Events

We are living amidst a multidimensional, radical moment of truth — under a shadow of existential risk, but also opening to nearly inconceivable transformational opportunities. This talk will convey, in vivid personal terms, how each of us can become an active agent of wholeness in the midst of our crisis of fragmentation, and how we can come together in ways that plant, water and fertilize the seeds and seedlings of a next-stage human civilization.

We will together understand and feel the ground of radical well-being and that is necessary to our continued survival, and the radical sobriety that faces what we fear to feel. Only by opening to these paradoxical radical truths — both liberating and terrifying — will we make sustainable changes in ourselves, our communities, our body politic, and our planetary life-support system. The life of the practitioner and the life of the activist are now inseparable, and each of us is now called to express our most heroic and most beneficent capacities in a practice that is not just personal but mutual.

This presentation will convey the essence of Patten’s acclaimed book A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries. It will describe how we can come together for “conversations that matter.” And it will point to new communities, enterprises, and forms of dialogue that have already created miracles that can be replicated on larger scales. We will thus come to see more clearly that a “new republic of the heart” is already coming into being, invisibly and quietly, as more and more of us respond to the necessity to animate our best qualities and cooperatively transform ourselves, our societies, and the planet.