The One You Feed - Terry Patten on Inner-Work and Outer-Work

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

Terry Patten on Inner-Work and Outer-WorkSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a way, we have to let go of clinging to positivity in order to actually become the people who are really able to meet the challenges of our time. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure?

And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are

pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships and engage in thought provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.

Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Terry Patton, who speaks and consults internationally as a community organizer, philosopher, and teacher. Terry also founded the online series Beyond Awakening, along with a local nonprofit, Bay Area Integral, and Tools for Exploration, a catalog company that defined the field of consciousness technologies. He's a social entrepreneur involved in projects that include restorative redwood forestry and the innovation of fossil fuel alternatives. His new book is A New Republic of the Heart, An Ethos for Revolutionaries, A Guide to Inner Work for Holistic Change.

And before we get started, I wanted to talk about a hobby of Eric and I's. Well, it's not really a hobby, it's more of a lifestyle, but Eric and I are both avid jugglers, but we don't juggle kittens or flaming bowling pins. What we tend to juggle is jobs, in my case, multiple jobs. It's extremely difficult to make this show and to do it properly. Eric has recently quit his day job to concentrate on doing the one you feed full time. We really do need your support to keep the programming going, and while it's difficult to ask for help, it's likely even more difficult to not receive any help. Being a Patreon of the one you feed and making monthly donations is what really makes this possible. It takes an enormous

amount of work and multiple people other than Eric and I to create a podcast like this that takes so much time and comes out every week and maintains the quality that it does, which we're very proud of. And it's not just Eric and I that need your help. It's other listeners that love the show that are maybe not capable of making a monthly donation. So for those of you who are, we really need your help. We really appreciate your help. And you can go to oneufeed.net slash support to make donations. Thanks so much. And if things do work out and our time opens up and we're still making the podcast, maybe someday Eric and I can post a video of us juggling kittens or flaming bowling pins. All right, that's enough of me asking for help. Here's the interview with Terry Patton.

Hi, Terry. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Happy to be here. I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called A New Republic of the Heart, Hi, Eric. Happy to be here. time to time, which is really what's the right balance or how do we trade off this doing inner work that is important, but also not getting mired in ourselves and contributing to the world that's out there also. And that's really the theme of the book. So I'm excited to talk about all of that, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and says, Well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I've always loved that parable, Eric. I was just kind of delighted and charmed by the name of the podcast because it refers to it. And in a way, I suppose it means for me probably pretty much what it means to you and everybody else. But as I reflected, knowing that you would ask me this question, I realized that in our time, it's important to recognize something about the bad wolf, that the bad wolf is a shapeshifter,

and it tries to disguise itself as the good wolf. And it isn't always so obvious to you what you're feeding. And therefore, you have to go a little deeper. You have to interrogate the apparent good wolf and see if the good wolf is encouraging you to be charming on the dance floor of the Titanic, or if the good wolf is encouraging you to shut your ears and heart to larger dynamics that morally require your engagement. And even to kind of tune you in to whether what looks like the good wolf is causing you to sit and meditate at a time when you really need to get up and go out and engage your neighbors. So I hope that's a useful reflection that might deepen your sense of it, even though, of course, I see it in just the same terms everybody else does as well.

That's a great take. It gave me an image of a wolf sitting under a lamp in like a traditional police interrogation room, which made me smile. But it's an absolutely valid point. And, you know, I'll start the conversation by saying the book, I found it challenging to me a little bit because I am wrestling with these questions. And so I'm going to start off by reading something that you wrote that'll kind of get us kicked off here. You say, we are called to a robust and dynamic new form of spiritual activism or activist spirituality that fuses the inner work of personal transformation and awakening with the outer work of service, social entrepreneurship, and activism. So talk to me about how you end up at that point where that's what you're feeling called to write about.

