Terry Patten argues that real transformation can't happen by abandoning the structures that keep us sane, like courses and relationships. We're trapped in a consumer culture consensus trance that drives stress and overconsumption. True breakthrough requires doing it together in a way that stabilizes us, not destabilizes.
Now we are meeting in the context of the forms of an online transformational course, and those conventions are important to us. We want to honor them because the conventions of life are how human beings ground themselves. When you break free of too many conventions, you go crazy. Psychological stability has to do with being grounded to form. And therefore, we do need the forms that we're bringing forward, like A Course. But we're attempting breakthrough. We're trying to go sane in an insane world. That's a little like going crazy. Our whole world is a bit of a cult. We're in a consensus trance. We have beliefs that we're all hypnotically reinforcing among one another, and they're crazy. We're stressing out over money. We're chewing up the earth in order to raise GDP. We're consuming things we don't really want or need. So we need to go sane together, but we have to find a way to do that that grounds us. It doesn't just break with all the forms of our— that keep us balanced, keep our credit rating and our driving record and our relationships from becoming a huge problem. So breakthrough is necessary, and yet to break through is in a way to risk madness. So we are here to stabilize each other so that we can really break through, really live a different principle, and stay very sane. We're gonna go sane together in a way that I don't know if anybody's quite pulled off before.
