves from "the grid", is stronger, and more urgent than ever. Educate yourself,apply, and then spread the knowledge. There will alway's be challanges but thats part of the learning process. Anyway, the topic of this thread is something that i've been processing, so i needed to throw in my 2 cents.
Peace to all
 
Yeeess Yes Earthships I've been checking them out too lately.

This is the way I plan on building cheap but proper housing for the community.
If land is somehow aquired for the community we could start importing thrash, like cans, bottles, tires, scrapheap wood and metal and bring it to our land.
With tire and pounded dirt walls and some easily made form of cement to make botte and can walls we can build community houses. We could settle there if we manage to create a constant source of drinkable water.

If some stables and sheds are made we could move there with some chicken(and some hens), some sheep, seeds for essential herbs, vegetables, spices and fruits...etc, etc so we could start our own food supply A.S.A.P.


I would really like to visit Ceu do Mapia myself. I would like to join in a ceremony there and I would like to learn from them about how they founded their community on this jungle patch of land.
 
Starting a Community in Suriname could be an option since I have a friend who's inherited land who is quite open and welcoming towards my ideas of a selfproviding community with a temple and alot of arts and crafts.

It's a lot of land in the jungle alongside a river that leads to the capital(eventually)
 
You have a friend who has inherited land in Suriname? How absurdly exciting.

This thread hasn't gotten any action in a while, but the idea is always in the back of my mind. I'm glad to see you still actively pursuing it.
 
The lot of land in Suriname is good, but I'm concerned that the location will be more and more urbanised in the future.

Also Portugal is more attractive to my Dutch friends.
I've googled around and found several stgarting communities seeking new members and other groups that seek to found new communities in Portugal.

Right now I've placed my aims on an Eco community project yet to be founded in Portugal.
I'll keep you people updated.

Feel free to contribute your ideas to this topic.
 
I've set up a simple, undeveloped freeforum for people who would like to join in the Ecomunity project.
Here, people who are SERIOUS about starting a new, mini society from scratch in a natural enviroment,
can discuss questions like:
-How to attain land to live on?
-How to exclude taxes, other costs or anything moneyrelated from our lives?
-How to go about distributing "power" equally?
Etc etc etc...

Only for those that want to seriously work on this new, sustainable and free way of life to make it a practical Reality and to live it.
Join if you want to:
 
I welcome people that are prepared to leave City life behind and found a free, self-sustaining community to live there permanently to join my forum.
I also welcome people that do not want to permanently live in the community, but support it and still want to be involved. Any help is appreciated.
And remember it is a forum intended to construct a practical plan to make the Community a reality.

If you don't believe a community as the one I have been speaking of can be practically realised, don't bother joining.
Constructive Criticism, to make the idea more practical, is most welcome off course.

I made an introduction Forum( Come Say Hello ) where newly Joined members can introduce themselves.
I'm still working on the forum and today I will start inviting some of my Dutch friends. I hope to
see some of you on my Forum: http://ecommunity.freeforums.org/index.php?sid=d153029bb65b21974ebdd172a5a2b0af
 
I recently became inspired with a fine, zero-emission, closed cycle method of generating drive/electricity.
I came to the ( not that new) concept by checking out this guy's site: http://www.aeromodeller2.be/interview.htm

To break it down; Wind generators and/or Methane Engine driven Generators (and/or Solar panels & other sustainable powersources)could deliver
a small part of their electricity to an Electrolyitc cell filled with water.
(the rest will go into a large battery of sorts, to be distributed and supplied to the house/village)

The electrolysis of water yields pure Hydrogen as well as pure Oxygen which can both be stored in seperate tanks.
The Hydrogen may be fed from the tank into an engine that drives an electric generator; The resulting energy is, again,
fed into the same large battery as mentioned before, to be distributed and supplied to the house/village.
The nice thing is that the exhaust fumes from the hydrogen burned in the engine is.... Water vapor.
This can be recondensed with a cooling system and fed back into the electrolytic cell. Cycle is round.
All it needs is some wind and/or sunlight.
In a minute I will make a simple diagram in Paint to illustrate this system more clearly.

This could be an excellent system to power vehicles, machines and houses in a self-sustaining entheogenic community.
Mixing the Hydrogen gas with some pure Oxygen gas might give more power and generate more electricity.
I don't know wether the amount of electricity to electrolyse Hydrogen out of water would exceed the amount of energy that a
Hydrogen engine driven Generator could generate. In any case it could be a great backup generator system.
Because I am no electrotechinican or engineer my system may be flawed. Feel free to critise so that we may improve this system.
 
Hello Ska!

I thought I'd pitch in a couple thoughts since I am now starting to live off the land in a foreign country (Romania).
What fuelled me to this point were basically the same things as you, notably

SKA said:
And this way we are forced to work senseless jobs and toss our lives away. It's slavery.
This is exactly what I seek to escape.
Click to expand...

It may be good to think about this again, as I have been. This vision of jobs being senseless is surely true for some, but one should beware of concentrating on the negative... I have since opened my eyes to the fact that some people have jobs that are interesting, helpful to others and the Earth, fulfilling... To see this just takes a bit more looking around.

Another thing that we should not forget is that living in a modern westen society (i suppose that's where you live too), despite all the crap that may imply, does offer us the opportunity to study and get access to a level of action that can potentially be more effecient in spreading the values of sustainability and creativity than simply living off the land, which can also be done in parallel with a job.

Communities such as the one you describe do exist, and you will surely find huge interest in spending some time there as a volunteer. The practical is what it finaly boils down to. The first and second hand experiences and contacts you will come across will really help ground your project(s).

I would also like to emphasise the tremendous importance of community, not only within the boundaries of your project, but mostly with the locals, wherever you might decide to settle. The local people are one of the most precious treasures you can cherish, for many reasons, and being in good terms with them (even if that costs you to shut up sometimes or get a haircut:) ) will make all the difference in the world.

Just my 0.2 cents...! Much luck!!:)
 
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