Here, we are not talking about meditative discipline as a revolutionary act, regarding our meditation group as a little fortress from which we can launch our guerilla warfare movement to change society. But we are talking about infiltration. Such infiltration can only begin with ourselves. We have to let meditative awareness infiltrate our being. In that way we can develop genuine comradeship with other practitioners.

Being together with each other, we are creating a society of its own particular type, an unconditional society, we might say. We don’t necessarily all subscribe to the same political theories, sociological concepts, or religious ideas. The solidarity comes from our mutual understanding of mind, which comes from sitting together.

Whether you are in a different physical location from other meditators doesn’t matter. We feel some connection with others who also plop themselves down to sit every day. That sense of working together is not particularly heroic or exclusive–we don’t condemn the non-sitters.

From “A Mindful Society,” in Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness, page 160

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