Terry Patten Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how inner transformation can mature into ethical engagement with social and ecological crises. It also examines the tensions between spiritual devotion, critical discernment, human imperfection, and the need to hold multiple perspectives.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual practice be integrated with activism and social change?
• How should seekers respond to a spiritual teacher who is deeply transformative but also ethically or behaviorally flawed?
• How can inner work be balanced with responsibility for collective problems?
• What does spiritual maturity look like when reality contains paradox and ambiguity?
• How can people honor personal spiritual experience while still respecting science and shared standards of truth?

Key takeaways

• Inner work without concern for the wider world can become self-protective and morally incomplete.
• Effective activism requires humility and honest examination of one’s own motives.
• A teacher’s transformative power and human limitations can both be real.
• Multiple perspectives often reveal more than a single final judgment.
• Spiritual awakening should deepen responsibility for collective well-being.
• Respecting subjective experience does not require abandoning science or reliable journalism.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com, where you’ll see all the previous ones archived.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there is a PayPal button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Terry Patton. First, I’ll just read his little bio that he sent me, and then I’m sure we’ll elaborate on that. Terry is a philosopher, teacher, activist, consultant, social entrepreneur, and author. Over the last 15 years, he has devoted his efforts to the evolution of consciousness by facing, examining, and healing our global crisis through the marriage of spirit and activism.

He co-wrote the book Integral Life Practice with Ken Wilber and a core team at the Integral Institute. As a teacher and consultant, he has worked on four continents, led a team at the HeartMath Institute that developed their first heart-rate-variability monitor, and is the founder of the Beyond Awakening Telos Seminar Series, which I’ve enjoyed over the years.

As a community builder, he founded Bay Area Integral. As a social entrepreneur, he founded Tools for Exploration, a consciousness technologies company, and currently he’s involved in restorative redwood forestry and fossil-fuel alternatives.

His new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries, was released by North Atlantic Books on March 6, 2018. When Terry first sent me the outline of that book, I literally got goosebumps because the topics he covered so interest and inspire me, and I knew it would be an interesting book. I just finished reading it this morning. So, thanks for coming on, Terry.

Terry: Thank you for having me, Rick. I’ve long imagined we’d be sitting down for a conversation. I’ve been a fan of what you’ve done and really appreciate it. I think bringing conversations together is key evolutionary activism, so it’s good to be here with you.

Rick: Yeah, and likewise, in terms of what you’ve done. Before we get into your book, let’s just talk a bit about your own life, your history, how you got interested in spirituality, and what sort of practices, paths, teachers, or whatever you were involved in.

Terry: Well, my mom comes from a blue-blood line of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants going back to the Puritans. My dad comes from refugees from the shtetl of Russia who just barely made it here, and they were kind of forward-thinking. She became a psychologist in the ’40s. They were interested in what we might consider alternatives.

When I was six, they moved us from Chicago to a community called the York Center Community Cooperative, which was about 20 miles west of the city of Chicago. At that time, it had been formed by buying a 70-acre cornfield. Members of the Church of the Brethren had done this. It’s one of the Christian peace churches whose members are conscientious objectors during wartime.

They admired the principles of the Rochdale weavers, the idea of cooperative ownership of the means of production. This goes back to when Marxism and the Luddites were fighting. It was when everybody was losing their jobs to industrialization in the 1800s. The Rochdale weavers said, “Well, let’s have the workers cooperatively own these big looms and do things differently.” They worked out a lot of really wonderful principles that inspired these folks.

They took it further and further until they invited people of other religions to live with them as a witness for peace and brotherhood, and then people of other races. Many of the people who were attracted to it had been conscientious objectors during the Second World War. Quite a few Japanese families who had been interned moved in. There were a number of mixed marriages, back when that was really unusual—there were laws against it in many states.

I was mentored by a whole group of co-op aunts and uncles because my years of growing up were the years during the buildup of the Vietnam War. As it happened, I was the co-op kid in that crop of children. There were quite a few children, but among that group of kids, I was probably the one who was most focused on talking about current events and wanting to have conversations with my friends’ parents and my parents’ friends.

So I ended up getting mentored by a whole group of people who very deeply believed in taking a social stand. They were spiritually inspired, many of them, but their spiritual inspiration expressed itself in being a stand for peace and justice.

As a good son of the co-op, I founded a local underground newspaper, got involved with Chicago-area draft resistors, became the SDS regional coordinator, and went off to Ann Arbor.

Rick: Students for a Democratic Society.

Terry: Yeah. I went off to lead demonstrations that took over the LS&A building and the ROTC building, and marched against apartheid and so forth.

But after a very tumultuous year, I began to realize that I was arrogant, that my ideas about how society ought to be reorganized were not based on a deep understanding of reality, and that the arrogance of youth was going to poison what I did. My certainty that we had a better way to do things was unexamined egoity, and that really crashed in on me.

Although for a few years I just focused on my writing—I had always been a poet and a writer—I ended up finding myself attracted to books like J. Krishnamurti’s books, Carlos Castaneda’s books, John Lilly, and Alan Watts: the very early kinds of things in the late ’60s and earliest ’70s.

Then I became a resident fellow at a place called Cold Mountain Institute, which was the progenitor of Hollyhock Farm. There I really had my heart opened up and realized I needed to find a teacher.

So I took a 40 Econoline van and drove from British Columbia to San Francisco, picking up hitchhikers. Every third or fourth person had some marijuana. It was totally the ’70s.

On that trip, I connected with students of Swami Satchidananda, Swami Muktananda, the Living Love Center of Ken Keyes, and a whole variety of different communities of practice. Nothing quite felt right.

But on my way back, I encountered the writings of Franklin Jones, as he was known then, and I just felt an electric current of a higher vibratory nature that felt enormously attractive. So I made it my business to visit his ashram in Los Angeles, and pretty soon I was hooked and involved there for 15 years.

I got drawn in very close right away by being made one of his editors, and I helped somebody else you’ve interviewed, Samuel Blonder. Together, we wrote a very infamous early book called Garbage and the Goddess, which is a book about the wild times.

We had a whole period of wild parties, sexual experimentation, and all that wildness was more or less swept under the rug, except in this particular book that Samuel and I co-wrote.

Inner work and outer change

I did that for 15 years, and then I began to feel limitations even there because, in a way, the inner work and the outer work cannot really be separated for me. Each of us is not just an atomized individual; we are all part of a larger evolutionary pattern. My thriving can’t be radically separated from yours, and the well-being of the individual at the expense of the whole is somehow morally ugly.

That drew me more and more to recognize that we do face challenges that can’t be solved at the level of consciousness that created them—paraphrasing the famous quote often attributed to Albert Einstein. In a way, that turned me toward doing the inner work. I needed to clean up my own stuff if I wanted to be a leader of any kind of change in the outer world that was going to be worth a darn.

You know the old thing: you’re pointing at somebody else, and three fingers are pointing back at you. Taking that to heart felt like a morally high-integrity thing to do—a less arrogant, more dimensional response.

On the other hand, it delays your actual engagement in the outer work and in changing the actual systems and conditions that are affecting so many people’s lives. So, in a way, I realized that I felt like I’d signed an IOU: “Gee, I’ve got to do this personal work in order to really clean up my act, but when I get that clean enough, I’m going to circle back and really make a difference in the lives of other people.”

I hadn’t done that. In fact, I’d fallen in with a lot of other deep practitioners who were, to some degree, in a self-reinforcing cycle where none of us were having the kind of impact on the outer world that was needed.

Meanwhile, we’re seeing that the outer world, the causes and conditions, and the practical lives of the whole human species—all of human civilization—are so profoundly unsustainable and unjust in a variety of ways that simply focusing on your subjective transformation no longer feels morally defensible to me.

We’re in a lifeboat that’s sprung a leak, and we need each other to address it.

That recognition has drawn me to a broader integration. Of course, in the last 15 years I’ve been working with Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute. I value a great deal of what I have learned and done there, and yet I don’t think that any particular philosophical approach should become victorious and take over everybody’s minds.

What’s important here is that all of us find the truths in our own ways of practicing that draw us beyond all of our insularity into a common situation. We’re in a lifeboat that’s sprung a leak, and we need each other to address it. That reconnection, heart to heart, feels—it doesn’t just feel urgent; it is objectively an urgent moment. I outline that in the book, and that’s what’s really motivating my work these days.

Rick: Good. Let me pick up a few threads from what you talked about just then, and then we’ll wrap those up and go on.

One is that, obviously, sometimes you need to go into a phase of inner work before you can really be useful in an outer application of it. I mean, you want your doctor to have gone to medical school before operating on you, or something. By the same token, I think perhaps one can prematurely rush into doing something for which one is not really adequately prepared.

So there might be a legitimate phase, I think, of exclusively focusing on that. But eventually you want to ride the bull into the marketplace, to use the ox-herding metaphor, and spread the joy that you’ve found.

Terry: With helping hands.

Rick: Yeah. The second thing is, you know, I don’t want to dwell on this, but for me, the ethics of enlightenment is an important topic. There are so many gurus and teachers who have obviously had something and who have obviously made an impact—my own primary teacher included, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—but who also, once you really saw what was going on behind the curtain, had some flaws. In the case of some teachers, there were some rather egregious ones.

Some might not see it as flaws, but I kind of think of it as more of a, “We’re all flawed, and we’re all works in progress.” If the kinds of energies that Adi Da, for instance, was channeling were to pass through my nervous system, I don’t think I’d be ready for it, even after 50 years of spiritual practice. So you have to give him credit for handling them as well as he did.

But if the vessel is not pure enough, some distortion results when that kind of power begins to flow through a human nervous system. Do you concur with that, and did that have anything to do with your leaving? Or do you really feel like all was well and wisely put in that scene?

Terry: Well, Adi Da was utterly remarkable, and participating with him is something I’ll always be grateful for. He transmitted a state of consciousness that was so potent, and the sheer wattage of divine conscious light that was, in a sense, pressed through my nervous system really did change me in a way for which I could never be anything but grateful.

And yet I always recognized the potential for cultism. I was almost always inside the ashram after a couple of years. I think in my earliest years I was an uncritically devotional character, but fairly quickly I began to notice contradictions and became something of a loyal-opposition devotee who was trying to press Adi Da to address what felt like cultic dynamics or inconsistencies.