Well, you know, it's paradoxical, our world right now. To some degree, you know, I think there were two streams that came out of the 60s, and I am a child of the 60s. One of them was mostly activist, and one of them was mostly focused on the inner work. And I always felt that those of us who chose to do the inner work were, in a sense, taking the high road. We were noticing that when we point at a problem outside us in the world, three of our fingers are pointing back at us. And we took to heart the idea that we had to change our own act first. in that self-focus in a way that's ultimately not allowing them to bring the depth of their character to a world that's right now in a real crisis. And I think what time it is on the planet is such that it's no longer morally justifiable to be so focused only on the inner work. And that, you know, in a way, you can't fulfill the inner work. You know, the last oxerting picture is coming back to the marketplace with helping hands.

The ultimate fruits are the bodhisattva vow. So, our inner work really does have to bring us under the circumstances of what's happening in our world right now. Brother to sister, arm to arm, you know, in contact with everybody else. Because we're all in this lifeboat together, and it's looking like it may run aground. So, let's find each other, you know, it's not a moment to just find your calm. Yeah, and there's a paragraph you have that hit me kind of right on, because I was like, yep, guilty as charged in certain cases. You say, we'd rather be resigned to it as one of the things we cannot change and

choose serenity. We like to focus on the things we can change our personal goals, dramas, trials, and satisfactions. And our personal lives always demand constant and immediate attention. So many people confidently assert that our emergency is an unhealthy preoccupation, a distraction. And, you know, that definitely hit me. And it's interesting, I was having a conversation with my son, who's just finished his first year of college, and he is certainly more on the forefront of what I would say social justice and what we would think of as activism in the more traditional sense, you know, out really fighting for social change. And him and I had an interesting conversation, where we talked about how we're both very interested in the relieving of suffering for

other people. He's going to be a sociology major. He's very focused on it from a sociological perspective. And I realized that I'm much more focused on it from a personal transformation perspective, not just mine, but working with people on changing their own relation to suffering, relieving suffering in the individual. But it certainly got me thinking about this idea and what different forms can activism take. And you talk about that a little bit in the book. So I was wondering if you could talk about what are the different ways that you see people who are engaging in the good fight, we'll say, who are also doing the inner work, but what are some of the ways that you see that

activism taking shape out in the world beyond just showing up at a protest as an example and carrying a sign? Well, you know, I have a little taxonomy of activism. I talk about in the system activism, which is donating money, helping register people to vote, voting yourself, volunteering your time, supporting a candidate, actually trying to affect political change in a direct way. Against the system activism, which is more that protest that we usually associate with the word. that protest that we usually associate with the word, and around the system activism, which is more social entrepreneurship or changing your diet or educating girls in the third world or things that really profoundly can change the world. You know, developing a new technology that would make fossil fuels less competitive. All of those things would change

the world, but they don't directly address politics. I think that there are two fundamental higher motivations that people have. One of them being, I want to self-actualize. I want to awaken. I want to be fully conscious. I want to realize my potential, be all that I can be. be fully conscious. I want to realize my potential, be all that I can be. And the other is, I want to help. I want to be of benefit. I want to make a difference for others. And I don't think that you can, in the end, fulfill either one of those impulses without addressing both. So, very often, people who are resonant with my message are already interested in activism, and I need to turn them more to the inner work. Whereas people who have been focused on the inner work, I'll point to the importance of an incarnate and embodied.

Being a force for change. We are alive in a very unique moment in our planet's trajectory, in our species trajectory. We certainly are. And, you know, what comes up for me with some of this is, and it's a tendency that I have gotten way better at as I've gotten older, and I tend to think of it being one of the wisest teachings that comes out of Buddhism, which is the middle way. Because my inclination is to always think I should be doing more on either of those fronts. I should be doing more to awaken. I should be doing more to help others, to serve in the world. How do these things come together for you in a way that doesn't feel like you are perpetually falling short really in both those endeavors? You know, in a way, we all have to allow ourselves to wake up from a trance state.

