Our Mission
DharmaCafé begins from two very simple premises: That there actually is a numinous, luminous, spiritual, transcendent, and irreducibly conscious Reality (what we shall here call “the sacred”) and that our own participation in this Reality is the most vital, passionate, interesting, and important aspect of our individual and collective lives.
Instead of expending most of its energies “getting to church”—that is, attempting to prove that the sacred really exists—DharmaCafé will start out “in church“ and go on to bring energy, clarity, depth of feeling, critical insight, and even great good humor to its most compelling and potent manifestations. It is committed to freely exploring and vividly reporting on the total specrum of humanity’s sacred endeavors to the millions upon millions of literate, intelligent human beings who are interested in hearing about them.
Expanded Mission Statement
Our global civilization is now facing a crisis so severe that few of us can even bear to take its full measure. While each of the various features of this crisis—ethnic and religious wars, terrorist violence, racism, an unchecked arms race, species depletion, global warming, pervasive environmental pollution, corporate malfeasance, domestic violence, adolescent anomie, epidemic disease, political manipulation, massive poverty, and so on—can and should be analyzed in its own terms, the sheer number and extent of these perils begs for an understanding that transcends their individual circumstances and features. Yet the educational and cultural institutions to which we turn for understanding (our universities, the mass media, and so on) are now almost entirely circumscribed by the dictates of scientific and technological reason.
