Social Issues and Meditation: How Related?

  I attended a student multi-faith dinner tonight and the question was asked at our table: what social issues are of interest to us personally, and how are our respective spiritual groups promoting social issues and justice? I thought about the question for a while (since I was the last in the table to respond). This question has always interested me, because the University of Toronto meditation group is mainly focused on sitting meditation and teaching some principles of mind. And the one thing that came to my mind has to do with living relationships and their impact on the surrounding environment.
    From my own experience, meditative practice has never been simply about going into the self or self preoccupation. Rather, it is really almost entirely an interconnected experience. What motivates a person to even sit down and do this practice? It is often something that is beyond the self, be it the need for a more harmonious relationship to others, or sense that there may be more than 'this self'. In fact, the motivation for me has always been a question that cuts through where the self begins and where it goes into the world. To try to reduce this practice to 'self-examination' would be a kind of mistake. Nearly everything that one can even say is 'oneself' is connected to something else. But in meditation, there is no mind discriminating between 'this thought is me', or 'that is the environment'. So there is an access point to view things as interrelated in some way.
    Whenever I am presented with a question like the one at the dinner, I feel somehow compelled to come up with one favored issue, such as protecting the environment or poverty. But somehow, I see them as all connected threads in one larger puzzle. For instance, what is it that makes some people have a lot and consume a lot, while others have little? If I examine this question without looking into the mind itself, all I am left with are these prescriptions for how to redistribute wealth so that everyone is given things equally.  But there is still something missing here, and that is the deeper question of why the inequality emerges in the first place. Is the inequality itself due to some past event, or is it some deeper mindset that keeps people in this way? Somehow, I am feeling that it has to do with how people relate to their resources.
   To take a simple example: if my identity is bound up in what I own or wear, or how much I have done or travelled, I am bound to see my value in terms of how much I have, and how much I can earn. At that point, I am simply unable to imagine a world where there is real equality. That is so because I will be so tied up with keeping up with the expectation of who I 'should' be that I would overlook the greater social issues. But if I am doing the practice for a long time, something can happen where I don't take any of these possessions to be me at all. In fact, I may even see that the totality of the experience I am having is the true mind, and I would start to take care of the world in a very different way: not rejecting any of it,, but listening and trying to heal its wounds.