You know, Charlie Tart back in the 60s coined this term, the consensus trance, to help us recognize that our social agreements about reality are not as objective as we tend to think, and that in some sense, we're all in a shared dream. And I think right now, many people use that metaphor of being on the deck of the Titanic. Our collective circumstances is not working. Human civilization is in, you know, some people use the word unraveling. We're scared by that. We tend to get frightened. We feel grief-stricken. And if we cognize what we're facing in terms of, gosh, should I despair or should I be hopeful? Should I be positive and optimistic or pessimistic? Well, of course, we can recognize it's way healthier to be optimistic and positive. that's actually deeper and more adequate. And that in a way we have to let go of clinging to positivity

in order to actually become the people who are really able to meet the challenges of our time. You talk about this idea that on one hand from an awakening perspective or a deep spiritual perspective, you say, I can trust reality itself never to really be a problem, however much death and loss it may contain. So that's sort of the absolute perspective, right? And then you go on to say, but we must not confuse the ultimate hope we may have in the goodness or rightness of things with the false hope that they will automatically turn out well for us and our world. And you say, a radical, robust hope lies on the other side of

despair. And I always find that such an interesting thing to try and hold in consciousness. And one that depending on where I'm feeling a certain day, I might land on one side or the other of that. I very often, you know, when I hear us talk about everything is ultimately okay and right, there's a part of me that's like, well, no, it's clearly not. Like, you know, as you and I are having this conversation, there are horrible things happening to human beings as we talk. And yet there is that deeper place that says, well, from some of the awakenings I've had, that reality is fundamentally okay. And so you're really asking us to kind of hold both of those things. of a higher level of consciousness, where we're ready for a stage transition, a maturation from what I like to think of as the adolescence of the whole human species to a new kind of human

adulthood. And we're passing through a harrowing rite of passage right now, which is like any rite of passage. It scares the bejesus out of all those adolescent boys. They think they might die. And it's because they find a way to show up with what's best in their character that they become a man. And this is something that's alive in some ways. I think women are ahead of men, become know, become a true woman. But the metaphors around manhood have a special resonance because there is a kind of toughness and resolve doomed, right? We're driving the planet off a large extent, I'm in the former category. At least, I feel like as a species, we are becoming better. We are evolving. There is more kindness, there is more love, there's more justice than there moment in time in a particular place, it may not appear that way. But overall, I'm a big advocate and could spend 40 minutes talking about why that's the case. And at the same moment, we are perched very perilously in a way that we've not been before. And so it kind of feels like both are true to me. That's right. They are both true. There are real important truths that we need to take in from both the doomsayers and those who, you know, I call it boom and doom, or the cornucopian or Malthusian metanarratives. And, you know, it is true that in the terms of our current physics,

in the terms of our current economy, in the terms of our current economy, we have overshot our planet's carrying capacity, and it looks like we're cruising for a collapse. It's also true that we are improving and awakening and becoming better people and experiencing exponential advances in our technology. And the whole history of evolution has been miracle after miracle. So, looking forward, it's only sane to imagine there will be more miracles. And so, there's a basis for being heartened and optimistic. And both those things are simultaneously real. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

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No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You touched on it briefly, but I wanted to hit it a little bit more, this idea of the consensus trance. Because one way that we think about a consensus trance, so to speak, would be that it drives behavior. You know, there's a consensus and it drives behavior, but you're talking about something, and the gentleman you referenced is talking about something much deeper, not just behavioral, but in terms of consciousness itself, the way that we see and perceive reality. And awareness itself is a little like sunlight flooding every corner of the room. So, what we're talking about, though, is, you know, very – it's a special moment when somebody awakens to awareness, to a point where they can see the flashing around of their attention as a flashlight beam. And they're really free of that point of view. In our social relations, in our media, in our conversations, we're mostly exchanging perspectives, points of view. And the points of view that we know how to take and exchange and reinforce among one another have been defined by agreements over time. And when we raise our kids, we speak to our kids and we orient our kids in a way that tunes them in to our way of seeing things.

And what Tartt did was to study the way we socialize our kids and recognize finally that, wow, this is exactly what we do to create a hypnotic trance. Our consensus reality, as important as it is, you know, somebody who can't join us in our consensus reality, we define those people as mentally ill. That's insanity when you don't join the consensus reality. So, we need consensus realities, and yet they also limit us. And right now, we're in a situation in which our greater consensus reality is not orienting us in a way that's allowing us to rise to meet a new set of civilizational challenges. separation, and that the world is made up of separate things, separate people, we're separate from everything else, versus a deeper reality that points to interdependence and wholeness? I think that's certainly true. And yet, again, it's paradoxical. We're at a moment

