Community. There are three types of community: (1) Geographic Community, (2) Shared Interest Community, and (3) Shared Spirit Community. A Geographic Community is simply a collection of people living in a particular region. Shared Interest Communities are groups who take an interest in similar activities. A Shared Spirit Community is characterized by the play of collective awareness among a group of individuals. None of these community types is complete. To have a true community in the fullest sense, you need all three: geography, shared interest and shared spirit. I call such a community a "Natural Community".(See Section 5.6)

Strength of Community. There are degrees of strength that can be determined for communities. Geographic Communities are stronger when people are more closely connected to the physical place that they occupy on the planet. Close connections require more permanency; a greater commitment to make a place your lifelong home. You also connect to a place by recognizing the earth that sustains you. Communities that grow and eat produce locally are thus geographically stronger. Shared Interest Communities are stronger when the members participate in activities that are life supporting rather than life damaging. An activity can be more or less life supporting for everyone in general, or it can be life supporting for you personally more so than for others. There are also activities that are life-supporting for particular ethnic, religious or cultural groups. Shared Spirit Communities are stronger when there are more individuals in the group who have more fully developed awareness. Stronger collective awareness depends on stronger individual awarenesses.

Courtesy. When we consider physical behavior, the word courtesy describes best that aspect of human activity which most generally corresponds to how well people treat one another. This includes committing crimes against another person. Thus all criminal acts, regardless of their severity, are fundamentally acts of rudeness. Courtesy may seem like a moral consideration, but in fact the highest form of courtesy goes beyond morality. It's a physical thing. It involves gestures, movement, posture, speech, expression. True courtesy doesn't require that you stop and analyze whether each and every action you take is right or wrong. A person comports himself in such a way that he or she is naturally dignified, composed, respectful, and self-controlled. For that person life becomes a ballet.

Courtesy Reduction. In community management you want to find the common ground, the place that everyone understands as the platform from with all other issues arise, regardless of political, religious, personal biases. What we're suggesting is that courtesy is as good a term as any to describe how people act towards each other. Every action – from minor things like dropping trash, to something as serious as an armed robbery – can be reduced to a courtesy issue, philosophically and in actual practice. It's easier to approach people with the courtesy angle as your basis, because everyone appreciates what it means. Even the most gross events – robberies, assaults – can be regarded as fundamentally acts of rudeness. This is how you implement an educational, preventive approach to crime: by teaching (i.e., demonstrating) courtesy to criminals and potential criminals. It's not that robbing and stealing are grave sins that must be punished – rather, they are things that courteous people don't do.(See Section 5.7)

Garden Zone. Our planetary environment is divided into three regions: the remote, uninhabited wilderness, the personal, interior space of our houses and homesteads, and the intermediate area between them. The in-between area is the garden zone. It's the region of the earth from which man derives his sustenance. It's our garden. We created it. In a typical neighborhood the garden zone consists of the yards and lots between and among dwellings, and also the parks, playgrounds, streets, sidewalks, and shopping plazas that make up the urban and suburban landscape.

Grass roots. Quite often people will speak of the grass roots in terms of specific legislative action or lobbying efforts: the environment, health care, etc. For example, if the AARP had a campaign to save Social Security, and they recruited seniors to support the cause in some way - with petitions, letter writing, calling their congressmen - it would likely be referred to as a "grass roots" campaign. But the grass roots that we would like to speak of is more fundamental. It's below the political and legislative levels. Grass roots in the truest sense refers to households, neighborhoods and communities. It's the lowest, most local level of human activity and societal structure, where residents, neighbors, and ordinary citizens interact in the least formal, most natural fashion.

Growth of Character. Character is one of several terms that on the surface has a straight forward meaning, but which on deeper reflection reveal a much more complex framework. I include character growth as a component of spiritual growth. (See Section 4.5) Character is something innate in the individual; it's in our DNA. But it's also something that develops over time. The degree of development varies widely from person to person. Even when character development does take place, the result is not always a person of the highest character. The individual's personal make-up, structured by their DNA and molded by their environmental upbringing, might not engender the highest human qualities. The other key aspect of character growth is that one person can affect the growth of another. People of greater responsibility in the community can alter the outcome in the development of a friend, neighbor or family member just by the way they interact with them.You could turn a potential criminal into a humanitarian.

Infinite. There is a mathematical description of the term infinite, but not a definition. There is no number or form that corresponds to infinity; no formula for calculating it. It's beyond the realm of logic and reasoning. Thus the only real way to grasp the infinite is to experience it directly. When you have that unbounded experience, it eventually becomes clear that you, yourself, are in fact an infinite being. You are the localized expression of an intelligence that exists beyond the limits of time and space.(See Section 5.5)

Morality. In this age people expend a great amount of energy debating what is moral and immoral. It seems we all have this innate, irresistible tendency to judge the actions of others. The debates have been going on forever – with disagreements that reach the point of violence. The point to understand about morality is that on some level there isn't any moral right or wrong. There is only doing and not doing; action and non-action. When you can get to that mode of functioning in which you stop making continuous judgments about which way to act, then you're behaving in a fashion that is amoral, or beyond morality. This is not a negative thing. It's the foundation for "spontaneous right action", as its termed.

