Zendik

In response to amberfilter's Wal Mart comments. You should read a book called "Nickeled And Dimed, on (not) Getting by in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich if you think that Wal Mart employees are "free to be themselves."

Also, I know plenty of people who make less that 35k a year who buy most of their food at healthfood stores: it's a matter of priorities.

And, go into a Walmart (if you must) and look at all the plastic junk there. How much of that stuff do you or anyone really need? If people stopped buying needless plastic foibles from China the world would benefit. (Perhaps ythe Chinese would use precious natural resorces to produce something worthwhile like alternative energy products or something.)

As for Dalmar's Zendik comments. I agree, in general, but I really can't imagine anyone reading this forum thread and still wanting to go to Zendik, but I suppose those who try the place out after reading this have at least been warned.

It's not just a matter of a few people not "working out there." It's what the people on this forum have said about how Zendik lies and treats people like shit, etc.

As for Spany's question about who takes over after Arol dies. I can't imagine Fawn keeping that place together and that begs the question of why would Fawn be the one to take over anyway. Doesn't it seem pretty elitist that Arol's daughter would "naturally" be the next leader? Pretty royalist & very seventeenth-century, not a blueprint for the "new benevolence." In a Zendik world, would the "money monarchs" be overthrown by the royal Wulfing dynasty? Not much of an improvement, if you ask me.

 

It's actually Barbara Ehrenreich (hope I'm spelling it correctly) who wrote Nickeled and Dimed. A good book.

And it was poisoned Flavour-Aid that they drank at Jonestown, not Kool-Aid, as I previously wrote.

Okay, that said, back to the Zendiks:
It's confusing as hell, but in spite of their "eco-village" posturing (and their 501c-3 "Arts Foundation"/educational organization facade), Zendik Farm's purpose is to bring about a "revolution" through the practice of "Living Therapy". The process is very similar to the "re-education" (brainwashing) of Chinese intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. The logic behind it is identical: create ideological unity through personal "transformation" of individuals. Once everybody has been "re-programmed", a new, glorious world of harmony and cultural sophistication will come into being.

The thought reform element of life at ZF is explicitly described in Zendik literature. You don't even have to read between the lines! It's all right there on the website, where they also state that it is impossible to practice Living Therapy ("to its full benefit")--therefore to take "revolutionary" action--outside of Zendik Farm.

The ecological practices that the Zendiks advocate can be done almost anywhere and by almost anyone (granted access to information and supplies). Notice that they don't link to any other organizations on their site. This alone is pretty telling. Thirty years of radical environmentalism and they haven't made allegiances in the activist community? Hmm...

To the Zendiks, even the most environmentally/socially conscious outsiders are still cozmik murderers because we aren't purifying our psychic selves in order to magically will a Zendik world government into being.

Has anyone read Fawn's prose? Link:
http://www.zendik.org/Arts/Literature/FawnLit/worldonfire.html
Something very wrong there.

 

from the "Sun Set the World on Fire" by Fawn Zendik.

Does this make any sense to you? The main problem is that it's just really BAD writing in the sense that it's really wordy, rambles, and doesn't communicate. Also, Fawn's "revolutionary" home-schoolers didn't teach her the best grammar: it's "would not die easily." Arol's actually a pretty good writer, but Fawn seemingly didn't learn or inherit her or her father's writing abilities. Children don't always have the same talents as their parents. That's the reason why all civillized nations have abandoned picking their leaders by heredity. It seems that the Zendiks have not abandoned this practice.

 

Again I wanted to ask if the people that go to Zendik without much are treated any differently than those who do have a lot?Does anyone know?

 

it seems like to me that what zendik is looking for in recruits are: underage girls, dudes with trust funds, or a disenfranchised young male with a car title that they can quickly dismiss and say that "its not working out" not that i know from firsthand experience, but ive never been called any mans fool before.

