Refuge, or the “Radical” Function of Cooperative Human Community within the Politics of State
an Essay by
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The intimate cooperative (and, necessarily, truly religious) community is, fundamentally, liberating in function whereas the secular State (as a parentlike power) is an abstract, and fixed, and potentially binding (or even enslaving) condition. Free men and women must create a sacred refuge, or human sanctuary, for their growth and this is not done in personal isolation, but only in intimate cultural community cooperation.
The intimate cooperative human community must be a truly free and truly sacred refuge, a servant of developmental adaptation to Reality and Truth (or the Unity and Non-Duality of Real God) a refuge from the humorless and negatively grounding (or merely gross and materialistic) demands of the secular ego-politics of the parentlike State.
The true and right function of the representative secular State is to serve the common requirements of all the intimate cooperative human communities within its sphere by acting as a focus for the representation of common necessities (legal, protective, broadly economic and social, international, and so forth), and by preserving restraints upon its own actions, such that the fundamental, necessary, and humanizing obligations of the intimate and regional cooperative communities constantly fall back on the cooperative communities themselves. (Indeed, the failure of cooperative human community is demonstrated when the State becomes the target of childish demands and the agent of grand solutions that should be the responsibility of human beings in their cooperative cultural and social intimacy.)
The sacred cooperative community and the secular State should be a dynamic play, in which the sacred cooperative community is the core value and Principle of all basic solutions.
The secular State should, by law and by common agreement, renounce all exercise and sovereignty over the intimate affairs of sacred cooperative communities, and all sacred cooperative communities should be autonomous (or self-regulating), except to the degree that the actions of any sacred cooperative community actually serve to undermine or prevent the very existence of sacred cooperative human community in the general case.
The secular State, as the self-limiting representative of all sacred cooperative communities (and, thus, of all individuals who submit, or adapt, themselves to living in sacred cooperative human community), must guarantee, and rightly and truly serve, the rights and general obligations of all individuals and all sacred cooperative communities but the sacred cooperative community (which is a truly cooperative, free, and responsible association of individuals within the secular, or general, State) must guarantee, and rightly and truly serve, the intimate, essential, and sacred developmental process of Man.
The secular State, independent of a cooperative and mutually tolerant society of sacred cooperative communities, is (effectively) a tyrant. However, the sacred cooperative community, without a benign, true, and rightly self-limiting secular (or non-sectarian) State to protect its rights, is (inherently) in fear, and (therefore) its members cannot fully release their energy and attention toward the out-growing of their egoic and developmental limitations, and toward the ego-transcending Full Realization of Reality, Truth, or Real God.