Rick: Was that well received? Because sometimes teachers don’t like constructive criticism.

Terry: No, he was not available to have that conversation, and that was disappointing. And yet, my experience was that he continued to grow, deepen, and expand in his quality of transmission of Divine Consciousness in ways that I continued to benefit from and learn from.

It was a paradox because, although there were aspects of it that I objected to and felt like I would just as soon leave, there were other aspects that were growing and transforming me in ways that I hugely valued and didn’t want to cut off.

Even when I did finally leave after 15 years of intense participation, it was with a great deal of regret and with a lot of respect for my friends who remained, because I knew they were engaging in authentic yogic work. I mean, there’s a dimension to this. Adi Da is a full-spectrum realizer, so there’s a transmission of radical consciousness, what we might call causal nondual awakening. But there were also tremendous transmissions of subtle energetic qualities, and there was also a profound transmission beyond the stuff of any energies—what he would call the Divine itself—that was subliming the being.

We would literally walk out of a long, deep meditation with him just exalted and purified, as if we were conscious light itself and love, as if the very cells of our bodies had been opened up to their Divine nature. There’s a profundity to that experience that you don’t necessarily have to…

One of the things that I benefited from in my years with Integral Theory was recognizing that multiple perspectives are necessary to capture reality. The eagle-eye view can see so much of the territory. In one sense, we might say the eagle sees it all much better than anybody else. On the other hand, the mouse can smell what’s going on, and the vole can dig under the ground and get at things that the mouse can’t even see, and the dog can go under the trees where the eagle can’t see.

Everybody’s participating with an aspect of reality that’s invisible to somebody else. My contemplation during many of those years had to do with what we are missing even while we are gaining so much, even while we are deepening in this profundity of submission to a divine paradigm in which the very cells of our bodies are being sublimed by this profound, yogic, bodily-transforming transmission.

We were also, metaphorically speaking, like the way he went and lived on an island in Fiji in the later years of his life. I never really spent time with him in Fiji, but using that as a metaphor for what was happening culturally, Adidam was becoming more and more a preposterous guru cult that was going to be culturally marginalized and looked at as an oddity. It might not even show up on the mainstream scope, and even in spiritual circles it perhaps would not be thought of as healthy.

The more that the behaviors we were doing as a group were going to create that result, the more I felt that I had come to participate in order to be a part of the wholeness of all things reasserting themselves, and to see the health and awakening potentials of humanity come back into their fullest expression.

To just become a part of an irrelevant guru cult that’s only focused on its internal palace politics and stuff was anathema to me. So I was always in struggle with those cultic tendencies and objecting to them.

And yet, when we have conversations about this—not you and I, but me and any other knowledgeable person who’s a veteran of deep spiritual work in various ashrams—there tends to be a very strong tendency for these conversations to become, “Well, was that really somehow the enlightened play of the guru, or was he a bad guy, or a deluded guy, or just not as enlightened?”

We try to come up with a single diagnosis that accounts for it all, so that it is a single knowable thing and we know it accurately, and we’re all debating, trying to come to that perfect description. Whereas I think that reality is multidimensional and elusive, and that multiple perspectives are actually necessary.

Rick: I agree.

Terry: So for me, I had to go through phases where I imagined putting Adi Da on trial in the living room. I wanted to be the prosecuting attorney, and I wanted to interrogate him. I was very aggressive in my objections to this and that which I felt were wrong.

Then there were other times when I wanted to set all that aside and just open up with the gratitude and joy of a devotee who had received a gift beyond price.

In a way, I discovered that I had two bodies of enormous experience that were state-specific, like state-specific memory. You can only remember something when you’re drunk, or only remember it when you’re tripping, or only remember it under a certain peculiar state, when you’re angry or having a flashback.

It was as if I had state-specific memories that really could only be accessed in the mode of utter, grateful devotion. They were enormous bodies of some of the most valuable and sublime experiences of my life.

Then I had other bodies of experience that were very important to who I was, which could only be accessed in the disposition that I had had to grow into: finding autonomy, thinking critically, having real objections and bones to pick with my guru, and having issues that needed to be discussed in public, and so forth.

I could never be in a single state where I had full feeling access to all the force of that whole body of both domains of experience. So I would always be taking a partial perspective on my own experience.

I felt like that was one of his most valuable instructions to me: to be such an impossible figure that he would break me out of that whole mode. I think it’s a form of ego—the mode that thinks it can know the truth.

Reality is multidimensional and elusive, and multiple perspectives are actually necessary.

I think that when we open up in a different way, there’s a lot to be said right now in this post-truth era. I think it’s dangerous to take the dethroning of objectivity as the end of the story. The dethroning of objectivity is an important step in our awakening, and yet the lack of respect for science, the proper practice of journalism, and finding our way to agreed-upon truths that large numbers of people can work from is what’s undermining the social fabric in our country right now in some important ways.

Reestablishing science, journalism, and a variety of other truth-seeking endeavors is actually important. So I need to put that footnote in, even while, in the story of my own life, there was a letting go of the egoic need to know and to get my hands around everything.

There was also an opening up to a mysterious world in which all kinds of people who were obviously less mature than me in certain respects had things to teach me. I became a universal student, and wonder opened up in a whole different way. That became a healthier relationship to the whole matter.

Rick: Reportedly, Nisargadatta once said that the ability to appreciate or embrace paradox and ambiguity is a hallmark of spiritual maturity. I think in that respect you’re very mature.

Just a final note on Adi Da, and then I really want to move on to your book, because that’s what’s important to talk about here. Do you find that Ken Wilber’s lines-of-development idea is a helpful tool for understanding somebody like him?

Terry: I feel like Ken Wilber’s lines of development idea has been enormously helpful in understanding a lot of the contradictions around pretty much all brilliant and awakened but sometimes apparently flawed teachers. My understanding of Adi Da is not… I do not reach for Wilber’s lines theory in order to explain Adi Da to my satisfaction.

What I saw in Adi Da was that some people—the usual line is that people see him using the “I am” of God and the “me” of God so aggressively, talking about “breathe me” and “feel me” and “awaken to me” and “notice me.” He’s always speaking in the “I am” of the ultimate, very much with the Jehovah archetype: very forceful, very demanding, sometimes seeming even like an angry, or at least displeased, white male God figure.

There’s a lot in the psyche of the time that reacts negatively to all that, and so people want to just look upon him as a terrible narcissist. It’s understandable, and it’s a way of integrating a certain level of understanding, but people don’t generally fully realize that his dharma is among the most…

Ken Wilber has called it his favorite spiritual writing of any era and any tradition ever, and has said nobody who’s a serious student of spirituality, religion, sociology, and several other fields can afford not to be a student of Adi Da. The quality of his writings is better compared to a school, like Soto Zen or Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhism, than to a single individual.

He has an enormous richness, and he was always more profound in silence than in words. His art speaks to it. He’s an enormously significant being, and I’d recommend, for the people who are most serious about radical awakening, that there’s a potency in what can be gained from exposing yourself to Adi Da that is really not available anywhere.

I remain primarily grateful and positive, but I have only been able to arrive at this looseness and this freedom after having hated his guts and felt that he ruined my life, and doing somatic psychotherapeutic work where I’m screaming in pain and hating his guts and feeling like I had to kill him in order to regain my pure connection to everything that he had given me.

So I’ve gone through so many different perspectives on this, and I know that others need to do that too. The discussion of an analysis that puts it all into a certain picture that we can then be comfortable with feels to me like a cop-out.

The encounter—at least with Adi Da. I don’t know what it was like to be up close with Maharishi, and I don’t know what it was like to be up close with Osho. I know what it was like to be up close with Adi Da.

He made claims that were the most ridiculously grand: no one had ever been enlightened as Adi Da. This is part of his trouble, of course, these high claims. But my direct experience of him was so stunning, so off the charts, that some part of me says, “Well, I can see how socially unacceptable, how useless in a way, it is for me to believe that he is the most ever, and how problematic that will be to my relations and my ability to achieve a commonality of view with any of the people I would want to be in discourse with.”

So I get why it has to be rejected, or at least looked at as preposterous. Another part of my direct experience is, “Wow, that was so mind-blowing. I don’t think—has anything like that ever existed on the face of the earth? Whoa!” He says, “Nothing like this has ever existed on the face of the earth.” Something in the naive perceptual mind kind of says, “Well, maybe.”

There’s not a knowing on my part that that’s just some pathology. I think reducing these great beings either to a pathology or to an ontological deification status that we then have to believe in and build a mythology around reduces our options tremendously.

If we’ve been touched by something transcendental, it has initiated us and asked us to become a reflection of the best human qualities that our nervous systems can conduct and express, and that is all I need to know, really.

Rick: Okay, good. I think a good general rule of thumb is that trying to reduce anything to black and white or to pin it down with any absolute certainty is sure to miss the mark and to fail to really do justice to the complexity and nuanced nature of things.

But having said that, let’s move on to your book, because we have a lot to cover. It’s a rather big book and has all kinds of interesting stuff in it.

Climate Change and Converging Global Crises

Rick: I guess the main starting point for your book is the premise that we’re in pretty serious trouble, particularly because of climate change, but there are a number of other things that could do us in as well. They’re all kind of ganging up on us at once, and most people don’t even see it coming.

In terms of climate change, for instance, half the population denies that it’s even a problem, and even those who think it is, most of them probably don’t realize the dire potential it holds for the future of humanity, although more and more people are coming to terms with that.

Take, for example, global warming killing the phytoplankton in the ocean, which account for about half of the oxygen we breathe. If the Gulf Stream stops, which is a predicted result of global warming, it’s really going to screw up the weather in the United Kingdom. There are glaciers moving in Antarctica that could raise sea levels at least ten feet rather abruptly.

Barack Obama and others have said that climate-change-related drought helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war. We see what a hellhole that is, and the migration of human beings out of there alone is more than Europe can deal with.

Now imagine if most of the coastal cities of the world suddenly, or rather quickly, got inundated and hundreds of millions of people had to migrate. At the same time, droughts were devastating agriculture, and temperatures were rising and making places like Phoenix uninhabitable in the summertime. We’d really be up a creek, with so many things happening at once.

The economy would no doubt crash big time. None of this is far-fetched if you really look at the evidence and listen to the experts.

So you kind of start with that premise, and then you go on from there in terms of what kind of counterforce there might be in awakening human beings and in the various organizations that are being formed to help change the planet.

