Later, the conversation veered to the love life of Mitch Cohen, a bearded member who had been quietly eating in the back row. ''When are we going to meet your girlfriend?'' someone asked. ''Do you want to marry her?'' asked another. The group then spent a few minutes talking about the macrobiotic diet of Mr. Cohen's girlfriend, her love of football, her propensity to channel surf, and, most worrisome, her resistance to group living. ''I'm concerned that because you have different life styles, it can't work,'' said Susan Grossman, a doctor at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. Added Ms. Gordon, ''It sounds to me as if you might not be so compatible.'' To everyone's surprise, Mr. Cohen ended the debate by telling the group he was thinking about moving with his girlfriend to California.

Candor and intimacy are hallmarks of daily life at Ganas. Many members are romantically involved with one another, and the pairings are sometimes fluid. For example, Ms. Wonder and her husband, Richard, switched partners with another couple two years ago but did not divorce. ''We're still great friends, but we just weren't compatible with each other,'' she said of Richard. ''If we hadn't been here, we would have broken up in a bad way.'' Few have or want children; most say they would rather devote themselves to self-improvement, or to Ganas.

The 13 core members seem to be the most intensely committed to the community. Anyone can join the core, and those who leave receive compensation based on a formula that factors in their tenure at Ganas as well as the money they earned and spent. The only three to do so since the commune was founded returned to their homes in Spain. When Mr. Greeson joined the core in 1996, he had what he called ''a wedding ceremony'' in the Catskills and invited his parents and stepparents. ''I considered it a serious commitment, like a marriage, and I wanted to formalize that,'' said Mr. Greeson, a Brown University graduate who manages the group's furniture store. ''Of course, in true Ganas style, we spent most of the day discussing what the vows should be.''

Although she brushes off any suggestion that she is the group's leader, Mildred Gordon is undeniably in the driver's seat. She is Ganas's oldest member, its spiritual hub and a font of crisp advice and endless sarcasm. Born and raised on the Lower East Side, the daughter of Russian immigrants, Ms. Gordon is largely responsible for the commune's New York brashness, something that the large contingent of West Coast members said they found jolting at first but that would surely bring comfort to Woody Allen.

When Leslie Greenwood, who once belonged to the Twin Oaks commune in Virginia, visited Ganas with her boyfriend several years ago, Ms. Gordon broached the topic of their troubled relationship during their first dinner. ''It was surprising but refreshing,'' said Ms. Greenwood, 41, who moved to Ganas, without the boyfriend, a few weeks later. ''Mildred was very inviting and outspoken. She basically said, 'I like you, I want you in my life.' ''

Ganas was born in 1973, when Ms. Gordon was working as a management consultant in Arizona and, she said, coping with a painful divorce by smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. When she was 52, a malignant lung tumor was diagnosed, and she reluctantly took a friend's advice to try biofeedback therapy, a technique that enlists the mind in healing the body. Within weeks, the tumor and a debilitating case of colitis had vanished, Ms. Gordon said, and she decided to move to San Francisco to study biofeedback. While at a student residence there, she met the five people who formed the founding core of Ganas, including Bruno, then a 21-year-old malcontent from Switzerland, and George Caneda, who had just received a master's degree in history from a university in his native Spain.

''I liked that if Mildred had a problem with someone, she would let them know,'' Mr. Caneda said. ''I was tired of people not saying what they really felt.''