Dumbo Feather – February 2019

age I was bright. I liked to read, I wanted to think about the ideas that were important to

the grown-ups and I wanted to engage them in conversation. So I ended up being mentored

by a wide range of adults who were active in the peace and civil rights movements. Some

of them had been conscientious objectors during World War II. So I became very active,

a political activist. I founded an underground newspaper and I was active in draft resistance

and students for a democratic society, and organised demonstrations in the Chicago area.

Then at college there was a moment when I had led a group of three or four thousand

people to march on the President’s home and saw a woman in a window who I think was

his wife, obviously distressed and feeling assaulted and pulling down a shade. In that

moment I realised how arrogant I was. The demonstration was about divesting in South

Africa during apartheid, yet I had inadvertently brought a kind of frightening violence

into this woman’s experience. I was careless. I was an arrogant adolescent. And that was

what was obvious to me. That moment was significant. It set me in another course that

led me to the human potential movement. I then had some profound experiences where

That meant having a transformation of my consciousness. The revolution had to begin

with me. So through that I found my way to Adi Da Samraj who was my root guru. I lived

in his ashram for 15 years. And that was also a very blessed opportunity because although

he’s a very controversial character and a very difficult man in a variety of ways, he was an

authentic teacher and I was able to go through a very profound school both of learning

and of practice. It was a very intensive approach where pretty much all of life was seen

to be a practice. I really woke up to the divine in a way that had never been apparent to

me. And it was a transformation of my consciousness. But that ashram became more

conformist as it was establishing itself, and I began to feel suppressed. So one of the most

difficult things I ever did was to leave that gathering. And out of that I found my way to

creating a business that I grew and sold which was called “Tools For Exploration”—selling

consciousness technologies. That was when my son was born, when I built my family,

when I became strong in a more ordinary middle class way. Which was also important to

my character development. But then after we sold the business I found my way into writing

what was actually an early draft of A New Republic of the Heart. It was 20 years before I

wrote the final book. I brought it to the person I respected the most in the world at that

point as a philosopher, Ken Wilber, and he invited me to join with him in the international

integral movement, this was the early 2000s. That produced the book I co-authored with

Ken and Adam Leonard who’s now at Google and Marco Morelli, Integral Life Practice.

Since then I’ve been teaching an integral approach to practice. The core idea is that practice

isn’t just about your internal consciousness but it’s also about exercise and diet and sleep

and your relationships. It’s an integral matter. It includes all of life. But of course my roots

in a sense of social commitment are very strong, and the speed with which our crisis of

fragmentation was progressing, particularly our ecological predicament, began to transform

my perspective on what practice needs to be. That’s why I wrote the new book, A New

Republic of the Heart. The whole human race is getting a shock of energy, one that can be

I realised that the point was not trying to gain

the love and approval of others but to actually

become a presence of love, and that meant

reformatting the hard drive.

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TERRY PATTEN

DUMBO FEATHER