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Why Was the Decision Made to “Open Up” Stelle?
Q: Alright. How many of the original
members of the Stelle Group are presently with you;
he original group in the 60’s? RK: Well, let’s see, somewhere between twenty
and twenty-five. Q: I do not understand why they seem to be phasing out now on
their way to RK: Right. Q: And it seems like The Stelle Group as it was, originally, is on
its way somewhere else and now you have local people coming into this. RK: Well, we do hire local people in our industries. Q: This is now an open community, isn’t
it? RK: Right. Q: So anyone can come in and buy a home here. RK: Correct. Q: And not necessarily be of the Philosophy of the Stelle Group? RK: Correct. Q: Why did that happen?
RK: Well, in
the first place, it happened because I was instructed
to have that happen and my questions—that took me aback. Also,
people really have difficulty moving into a community, whether or not it
promotes New Age concepts, if it seems to be dominated by some particular
church. And by backing off of that situation, of The
Stelle Group being the organization that is in control of the community,
allows the community to feel more open; allows people then to say, “Well,
hey, if I move there, it is not going to be something I have to belong to.”
It also gives people a chance to come here for awhile, see what it is that we
are trying to accomplish, and then decide, on that basis, whether or not they
really want to join it. We will continue to offer courses here for anybody
who wishes to learn about the Stelle Philosophy. Other people may choose to also teach their things, in which, indeed, we are
allowing others to do. We rent these facilities to people who wish to teach
what it is that they feel that other people would like to know about. And it gives a more Americanized openness to our community
than what it had been before. In closed communities, I think people feel are
elitist, and they are a little bit upset about, just
by the tradition of our training in this country. So,
by opening it, people who are still interested in New Age things are the ones
who are encouraged to move here. And they are
encouraged by their beliefs and ideas. The people who have been moving into
Stelle have almost not been local people. They are people who have moved here
from all over the This city has to grow to a
considerable size and I think this is the way to do it. I didn’t
at first. I was first told, you are going to build a
city, and as far as I am concerned, we started Stelle and got it off the
ground and it is here. And that is more than a lot
of people thought we would ever be able to do. So,
since these things seem to have been somewhat successful, I am going to
continue to assume that it is going to continue to be successful. Meanwhile,
the special community that is being created down at Much of the technological development will still be done here at Stelle. Self-sufficiency has
been pretty much determined that we can do it,
except we can not. We can not sort of, say for instance, say well if you are
already self-sufficient you should have your own chicken farm to raise your
own eggs, raise your own cows to get dairy products, grow our own fresh
fruits and vegetables here, and indeed, we have done that. We have shown that
we can do it. But it is not commercially feasible to
do so. We can not compete against, say, the big
conglomerates. Even with all the distribution involved, it is cheaper to buy
things in the super-mart than to try and do it
yourself on a small scale. I think somebody told us we have to raise
two-hundred thousand chickens in order to be commercially feasible in being
able to compete. So, we go along with what the rest
of the world is doing, but we know how to do these things and can switch over
to do them whenever it is necessary and when it is in our need to be able to
do it. So we do have two-hundred and forty acres
here, I mean there are a lot of things you can do with that much land. Do you
have further questions on that? Is There a Program for People Coming Into Stelle? “We expect to have a
‘staged’ system for people to get involved with The Stelle Group and making
it easier to accommodate, step-by-step, rather than being plunged, all at
once, into what is essentially a kind of a very separate kind of society. If
you look at us, we dress the same way, we work the same way, we live in the
same kinds of houses everybody else does, but we have, in subtle ways,
created a different kind of society here. “Sometimes people can sense it from
the outside because they kind of look at us and they have kind of a sense
that something is different about the group. However, when you actually come
here to live as part of it you discover that it is really hard to accommodate
to because it took us ten years to get to this point. Let’s
say, for instance that you move to a small town in “Of course, when people
come here to Stelle, they are under a triple stress because they are changing
jobs, changing the place where they are living, and giving up the closeness
of their former friends and family. Anybody who makes any one of those
changes at a time feels stressed for months afterwards. When you change a job,
you really do not feel completely integrated into that for a couple of
months. When you change into a new neighborhood, it will be the same thing. So, to do all three at the same time is very stressful. Then
you find out that there are all kinds of little subtle rules that people live
by that are not written down anywhere. They seem to
