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Members of the LiFT Politics project
The new paradigm of integral politics - presentation of the results of the LiFT Politics project
The EU-funded Leadership for Transition (LiFT) Politics project hosted by the Institute for integral Studies has been working since September 2019 on exploring a new, more holistic, more integral way of doing politics which we currently see emerging. This new kind of politics is inspired by a different kind of consciousness. How can we describe it?
What we call “New Politics” is radically different from what we know and practice as politics so far.
New Politics has a soul. It reaches wide and deep. It's understood that, in order to really serve us, it's not enough to administer or regulate. It is not only responding to what we see ourselves confronted with in the outside world, but acts from within.
New politics is longterm and takes a perspective on humanity and the planet that includes past and future generations. It is not attempting to solve things top down, but instead is is designed in a way that explicitly invites individuals to contribute and experience how they are part of the world.
We witness a deep longing to approach suffering in a new way. Instead of managing it, we can embrace it. Instead of mentioning suffering or pain as a side note or the legitimation for our actions, we can apprehend it.
This takes courage and grounding. To many of us, it could, at first, seem overwhelming. Yet what we found during the past years is that a constantly growing number of people know in their hearts that this way of being in life, this way of relating to our collective world, holds the promise of real change.
Writing this, we realize that we have left the old grounds already. We dare to use the word “heart” in the context of politics. We dare - and we must.
Because new politics “include the totality of humanness”, the fullness of ourselves. In this new paradigm we stop to consent to the seeming separation between an internal, apparently individual experience - and our outside, apparently collective worlds. We are interconnected and entangled with all of humanity, all of earth, all of life.
This knowledge is expressed in many different ways and forms. What they have in common in this radical embrace of the fullness of life and the willingness to be available to it.