That’s a bit of an overly long introduction. You might want to add to or amend what I just said, but let’s maybe take that as a springboard and get into it from there.

Terry: Yeah, well, I don’t regard… I summarize them in slightly different terms from what you offered, but you pointed to a lot of factors that I think are really important.

I don’t regard that as a premise exactly. I think what’s important for us to look at is that the actual temperature readings that we see worldwide have been warming, and the actual carbon dioxide parts-per-million readings from Mauna Loa have been upticking at a rate that is worse than the so-called worst-case scenario that had been predicted by Limits to Growth back in the ’70s or by the IPCC project in the…

That’s what the actual facts of the matter are. To me, it’s astounding that you can have—well, just this last summer, less than a year ago, 15,000 scientists updated a 1992 scientists’ warning to humanity that warned humanity that there were several crucial crises that could bring an end to human-friendly conditions on the planet.

A majority of Nobel laureates signed this letter in ’92, and they updated it for 2017, 25 years later. They said that all of the crises were appreciably worse except for the ozone layer. We had done some mitigation there.

It’s actually much more complex. I know many people who believe that even if we did discover a free, cheap source of energy, and if we even discovered a way to begin to capture and sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and we actually reversed global warming, there are other trends where this machine of growth—the proliferating numbers of human beings and the consumption patterns of human beings—is hitting against the hardwired limits of an actual physical living system, this living Earth.

The way the Earth supports our life depends upon countless living forms, high and low, a whole ecosystem that we are really a part of. Human economy is a subset of natural ecology. The recognition that all of that has been destabilized critically tends to be ignored.

Those who are able to have the focused attention and the psychic courage to face the darkness tend to get to a place where they conclude, essentially, that human civilization is coming unraveled, the human species is going to either extinct itself or go to some hellish, dystopian condition, and there’s really nothing that can be done.

That set of attitudes, from my perspective, is dangerous and inaccurate because we don’t know enough to be pessimistic. We know enough based on climate science—it is a reality, and there is universal clarity among scientists. We should honor that.

Some people will say we only have five years to turn this around. They’re saying that on the basis of real calculations that we should take in with humility and learn from, for sure, but nobody knows. There is no objective way of knowing that five years from now we’ll have passed some awful point of no return, and that after that moment in time we should cease trying because everything is lost.

Rick: No, we don’t. No, for sure, but then there are tipping points. For instance, if the methane in the tundra really starts releasing much more quickly—it’s already releasing, and the pace of that could increase—and that’s 80 times more potent than CO₂. I mean, the worse it gets, the harder it will be to reverse.

Terry: Guy McPherson is one of the people who believes that we’ve already set ourselves on a course that’s going to extinguish us within many of our lifetimes, in 30 years or so. He thinks these positive feedback loops are going to take us to an overheated condition. But there’s a whole spectrum of opinions that all have some facts to back them up.

We’re encountering this in a context in which our ability to even agree upon what facts are significant and to have a coherent conversation has been undermined by the relativization of truth. We’ve all seen this most vividly with fake news, and then Trump using the idea of fake news to demonize and delegitimize the actual practice of honest journalism in order to exempt himself from any accountability or responsibility for his actions, or from true reporting of what was happening in any aspect of his life, actually.

So we’re already in that brave new world, newspeak environment in which many, many people on the left and on the right are being sucked out of any kind of frame of reference where we can have a common truth. There are real conspiracies. We’ve discovered that there was a conspiracy to kill Dr. Martin Luther King that was covered up. There was COINTELPRO. There are wild things that have gone on in our national security state that have created serious injustices—not merely injustices, but you might kind of say a swindle of the health of our national life.

On the other hand, this tendency to be so suspicious of the official lie has drawn so many of us toward something else, which is a kind of cynicism. When you think that whatever you hear, you can’t take it at face value, and you’re always peering beyond it to see the agenda behind the people who are promulgating that point of view, what has begun to happen—and this is happening in a critical way for all Americans and really most educated people—is that we’re losing our ability to have an honest conversation.

We’re losing our ability to look at what’s in front of us, to see it, and to talk about it honestly and in a heartfelt way, in which we use the best intelligence of our whole being—not just our mental and analytical intelligence, which is capable of enormous things, but which, in another sense, is rather easily fooled. It’s odd how easy it is to trick the mind. You need discernment.

There’s neurocardiology and neuroenterology. The brain and the gut are sources of will and street savvy; the brain and the heart are sources of intuition and wisdom.

Rick: You mentioned in your book that there are as many neurons in the gut as there are in the spinal cord.

Terry: Yeah, and many, many things register. The Institute of HeartMath has done some very interesting research in which we’ve noticed precognitive awareness arising in the heart before it does in the brain. There’s a great deal of wisdom.

What I put forward in the book is the idea that the total intelligence of the being is necessary and that it needs to be integrated, and it’s integrated at the very center of the being. The heart is the faculty capable of integrating that gut-level intelligence with our mental intelligence, which is absolutely crucial.

The heart is the faculty capable of integrating that gut-level intelligence with our mental intelligence.

It’s definitely not about moving from the head to the heart. It’s about moving from an exclusive focus on an analytical, mentalized orientation to the best intelligence of the whole bodily system. That’s integrated at the heart, and that’s what I call integral heart intelligence.

It’s definitely not about moving from the head to the heart. It’s about moving from an exclusive focus on an analytical, mentalized orientation to the best intelligence of the whole bodily system. That’s integrated at the heart, and that’s what I call integral heart intelligence.

So we’re in a situation right now where people who are very, very—among the people I love the most—haven’t gotten sucked in by these conspiracy theories done from Russia or Macedonia. We see others of it being done and funded. It’s becoming pervasive. There was quite a lot that was funded for many years in order to delegitimize the Clintons and so forth. Side streams of those ideas are penetrating everywhere. There are all kinds of people who now believe in Luciferian and Illuminati conspiracies.

Rick: Pizzagate.

Terry: Pizzagate. Yes. And we have some things that are—I find it, when I have looked at them and listened to the architects and engineers, gosh, it seems that it fell too fast, and maybe it did. But when I try to imagine the thousands of people keeping the secret so perfectly, I’ve made some decisions for myself that focusing on the conspiracies could, in fact, be a very, very unwise personal practice.

Psychic hygiene is, in some sense, something we all need. You meditate on a regular basis, right?

Rick: And necessarily.

Terry: It’s part of your holistic hygiene. You wouldn’t be in shape if you didn’t do that. Thinking about conspiracies all the time is not the optimal holistic hygiene for your psychic health.

Rick: It kind of gets you into a mind-state where you get to a point where you never meet a conspiracy theory you don’t like. You just kind of buy into all of them. I know people who have been meditating for decades who have focused so much on that sort of thing that they think freckles on your skin are some kind of alien nanobots, and that Obama and Mikhail Gorbachev had a meeting on Mars—and they believe it.

People in my town have said this kind of thing. There’s a guy, the biggest Trump supporter in town, who’s been meditating for decades. He thinks that the moon landing was faked and also buys into the 9/11 conspiracy. So you really can, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been meditating, get yourself way out in la-la land if you put your attention on this kind of thing, don’t stay balanced, and don’t exercise critical thinking. I guess that’s what you’re kind of saying here.

✨ Awakening in a time of crisis

Terry: I’m saying that the political issue of the 2018 election cycle is one in which the most revolutionary among us—those who are really committed to bringing awakening, who are willing to break through all the shibboleths—are being called forward.

We live in a revolutionary time. Wholeness has to reclaim the public sphere. The heart itself will not be denied and must come forward with a different kind of fierceness.

It is a time in which, in a spirit that is not only benign and nonviolent but even radically non-oppositional, this is a time for a declaration of a kind of paradoxical war, a war that says, “You’re in this lifeboat with me, and I’m not going to let you divide yourself from me. I’m demanding that you come back here into relationship. We are in this together, and that in you which becomes cynical, that in you which departs from any kind of accountable relationship to any consensus reality, is depriving me of your brotherhood and your sisterhood in a situation that we can only solve together. I need you. I refuse to accept your separation.”

There has to develop within us a new capacity, born of practice and born of real realization, to be capable of a fiercer stand. I sometimes wonder whether, in a time in which upset reaches a certain fever pitch, I was just doing something there. I was kind of expressing an aspect of realization in a mode that had fierceness in it and even a kind of edge of anger.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I’m, like you, so much more comfortable expressing and honoring the humanity and tenderness of the soul in front of me and joining with it. I’m so much more interested in shared inquiry than I am in debates where somebody wins and somebody loses. I think that the bankruptcy of adversarial discourse is on TV every night. It doesn’t take us anywhere we want to go.

Expressing anger almost feels aesthetically repulsive to me. Yet we are in a time in which everything we love is potentially threatened: the world into which our grandkids and great-grandkids might live, but also the very biodiversity of life.

We have children getting shot in schools who are coming and saying, “No, this is not okay. Defend us.” And we need to defend those children. They need elders who recognize that, in this odd moment, we’re at a tipping point.

Things have been crazy ever since the beginning of time. Evolution has always been a life-or-death struggle. There have always been reasons to think that the moment was the moment. Jean Houston has a line she often speaks: “Everybody throughout history has always thought that they were living in the time that really mattered, but they’re all wrong. This is it.”

For very real reasons. Because you see, it isn’t just global warming. There are actual aspects of globalization, aspects of cultural transitions, and even the coming together of all our wisdom traditions, which is the dramatic shift that has shaped both of our personal lives. All of those things have brought us to what can be called a tipping point—a crucial moment or an inflection point where a certain pattern of things changes its character altogether—and that calls on us to step over a threshold in our own lives.

We actually need to rehabilitate the archetype of the revolutionary. For me, the most attractive revolutionaries are people like Gautama, Jesus, or Socrates. But even in more recent years, people like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela changed the world with love.

Those examples point to something that’s needed on an even bigger scale right now, because you can kind of get your hands around anti-apartheid, British colonialism, or racist laws in the United States. But to go through a radical conversion to a sustainable, non-extractive way of life with stable levels of population, where we actually get along with each other—what it would take for that to happen is almost inconceivable.

To my way of thinking, what we can realistically hope to do is to become brothers and sisters in a different kind of community of practice, where together we might function like a superorganism, where together we would be the presence of such a one, where the next Buddha would really come into being as a sangha.