in the complexification of human culture where we can't hold paradox and learn more by understanding those paradoxes, reveals something about the very structure of our own perspectives and the structure of reality. So we're kind of used to thinking in these either-or terms. We have to learn to think in both-and terms in a wild wild way where we can appreciate and join in a consensus reality and also outgrow it simultaneously. And that actually requires the development of not just metacognitive awareness, but metaperspectival. It's a paradigm shift. It's another stage of the evolution of our meaning making. This isn't just like a high state of consciousness where we sense our oneness with all things. It's an ability to

account for way more nuance and ambiguity and a process view. We are processes in bigger processes. All of that complexity is apparent to us, but our language is always dumbing us down into a subject-object dualistic framing of things that right now just isn't good enough to deal with the complexity of the world we're living in. Yeah, and I think that's where you talk about there needing to be evolution in the species as a whole or in more people. I think that's exactly the area that I most see us lacking as a species is in that ability to hold multiple nuanced points of view. Our cultural dialogue certainly has not been heading in that direction as of late. And it's certainly an area that a lot of people are challenged with. I think it is, I think you're right, it is a big step forward as a species, I guess, for lack of a

better way to put it. Yes, and yet, those of us who are on the path, who have been awakening, who have been doing spiritual practice, or who have been taking perspectives on the way we see things, looking at our own consciousness and outgrowing our limited patterns, there are way more people doing that than there ever were before. And our numbers are growing rapidly. And as I point out in the book, if we can get to the point where 10% of the population is operating at a different level, and I think some of the Nordic countries in Europe, you know, who are kind of at the growing tip of evolution are getting kind of close, of evolution are getting kind of close, we're going to begin to see rapid and dramatic cultural changes and political changes of a whole new order. And I'm excited about that. I think we are the tip of the spear of something that can even change the game.

Yeah, I thought that was an interesting part of the book, that the studies and the science that show that once 10% of a population really firmly believe something that it, it tends to, to bring the other folks along. Let's change a little bit. Cause I want to move, we've been talking sort of broadly and I want to take it down to the person a little bit more for a second. because one of the main things that you talk about, a fundamental change that people can make and that do make and is really important, is going from a seeker to a practitioner. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that means and why it's so profound. Yes, sure. Well, you know, when we first have a moment of awakening, whether it's through an entheogenic drug or a meditation retreat or just a spontaneous opening, we suddenly realize, wow, there's another mode of consciousness that's way, way happier, more connected. I want more of that. And we seek it. And yet, that mode of seeking, the orientation of a seeker, is an orientation that is, well, grounded in lack. It's grounded in what's missing.

You say it very well. You say the problem is that seeking actively prevents the happiness it imagines. And therefore, you really do have to wake up out of that mode of seeking, because what does the seeker do? The seeker seeks. And what is the presumption of seeking? Something's missing. So, we're looking for what's missing. We're always residing in what's missing. And as long as we're seeking, we're being someone who's missing something. allow the incredible joy and freedom and peace and happiness that come with that awakening to become our orientation, and then we notice that we are tending to contract from that, we're tending to lose that clarity, then we can return to it. We can reassert it. We can relax that contraction. We

can observe it, recognize, and reorient to trusting the wholeness and okayness that is deeper. And if we orient in that way, then instead of being a presence of anxiety, a presence of lack, a presence of problem and dilemma, we can be a presence of the wholeness that is really our condition. And that is profound for us because we're relaxing into our awakening rather than always trying to create it. But it's really profound for others because we're kind of an irritant to others as long as we're reasserting the problem. And we're a source of strength once we're practicing the wholeness that we've intuited to be our actual condition. So is it a mindset change into one of practice? Because that's very easy to sort of say, well, if you've had a little bit of an awakening, you should just live from that awakening, which is, again, relatively easy

to say. But if 95% of the time you don't feel that, right, then to your point, it's natural to seek it. What is the process process of since we can't control the experience we're necessarily having right i can't just flip a switch and say okay now i'm going to feel whole no that's right but i can i can feel a problem and be inclined to seek and reflect, huh, interesting. Here I'm feeling so separated, and yet I know I'm not really separated. Huh, what's going on here? And I can become a curious participant in this automatic process of seeking and not just be in motion, pursuing and reinforcing that sense of lack. And the more I do that, the more recognition

