Brightening Every Darkness
Collective & Personal Mortality amidst this Crisis
This is an amazing course, following the insights, revelations, and authentic journey into the “Bright” as Terry Patten experienced the last months and moments of his life.
This was live event series of intimate gatherings, where the community joined Terry Patten, and special guests Diane Musho Hamilton, Indra Adnan and Craig Hamilton, as Terry travels the edges of his personal confrontation with death and dying, and its profound teachings for all of us facing our collective predicament.
Watch a Short Message from Terry
Please Notify Me When Online Course Is Ready
New Republic of the Heart is creating an online course of the Brightening Every Darkness conversations for those who want to experience Terry’s internal journey to mortality, between Terry and his Friends, and Terry and his broader community.
His “Brightening” is an example of a life well-lived and a dying well done.
What is in this Course?
Session 1: Diane Musho Hamilton & Terry Patten
“Collective Mortality ‘Rhymes’ with Personal Mortality”
Saturday, Sept. 25, 10:30 AM–Noon PT – Broadcast + Q&A w/ Terry
Award-wining mediator and Zen Roshi Diane Musho Hamilton will join Terry to explore how the simultaneity or “rhyme” of our collective mortality and Terry’s personal mortality illuminates the practice of being in “right relationship” with reality and communion with the Divine.
Learn more about Diane Musho Hamilton here.
Session 2: Indra Adnan & Terry Patten
“Mortality’s Lessons for Our Collective Predicament”
Saturday, Oct. 2, 10:30 AM–Noon PT – Broadcast + Q&A w/ Terry
Social psychotherapist, political theorist and cosmolocal community organizer Indra Adnan will join Terry to explore the lessons of a conscious relationship to living and dying and their implications as we navigate this time of collective crisis and opportunity.
Learn more about Indra Adnan here.
Session 3: Craig Hamilton & Terry Patten
“Morbidity, Transformation and Joy”
Saturday, Oct. 9, 10:30 AM–Noon PT – Broadcast + Q&A w/ Terry
Pioneer and teacher of evolutionary spirituality Craig Hamilton will join Terry to explore how living at the edge of mortality and morbidity can transform us and allow us to yield to an unreasonable joy and commitment to “brighten every darkness” no matter what.
Learn more about Craig Hamilton here.
Session 4: Live Q&A with Terry Patten
“Practicing with Collective and Personal Mortality”
Saturday, Oct. 23, 10:30 – 11:30 AM PT
Terry will reflect on his conversations with Diane, Indra and Craig, and share additional insights about how a conscious relationship with our mortality might serve us in the years and decades ahead. Then, he will invite all participants into a live conversation and Q&A.
Learn more about Terry Patten here.
Terry Patten
Teacher, Author, Philosopher
Terry Patten was a leading voice for facing, healing, and engaging our civilizational crisis through the marriage of integral heart intelligence and holistic activism. He is the author of A New Republic of the Heart and the founder of the nonprofit and international practice community of the same name. He is also the co-creator and host of the podcast State of Emergence, which convenes courageous and vulnerable conversations with leading teachers, thinkers, healers and activists about our civilizational predicament.
Terry taught Integral practice and transformation for 15 years to over 10 thousand people and co-wrote the book Integral Life Practice with Ken Wilber and his colleagues at Integral Institute. Today, he teaches and participates in a co-creative social experiment in Being of Benefit.
Learn more about Terry Patten and his work here.
“A radical, bright possibility on the other side of horrible darkness…”
This moment in the human journey is deeply paradoxical.
We all thought for hundreds of years that we were on a path toward progress, but life is now teaching us something new, requiring us to become different. That process of becoming different is a collective, life-and-death challenge that we can only adequately face together. When we gather together in the disposition of practitioners — people who are growing and learning — we can enter into a deeper depth of presence with the realities that sometimes feel too horrible to fully face.
This very moment is beautiful, and even the larger process of living and dying is beautiful and sacred. You will be passing too and that’s okay.
As a true practitioner, you can grow beyond the tendency to be fixated in the position of a separate, independent being that is threatened, and instead continue to wake up in spiritual realization to a free spaciousness that is bright and grateful and amazed and coinciding with the very mystery of existence that gives birth to all we love and have loved. Death isn’t a problem, death makes life possible.
If you sense that our civilizational crisis is teaching you a profound lesson about our mortality and if you feel called to shine even more brightly in these times, we hope you’ll decide to be a part of this series of gatherings. Let’s soften into our own felt experience of living and dying and let’s be curious together. For all that we know, there is possibility. Let’s be together in the light of possibility, related to what might be wonderfully surprising.
Essential Questions Terry Explored in Depth
In what ways can the nearness of death open awareness to the tender, glistening beauty of every moment and morsel of this precious human life?
Facing death has been regarded since ancient times as radical medicine that can open pathways to wisdom, happiness, truth and power. What is Terry learning now, even after a lifetime of practice, and how might it be of use to you?
How can we discover, and where can we locate, a new kind of power — able to transmute the energies of overwhelm and despair into deeper awareness, gratitude, inspiration, and bedrock authority?
