View From the Top > Esteemed Reader

If we have no peace, it is because we have
forgotten that we belong to each other. — Mother Teresa

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:
Community is the fabric of the collective life of humanity. It defines the rules and aims of all the endeavors of our lives—endeavors that are undertaken relative to our fellows. Community is what gives our lives meaning and purpose. It informs who we are in the world, and also provides an arena for exercising the power to become more than we are.

There are many communities, each one fitting the next like a great matroshka (Russian nesting doll). From the solitary body to the family, all the way to the body of the biosphere, nature, and beyond, to the great cosmic body we call the universe, the Absolute, each level of community comprises the next. And we are here, located at the level of humanity, forming communities in relation to one another.

We can infuse life into the flesh of the human community by being alive within it, by relating freshly, creatively, compassionately with our fellow humans. With a basic disposition of goodness we can build something powerfully synergistic with one another. We can gather together in a meaningful way and interact in a living way. We can make music, poetry, dance, theater—even consciousness. We can be as fine carpet woven together of disparate threads that has beauty, utility, and durability. It is in these relationships that true culture arises.

What we find in these dark days of the Kali-Yuga (in Hinduism, the time in which the duties of the respective order disappear) is the absence of community, and anything but culture. People relating one to another is the exception. Instead, our relationships are mediated by many barriers—newspaper, television, computer—the interfaces that present the idea of us to one another like so many generic emoticons. These prevent the actual exchange of emanations—the stuff of being—which is the glue for knitting true community together. In fact, all the media that is designed to facilitate exchange has had the reverse effect of preventing relating, one to another.

We are left without trust in the real relationships with one another. Instead we trust in colossal abstractions—economic, political and religious systems, and the pseudo-entities of organizations that purport to represent these models. We can’t even make love without a latex intermediary. We are left lonely, fearful of one another as individuals, because we don’t have relationships with one another. Our relationships are forever managed by another mechanism.

Here in the dark ages we are setting new records for special extinction. We blithely and recklessly consume the earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate. We ignorantly and hubristically destroy one another’s lives and cultures. Soon we will have to face the music. We will have to pony up and pay the debt of our existence. We will be forced to live in a new way.

But we can choose to make a new world before the piper comes to collect. We can develop meaningful relationships with one another. Relationships that are truly cultural—based on creative human output. We can gather together for other than selfish purposes, other than the incessant meetings of chambers of commerce in which we contrive to capitalize on relationships for personal gain.

True culture and true community each has its basis in people meeting to celebrate the creative spirit of humanity, and to cultivate beautiful, enduring mutual interdependence. It is these activities that Chronogram endeavors to support and nourish, for it is these activities that form and reform the fabric of true culture.

—Jason Stern