And yet it would take each of us—you and me—changing, even though you’ve had a lifetime of practice and even though I have had a lifetime of practice. In many ways, there are all kinds of spiritually fragrant, awakened expressions already in place in our beings and in those of many of our friends. All of us are going to have to change in a dramatic way if we are going to see the kind of social change that’s necessary.

It’s a change that’s global and universal, and therefore it challenges every one of us. So I’m interested in being in a conversation with awakening people who are recognizing that this injunction to be the change is a very profound one in this time, that we can only answer it together, and that this is the hardest thing to do.

We need to get very, very humble and kind of tender, because what happens now in our lifetimes matters on an evolutionary scale, on a scale measured in millions of years. In a way, we’ve hit the jackpot. Our practice could ripple forth on an amazing level. We could make a difference that could really be a difference.

Yet on some levels it seems as though the deck is stacked against our success, and here we need each other if we’re to be successful. The heart has to break open. The game of being a persona—we need to leave it behind and discover each other as brothers. I call it a brother-sisterhood.

Rick: Yeah, let me throw in a couple of points here. I’ve often said on this show that I felt that the condition of the world, whatever it may be—all the good stuff, all the bad stuff—is just a reflection of the collective consciousness of all the people in the world: the condition of their minds, intellects, hearts, and so on. They each have an influence in their lives, and it all ripples up, and we have everything we have in the world, for good or for bad.

The most transformative thing that can be done in a human’s life is spiritual evolution, and therefore spiritual development is perhaps the most influential fulcrum, or the most causal or fundamental influence, that could impact all these various things in the world.

There’s a verse in the Gita which is something like, “For many-branched and endlessly diverse are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one-pointed.” You kind of get the image of spokes of a wheel, and that people are stuck on the periphery of the wheel, and all the spokes seem separate from one another, as opposed to the hub of the wheel—the resolute intellect—from which one can see the interconnectedness of all the spokes.

And so you were talking a minute ago about somehow all coming together despite our differences and so on. The question arises: What is the solvent? What is the common denominator from which we can all be one despite our differences? Because no doubt differences are not going to go away. Variety is the nature of life, as is obvious even without human beings. Go to the rainforest or any place.

Most wisdom traditions would say that there is a common ground that we all share, even though most of us aren’t aware of it. It would seem that getting in touch with that common ground consciously, by a sufficient number of people—I think Ken Wilber mentions 10 percent or something, maybe that’s not exactly what he was referring to—could be the thing that would enable us to function not only individually but collectively from a more resolute, united level, one which would be in tune with nature, in tune with natural law, rather than at odds with it.

Because not being aware of that ground, one can easily act in opposition to or in violation of the laws of nature unwittingly. But being aware of it is tantamount to living at the home of all the laws of nature and functioning from there. If enough people were actually doing that, then these insurmountable problems we’ve been talking about might be surmounted in ways that we can’t even anticipate. So, go ahead and respond to that.

Terry: I agree with that. I mean, in a sense, you’ve read my book and you’re preaching back to the choir. I think that there are paradoxes of a lot of different kinds, one of them being—I was saying we don’t know enough to give up. But on the other hand, the people who have faced the darkness most fully, most of whom have come to the conclusion that we’re in the process of civilizational collapse, are in some ways the bravest among us because they’ve had the courage to face the impossible to face, the horrific thing that we look away from just to feel better.

I feel that we live in a culture of denial. We all partake of a certain amount of denial. I was just at Spirit Rock the other night, and there was a beautiful evening with really intelligent, deep people honoring each other and appreciating the work they’ve done together to reestablish Buddha Dharma. And yet that whole evening, you could have imagined that it took place in a completely stable and permanently sustainable, wealthy Marin County bubble of prosperity and goodness.

Rick: Because on one level, it did.

Terry: On one level it did, except for the fact that almost everybody in that room is quite aware of the reality of global warming and the seriousness of our ecological predicament. And yet we disconnect. We can’t help but disconnect, and they were disconnecting.

I think that the integral community disconnects because we have a narrative of ongoing evolutionary progress. We’re focused on getting to that next stage in culture, and we see all kinds of potentials. We don’t want to go into this postmodern narrative of gloom and doom because we can see how it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and brings about exactly what it fears.

We have all kinds of sophisticated bases for either going to an orientation of denial and a kind of mediocrity, or we have this other setting, which is apocalyptic: “Oh my God, everything is going to hell.” And I think a lot of the ecologists, the people who are really facing the darkness of what we’re doing to the living planet, have arrived at a certainty a little too quickly. It’s so understandable.

I feel, in relation to those people, like they have some things to teach me because they’ve contemplated what the implications might be of living in a culture that’s in the midst of collapse. They’ve faced some realities that maybe even I haven’t quite taken in fully.

Rick: But you’re aware of some things which they aren’t.

Terry: I want to wake them up to a beginner’s mind.

Rick: Right.

Terry: I want to wake them up to a recognition of what’s called epistemic humility. Ontology is what is real, and epistemology is how do we know it. So epistemic humility is a recognition that whatever we think we know, we don’t know it perfectly. All these perspectives are both true and partial.

So that epistemic humility makes us realize, “Oh yeah, the future is being co-created right now, and my behavior, your behavior, and the behavior of millions and billions of other people are going to co-create our shared future.” And these squeeze times, yes, they do bring out the worst in people in some respects, but they also bring out the best in people in many respects.

So that epistemic humility makes us realize, “Oh yeah, the future is being co-created right now, and my behavior, your behavior, and the behavior of millions and billions of other people are going to co-create our shared future.” And these squeeze times, yes, they do bring out the worst in people in some respects, but they also bring out the best in people in many respects.

Rick: It’s true. Whenever there’s a hurricane or a big snowstorm or something, everybody starts to love each other a whole lot more and comes out of their shells and helps.

Terry: Exactly. And that greatness of the human spirit is going to be summoned. And not only that, if you look back at the history of evolution, it’s been one miracle after another. That’s what the word “emergence” in evolutionary theory connotes. It connotes a miracle: “Oh my God, there was just dead matter and now there’s life.” “Oh my God, there was just seemingly vegetative life and now there’s culture, and how is it…”

There’s a great line from Brian Swimme: “If you leave hydrogen and helium alone long enough, they’ll eventually write symphonies and build cathedrals.” That’s emergence.

If you leave hydrogen and helium alone long enough, they’ll eventually write symphonies and build cathedrals.

And so the idea that no miracle is possible and we are definitely just bound to collapse, well, I think that’s concluding too much too soon. I’m hanging in here for some more miracles. In fact, I’m looking at how I can make my own practice and my own relationships a kind of lightning rod that will attract the electricity of new evolutionary emergence, where new amazing things can come into being.

Rick: Yeah, what was that thing, the mycelium or something like that in your book, the mushroom things that grow underground and then all sprout up when the time is right? Is that what it was called, mycelium?

Terry: Yeah, it’s called the mycelium.

Rick: Mycelium, right.

Terry: And it’s the root structure of all fungal forms, and mushrooms grow in the earth. You know, there are fungi that grow on dead trees. They have mycelium too. Even the stuff in your fridge has mycelium. It’s just the root structure.

It doesn’t look like much. It’s just a kind of threadlike structure that’s very thin. Sometimes it’s kind of shiny, and it looks almost like a snail trail at times. Paul Stamets, the great student of mycology—an expert on mushrooms—has pointed to one that he located in Oregon that is like 30 miles in diameter and essentially one organism. It’s one plant.

Just through this mycelium distributing itself and going very, very far, you’ve got a single living being with its own DNA stretched across this forest floor 30 miles in diameter.

The cool thing about mycelium is that it has a kind of intelligence. If there’s plenty of water in part of its area and not so much elsewhere, it’ll be drawing water where it’s needed. It’ll do the same with other nutrients. It will also synergize with photosynthetic plants, and that’s actually how topsoil is created. It’s the synergies of the photosynthetic and the mycological life that create a lot of the important elements that create new soil.

It can sit there dormant in the soil for years, and seemingly there’s no life because the conditions weren’t right this season, and the next season, and the next season. But then, when the time is right, kaboom. I think you’ll bring it up in a long time, and that’s another really important part of what the mycelium is.

Rick: I was just going to say, I think there are probably a lot of things we can learn from understanding that, but it’s a great metaphor because it implies that as you’re walking through the forest, and the forest might seem like it’s in really bad shape or something, there’s something going on beneath the surface that you’re not aware of.

I’m just always aware of this when I watch the news or anything else: There’s something extremely powerful going on in the world that you’re not going to see on the news and that the vast majority of people aren’t aware of, but that is perhaps the most influential, potent thing of anything.

It’s the whole sort of awakening thing that I think is really happening in an epidemic way, but it’s so subtle and quiet and undetectable by gross instruments. But that, to me, is why I’m optimistic.

Somebody like—what’s his name? Guy McPherson or something? I don’t know what his orientation is—but you can take a certain set of facts and get totally bummed out and feel like we’re doomed. But you’re not taking into account, as you’ve been saying, all the factors that are actually in play.

I think that’s a big one, and it may be rising to the extent that it seems to be, much more rapidly than at any time in history—the whole awakening thing, the interest in enlightenment, the availability of these kinds of teachings—precisely because it’s needed now to counterbalance the dire circumstances that we’ve created for ourselves.

It’s kind of like God’s response, or nature’s response, to the mess we’ve created. Out of mercy, or whatever, an opportunity is being offered—not a certainty, but an opportunity—for us to turn things around. It wouldn’t even be us turning things around. It would sort of be the Divine turning things around through the participation of enough willing people.

Terry: There are multiple sources for what might turn things around. I think that technological breakthroughs, radical technological breakthroughs, are not unlikely. Technological progress proceeds exponentially, and exponential change is completely nonintuitive.

If the amount of water in your swimming pool is doubling every second, you’re going to see just a few drops at the bottom of the pool, and then suddenly, when you get to a place where there’s like one-thirty-second of the pool has water in it, boom, eight seconds later the pool is full. It’s so fast how exponential change and exponential progress operate. So the idea…

Rick: Before you go away from that point, I just want to interject that in nature, phase transitions are a common phenomenon. Water can be at 99 degrees centigrade and it looks like nothing much is happening. One more degree and it’s boiling. In the heart, 1% of the cells are known as pacemaker cells. They regulate the functioning of the whole heart. In a laser, the square root of 1% of the photons, if they align coherently, trigger the rest to align, and it becomes a laser. So there can be sort of a move toward a certain tipping point of coherence, if we want to call it that, which is imperceptible, but which, once reached, could result in a rather sudden transition.

