State of Emergence

Philosopher, pro-activist and author Jeremy Lent joins Terry in a deep and vulnerable exploration of where we are right now as a species, the underlying nature of our ecological and civilizational crises and how we frame our work to catalyze emerging potential for a rapid collective transformation toward a sustainable future. They consider how a greater understanding of the interconnectedness and wholeness of life — both its evolutionary history and the always-active physical, biological,...

Poet, teacher and interfaith chaplain Fred LaMotte joins Terry to listen, notice, honor and share the mysterious depth that emerges between them, among them and beyond them. Terry begins by reading one of Fred’s poems, and later Fred shares a couple of his favorite poems with Terry. They explore the inner processes and revelations from which luminous poetry, writing and art arises and how Fred practices in relation to his writing. Their shared inquiry continues to find its way back to a...

Futurist, teacher, and author Peter Russell joins Terry in person at his home to connect more intimately and explore several profound considerations about this human miracle and our current predicament. In a previous podcast episode (February 2020), their conversation focused on an essay Peter had written called Blind Spot, in which he explores how human creativity builds on itself, leading to an exponential acceleration of complexity that he believes inevitably exceeds our...

Social psychotherapist, political theorist & entrepreneur and community organizer Indra Adnan joins Terry to explore the politics and power dynamics of “waking up” to the “meta-crisis” and to one another. Indra is in contact with the raw nerve of possibility. While many thinkers look at our civilizational predicament with increasing pessimism, she is both brilliantly theorizing about our potential for agency and proactively applying her influence in embodied, practical, and...

This episode of State of Emergence, features an additional conversation with last week’s featured guest, the evolutionary biologist and important social theorist David Sloan Wilson. If you haven’t already listened to last week’s episode with David — episode 069, titled “A Human Superorganism — The Higher Potentials of Cooperation” — we encourage you to begin there for a more concise and concentrated overview of his ideas. In this separate unedited conversation (which took place...

Brilliant evolutionary biologist and important social theorist David Sloan Wilson joins Terry to clarify the real implications of what we know about evolution, focusing on how “multi-level selection,” interpersonal cooperation and altruism are no less central to evolution than is competition. Groups of “prosocial” individuals, under the right conditions, robustly outcompete groups of self-interested individuals. David shares important concrete principles that can be applied by...

Spontaneous poet, culture activist, and shamanic bard Stephen Jenkinson joins Terry to explore the totally disarming ordeal of bearing witness to death up close — both our individual mortality and our collective mortality. They also drop into felt contact with Terry’s present, uncertain situation — recently on his 70th birthday, Terry was suddenly informed that there was probably metastatic cancer in his lungs and he spent five nights in the hospital undergoing a series of tests....

This week, we are featuring one of our favorite past episodes — a tender, intimate, and deeply grounding conversation with the psychotherapist and soul-activist Francis Weller. We recorded this conversation almost a year ago, however, it’s feeling very alive and timely to us now. Francis’ transmissive presence and his “soul obligation to register the rips and tears of the world” — remains powerful medicine. He and Terry first turn to one another in the initiatory power of the pandemic...

Chess Grandmaster, philosopher, author, and social entrepreneur Jonathan Rowson joins Terry to explore our global, civilizational predicament from new angles — inspired by his recent brilliant essay “Tasting the Pickle: Ten Flavors of Meta-Crisis and the Appetite for a New Civilization.” They go beyond its more recognized features such as COVID, the climate emergency, and our economic and political crises to consider it as a crisis of civilizational purpose, a lack of a meaningful global...

Integral scholar and Exostudies pioneer Sean Esbjörn-Hargens joins Terry to explore an integral approach to conspiracy theories and “exo realities” — including the anomalous phenomena that challenge our current models of reality. Sean begins by sharing an illuminating series of wise guidelines for navigating our post-truth conspiracy-theory-filled culture. Then, he and Terry build upon our recent episode with Jeffrey Kripal by considering the strange territory of anomalous phenomena...