takes place. Recognition is really what relieves me of that momentum. And when that recognition arrives deeply in the body in a felt way, such that the wholeness and okayness that really is my situation, even if I'm going to die, which I am. But even if I'm going to die soon, or even if someone I really, really love is dying, or even if there are horrible things going on in my world, which there are, there's a kind of surrender and trust of being that is the very soul of sanity. And yes, we lapse in it, but if we're really clear that that's what's true, we can reflect and recognize this process of contracting from it. And that is what crosses that kind of infinitely, it's an infinite gulf until our recognition causes us to magically arrive on the other side of it. And that is what's possible. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned

during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian kranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel

might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a few things you wrote. I'll just read them because I think they say it better than I will say it. But you say, am I practicing separation and division or wholeness and interdependence? Where am I coming from in a moment? You know, if I can stop and look at what my orientation is. And I do think that that idea of practice is such a big one. And you've got a line, you're quoting some people that were it every time the show starts, which I mean,

I wouldn't blame them if they did. But we have a little intro we read at the beginning. And one of those lines that in there is it takes conscious, constant and creative effort to make a life worth living. And those things really resonate strongly with my personal sort of sense of the world, which is there's no quick fix. And that I say often on the show, I don't know where I first heard it, I did not make this up, but that often we can't think our way into right action, we have to act our way into right thinking. Yeah, that's lovely. Well, I totally resonate with that. In fact, you know, for years, what I've primarily done is to teach integral life practice, which is an understanding of practice that recognizes it's not

just about our internal consciousness, it's body, mind, spirit, psychology, shadow, relationships, work, our citizenship in the world. Everything is practice. And I'd like to mention something that's in the book. There's a way that's genuinely caring, really hopes for the best for every listener, for you and everyone, then I'm practicing something healthy, and I'm going to be more likely to be in that state. But if in some part of myself I'm distracted or not fully present, if in some part of myself I'm anxious or resentful, I'm cementing those neural circuits. So, we're always practicing something, and we're often practicing anxiety or resentment. We're often practicing distractibility and a kind of wandering craving.

So recognizing that we're always practicing something helps us to wake up and then bring intention to how we're living and begin to repattern our neurology intentionally, because we can, and why not? Otherwise, we tend to drift toward a kind of unconscious pattern that's ultimately an unhealthy and unhappy one. I agree 100%. The way you wrote it in the book, and you just said it right there, we're always practicing something. There's another thing that you write that I think is really helpful, because sometimes when I hear I'm always practicing something, and I'm practicing resentment or disconnection or whatever, I start to feel bad or frightened or it reinforces itself. And so there's a little

short part you have here that I found very comforting. It says, our lapses become shorter in duration. If we forget, we will remember again. And however we feel at a given moment, even if we feel terrible, even if we feel nothing at all, our commitment to practice remains unabated. So whether we have lapsed for a minute, an hour, a week, a month, or several years, we can always begin again now. And I just love that because it takes us out of the regret for I have not been as conscious, as active, all the different things that I wish I was. Oh boy, am I programming

these neurons wrong, and into, okay, I can just start again now. It's just like meditation. Just in this moment, oh, okay, I'll return my attention to the breath, or thank God we are able to be practitioners. You know, it is such a grace in our lives that practice is possible and that recognition is possible. And there's a kind of joy that comes in that brief moment of sudden recognition. Oh yeah, I can reorient and I can rest as the open intelligence

that I always already am. And as that, I'm a free presence and there's a certain sanity and happiness. And then I'm strong enough to turn to face some things that are really profoundly disturbing to my ordinary separated consciousness, but I show up for them with an entirely different quality of feeling and attention and capacity. There is a lot in the book. And one of the big things that is in the book, and you were a very early part of the integral movement, and there's so much to that, that we're just not even going to have a chance to tap. I'm basically saying that for listeners that, you know, there's a lot here, that integral idea of that, you mentioned it from the context of practice that we need to be looking

at, you know, body work, mind work, spiritual work, shadow work, or psychological work, you then go on and say, those are all individual practices, very important, but we also have to be looking at relational practices. And you say there are three main spheres of these relational practices, or you call them social praxis, intimate relationships, work and creative service, and civic participation. Yeah. Well, you know, in the book, Integral Life Practice, that I co-authored with Ken Wilber, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli, we identified four what we called modules, core modules of an integral life practice. Practices relating to the body, the mind, to spirit, and to shadow.

