The Art of Community

EightThe Inner Rings Principle

We all want to be special to someone or several someones. We all want to be valued and valuable. This could look like joining the elite club of Academy Award winners, Olympic athletes, or Nobel Prize winners. There are formal inner rings with official membership, and there are many more informal inner rings. We all aspire to belong to prestigious inner rings, perhaps not just for authority and respect but for new ways to participate and contribute. This desire is so powerful that we’re rarely satisfied with the rings we already inhabit. We simply differ on the inner rings we aspire to join and what we’re willing to do for admission.

I’ve not yet discovered a single spiritual tradition without some sort of inner-ring ...