 

The only insight I have into this question is that when Chen asked me how I was transporting myself to Zendik when I went there, I said that I was bringing my car, and he said "that's great!" I didn't understand why he was so enthusiastic until later. They like an influx of people's cars to get the ownership & keep, whether or not they keep you (although seeing my old wreck show up must have dampened his enthusiasm). Also, one guy had to pledge a large AMP as an offering to Zendik, and when he left a few months later they wouldn't let him take the Amp with him, even though he'd been there a while and had worked hard for the Zendiks, like the rest of us. They really like taking people's stuff and seemed a lot less enthusiastic about penniless people than those who had something they wanted.

If you read back in this thread, Red Lentil describes an instance where the Zendiks got a guy to give a large inheritance to Zendik and kicked him out shortly after he forked over the last installment.

 

That is a good point. You would think they would develop partnerships with other groups if their goal was to “save the planet”. One small organization can’t change anything on it’s own. The best advocacy efforts are achieved by lots of small organizations working together toward a common goal.

First a small correction. I did not say (or mean to imply) that the people did not “work out”. What I said was that it appears that the “zendik life did not work out well for some people. Meaning that, for whatever reason, people on this forum did not enjoy their stay there. Some may have found the experience harmful while others might have disagreed with the values the farm represents. I hope I cleared the distinction.

With that said, even people most critical of the farm on this forum seem to agree that they have about 50+ members living there. So. Other people must be getting some benefit out of their stay there or else they would leave.

I agree with you there, her writing does suck. I hope that is not her day job. (just my opinion)

How could you make such serious accusations even though you have not witnessed such activity yourself?

 

you said "One small organization can’t change anything on it’s own. "

i disagree. one person doing one thing can change lots of things. study quantum physics and you'll know that. now i do think communities should network, but i just want people to also understand that even the eway they feel about something can change things.
have a beautiful day!!
in love and lite--rabbit www.co-operativeeffort.com

 

I am just curious. In your experience there, did they accept people who did show up pennyless? Did any of those they did accept “work out”.

That does suck about them taking your car.

I am sure you already said in this thread but, how long did you stay there? Why did you decide to leave?

 

when the intuitive mind and the logical mind agree, its pretty much a safe bet. earlier in the thread a seemingly intellegent enough sincere male wrote a number of emails with no response. then a 16 year old girl wrote one and got a very enthusiastic "come on out, this is the place for you" response within an hour. although part of the journey to spiritual freedom is to remove our attachments to possesions, the demand of all of them when you join, and the apparently random booting out of people. the slave labor and oriental despotism in the leadership of this cultmune, the intimidating coercive approach to get underage trouble girls to submit to sex with more established members of the cult. everytime ive run into yall on the road and started talkin about what you were about, you seem very disintereted in me. knowledge is dynamic and growing, yall just seem to mindlessly babble ramblings of a dead man who never provided anything useful to society, and you shun openmindedness and your own members perspectives on things. you just want people to come to your farm that you can rape and rob, and if they are dumb enough or lost enough to put up with it and still work hard, then all of a sudden zendik life has worked out for them, but if you dont see your cult getting anything else out of them, or if you fear thier minds or libido as a threat to the established hierarchy, then they are gone. you give no oppourtunity or plans for longterm housing or families if people provide years and decades of slave labor, yall produce no knowledge actions or products that are useful to anyone, yet you have many practices which are detrimental to the earth and its people. yall are a cult.

 

When you say "ya'll" who are you talking about? As far as I know only 2 or 3 people who are currently zendiks have posted on this thread. The rest are people who have been there and left because it wasn't for them.There are also some (like me) who know people that have been hurt by the zendik experience. Am I misunderstanding or do you really believe that we are zendiks trying to promote the farm? If that was the case don't you think we would have said things that were a bit nicer?

 

i think that some of you are ex zendiks, some are posing as ex zendiks, some are zendiks, and hopefully not to many outsiders will get caught up in it. but no i was talking to the person(or former person depending on your definition) that i quoted.

 

Dalamar: the Zendiks did and probably still accept people who are pennyless, so long as they commit fully to the group and become fanatical about Zendik. And yes, to my knowledge, some of the long-term Zendiks came (and left)with nothing. Red Lentil and the other people who spent more time on the farm than me saw more of the economic exploitation of Zendik initiates than I did.