Terry: That’s right. And yet we have to relate to that in a mature way. One way of relating to that is to say, “Oh, good. I don’t have to feel hopeless, and I can kind of just go on as I have been and feel more of a sense of hope.” And I don’t think that’s the best way to relate. I think that the sense that this tipping point really is a call for us all, each and all, to change now, dramatically. You can’t get away from that. This is a fierce moment. It’s a fierce moment of confrontation. We were lucky enough to live, you and I, through the ’60s and the ’70s and the ’80s.

Rick: By the skin of our teeth, yeah.

Terry: We’ve seen an awful lot, and we’ve been changed by it and uplifted by it and all the rest, but now we’re in a moment where all of what we learned under those circumstances has to be brought to bear as best it can be. So it’s not a matter of going back to being a comfortable middle-class American in Trump’s United States and just kind of tuning out the negativity of the news and the ugliness of Trump and keeping your attention and your meditation and kind of positive visualization and hoping for the best.

I think that this year, in the 2018 elections, it’s important for every one of us not just to vote, but to try to register other people to vote, to do what we can to influence things. We’re in a moment in which something that you and I took for granted almost all our lives—that we would always live in an open, pluralistic, relatively wealthy Western democracy—all of that is no longer something we can take for granted. And the idea that we have a social responsibility to express the disposition of awakening in action, it’s upon us in a new way.

So that’s why my book has—it’s a deep meditation on—the very heart of what has been revealed to my heart is that there is no dilemma, that everything is okay in the deepest possible way. And to the degree that I’m awake, I’m grateful. To the degree that I’m sane, I’m able to trust the process of my life in a kind of unconditional way.

And to the degree that I am really rooted in the fact that we’re in this crazy moment in life and culture, understanding it in the right way is crucial, because it’s so easy to hear all this bad news and lose touch with your fundamental well-being and just think we’re all in trouble and be anxiety-based and be bringing that presumption to everyone around you instead of bringing something really rooted in the wholeness itself.

Now, it’s true, the speed of change has begun to create this self-accelerating complexification, fragmenting influence on everyone and everything. This is why, in the book, the themes of fragmentation and wholeness are so central. I think that in the book I’ve been able to forge a much more inclusive synthesis of a lot of fundamental bottom lines of our reality than I have seen anyone do before.

I hope that that makes this book a usable catalyst for the reader to recognize that this tipping point is a little like getting your draft notice from God: “Okay, now it’s time to really bring—you know, you’re an elder now, Rick—and all the wisdom and all the goodness and all the capacity that has been built up by your years of practice, flawed and beautiful in whatever mix they are, are needed.”

I can’t respond. I’ve been given my draft notice. I have to be the change that’s needed in this place, except the only way I can do that is with others. I actually need you. I need your brotherhood. How can I break through the usual Rick persona, Terry persona, the way in which we’re two atomized, different beings, and your agenda, my agenda, and—we’ve all seen the limits of human relations. We love humanity, but people are a lot of work.

What would it be for us to recognize this draft notice in a way that allows us to become a coherent force through which wholeness can reassert itself in a time of fragmentation effectively? It’s important that we do. So the most exciting conversation that I would love to have with you right now is for us to inquire together into how we—we’re facing questions for which nobody has adequate answers. Humanity is up against challenges nobody knows exactly how to solve.

Things are far too serious for us to lose our sense of humor.

To be with those impossible questions like a koan and let that koan change our consciousness, and to do it together in a shared inquiry, living the questions like Rilke said to the young poet, loving the questions, letting the questions change us. That’s a different kind of conversation that we don’t know much about how to have, but we kind of have to try to have.

Rick: Yeah, well, I think you and I are kind of on the same page, and we’re kind of doing it right now, what you just said. But what I found interesting in your book is all these different groups that get people together from polarized ends of the political spectrum and enable them to begin to see shared ground and to see that each of their perspectives has something to contribute, and that they’re not as at loggerheads as they thought they were. That kind of thing could proliferate and become much more common, and it could have a hugely healing influence on the political discourse and all kinds of things.

Terry: Yeah, and you can do that. All you have to do is find a conservative person who is willing to engage in an honest, open conversation, and you bring another liberal and he brings another conservative, and the four of you can have a living room conversation or a civil conversation through one of these networks that are already established. I’m getting into doing that myself.

Rick: I play pickleball with one. The other day he was telling me about some spiritual teacher, and I said, “Yeah”—he’s a well-known spiritual teacher from another country. And he said, “Oh, he’s so conservative.” You know, he actually suggested that we put landmines along the Mexican border? And the guy said, “Well, I haven’t heard that, but I’m very conservative.” Nicest guy in the world.

Terry: So I have friendships with people like that. We don’t often talk politics, but it would actually be interesting to sit down and actually talk politics and see what kind of mutuality we can find.

I think that it’s an art, and even if our first attempts don’t get where we would hope for them to get, we can’t give up. We have to learn from them, adjust, and develop better skillful means, because we’re living in a time in which our ability to make our collective decisions wisely has been, in some sense, delegated to the neoliberal elite.

That’s the bureaucrats in Belgium, Washington, New York, and all the coastal areas where I live, and they didn’t stay in touch enough with the experience of average people in any of the countries. We also ended up having to discover that ethnic identity is a deep, deep matter, and tribalism doesn’t just go away, that there’s an enduring polarity between globalism and nationalism, or we could call it tribalism.

The Tribal Roots of In-Group Division

All those millions of years that we were hunter-gatherers, our membership and our group were the most important things about our identity. Many of us willingly went to human sacrifice to be killed in order to propitiate a god who would then help our tribe not have such a tough time. We have that kind of a history in our DNA: this in-group, out-group, us and them. It’s very, very important to the human psyche.

We’re not going to evolve to a place where we just go straight to a universalism where everybody’s in the same multi-ethnic tribe. There’s something beautiful about African American culture. There’s something beautiful about Dutch culture. There’s something beautiful about German culture. There’s a soul to Jewish culture. It will fight being homogenized out of existence. It will not go away passively.

No group of people would willingly, in a circumstance of global difficulty, let large numbers of people come across their borders and draw them down to the lowest common denominator if they have a relative condition of privilege. They’re going to try to defend the sanity and well-being that they have, and that throwing up of walls is structurally understandable. Our new challenge is going to be to honor that in a whole different way than we ever thought we had to.

I was a globalist all this time. I was always a liberal. I was raised in an interracial community. I always saw us good, kind of liberal, diverse, culturally diverse people as the us, and those mean white racists as the them. That’s how I grew up in the co-op.

But in my adult life, I’ve just followed what I was interested in, which was spirituality. I found my way into environments and the kind of spirituality that spoke to me, and that was predominantly white. There were always some people of color in the mix; it wasn’t purely white, but I didn’t realize that in some ways, in my adult life, these little preferential choices took me into a very lily-white world.

That white world reflects something in me: “Ah, I’m a racist.” There’s racism even in somebody with all these attitudes, even though I marched in civil rights, even though some of my dearest early childhood friends are of every different race.

So this deeper patience with the ethnocentrism and the racism of one another is a part of us being able to make peace. I’m curious right now whether, just as there are sometimes closed conversations in which only Latino Americans are invited to a Latino Studies meeting or African American meeting, there might be some version of a conversation among white Americans.

The meetings among white Americans are always kind of racist, and us more enlightened white people would never go and participate in a white-identitarian gathering. But what if there were some version of a conversation among white Americans where people might thoughtfully challenge the idea that white supremacists are really not doing us any favors?

The future of white people in America is going to be a whole lot better if we can find our way to advance our own tribal interests in an environment in which we respect that we’re going to be increasingly a minority too, and where we have wonderful things to offer, but so does every other group.

Living in a harmonious relationship, and not having the stain of racist behavior and the karma of that on our heads, is going to be crucial. I’ve worked closely with Thomas Hübl, and he’s done some very interesting work with the collective trauma that Germans have experienced after having committed the atrocities of the Holocaust. It’s a weight on the psyche of every German individual, a very powerful dark shadow, a cultural inheritance.

We white Americans do not want that as our destiny. Some of what’s going on in our world right now could have us inheriting it, and those of us who really want a different future may need to be able to swallow our sense of superiority and speak to white Americans who are supporting Trump and embracing their racism, and discover that we have a brotherhood and a sisterhood with them as well.

We owe it to them and ourselves, but also to people of other colors and people who are not part of that, that the conversation among white people reflect all of what is best in the whole spectrum of the souls of white Americans.

So I think we’ve got a lot of very new and kind of puzzling challenges. Those are impossible cultural challenges. I don’t know that I could do that very well today, but opening up to a recognition that the profound awakening of my being, that I was given by grace, has to translate itself into a new kind of efficacy and make a difference, even in territories that seem a little weird and unfamiliar and scary, where I think, “Gee, I don’t know how to do that.”

Rick: I heard a story on NPR, and I just looked it up as you were speaking, about a guy named Daryl Davis, who is a Black blues musician. For the past 30 years, he has made it a project to befriend members of the Ku Klux Klan.

He has met them in restaurants and ended up meeting with them in his home or in their homes, and so far he’s gotten 200 Klansmen to realize that their hate may be misguided and to give up their robes. I think he actually collects the robes—yes, he does. He collects the robes and keeps them in his home as a reminder of the dent he has made in racism by sitting down and having dinner with people.

So people can look up that article if they want to read more: Daryl Davis. Kind of a cool little example.

I just want to comment on one thing you said, which is about the homogenization of cultures, possibly if there’s going to be any kind of unification of the world. I don’t think that would necessarily be the case. If you look at the enlightened people we may have known or encountered in our lives, they don’t seem homogeneous. They have these incredibly charismatic, lively, vivid personalities.

If you take the tropical rainforest as a metaphor, where the ground is very fertile, there’s a huge proliferation of diversity. The more nourishment available to plants, in this case, the greater the diversity and the vividness and the richness of everything. Yet it’s all kind of living in harmony with itself.

So I personally think that a world in which we’re all, or a lot of us, are aware of our common source would not actually be more homogeneous. It would be more diverse and, at the same time, more unified than the one we’re living in now.

