TERRY PATTEN PURSUES DEEP HAPPINESS
SUBJECT Terry Patten
OCCUPATION Author and teacher
INTERVIEWER Berry Liberman
PHOTOGRAPHER Ramin Rahimian
LOCATION San Francisco, US
DATE February, 2019
ANTIDOTE TO Self-imposed limits
UNEXPECTED Founded an underground newspaper
Terry Patten’s book, A New Republic of the Heart, an ethos for revolutionaries, is a magnum opus of such awesome significance at this time on the planet, I’m still processing the ideas within. Fundamentally, it is a call to action, for, as Terry says, “We are alive at game time.” We are at a tipping point that it is imploring us to write a new agreement. As I was reading the book, I kept underlining every second sentence, ear-tagging every page and then putting it down just to absorb a chapter before continuing. Then I came to a sentence that has stayed with me in equally disturbing and inspiring ways ever since: “If it is too late, we can at least write the end of the human story well.” I had not, until reading that sentence, ever truthfully considered the possibility that all endeavour to save, support, sustain, pivot and change the world may come to nought anyway. That it was not actually the goal of change which was the point in the first place. That how we live, the quality of our contribution to this period of history, matters most. It is, in fact, all we have. The book distils this idea further: “No matter what lies ahead, it is tremendously important that we participate in ways that express our highest character and values.”
Terry is a philosopher, author, activist, teacher and entrepreneur who has dedicated his life to healing our global ecological and sociocultural crises through higher consciousness and activism. He has spent large periods of time in intensive spiritual practice and emerged as a leading voice for integrating inner work with outer action and restoring wholeness to our systems. When I met him, I was surprised by his humanness. His ideas are so big and so whole-heartedly expressed I imagined an otherworldly figure. It wasn’t the case. I had prepared questions for our conversation but where we went was so vast and unexpected I didn’t follow any of them. Once immersed in a dialogue with someone like Terry, you really just have to go with what happens in the moment. I leaned back into it and let it take me to new places in my mind. This work is the deepest end of the pool.
“Every one of us can find ways to magnify love and sanity and beauty and truth and human connection,” Terry writes. That’s what we can do about the times we live in. It’s an enormous commitment. It presumes responsibility for the predicament we find ourselves in. Can I find in myself a no-matter-what commitment? This proposition messed me up for days. In my haste to fix or solve or save, I had run anxious circles around myself, desperate to carve out a certainty. So much accumulated trauma and suffering had landed my generation and those to come in a wicked predicament with no reliable outcome. We have plundered the planet for so long, we have to reverse engineer ourselves out of this mess. We need big-hearted thinkers to help us find our ways to the biggest questions and the deepest healing.
“Certainty about a negative outcome can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can create what we would like not to happen by believing that it is inevitable. We have to suspend that certainty.”
BERRY LIBERMAN: I’m just turning on my phone recorder. Everything was working and then suddenly I couldn’t get onto Skype for love or money [laughs]. It wanted 25 different passwords that are not connected to anything else. So I’ve just been in a state of bafflement and confusion [laughs]. And actually that’s probably a good place to start. We’re asked to engage with this technology, this
