ABSTRACT
Most of us, like it or not, are significantly involved with human groups of various kinds: families, organizations, communities, nations, and other human collectives. For better and for worse, our lives are socially entangled, whether we are designated as our groups’ leaders or as members. How have our personal histories affected our lives within our various groups? How can we attend to the quality of our group membership? This book proposes a practice of studying ourselves in collective life that utilizes a naturalistic method of observation, analysis of experiential data, and hypothesis formation, all of which are always subject to further revision as we gather more and more data from our lived experiences. The book’s major themes are summarized in terms of the vagaries of the human bodymind, our inherited legacies related to group life, and our intuitively evolving views of our involvement with human systems of every kind.