live in a way which is obviously something you are
not able to do as yet, and it tends to be even more of a stress. Some people
just cannot take it. It is as if they are not fitting in. They have spent a
lifetime fitting in and all of a sudden they are not feeling comfortable and
it freaks them out. Then maybe after five or six months they say, “It has
been nice, but I cannot take it. I do not know what is wrong. You are all
lovely people, but something is wrong and I do not know what it is.” “I think that by ‘staging
it’ step-by-step that we will make it easier for people to join us in The
Stelle Group. I know that when The Stelle Group started out, we were just the
same as anybody else with high ideals and no idea of the hard work that was
ahead of us. Now when we have accomplished many of our ideals and a lot of
the hard work is behind us we have become quite different from what the rest
of the world has been doing. As I say, you cannot look at us and tell the
difference, but when you live here you discover that there is one. So, this will make it easier. “There is another stage
beyond Adelphi, which is “The Stelle Group, as it is
now, is kind of an intense emotional and mental experience to get involved in
because so many people are working so hard at working at an accelerated pace
to accomplish in one generation what it normally takes three. People just
sense that there is no time for frivolous things because there is so much to
accomplish in such a short period of time: changing
the environment, changing the culture, and changing themselves. “First discovering the
emotional and psychic shortcomings that you are suffering under, either from
the culture or interiorally, is a devil of a blow to most anybody to find out
that that you are not anywhere near as high as you thought you were. And then you have to rapidly try to overcome those things
which you now have discovered are shortcomings and that is even a greater
stress because you find out that it does not happen overnight. Just because
you want to be a certain way does not mean that you
get there overnight. You may hold all the visions of where you are going to
get to, but it takes an incredibly long time to get there. Some one
particular problem, you are trying to work through, may take three years,
five years, or something like that to overcome. Some emotional difficulty
that the culture or some specific incident in your life
kind of rides on your back and you have to find a way to get out of it
so that you can move forward. That is why we have such an involvement with
techniques for getting at subconscious difficulties;
bringing them to the fore so that you can deal with them. And
that is not fun either. But it sure is a
wonderful relief getting inside of those things. It makes it worthwhile for
people to get into. They like what happens on the other side of facing up to
their problems. And we are talking about things
which take a decade altogether; literally takes a decade. “And some people whip
themselves so severely and say, ‘Gee, I am not doing this. I am not doing
that. Look at this guy how far ahead he is. Gee I
wish I had so and so’s abilities and I want to work
toward that too.’ If you come into it with that attitude, you can break
yourself. So you do have to know that you are doing
the best that you can at any given time. You have to love yourself as it were
just as you would love your child while they are working through all kinds of
growing up problems just learning basic things like how to tie a knot in
their shoes without crying over it. You can love them through all of that by
showing them your love and acceptance and it will really help them over the
hard spots. You have to show yourself the same kind of love and acceptance of
where you are even though you are not where you want to go. You feel very
frustrated. So that is an important technique that
some people have. “Some people get so angry
at themselves that they almost break. They cannot take it and they find they have to leave because they are putting
themselves through too much of a ringer. And that is
unfortunate. But that is part of the problem of
getting back to ‘even keel’ after having been subtly warped, in many ways, by
the culture. We buy into a lot of the things that
culture does to us, too. That is the way it is. Cowboys kill Indians. That is
the way it is with cowboys and Indians. That becomes so ingrained in us that
we do not even think that cowboys would do anything else except kill Indians. “Eventually, you grow up to
the point where you realize that cowboys and Indians should be friends. They
are both human beings. That is kind of a startling fact to recognize
sometimes. And you multiply that by hundreds of
different things which have been told to you as just self-evidently true that
that is just the way it is. Then you find out as you investigate it that all
those things are wrong, but you still have the attitude
which is the acceptance of those things. You have to turn them around
and that is a conscious process of catching yourself when you think in an
‘old order’ way. You can either beat yourself over that or say, ‘Well, I will
do it again, but next time I will do better.’ Everything eventually yields to
intention. Thank goodness that is one of the powers
of human Mind to adapt to just about anything. And I
say that if it were not rewarding as you go along nobody would do it. And
fortunately there are great rewards as you go along.” (06-1982)
How Will The Stelle Group Respond to the Opening of the Town?