Terry: Yeah, and how are you able to translate that intuition into your own behaviors and practice?

Rick: Well, in my own case, look at it: I’ve interviewed almost 450 people with all sorts of different philosophical viewpoints and backgrounds, and I feel a deep rapport with every single one of them. But, of course, they’re all more or less in the same genre.

Also, just in terms of my daily life, I feel a camaraderie or an affinity with just about everybody I encounter, even that guy I mentioned who is the conservative who plays pickleball. I feel a kind of harmony with people. I don’t feel like I clash much with anybody, even those who think very differently from me.

Even if I consider some of the hot issues in the news, such as abortion, gun rights, gun control, and various other issues that come up, I can resonate with the perspectives of the people who are on a different end of the issue than I am and who would vote very differently than I would about those issues. I can see the validity of their perspective.

As you were saying, you said something earlier about no one perspective doing justice to the totality. I realize that my individual opinions and attitudes don’t either, and yet, as an individual, I have them. You don’t become a kind of opinionless blob of mush if you get more in touch with your essential nature. You may be very adamant about certain things, and yet at the same time, you have a more compassionate or appreciative attitude toward those who see it differently.

Terry: You’re describing things I would say about myself too, but the really interesting question for us to rest in together, I think, is: How am I, how are you, able right now to practice in a way that goes beyond what we’ve already realized and becomes even more an agent of that kind of harmonious uniqueness in action that actually makes a difference in the practical world?

What’s the growth arc ahead of us? What are our next practices, our next learnings, our next opportunities?

Rick: Well, we don’t always know, do we? But if we just kind of keep putting one foot in front of the other, so to speak, it’s like when I was about 11 years old. My friends and I, on a Sunday, decided to walk to the next town to see the monkeys in a pet store there. We didn’t quite realize that the next town was about 14 miles away, but we started walking. It was winter—well, it was springtime, with slush on the ground.

We kept saying, “It’s just over the next horizon; it’s just over the next horizon.” We got ourselves all the way there doing that. It was Sunday, and it turned out the pet store was closed, so we turned around and started walking back. Then a neighbor recognized us and picked us up.

But you never know what’s quite over the next horizon. If you just keep on walking, you’ll find out. So my attitude is that there’s a great quote in here, in your book: “It’s never over. It’s not too late, and it never will be.” You also say, “There is no way out but through.”

My attitude is that you just keep on truckin’, and keep your spiritual and personal evolution as a high priority in your life. One thing will lead to the next thing. You never know quite where it’s going to lead, but there’s a wisdom inherent in the way the universe works that will kind of guide your steps, and you’ll find out when you find out.

✨ Taking awakening into public life

Terry: I’m contemplating getting more involved in system politics. Basically, just electing better people during the 2018 election seems very important. I think that’s an expression of spiritual practice that feels accessible and healthy. It’s kind of ordinary, sort of civic-duty stuff that makes a kind of sense as an aspect of our responsibility.

I definitely think it’s important for me to speak out. There are intelligent people who scorn voting and participating in the political system. I am willing to get fierce with them. I’m discovering that…

Rick: Well, if fierceness is going to be effective in getting them to vote—otherwise, maybe some other tactic.

Terry: That’s right, it depends. But that’s actually a little bit of a tangent, though it’s something I’m contemplating currently. I like to bring up things that aren’t fully cooked, because you actually get the juice sometimes from an idea that’s not necessarily quite ready for prime time.

My whole mode of discourse—I began to say some things about this earlier, but I got diverted in another direction—is really very much that I’m a sweet New Age guy. I don’t particularly enjoy conflict. I’m very much interested in tender, disarming, inspiring, touching, moving, evocative discourse. That’s what brings me alive the most.

Yet sometimes what it looks like in our public sphere is that all that can register is anger, rage, ferocity, intensity, conviction, and assertion. Mostly, my response to that is to just tune it out, because I find it aesthetically offensive, for one thing.

But I’ve been contemplating that there may be other moves available to us, that there is another sense in which the heart of being—the Divine itself, that which is consciousness undivided from the phenomenal play of life—is rising up. Like I say, wholeness has agency, and in the face of fragmentation, wholeness reasserts itself.

There is a sense in which the heart is, in this time, saying, “No, this bullshit isn’t going to be able to keep going on. If we’re at this inflection point, it’s time to show up with whatever it is in your being that is true, that recognizes a higher authority, and that, in a sense, is obedient to a higher set of values.”

The heart needs to speak, perhaps very forcefully. Maybe there is a necessary function for a very fierce voice, a voice that demands the very best of all of us. Maybe we need to hear that draft notice shouted at us at times. Maybe we need to hear it in a form that breaks through the veil and demands a different level of waking.

Now, of course, how are we going to live it together? We’re going to live it together as—how can I be love? How can we do this together as loving beings? How can we discover a way for love to be the force that we know it can be?

Now, of course, how are we going to live it together? We’re going to live it together as—how can I be love? How can we do this together as loving beings? How can we discover a way for love to be the force that we know it can be?

A love that is more powerful than anger, a love that is more authoritative than mere assertion and aggression, a love that has the strength of that gut level. Trump has gotten what he’s gotten because of that brain in the navel. He’s not so smart in the head, and certainly not in the heart. His navel is a genius.

What would it be for a heart intelligence to acquire the strength of the navel and come forward with a self-evidently authoritative voice that commands a kind of influence, authority, and response? Perhaps that’s necessary. Perhaps part of what’s percolating in us is the capacity for us to be a fierceness of a different kind.

We talk about speaking truth to power on the left, and there’s much to admire about people who have the courage to speak truth to power. But if the future of life on the planet is going to be all that we would hope for it to be, we’re going to have to go beyond speaking truth to power. We’re going to have to become capable of acquiring, seizing, holding, and wisely using power.

That is perhaps an evolutionary step that we sweet spiritual practitioner types haven’t prepared so well for, but it’s a necessary evolution. Confucius advised the emperor, and at the end of my book I talk about the ancient strategy being one of first becoming a sage and then gaining the ear of the emperor.

Bringing Wisdom into Collective Decisions

Our wisdom has an obligation to affect the temporal domain of human experience. Our wisdom has to find its way forward so that it actually helps collective decisions of large numbers of human beings to be made with some measure of intelligence, and not just intelligence, but wisdom.

We’re in a situation right now in which our collective decision-making is increasingly being made not only in short-sighted ways, but in actually self-destructive ways that are influenced by all kinds of corruption dynamics. What is it for that health to reassert itself? Because, from a systemic analysis, things don’t just fall apart without this. That which is healthy in the system is going to try to reassert its authority over the way the system functions.

Part of how it’s going to do that is through your heart, through your intelligence, your wisdom, and mine. We’re going to confront this paradox: no matter how clear I get, I’m ineffective unless I’ve found my way to a fellowship with other people who understand enough in common with me that we can act together as a “we” in a way that actually has some heft in that larger field.

These are impossible questions. These are koans. We don’t have full answers to that question, but we have to sit in that question because it’s got to be answered. And sitting in that question in a fruitful way—I feel so alive. How inspiring.

Rick: As you were speaking, I was thinking of the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the activism that arose out of their tragedy, and how brilliant and articulate, and at times impassioned, they have been in their approach to this.

And yet they haven’t resorted to nastiness or name-calling or anything else, but they’ve been really firm. When David Hogg was up against Laura Ingraham, or whatever her name is, recently, it’s like, “No, I’m not going to take this.” And then all of her advertisers started pulling their advertising.

So I think they’re a beautiful example. And also the youth of the country—maybe you and I have seen better days, or maybe we’ll still see some good ones—but if those kids are any indication of the kind of generation that’s coming up to vote and to become politicians and everything else, if they don’t sell out at the age of thirty, like many of the ’60s radicals did, then that might be one vein of optimism that we can look forward to.

I also wanted to say quickly that the examples you mentioned of Gandhi, King, and Mandela weren’t confrontational in a violent or angry sense generally, although they could become very impassioned. But they did have an adamantine determination to achieve a certain thing, and they wouldn’t back down.

That sort of quiet but invincible intention eventually triumphed over seemingly insurmountable and much more powerful forces. There might be an example for us of the kind of thing you were asking about.

Terry: Well, I think that there’s a necessary—those kids can’t do it on their own. We can cheer them, but we also need to defend them. Absolutely. And we need to create a dialogue among people our own age.

Good God, people, we’ve gotten to the place where our own kids can’t rely on us to do the things necessary to keep them safe, and now we’re grateful for their leadership. That kind of shames us into taking a different kind of action.

Certainly, the way in which certain right-wing people—I saw somebody share with me a YouTube video of a young guy, not a heck of a lot older than the high school students, with long, yellow-blond hair, wearing an InfoWars headband and viciously tearing down David Hogg, showing outtakes where he stumbled and didn’t say things right.

Rick: Yeah, and people are claiming that they’re paid actors and all that kind of stuff.

Terry: They need to be defended in a very forceful way because they are expressions of what is healthy, and what is attacking them is an expression of what is unhealthy.

These distinctions and this awareness that we’re living in a post-truth environment—Ken Wilber has written about this a lot—it goes on and on and on, and he blames it on the green meme. But there’s a simple recognition: we got to a place where we realized that the idea of objective truth was imperfect, and that we needed to have a multiperspectival understanding of reality.

But we’ve taken it too far, and we’ve gotten to a place in which we’ve relativized truth in a way that threatens to destroy our ability to function as a society. The restoration of some measure of objective truth is absolutely critical at this time in human history.

Rick: How do we do that?

Terry: Well, we have to join together with modernists. There are people like Sam Harris, or right now Steven Pinker has an important new book called Enlightenment Now, and those are all defenses of rationality.

In many cases, the people arguing for rationality are materialists. They look upon us as fuzzy, woo-woo, New Agey people who they often ridicule and treat with contempt. They haven’t been our allies, but compared to the people who are falsifying all truth, they are right now our necessary allies.

We have to be willing to unite activists, awakeners, people who are ecologists, mostly interested in the earth, people who are interested in whatever social justice issue is close to their hearts, people who care about animal welfare, and people who simply care about economic justice.

All of them—all of us—have one thing in common: without rational discourse as the basis for adjudicating power disputes in the public sphere, we’re all screwed.