I stayed at Zendik for just one summer & never fully committed myself to it. They didn't get my car, although they've convinced others to sign cars over to them. And although my car wasn't much, they did scold me for locking it and said that if and when I decided to stay on permanently that I'd have to sign it over.

I went to Zendik intending to stay there for good if I liked it there, but left at the summer's end because I saw the Zendiks as too closed-minded and conformist, always trying to make everyone submit to the group in every minute way, from the color of their socks to their sexuality and their most private beliefs.

 

I was just about penniless when I showed up at the Farm (and I was literally penniless when I left the Farm a year later). They asked me for a $300 “apprenticeship” fee, and I could only come up with $100, or something like that, after I sold some of my stuff...though I’m sure that $100 didn’t come close to paying for the resources I consumed even in that little trial “apprenticeship” period when I first arrived. I remember a couple of incidents like the one that Greenhornet reports, where someone donated something to the Farm, and then unsuccessfully tried to get their property back when they left (or were kicked out).

The Zendiks all live well below the poverty line, and often seem to be at crisis moments where they’ve got to figure out how to feed 50 people at once...they’re not making any sort of profit on these donations, it’s all going for basic survival expenses (despite what people have said about the perks that Arol and the old-timers get, it seems to me like the difference between the homeless guy who lives in half a cardboard box, and the homeless guy who’s got himself a whole cardboard box...that is, not much of a difference at all). The Zendiks recruit people who seem actively interested in what they’re doing, and likely to stay long-term...they’re certainly not marketing themselves to the affluent. Think about it for a second: if you were doing very well out here in the Deathkultur, what possible appeal could Zendik Farm have for you? The Zendiks’ main fan base is composed of desperate people who have little or nothing. There is pressure to hand over whatever assets you’ve got, but this pressure is mixed up, in complicated ways, with the pressure to become a good, loyal Zendik. So if you’ve got a car, even an old beater like Greenhornet’s, the Zendiks might have their eye on it because they could use the car, but also because the fact that you have qualms about handing over the car would be taken as symbolic of your lack of loyalty or commitment to the group. The fact that you want to keep your car means that you’re probably thinking of going back to civilization, and as I and others have said, part of being a Zendik means surrendering yourself totally to the Zendik trip. And conversely, people who plan to stay for a long period are happy to hand over their stuff, because, well, the Zendiks have become your family, and you don’t let your family go hungry when you’ve got food, right?

The Farm is, after all, a commune, and so it’s hard to think about it as if it were a place of employment (where you expect to get paid for the work you do), or as a vacation spot (where you’re paying for certain services, and might demand your money back if you had a crappy time). I would add that the Zendiks could avoid some of this criticism if they’d be open and frank about what they do with the money they’ve got, and who decides how it gets spent...and if they’d be a bit more humane to people who have spent a long, long time there but leave with only the clothes on their backs.

 

By the way, as far as the issue of the 16-year-old girl getting a faster response from the Zendiks goes...well, this seems to have been an experiment designed to get precisely the response that the experimenters were looking for, no? If you write the Zendiks and ask a lot of provocative, in-your-face questions and get on their nerves, then of course, they’re not going to respond. Can you think of a good reason for them to do so, when such questions basically signal that the writer is either someone who’s generally hostile to Zendik, a would-be Dianne Sawyer type mounting her own “investigation” of the Farm, or someone who’s just killing time on the internet and has no real interest in the Farm? On the other hand, if you write and pretend that you’re way interested in the place, then of course, they’re going to encourage you to come join the Farm. It’s true that attractive females get more attention at the Farm than others, but as far as I can see, the desperate dumb male’s quest to get laid is a more or less universal constant in life...it’s true at the Farm, and it’s true everywhere else...

 

First, let me say that I am not a zendik. I have never been to zendik farm, know anyone who has or, even had any contact with them for that matter. Just because I do not automatically hold the opinion that zendik sucks does not make me one. I always like to look at both sides of an issue. I am also very inquisitive and skeptical by nature. Always trying to get to the facts not emotion by asking who, what, where, when, what happened and so forth. That does not make me a zendik.

Furthermore, I can understand why the zendiks act the way they do without agreeing with them.

