One Community
Freedom
One Community is founded on principles of freedom, love, and acceptance. Our purpose is to create a place where people feel free to be themselves while living specifically focused on what is for The Highest Good of All and positively and permanently transforming the world for everyone. Key focuses we feel embody this at One Community include creating a place of loving connection, spiritual diversity, proactive communication, and celebrating the diversity that is humanity.
This page explores these concepts further with the following sections:
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WHAT IS FREEDOM*
For One Community, Freedom is a foundational value founded on celebrating people’s differences and encouraging people to be themselves. We do this by recognizing that our experiences and perceptions create our personal viewpoints and opinions, and acknowledging and respecting that the thoughts and actions of others are based on their own unique perceptions. This idea of celebrating freedom and differences specifically includes (but is not limited to):
- Age
- Race
- Gender
- Religion
- Political Views
- Sexual Preference
- Religion/Cultural Practices
- Lifestyle Practices (nudity, polyamory, appearance, etc.)
- Anything that does not cause harm or injury to another
In practice this means:
- People focus on inquiring, accepting, and embracing each other’s differences
- People hold each other accountable to identify true affront versus judgment or fear
- People recognize and release the negativity that comes with preconceived notions and generalizations
- People use the consensus process to then integrate all of the above in a way that works for everyone
- USING FREEDOM IN DECISION MAKING*
In decision making* at One Community, the core value of “Freedom” is applied by asking ourselves the following four key questions:
- How can we transcend ideology even more in this case?
- How can this also respect people’s rights not to participate?
- How can we ensure this allows every group’s ability to thrive/succeed/create change?
- Does this respect the freedom of an individual to choose while also supporting the Purpose, Mission, Vision, and other values of One Community?
* To ensure we are always aligned with our purpose, values, and mission, One Community uses the values as defined by our organization as the compass for all our decision making; we then factor in the diversity of individual perspectives and experiences. We highly recommend this approach because it saves us hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of collaborative decision making time. If you are considering our model as a template for your own creation, we especially recommend you apply this approach too and use, adapt, or completely change the values we’ve presented so you too can create a clear guidance system that aligns with your own organizational/group/individual needs.
WHY FREEDOM
From One Community’s point of view, by celebrating people being themselves and specifically asking how our decisions can also be made to respect people’s rights not to participate, we maintain a focus that transcends ideology and helps us to constantly think and act for The Highest Good of All. As an organization we recognize we are all really ONE, so we choose to see any judgment or discrimination of another as truly just judgment or discrimination upon ourselves. This appreciation of all perspectives supports our open source approach and is a mindset we see as essential to helping us create positive global transformation.
It also celebrates diversity, love, and inclusion and, in our opinion, just makes sense:
RESOURCES
- One Community Resource: Celebrating Diversity
- Article: “The Foundation of Love: Releasing Judgments and Expectations”
- Article: “5 Ways to Let Go of Judgment & Fear”
- Article: “10 Ways To Always Be Yourself And Live Happily”
- Article: “Want to Be Free? Truly Free? Here’s How”
- Article: “Six Habits of Highly Empathic People”
- WikiHow Article: “How to Be Free”
- WikiHow Article: “How to Be Yourself”
- Use this page (click here) if you have a resource you’d like to suggest be added here
One Community has also created a Freedom Lesson Plan as part of the open source Highest Good Education component. This lesson plan is purposed to teach all subjects, to any learning level, in any environment using the central theme of “Freedom.” Here is the mind map for the lesson plan:
Lesson Plan Mind Map for Freedom ” Click to visit the complete lesson plan page
SUMMARY
From a world-change perspective, we see celebrating people’s differences and releasing the human patterns of judgment against others as helping to transform the world positively for everyone. We are creating a for The Highest Good of All environment focused on this to help us help each other take even more ownership of our feelings as a foundation of celebrating different world views and lifestyles.
FREQUENTLY ANSWERED QUESTIONS
Q: Where can I learn more about your other values and how you use each of them in your organization?
Click the icons below to be taken to a complete page for each value:
Q: Where can I get more information about your philosophies for world change?
Please take a look at each of these additional pages: (click icons)
Q: Does this mean someone can do whatever they want, no matter how it makes others feel?
No, it means we as a conscious and conscientious group are focused on living and creating for The Highest Good of All, and are first and foremost focused on an awareness that how we feel about the actions of others that don’t specifically cause harm to us is OUR choice. Maintaining this understanding as our foundation for operations, we are also sensitive to the feelings of each other and are committed to clear, honest, and open communication so that our choices and the choices of others are always open for discussion and exploration of mutually honoring options whenever they are needed.
Q: What if someone feels someone else’s idea of freedom specifically impinges upon their own?
This is addressed by these three questions One Community asks in our decision making process:
- How can this decision be made to also respect people’s rights not to participate?
- Is allowing this freedom impairing any significant group’s ability to thrive/succeed/create change?
- Does this decision respect the freedom of an individual to choose while also supporting the Purpose, Mission, Vision, and other values of One Community?
The first question seeks to create solutions that allow behaviors/decisions where participation is optional. If for some reason non-participation is not an option like a personal lifestyle choice, the second two questions are used as guidelines for identifying the path that is for The Highest Good of All. The first specifically checks to see if the “freedom” being chosen is or isn’t hurting anyone. The second reaffirms that importance of highly valuing a person’s right to “choose” and “be themselves” while also double checking for synergy with One Community’s other core values that include love, diversity, open source sharing all we do, communication, and consensus.
Q: What would be an example of global freedom differences?
Nudity would be a common example of something frequently discriminated against in Western society. In Europe openly breastfeeding is considered normal and beautiful. At freedom celebratory festivals people of all shapes, sizes, and ages walk around totally naked while other people dress in elaborate costumes. And in naturalist communities nudity is not associated with sexuality; the “dirtiness” and “taboo” does not exist along with all the other commonly associated body image issues. Yet in American society, just a woman breastfeeding or going topless is grounds for someone getting offended. In other societies still, it is forbidden for women to show even their arms or legs in public.
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