Quick reminder: There is still time to contact NY government officials to urge them to keep NYC plastic bag recycling law in effect – see here for more details.
Now to our regular scheduled post:
Sen. Eric Schneiderman has been working hard on revising the last Integral Activism memo based on the feedback that he has gotten (see the last integral activism post). I thought I would share the new updates from the revised memo and my personal reaction to it.
Schneiderman writes:

The path of integral activism includes three levels of transformational practice:

1) Mindfulness meditation and other contemplative practices serve as the base, focusing our awareness on the nature of the “I.”

2) Our second area of practice—mindful interpersonal conduct— draws our attention to our interaction with other people, enabling us to explore the richness of “you and I.” These practices include acting with integrity and compassion towards others in our own circle—our friends, family and sangha—but also extend to charitable acts and mindful service to strangers. These two levels of practice are found in a variety of spiritual traditions.

3) The third level of practice incorporated in the path of integral activism is more unusual, but no less important to our personal and collective progress. Collective action for the common good—mindful political work— enables us to move beyond our awareness of the “I” and the “you and I” to the extraordinary experience of being a part of a “we.” …. Politics requires us to own our “we-ness”, to exercise the muscles of our collective nature. We enter the realm of politics whenever we engage in collective decision making. It is a not limited to electoral or public policy work.

Since I have been participating in the IDP and integral activism, I have done a lot more exploring around “our collective nature” and engaging in politics. I think this is the first time I have thought about engaging in politics as a “we” activity. When I thought about politics before IDP, it was often about what I supported, what I wanted the government to do for me, or even more often, what I wish the government would stop doing. It was never a sense that politicians, the government, other citizens and I were all part of a collective.

Maybe it is because I have often felt like an outsider in my life – I was never in the “in-crowd”, I didn’t participate in team sports, I wasn’t a joiner, and in general, I had issues with authority. Conflict made me uncomfortable – I was raised in a household where my father was right and everyone else was wrong. So I never learned the skills to negotiate well with people who were different from me, which was quite a few since I grew up in a conservative community. So I just kept my mouth shut (mostly) until I got the opportunity to move somewhere where people agreed with my viewpoints.

But I have grown and changed, and I have become more of a joiner. I have learned to play well (or at least better) with others. I have also started thinking more about how we are all in the same ship, or more accurately, we are all on the same planet. And I don’t really like the direction that the ship/planet is going in. And in order for that to change, I have to stop thinking just about me, and start thinking about we. Because no matter how much I want something to happen, I can’t change it all by myself. Nor should I be able to (because maybe I am wrong). And I agree with Schneiderman when he says:

“Embracing and exploring our collective nature is a critical area of practice. And mindful engagement in the activity of a collective—politics—is a unique vehicle for this practice. When combined with our personal and interpersonal work, mindful politics opens the door to a full understanding of our interdependence, and of the permeability of the shell we usually imagine between what is “inside” of our individual selves and the other people ‘out there’.”

However I am not sure where I stand when Schneiderman states:

Most of us intuitively understand the need for this third level of practice. We are profoundly social beings. In his POLITICS, Aristotle observed that: “Man is by nature a social animal…anyone who is unable to live a common life or who is so self-sufficient that he has no need to do so is no member of society, which means that he is either a beast or a god.” There is a big difference between reaching out to another and offering him bread, and reaching out to another to say: “You and I are a part of the collective of New York City. Will you join me in collective action to use our shared resources to provide bread for all?

Being part of a “collective we” is not intuitive for me. I am social and I feel very bonded and aware of my interactions with my family and friends (mindful interpersonal conduct), but I still have a hard time with social engagement on the collective level. I think it is because of several different factors: 1) Sometimes I don’t feel like I am part of the “we”. 2) I don’t know how to deal with differences in opinion within the collective we. 3) I feel disappointed that my previous efforts at getting my voice heard in the collective have often failed (for example, in protesting the beginning of the Iraq war).

Often I find myself ambivalent about going out to get other people to listen to what I have to say and trying to convince them to agree with me – particularly because I don’t really like it when others try to convince me to change my opinion and intrude on my time. However, I also see what has happened over the last 8 years and where our future is headed if we (I) leave it to others to shape it. And slowly I feel that maybe it is not only about changing opinions but also about finding common ground. I think that is a more comfortable position for me, but I still need to learn the practices that help me participate actively and positively within the collective we.