Prevention. Prevention is the opposite of reaction (See Section 1.2). Rather than reacting to emergencies, accidents, crime, crises, and so forth, you prevent them from happening in the first place. Instead of learning from our mistakes, we structure life such that we don't ever make any mistakes. True prevention is a state of mind. It can't be fully understood unless a person has the preventive "mind-set". This mind-set does not spring up overnight. Rather, it comes as a by-product of an internal growth process that happens gradually over time. This is another aspect of spiritual growth (See Section 4.5).

Quality of Life. There are three basic elements that determine the quality of life in a neighborhood, and fourth that underlies them. The core elements are: (1) Courtesy, (2) Quietness, and (3) Safety. This scheme assumes that the material requirements for life – food, water, shelter, etc. – are taken care of, and also that intellectual needs such as education, and career opportunity are suitably provided for. The way we normally prioritize these elements is to put safety at the top of the list. However, with the preventive approach of Garden Zone Management, the order is reversed, and courtesy gets top priority. The fourth element of the quality of life table is awareness. Courtesy derives from awareness, thus awareness deserves the highest priority of all.(See Chapter 1)

Responsibility. On the surface responsibility seems a clear-cut notion. But it's a perfect illustration of a term that challenges you to think more deeply. Responsibility is a human quality – not physical, but something that characterizes the non-material spirit of a person. We judge how responsible people are by looking at their actions. Different people have different criteria for making such judgments – depending on how they were brought up, their cultural background, etc., It's tricky to come up with a set of actions that people from all backgrounds will regard as universally responsible. But the conclusion that you inevitably arrive at is this: we are all responsible for each other. What this implies is that when someone else makes a mistake – commits a crime, say – the fault is ours, yours and mine. This has profound implications for how we structure and operate our justice system.(See Section 4.1)

Spin. Spin is thought. It's thought that is connected to action. Something like intention, though intention is often associated with planning or premeditation, rather than a more spontaneous act. Unlike the use of the "spin" that politicians use, which is an explanation of something after the fact, I use spin to describe something that is experienced during the fact. Every action we take is accompanied by some qualities, some desire, some flavor and feeling. You can do something sweetly, angrily, reluctantly, sadly. You can be malicious, kind, selfish, joyful. The actions that have less spin are actually the ones that have the farthest reaching effect. An expert who tweaks the right screw at the right time might fix in a minute a problem that would otherwise take a year for others to solve. By performing actions with the least degree of spin, you achieve the greatest results. When you do something without any spin at all, you're practicing a technique that allows you to appreciate most subtle aspects of cause and effect. The ultimate goal is to be able to accomplish whatever you want by doing nothing at all. It's the instant fufillment of desires. (See Section 5.9)

Spiritual. This term is widely misused. Most often folks define spirituality by cataloging religious or cultural activities. You observe what a group of people is doing and create a definition based on what you see. This OBjective methodology overlooks the SUBjective aspect of spirituality. In other words, to truly understand the spiritual, you must turn away from what others are doing, and instead look within. You, yourself must have the personal experience of spirit. It comes back to the three-fold nature of reality: the knower (you), the process of knowing (your senses, faculties, etc), and the known (all that is "out there").

Subjectivity. Around the time of Isaac Newton scientists began using more care in their examination of the physical phenomena in the universe. They removed their personal suspicions from the analysis – maintaining a strict separation between themselves and the objects of their study. For several hundred years thereafter we were taught to be purely objective not only in the physical sciences, but in every discipline. When the new physics came along in the early 1900s with Einstein and his successors, this all changed. Physicists discovered that the state of the observer influences the outcome of the observation. In other words, what the observer thinks will occur affects what eventually does occur. This is how subjectivity works. You color what you see according to how you would like to see it. For people with a strictly objective mindset this is not something that is easy to get your head around. This also comes out of the structure of reality: observer, process of observation and the observed. This structure was understood by sages in ancient civilizations, then rediscovered by modern physics, when Einstein and others developed theories that took into account the observer's "frame of reference" . In social work subjectivity comes into play when people seek out the good. Rather than getting bogged down dealing with the worst problems in the worst areas, you step back to locate a living environment that is basically good enough, and then try to improve and expand on what you have. Thus garden zone, neighborhood management is designed not for inner-city ghettos, but for areas that are relatively crime-free, and more or less livable already. (See Section 5.3)