Author and professor Jeffrey Kripal joins Terry to explore the multidimensional, psychophysical nature of reality, as well as the potential of new kinds of agency, cooperation, and co-creativity. They begin by noticing the stranglehold that materialism still seems to have on our popular imagination, and also acknowledge the recent emergence of what Jeff calls “the flip” — a paradigm shift from imagining consciousness as an accidental epiphenomenon to recognizing that it is quite...

Prophetic teacher, psychologist, author and poet, Bayo Akomolafe joins Terry to explore the “cracks in the world” that are opening to swallow everything we’ve been taught to believe and sense into the voices, adventures, and new worlds that are poised to emerge. With vivid original imagination and a ruthless deep kindness, Bayo names the limits of modern Western “solutionism” and invites us to make “fugitive breaks” away from familiar ways of knowing — to become consciously...

Philosopher and author Tim Freke joins Terry to explore the personal, cultural, and global implications of an integration of our best rational and spiritual understandings of reality. Tim Freke is an English philosopher and author of 35 books, including a Sunday Times bestseller and Daily Telegraph 'Book of the Year'. He is the founder of ‘Unividualism’, which combines evolutionary science and deep spirituality to offer a visionary new understanding of the nature of reality and the...

Terry Patten explores the delusion, anxiety, loneliness, and fear experienced across our culture as well as the potential for sacred, next-stage friendship to be a key leverage point for healing the madness. Terry also invites members of the New Republic of the Heart practice community to share their experiences participating in a daring social experiment in transformational relating and co-creativity. Ultimately, Terry and others extend a special invitation to listeners. Here...

Purpose guide and psychotherapist Jonathan Gustin joins Terry to explore the vital processes of discovering and actualizing our soul’s purpose, in clear and practical terms, to benefit our world in crisis. Jonathan builds upon our recent episode with Bill Plotkin by offering important distinctions between purpose, vocation, and pleasure. He also describes what he calls integral awakening, using his “three worlds” model of consciousness, in which the “lower world” represents our...

In light of the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, host Terry Patten shares spontaneous reflections on endings, new beginnings, hope, despair, the spiritual tasks of this time, and how we can refuse to put anyone out of our hearts. We hope that you appreciate this episode, and, most importantly, that you are finding your own way to a renewed and inspired civic engagement during the current transition. Also: We invite you to join become a Friend of State of...

Ecopsychologist, wilderness guide and author Bill Plotkin joins Terry to consider the human crisis as essentially a crisis of immaturity — that true human adults and human elders are both extraordinarily rare today. Bill speaks to what is truly required for us — as individuals, and collectively — to grow from our extended adolescence into mature human adulthood. He describes the challenging, and sometimes hazardous, spiritual process of “soul initiation,” which demands the...

Evolutionary leader, thinker, and founder of The Shift Network Stephen Dinan joins Terry to explore how conspiracy thinking and new paradigm ideas are sometimes merging in a phenomenon some call “Conspirituality” — which he articulated, with clarity and courage, in a Medium essay some months ago titled, “Anatomy of Delusion: How Otherwise Conscious People Descended into the Darkness.” Although this episode was recorded a couple weeks before the recent rioting and insurrection at the...

Remarkable mystic and teacher Thomas Hübl joins Terry to discuss his new book Healing Collective Trauma, and they take the exploration into some new deep places. Every human being is born into and affected by, either directly or indirectly, the collective wounds of human history — epigenetically, energetically, and systemically. This is why Thomas says that we are all “shareholders of our collective unconscious.” Intergenerational and cultural traumas become “frozen hostages stuck in...

Author of Wake Up Grateful and the Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living, Kristi Nelson joins Terry to explore the elusively obvious gift of this very breath and moment and the transformational practice of living with grateful generosity at this moment in our human journey. Kristi illuminates the differences between gratitude and gratefulness, and how the uncaused and unconditional nature of gratefulness enables us to stay open-hearted, in all of the ordeal and the...