Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

America’s Healing Crisis

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The US is in a healing crisis, and we each play a part in determining its outcome.

I write and speak a lot about the illusory nature of the egoic mind that perceives all things through a concept called “separateness.” In the mystical experience this idea is revealed to be a fallacy, a trick of the mind. When the veil of illusory separateness is lifted, we see that everything is an interconnected whole. One could say that the mystical state is a united state in which all is seen to be inextricably interwoven and where the separate self we have always thought ourselves to be simply doesn’t exist.

At the dawn of this new millennium, as people all across the globe are increasingly awakening from the trance of the separate self, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic that is accelerating the process by revealing in unmistakable terms the inescapable nature of our interconnectedness.

We are coming to see, thanks to COVID-19, that we must care for our neighbor not simply out of a moral obligation to do so, but out of the recognition that at a fundamental level our neighbor is ourself, and our personal wellbeing is inextricably tied to the wellbeing of all.

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An Open Letter to Future Generations

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All is interconnected. One Life. Indra’s Web.

Dear Future Human Inhabitants of Earth,

I am writing to you from the early 21st century guessing you may be looking back on our time and wondering how we could have made such a mess of our world. I’d like to try to give you some insight into that question.

One of the huge breakthroughs in our recent understanding has been to recognize that everything we see, touch, experience—and even things that we cannot—is woven into a single system. All is interconnected. Interwoven. One Life. Indra’s Web.

I understand this is not news to you. It is obvious. But for us, for a very long time, it was far from obvious.

You see, the mind state most of us lived in was very different from yours. This will seem alien to you, but I’m going to try to explain.Continue Reading

Eudomy: The Land Where Truth Reigns

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tree at sunset
In Eudomy there is no judgment.

I once had a dream where I am transported into the future. I look around and I see a thriving Earth and a world at peace. And I think, elatedly, we did it! We humans did it! We made the transformation into the new consciousness!

As I walk around, I see a woman with the most interesting garb. It has a traditional feel, colorful, and somehow it conveys wholeness and wisdom.

Around her on the ground are seated several children and I realize she is their teacher.

The students are reading passages that they have written and one of them reads something that refers to or implies judgment.

The teacher gently explains to the child that in Eudomy, which is the name of the land where they live, there isn’t any judgment. I understand that she doesn’t mean we don’t do judgment because it’s bad. She means in Eudomy judgment simply doesn’t exist. It has no reality.Continue Reading

Squandering Time: A Spiritual Practice

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pocket watch in sand
What does it really mean to squander time?

Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” It’s not surprising, given such a philosophy, that Franklin accomplished an amazing amount during his lifetime. Inventor. Statesman. Author. Public Servant. Founding Father.

But as much as Franklin is revered here in Philadelphia where I live—the city Franklin also called home—and as grateful as I am for all of his contributions to our city and society, I’ve come to question his premise that time is the stuff life is made of. More and more I see that life is made of a kind of attention that takes us into a dimension where time doesn’t even exist.

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Why Resistance Isn’t Radical Enough

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We_One

[This article was also published on the Huffington Post.]

The other day I was having coffee with a friend, and as we got to talking about what is going on in our political arena she asked me, “Do you ever say ‘no’?”

What she was asking was whether, in my way of seeing things, there a place for resistance, for saying “no.”

Her question got me thinking, because—as someone who has been arrested more than once for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience and who went to prison for doing so when the US invaded Iraq, and as someone who all my life has been haunted by the Holocaust and wondered how it could have been prevented—I am not a stranger to these questions.

And yet in recent years I have strongly sensed that at this juncture, given the political and environmental challenges we face, something far more radical than resistance is called for. We have reached a point where we need nothing less than an entirely new understanding of who we are and why we are here, because it is the stories we hold that generate the world we create.

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Hate Crimes and Humanity’s Metamorphosis

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"Metamorphogenesis" painting by Sara Steele.
Metamorphogenesis Nacimiento, c. 2016 by Sara Steele, All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

As fear and turmoil engulf our nation, there is a metaphor that has been on my mind which I would like to share with you. It is the story of what happens to a caterpillar when it undergoes its metamorphosis into a butterfly.

I am indebted to David Korten, who, in his excellent book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, spoke about the work of evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris who has studied this mysterious and miraculous transformation.

Before its transformation, the earthbound caterpillar is focused on consuming. It engorges itself, devouring as much as it can, until it is so bloated it can do nothing but hang upside down and give itself over to its destiny. It forms around itself a chrysalis where it undergoes a metamorphosis that, if you had never known of it, would seem completely implausible.

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Fear: Passage to Liberation

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facing fear

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

In the wake of our recent presidential election, many people are feeling deeply afraid about what the future holds, and understandably so. We have already seen an alarming rise in hate crimes now that bigotry has seemingly been legitimated through our electoral process.

In upcoming posts I will say more about the bigger picture that I see unfolding and the unprecedented opportunities now before us to come together in ways the world has never seen. But for now, I want to speak about fear and offer some ways we can work with it to become the mindful, liberated agents for change these times need us to be.

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Election 2016 and Our Evolutionary Task

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election 2016 evolutionary task

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Many of us are heaving a sigh of relief that this presidential election 2016 is drawing to a close, yet we also know that the hostilities that have been playing out in our nation these last many months are not simply going to evaporate after the last poll has closed and the last vote tallied.

We are going to be left with some important work to do — and we are going to need to be clear about what we are dealing with.

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