So, in that sense, Steven Pinker and various other rationalist materialists are our allies, and we have to get beyond the fact that we don’t ultimately trust them because, in other moments, like in the skeptic universe, they’re trying to kill what we think is most important.

But for a time, faced with the threat of this kind of deconstruction of truth, just in the interest of creating essentially an authoritarian state, we need each other. Uniting and finding common cause around defending journalism and science are foundational.

Yes, it isn’t perfect objective truth, but it’s a whole lot better than the conspiracy du jour and “make it up yourself” approach that is tending to rule in the absence of that consensus. That’s a really, really important point.

Rick: Yeah, I listen to Sam Harris all the time, and I enjoy his conversations with Pinker and with guys like Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, when he was alive, and all that. They’re providing a useful function in cutting through a lot of the nonsense that has grown up in the name of spirituality and religion and so on over the years, most of which probably had little to do with what the founders of those religions were teaching or had in mind.

I’d love to have Sam Harris on the show if I could ever get him. But, on the other hand, I think they set up a straw-man argument with regard to God, and they’re shooting down something that the deeper mystical understanding of God wouldn’t be arguing for in the first place.

But anyway, I wanted to comment, and this kind of segues into what you started out saying in your book. I think it was in the introduction that you said the marriage of science and spirit is the big thing happening now in terms of cultural evolution, an event on the scale of the Reformation or the Enlightenment. So we don’t have too much time left, but maybe we could talk about that a little bit.

🕊️ Science, spirituality, and the living Divine

Terry: Well, I’ve worked extensively with Ken Wilber, and he offers a particular integration of science and spirit that’s really very well-reasoned and quite complex and nuanced. There are other approaches. I think there’s a very significant challenge to his approach from Jorge Ferrer and a number of other transpersonal psychological theorists who argue for a participatory integration that they think is more adequate in a variety of ways.

But in the public sphere, the most persuasive integration that’s going on right now is an atheist integration of science and spirit, in which the utility of mindfulness meditation and the idea that the self is a user illusion—that there is no self, and in some formulations that there is no free will even—is being put forward as the integration, because it’s like a neuroscience integration. Sam Harris is probably the best-known proponent of that.

But it’s a desacralization. It’s an integration of—or a shearing out of—God, the living force of Divinity, from spirituality. On that basis, all the benign aspects of what spirituality can confer are imagined to be able to be included. But what is subtracted from that is the juice that powers all of the most dynamic religions and spiritual practice communities in the world, and that juice is the direct experience of the Divine at one or another level.

One of the things that I would like to do with you before we finish—this has been, in the range of things that I do, perhaps a more intellectual conversation—is talk about something that I will often do when I’m teaching my own events. I will begin them with a period of prayer.

I sometimes explain, if I’m with people who are atheistic and/or people who don’t like prayer, or who think prayer is petitionary and dualistic and kind of imagines a nonexistent God to pray to, that I’ll identify this idea from Integral. I coined it the three faces of God.

Three Ways of Knowing the Divine

There is the I-am-ness itself, that we can find our way into through meditation. That is first-person. Then the contemplation of the natural world, or philosophical contemplation of the patterns of existence, draws us into a contemplation of the patterns that connect reality and the kind of divinity there. We see God just in the light of the sky, the arc of the flight of the bird, and the music of the natural sounds around us.

Then there’s a second-person spirituality, which is when we recognize that our most primal relationship—the one that has never left us, the one who gave birth to us and the one into whose arms we will disappear as we slide through that final tunnel in the process of our dying—is here right now as this mysterious now moment.

This now moment, as soon as I cognize it, is gone, but I can keep opening to that one, and that one is my Beloved. When I turn to that one, I notice a quality of joy and gratitude. I notice that I am richly, richly blessed.

In a way, I’m amazed that if I’m really present to you—you who are beating this heart, you who are the spark at the root of the intelligence of me or anyone hearing my words—if I am really present to You, I’m amazed. I’m blown away. Every hair on my body stands on end in astonishment.

If I’m really present to this moment in its totality, there is a glory. There is an awe. There is an amazement. There is a joyous apprehension. And there is force to this.

When you somehow, through the agreement and the practice of a whole group of people, are really summoned into the space, the living God stands forth. And the living God is not just the absence of something else. There is grace. There is a kind of spiritual fragrance. There is awesome beauty and remarkable sacredness, holiness, sweetness, and a fierce force.

There is something utterly uncompromising and yet incredibly generous that comes forward. In the presence of that Divinity, I discover something different about my relationship to reality. And so this presencing of God is an absolutely necessary part of any real conversation about spirituality.

Bringing together science and spirituality in a way that denatures the living force of God, and the sense of glory and devotion and gratitude, and the sense of, “How can I be of service?”—this is the thing that evangelical Christians get right.

They have a juicy relationship to God. They accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and they have a loving exchange and engagement in their community of practice where they feel some measure of this Divinity. That may be mixed with a bunch of beliefs and interpretations, the infallibility of Scripture, and a whole bunch of other things that I don’t share, but the juiciness of their relationship to the Divine, I celebrate that.

I want more juiciness in people’s relationship with the Divine. That’s where I would say we have an important disagreement with somebody like Sam Harris. He’s not going to be an advocate for that juicy presence of the Divine, and yet that’s an essential part of the term.

What I’m saying is that what we’re involved in now is negotiating the terms of the synthesis that’s going to dominate educated Western culture in the time ahead. There’s a very strong advocacy now for an integration that is essentially atheistic.

I regard Sam as an ally in culture and politics. I was just recently, a few minutes ago, saying that we all have to unite around the restoration of truth and objectivity in science, which I know he would heartily agree with. But on this point, I think he’s tended to be willing to leave out something hugely essential and central, and that’s where I would fight a battle for God—for all of us learning that, you see, there’s room in a nondual, profound, radical conception of spirituality for an incredibly juicy, passionate relationship to God as our intimate Beloved, and for devotion to rise up in a whole rich and profound way.

It’s not what you’re going to see at Wisdom 2.0. It’s an essential dimension of what true spirituality really is. When you’re around even a Buddhist teacher in a nontheistic tradition, the quality of the room is as if the angels are all there. There’s a shower of light in the room; there’s a quality of sweetness.

Let us not allow that sacredness, that holiness, to be rationalized out of any final synthesis of science and spirituality.

That ineffable siddhi of sweetness and generosity and love and forgiveness and humility—that sacredness, that holiness—let us not allow that to be rationalized out of any final synthesis of science and spirituality.

Rick: I think there are stages of spiritual development, and there is a valid stage at which God isn’t too relevant to a person’s experience. There may be more of a sort of flat absolute: no self, no free will, and the relative world is insignificant. That could be a part of it, a sort of flavor.

But maybe one can get stuck there for a lifetime. There are developments beyond that which hopefully one will eventually realize. In Sam’s case, he’s an ardent spiritual practitioner and has been for many years. I don’t know what the nature of his practice is. It’s one that, no matter how ardently he pursues it, will never result in the kind of appreciation of the Divine that you’ve just been articulating.

On the other hand, maybe it will, and he’s like a guy with one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat. Eventually, the boat is going to move, and he’s going to fall in the water if he practices diligently enough. So that remains to be seen. He’s still a relatively young man.

Definitely, the best-known nondualists, such as Shankara, Ramana, Nisargadatta, Papaji, and all of them, were highly devotional characters. They weren’t content with just a sort of flat, absolute perspective.

There’s something I want to throw in here from Carl Sagan about religion and science. This is a quote I picked up from our friend Michael Dowd. Sagan said:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought. The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant”? Instead they say, “No, no, no, my God is a little God and I want Him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe, hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

I really resonate with that quote. To my mind, when I think about what science tells me about a little bit of my fingernail—what it actually is, how many atoms are in it, and how perfectly orchestrated those little atoms are—and the hundred trillion cells in my body, each one of which is as complicated as Tokyo, and how they are all replicating themselves and repairing themselves, it’s like God is hiding in plain sight.

Every iota of the universe is a divine mystery and dance that is awe-inspiring. You used the word “awe,” and we wouldn’t know all that if not for science. So scientists may not have known they were doing it, but I think science has given us an appreciation of the vast intelligence of the Divine that we couldn’t otherwise have had.

Terry: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that in a very natural way, many, many, many people are just growing into that sense of a rationally and scientifically informed understanding of the miraculous and wondrous nature of both the consciousness, the unmanifest dimension of reality, and every bit of manifestation, consciousness, and phenomena.

I also want to presence another thing with you before we finish. Rick, it feels—

Rick: Before you do that, a question came in from someone. Should I ask it now or after you say this?

Terry: Go ahead and ask the question.

Rick: Yeah, who knows? Maybe it will even relate to what you’re going to say. This is from Mario in Naucalpan, Mexico. He says, “Isn’t a lot of what you’re talking about the birth pains of second tier? I dig the fact that it’s being discussed.”

You know what second tier is? I don’t know. Is that a Ken Wilber thing?

Terry: Yes, it’s a term in integral theory. The idea is that there are two different kinds of higher consciousness that we often talk about. One of them is waking up, which has to do with waking up from our identification with the body, the mind, and all the false boundaries that hold us. We wake up to our universal nature, and it ultimately results in higher and higher samadhis and nondual awakening. It’s radical.

But there’s another kind of higher consciousness that has to do with the evolution of the very structure of the way we make meaning. We can see that this has evolved culturally. There was a time when we were pretty much like other animals, a kind of archaic period. Then there was a time when we were living in a magical world and doing sacrifices. We had tribes, myths and poetry, and some beginnings of music and human culture.

Then there were power gods and warrior states, and we evolved from that. Then we got to the place where we had real religions and traditions, and a kind of conformity to a traditional worldview, out of which you would be an obedient member of your community. You’d make sacrifices for God and country. You’d know your place.

A lot of those traditional values are still very important. They’re a big part of heartland values in rural America and the Republican Party. That’s a big part of current culture: traditional values.

But then there evolved the Enlightenment, rationality, science, the competitive marketplace, and modern values, and then, out of that, postmodern values. Now there’s a second tier of that kind of growth just about to become possible, and that begins with an integral stage of consciousness.

There’s a color coding of these. Teal and turquoise are the first two integral stages. This evolution of another tier has a spiritual quality, even though the first thing I talked about—the higher states of consciousness—has more to do with the spiritual paths. These new worldviews that are evolving represent the structures through which we make meaning.