Q: Will you say more on the role of The Stelle Group, here in Stelle, now that the two are separate?
RK: They will probably be running a school here and we are definitely going to be working to have this be sort of a “new age” center where people can come to find out a great many things of different beliefs. A place where you can have conventions and “new age” entertainment and things which would attract people to the kind of spiritual, practical things that many people feel these days. The way to attract those kinds of things is, of course, to have as much available to them. Not just one thing like The Stelle Group, but many options to investigate, and we, therefore, would have to have a kind of a school setup for people who want to find out about our beliefs and if they choose to become part of the Adelphi organization as a participant, a formal participant, then they would go through Orientation and through the process of learning how to work with one another, live together in a beneficial way to all concerned, which are some interesting tricks to learn when you have not been exposed to that sort of thing in the world-at-large. Most of us have not. When we actually get down to living democracy on a day by day basis, if always proves to be much more difficult than the theoretical kinds of things you get in a republic where you elect somebody. Here you have to discuss everything on your own. We have found a town hall system the most effective for people to really be heard and get their input into whatever is happening in the decision-making that is going on. That is experiential kind of thing which is necessary for people to really catch on to what it is that we are trying to teach.
We really expect people to change themselves when they become a member of The Stelle Group. Change is very difficult for everybody. You may have a desire to have many spiritual abilities like clairvoyance and the ability to read what other people [inaudible] to you, don’t offend them or don’t [inaudible] in some so that they become angry, to be able to en rapport with them, and to have those kinds of skills, that kind of sensitivities to other people is generally classed under spiritual abilities. Things that [inaudible] you having those kinds of things that always kind of held you off, but they are things which all of us can learn to do. Well, there are certain disciplines required in order to learn how to do those kinds of things. There are paths to acquire those abilities. Most of [inaudible] would like to have them. Many people like to gain them mainly because it allows them to become members of the Brotherhoods and they wish to work within the framework of the Brotherhoods because it expands there creative efforts so much more in productive areas, because you are part of a team that is working worldwide on certain things. So, the only way to learn those things is by doing, and The Stelle Group provides the opportunities to do that. It is just not a matter of correspondence courses and [inaudible] more information by doing more reading, but by putting that information into practice, and that what The Stelle Group will continue to do.
We also have our own school for children. For people who want to—we have learned so much and have proven the theories that so many people have come up with around the world that educators have [inaudible] better and better ways of getting children to learn easily and at an earlier age than we thought possible before. We have tried those things and have found what works and what doesn’t work and we just use what works. Many people would like to have their children enjoy the same advantages that the children here in The Stelle Group have, and we will open that school to persons who are not in The Stelle Group to have their children go to our school. That, however, will require a nominal tuition fee that obviously will not be exceeding anything [inaudible]—the cost of education is probably the most expensive thing that any community gets into. About eighty percent of cities budgets go to education. We are not in a position to do that free for people. You still have to pay for that just like you would for any other private school, except, of course, if they happen to be members of The Stelle Group and the kindness of The Stelle Group. There area number of educational type of things that we are involved in. We also hope to not necessarily from up here but from Adelphi, expand our exposure to the public as far as what we have to offer. We believe we have learned a number of practical ways of doing things better, and we are going to pass that information on to other people. We think they ought to have, at least, the option to decide if they want to do that or not. We have to let people know what we are actually accomplishing here.
With more people coming in, I am sure that we will be able to offer them many things which they have not otherwise have found out about. I think the example of what we do here will certainly catch on since Christ believed that teaching by example is the best system. We have something which works and other people will want to do the same sort of thing.
We
do have an obligation—we have many people who inquire about how to start
their own community and how do we go about it? Well, we can certainly
[inaudible] how to do it. We have been through the mill, so we [inaudible]
extra effort. (06-1982)
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