On Becoming a Community. If you can speak from your heart of your own experience, what you have to say is likely to touch the hearts and minds of others. So I chose to draw heavily from my own experience and to speak simply and directly of my passionate belief that what we learn in our community meetings can have wide implications, not only for those immediately engaged, but for the attaining of peaceful relationships among many peoples around the world. So this in essence was my keynote address. The first condition for the beginning of community is that a group of persons have chosen to come together just as we have chosen to be here.
Every group represents diversity.
Even in the same culture, we come from different values, backgrounds, and families. We come from different objectives in life. We have never been together as a group. We are taking only our first step toward becoming a community. I think I'd like to start with what happened in that small group on the stage in Johannesburg in 1982.