Under a canopy of stars we heard the stories and myths that shaped our lives. For ten thousand years humans have shared some of their greatest experiences around the campfire. Some of us still do. We heard fantastic things from our elders that cultivated our imagination and helped shape our behavior.

Then we became the storytellers, the stewards of our social values, guiding the growth of each individual, family and whole communities. It was the setting where we explored the meaning of life and death and searched for a higher significance - to feel the energy of being alive.

Campfires are where we communed as a whole, where we performed fundamental rituals together like eating, singing and storytelling. It was the place we felt most interconnected to one another. Campfires are where we all sat in a circle and warmed ourselves from the same source.

It's no wonder campfires are a place of spiritual origin and healing. You can lay back and explore the heavens, the meaning of creation and the purpose of our lives. Stars streak across the sky and kindle our curiosity. In our struggle for survival, it was the place we stayed in touch with the immeasurable, the intuitive and the mysterious.

Campfires also helped open new paths of thought. As "the greatest philosopher on earth", campfires gave us our ethos, our fundamental character and our cultural beliefs. And it occurred on a subconscious level as much as a conscious one.

Campfires helped satisfy our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs, beyond our economic and political ones. Campfires provided a forum to our lives that transcended individualism to one of caring and community.

As part church, school, home and theater, it was the medium through which cultural positive reinforcement was expressed.

Today the campfire has been replaced by television, one of the most powerful influences in our lives. Television is primarily a passive communal through which negative reinforcement is mythologized, undermining our social values with the lowest common denominator of "pop" culture. Yet television also gives us the chance to relax and be entertained.

Our campfire, the television, where we learn the values that help shape our lives, has barraged us with violence and explicit sexuality to capture our attention, not to strengthen our human significance, but to sell advertisement and products and services to the masses. Television reinforces the loosening of human bonds, undermining the growth of a mature person.

For many people, it is affecting not only what they think but how they think. It reinforces a kind of episodic, reactive, careless mode of behavior.

The emergence of digital technology now offers us the means to interact around the campfire of old, to sit around the circle and participate in the collective progress of our world. Rekindle the sparks of your imagination and ask why.

Subscribe to Campfire, the collective campfire of humanity, a place you can relax and explore the myths of the planet with the people who are making them.