That is not always true and can often lead to the wrong conclusions. You concluded that I was a zendik yet, all I did so far was visit their web site and participate in this discussion.

I apologize for this in advance but, you hurled some serious accusations against the zendiks without having all the facts or any personal experiences on which to base those accusations. I personally think that is unfair. Just something for you to think about.

Good I am glad to hear that they did not get your car.

I am sure you are thinking that I can not possibly come close to understanding your disappointment with the zendiks. But, I was involved in an organization that claimed its mission was to promote social change. They claimed they were accepting of everyone no mater who they were. In the end, the opposite turned out to be true. In reality they were worse then the people they were supposed to help. Anyway, I am going off topic here. I just wanted to point out that I do have some understanding of what your disappointment was like. I just hope you understand from my previous post I was not saying the you did not work out for the zendiks but, that the zendiks did not work out for you.

 

Another excellent point. I'd like to add that many of the people who came for the "apprenticeships" were also stripped of their belongings when they tried to leave after their time was up. Considering that they were paying $300 for an explicitly temporary six-week stay (during which they worked their asses off just like everybody else!), and that this stay was considered "educational" (in Texas ZF was supposedly certified, so that these kids could get college credit for their time on ZF), it is just plain wrong that they were told to leave their valuables behind as "part of the payment for their stay".

 

According to the above posts:
-Greenhornet was allowed to stay for a hole summer and left with his car.

-godlesscommie showed up pennyless and stayed for a year and only paid $100.00 dollars.

warning the following is strictly opinion. Now that does make sense to me. As I am following this debate I found my self wondering where all these “rich kids” are coming from. My feeling from their web site was that they were reaching out to people who are in a state of hopelessness and may even have some emotional problems. Such people are more likely than not to be flat broke.

godlesscommie:
It would be great if you could share more of your experience at the farm. What was it like for you? What did you do during the day? What were the living arrangements like? Why did you leave? Things like that. Thanks.

 

Others (esp. Red Lentil) have talked a lot about what life on the Farm is like on a daily basis, and my experience wasn’t all that different. As far as why I left, I’ve covered the main (political, philosophical) reasons in my previous longwinded posts (i.e., frustration with the Farm’s simpleminded, dogmatic philosophy...its "new age obscurantism," as Slavoj Zizek would put it). But I could also add some personal reasons, including:
(a) nothing sucks more than doing manual labor all day long in the hot Texas sun,
(b) I never really found my work niche at the Farm...you’re rather shit out of luck if you’re not keen on the main categories of work that go on at the Farm, like carpentry, cooking, or gardening...I liked taking care of the animals, I guess, but 90% of the time, I was doing work that I found boring, repetitive, dumb (either painful outdoor manual labor, or painless but tedious indoor labor such as sorting fruit, or “tape work,” putting together the tapes for sale on the street)...so it didn’t seem likely that I’d be finding my “genius potential” any time soon, doing this sort of thing...
(c) I simply didn’t like a number of the people whom I had to spend every moment of my life with...I liked and respected most of the elder Zendiks, but I was often in this shitty position of having to live with some group of street people who followed the Zendiks home from a Horde tour...shudder...
(d) there was a lot of really obnoxious competitiveness/rivalry among the newer people (the people I spent the bulk of my time with)...it seemed like the elder Zendiks were living their little dream of becoming “philosopher/artists” while the rest of us were living out a Lord of the Flies-style nightmare, digging into each other about the stupidest petty bullshit imaginable,
(e) I’m a pretty private guy, don’t like people prying into my business, and that doesn’t really work when you’re living at a commune! Especially a commune where every community member is authorized and encouraged to get in your face about any little thing...as Greenhornet put it, from the color of your socks to your sex life...
(f) Missing the offerings of the Deathkultur...cultural stuff like books, music, and movies, creature comforts like sleeping in a real bed, wearing clothes that aren’t someone else’s discarded rags, etc. And cheap thrills like cigarettes and coffee. Maybe I’ll give Zendik another shot once they invent an organic gin and tonic...

 

Ok. I was just curious because you seemed to have a less anti-zendik attitude then the others. So, I thought perhaps you had a different experience.