And as I taught it, I ended up expanding that definition to include relational practices and also a wider definition of psychological soul work. In the relational domain, a lot of us do our deepest work in our most intimate relationships with our partner. But our intimate relationships with our kids and with our parents and with our best friends are equally rich domains for us to learn about ourselves and our feelings. So, it's important to recognize that the hardest thing to do is to be related to other people. It is where we experience limits most. We're lonely.

We want more connection. Where we have the most connection, there we suffer the limits of our intimacy and our mutual love the most. It's when your dearest friend seems not to hear the thing you felt most deeply. It's when your spouse seems to just interrupt and run roughshod over something that was really important for you to share. That's where we suffer it. So, that's a hugely rich domain. of our time working. We spend most of our time engaged in trying to make some kind of a constructive contribution to our world. And our ability to do that has to be an area of constant growth and practice. It's time management. It's got to do with being our best in so many different ways, managing our attention, thinking outside the box. But it's very important that we not forget that we have this huge responsibility to the commons. We're in a time right now where our world is largely falling apart because it's, in

the United States at least, it's become a kind of inbuilt presumption that smart people game the system. Smart people find ways to cheat on their taxes without being caught. Smart people find ways to gain an advantage economically that ends up costing everybody a tenth of a cent, but the lawyer who figured it out is a multimillionaire. These kinds of relationships to the collective are sapping our collective health. And individuals who are really conscious, who begin to notice and see this, have to begin to become a presence of the health of that collective. We need to restore the broken commons. We want to be a presence of something different. And so, our engagement with our communities, even our families, our towns, our states, our nations, our towns, our states, our nations, our world, wherever we live, is actually an area where we depend on each other the most.

We really need others to be good citizens of all these different levels of community. And recognizing that as a dimension of our practice is super important, especially right now. I've said this on the show before. I started the show largely to avoid going on to autopilot and living unconsciously, as we talked about. And I really figured that most of it would be about inner work. And certainly a lot of it is. But what has been surprising to me and shows up over and over and over again is the importance of the world outside of ourselves, whether it be, to your point, our intimate relationships, our work relationships, our civic participation. I cannot say that word and we're just going to let it go. That is an equally important part of our growth and ourcrates and Jesus, who really had an impact on their whole society.

There are people like Dr. King or Gandhi or Nelson Mandela that changed the world. ideal of the sadhu, of the completely still, moveless realizer, that's not a role model for realization in our time. Real, true awakeness in this time has to find its way to express itself in a way that affects our shared life. If everything that we love is threatened, affects our shared life. If everything that we love is threatened, and in a sense it really is, that calls to the heart. It asks for us to be a presence of wholeness in the midst of this crisis of fragmentation. And the fact that that requires something new, you know, there's no perfect models for what I'm pointing to. I'm noticing that there's been an evolution of dharma, an evolution of awakening, and it continues to evolve. And those of us who are most awakened shoulder a different level of responsibility for our shared future. So, we're all being drawn into a wild new uncharted territory where absolutely our inner work is primary and it's essential that it be expressed in a way that's more than merely subjective.

Well, I think that is a wonderful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to have a post-show conversation briefly. us to wrap up. You and I are going to have a post-show conversation briefly. We're going to talk about your five categories of practice, mornings, moments, mission, milestones, and momentum. And listeners, if you are interested in hearing the post-show conversations for this and lots of other guests, you can go to oneufeed.net slash support, and you can learn about how to support the show and how to get those extra conversations. And we will have links in the show notes, Terry, to your book and your website and all that stuff. So thank you so much.

I've really enjoyed talking with you. I've really enjoyed this too. Thanks so much, Eric. Okay, bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for

supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to decisions decisions the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid join your favorite hosts me, me, Weezy WTF,

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