The structures get progressively more complex and nuanced. As they get to a certain level of complexity, instead of becoming like a super-complex, digitized thing, they begin to become more holistic. Instead of becoming hyper-complex, they become nonlinear in their quality. As they become nonlinear, there’s something kind of spiritual about that, and that’s one of the features of a second-tier mind.

But individuals operating at a second-tier level, or writing a book at a second-tier level, or having a conversation at a second-tier level, is a whole different thing from an actual culture operating at second tier.

In part one of my book, which I think you read, I point out that not just Ken Wilber, but also some very good recent research from a university in New York, has identified that when a new clarity that has some kind of functional validity reaches acceptance by 10 percent of a population, it starts to spread like wildfire. The speed with which it takes over everybody is amazing.

It was only 10 percent of the colonists in America who were modernist, but when we wrote a constitution, it was written with modernist presumptions at the core of it: rational, universal rights of man. It was world-centric in its disposition.

So we’re at the point now where it may be that we can see this bigger, larger-scale cultural transition—except that’s if we just look at what’s happening at the leading edge of culture. If we also look at what’s happening at the trailing edge of culture, and the degeneration and regression that are also threatened, what we’re seeing is all kinds of reasons to fear that not only aren’t things going to take a leap to a new, greater possibility, but that they’re going to take a dive to something much, much uglier and worse.

That seems to me to be the mechanism out of which—I am sounding the alarm with this book. The last words in the book are “It’s time,” at the end of the last chapter.

I am willing to go out on a limb. When was that tipping point? Was the tipping point six years ago? Is it going to be in ten years? Exactly when is everything crossing? We don’t know.

We know enough to know that approximately now—good God, we’ve got Donald Trump as the president of the United States. What does it take for us to recognize that the critical threshold where we inherit a new responsibility is upon us? If we take that seriously, everything changes.

There’s a book by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, about global warming. Well, we’re in a moment in which this changes everything, and it doesn’t even just reduce to global warming. I appreciate many things about her critique, but it’s basically an economic critique, and it focuses on capitalism.

What we’re dealing with right now is a necessity for whole-systems change, and it’s going to require a different kind of consciousness brought to bear. It’s going to require the spiritual practice of everybody who ever hears this: whatever we’ve built in terms of a degree of coherence, sanity, and depth, and an understanding that who we really are is bigger than our atomistic identities, that’s absolutely crucial at this moment in time.

For us to recognize and really get that we’re being given our draft papers, that’s one of the purposes of the book. I want this book to confront the reader and wake the reader up enough to say, “Okay, so my practice has to find its way into that outer world. I’m at that point now in history and in my own maturity where the inner work and the outer work are not two.”

I want people to also recognize that we need each other, and that our practice can’t be atomistic and just individual. We’re going to have to find and forge communities of practice where we actually grow together, and we get that that’s essential, too.

I want people to also recognize that we need each other, and that our practice can’t be atomistic and just individual. We’re going to have to find and forge communities of practice where we actually grow together, and we get that that’s essential, too.

So I’m hoping that this recognition that now is the time can be received in a way that doesn’t draw us back to our old habit energies, where, “Oh, there’s an emergency, it’s all happening right now,” and we go into our fight-or-flight, sympathetic-activated state, where fear becomes prominent and we’ve got too much cortisol in our systems.

No, things are far too serious for us to lose our sense of humor. That’s one of my core lines. Things are far too serious for us to be anything less than love, and love is inquiring into how it can reclaim the human world through you.

There is a way, Rick. As good a man as you’ve been, and as great as your 440 conversations have been, this one and the one after it can be something even better and even new. There’s an opportunity for you, for me, for every one of us to become that which we are becoming even more forcefully, and to be a presence of sanity and wholeness at an even newer level.

Rick: We’re always working at it.

Terry: “We’re always working at it” is a nice, humble thing to say, but that beginner’s-mind sense of openness and possibility, and willingness to step over a threshold, is part of what’s necessary right now.

I hope that feels like an exciting opportunity to everyone who’s hearing these words, and that something in our habit energy of how we’re rolling as individuals is going to go through a shift, such that we’re going to be seeing some powerful cultural engagement of a whole different kind.

As old people—whatever it is we’ve got going—this is an interesting generational moment. Maybe our involvement in politics, maybe it’s things we fund, maybe it’s what we do in alliance with some of these people, like the Marjory Stoneman Douglas leaders of the Never Again movement. There are a whole series of intergenerational synergies that we might participate in in a whole different way.

We’ve got a chance for leadership left. Those of us who are older, and those who are young, all face a real challenge because the news is so weird and so crazy-making. We have a guy as the president who is the embodiment of all ten of the seven deadly sins. It seems like we’ve got corruption and treason at the very top of the government.

We’ve been given all the opportunities it should take to activate us, to recognize that our citizenship has to become potent in a whole new way, and that our elderhood has to actually find its way into the common life.

If we press into those existential questions, they’re impossible questions. They’re like a koan. What’s the purpose of a koan? It’s not just to get the right answer; it’s to change your consciousness, to stop you, to force you to pop into a whole other way of being.

It’s like a shaktipat, too. It’s not just a koan; it’s a cultural shaktipat. A new energy is coming in because the old way we’ve been human isn’t enough anymore. So, wow!

Rick: Toward the end of your book, you make the point that perhaps ten years from now, people will look back on Trump with some sort of fondness for having brought about the conditions that resulted in rooting out and eliminating everything that he represents. It’s kind of like a boil coming to the surface on the skin, giving us an opportunity to have it lanced and get the impurities out of the blood.

Terry: Yeah, he even looks like a pimple.

Rick: Now, before I interrupted you with that question, what was that point you were going to make? We’ll probably have to wrap it up on that, but what was it you wanted to talk about?

Terry: Well, it has to do with subtle forms of spiritual bypassing and cynicism. In the midst of all this, it makes us uncomfortable, and tolerating this discomfort and letting this discomfort grow us requires us not to take easy answers.

To go into our spirituality and bypass these larger questions is one way to cop out. To plunge into it and become a news addict, let the whole thing rattle your nervous system, and turn you bitter, confused, and useless is another mistake you can make.

To go into all kinds of conspiracy theories, get out of whack in a whole other set of ways, and depart from reality—there are so many ways we can get it wrong right now.

It’s really, really important that we recognize that this crisis is calling us each to greatness. This is an opportunity for what’s best in us to come forward.

If we take that to heart and really don’t choose cynicism—and there are subtle forms of cynicism in giving up, subtle forms of cynicism in just tending to your knitting in your own little life, and subtle forms of cynicism in almost every direction—what it takes is to regenerate your hope, your purity of inquiry, and your genuine sense of possibility.

We are the luckiest people who have ever lived because we’re given more comfort and wealth and access to information and mobility and the wisdom traditions of humanity, and so much more. At the same time, we have an opportunity to make a difference on an evolutionary scale.

We tend not to be able to take it in. It’s such a big gift, it’s like you can barely deal with it. It’s too heavy. But if we let ourselves realize that our souls chose to be here now, this is our time.

If this is our time, and it looks like this, then we must be capable of it in some way. If we just keep inquiring into how we can show up with whatever it is that is our greatest awakening, our most loving expression, our most open heart, and our most dynamic, effective way of carrying this responsibility, then we’re going to start being the brotherhood and sisterhood that all our years of practice promised.

We signed an IOU. We said we’d change our consciousness so that we could solve problems at a new level. Well, now it’s time for us to cash that check, to pay that IOU, and that’s perhaps going to be the most exciting, most meaningful year—or years—of our lives. I hope that people can see this and feel inspired, and not just burdened.

We signed an IOU. We said we’d change our consciousness so that we could solve problems at a new level. Well, now it’s time for us to cash that check.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. Well, to summarize what you just said, “Make hay while the sun shines.” The sun is shining, and this is a very opportune time for rapid evolution, both individually and culturally, and it’s happening. There’s a wave, and we can catch that wave if we so choose. It’s really a conducive time for rapid growth. I mean, the pace that we see in technological development, for instance, I think is paralleled by the pace that spiritual evolution can take if we want to be in that stream.

Terry: Yeah, and I think that I was able to synthesize an integration of a variety of different approaches to inner work. We didn’t get into it here in this conversation, but one of the things I’m proudest of is that I don’t think I’ve seen as robust and thorough an integration of transcendental non-dual spirituality with soul-based spirituality. I think that’s an important integration.

I think that integrating that with intersubjective practice, the practice of the we, and integrating the inner work with the outer work, and understanding all of that in terms of the dynamics of wholeness in play with fragmentation—I think there’s, in many respects, an operating synthesis that one can feel and practice embodied in this book.

I hope it’s going to give a lot of pretty sophisticated people who have been on the path for a long time some important additional insights by which they can even more fully integrate a lot of things they already knew into a new whole and wholeness that we can actually bring to bear effectively in a time when we’re all really needed.

Rick: I think you did a good job doing that. I mean, the book is very integral in that it integrates a lot of things that people would not ordinarily think could be integrated, and I think it does a good job at doing that, so thank you for writing it.

Terry: Thank you, Rick. Thank you for spending this time with me, and thank you for taking responsibility for all the complexities of the technical side of it, which have not always been so easy.

Rick: There’s always a challenge. It’s like, you know, every week there’s something to deal with, but that’s the way it is. No worries. All right, well, thanks, Terry.

So, to those who’ve been listening or watching, you’ve been listening to or watching another episode of Buddha at the Gas Pump. There will be many more, hopefully. Next week I’ll be speaking with Anne Baring over in the UK, whom I first saw interviewed by Andrew Harvey, and who speaks somewhat along the lines, I think, of what Terry has been saying: that we’re headed into some rather turbulent rapids.

I haven’t totally delved into what she has to say yet, but next week will be the opportunity to do that. So, I guess that’s just about it for today. As usual, I’ll be creating a page on BatGap about this interview with links to Terry’s website, his book, and his other book, so feel free to follow those links.

Just for the sake of those who are listening who might not come to the website, what is it, TerryPatten.com?

Terry: TerryPatten.com, and also NewRepublicoftheHeart.com.

Rick: Either will get you to the book.

Terry: Yeah.

Rick: All right, well, thanks, Terry.

Terry: Thank you so much, Rick. It’s been a pleasure.

Rick: Sure, we’ll be in touch.

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Thank you.

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