6. Community

During the past six millennia humanity has been guided into recognising the necessity of learning to live more and more in vast communities, to the point of forgetting ethnic and cultural differences and to recognising its own essential unity. It has not yet come to ahead with this but it has, all the same, come a long way. Such a slow and tiring process tends to teach the individual the necessary detachment for sharing common experiences, but at the same time conserving individual freedom.

The lesson has been learnt only partially and with distortions, in the same way that the concept of the Common Good, which levels all difficulties, is now constantly quoted and repeated, even though we are a long way from knowing its true meaning, and few have a clear idea as to what it incorporates.

The Workshop of Thought is assimilating that elevated concept, which makes it a pioneer in the new understanding of the term community. A human community is not a herd or a flock. Be it as numerous as a nation or comprised of just a few individuals, to be a community seven departments, centres or sections have to be present, active and collaborative, and they must be related to the seven fundamental qualities expressed by the laws of Sound and Light. This is a solar and cosmic law; not a simple psychological or social theory. The success of human development depends on practical application of this principle, respected throughout Cosmos and visible in the orderly arrangement of the solar System.

In studying the sixth Working Direction we discover its dualism. In fact, it concerns not only the Community, and therefore human society and groups of every kind, but also the binding factor that holds them together. The two principles are inseparable, and it is always disastrous to form a group without thinking about what unites it. The absence of a uniting principle results in failure.

Society is a true construction, and in order to survive it has to be well connected in all of its parts, which may be numerous and diverse. The element that welds everything together has a clear, ancient and precise name: from its Latin origin this name is religion. For many centuries this term has assumed a clerical and ecclesiastical meaning, but this is a derivative superimposition which hides its true meaning. Any action, of any nature and of any level, can and must be “religious”, namely connected, communicating; otherwise, it remains disconnected from the environment and perishes in the long run. What is disconnected is destined to failure.

A community of any kind, religious or secular, cannot subsist without an order. On the other hand, communion does not tolerate limits or restrictions – that would nullify it. The dissension seems irreconcilable: rules or not?, freedom or not? The dispute offers only one possible solution:

The various communities have to be one only, open and free,
otherwise they are not a Communion…

***

The Community of the Human Workshop of Thought is thus the Communion of Hearts.

View also the Introduction to the Working Directions.