Community, which is cognate with municipal ‘service performed for the community’, shares a PIE base with Sanskrit maitreya ‘friendly, benevolent’ and Pāli mettā ‘loving-kindness’ meaning ‘to change, go, move’. So community literally means ‘changing together in loving friendship’, synergistically sharing the unifying purpose to discover what communities share in common.
However, society, as a whole, rarely functions in this manner today. First, we tend to resist or ignore change, in what we can call the Canute and Ostrich Syndromes or Complexes, respectively. Secondly, we are taught that we must fight and compete with our fellow human beings for a share of the money supply, which must remain finite if financial units are to maintain their supposed value.
Such a way of life is no longer viable. If the long running wars between science and religion and between all the religions, nations, companies, economic ideologies, and sexes are ever to come to an end, the international community needs to realize that we all share the Divine, Cosmic qualities of Love, Consciousness, and Intelligence and that the Principle of Unity—Wholeness is the union of all opposites—is the fundamental guiding principle of the Universe, and therefore also what we all share in community with all other beings.
Latin commūnitās ‘community, fellowship’, from commūnis ‘shared, common, general, universal, public’, originally in sense ‘sharing burdens’ (opposite to propius ‘individual, private’), in Late Latin ‘a body of fellows or fellow-townsmen’, like ūniversitās, root of university, from cum ‘together with’ and mūnus ‘office, function, duty; gift, present’, from mūnare ‘to give, present’, from PIE base *mei- ‘to change, go, move’.