Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Charles Eisenstein. Charles is a public speaker, a self-described “degrowth activist” and also the author of several books, including Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self. In his most recent book the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, he relates real-life stories showing how small individual acts of courage, kindness, and self-trust can change our culture’s guiding narrative of separation, which he shows has generated our present planetary crisis.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Charles and I spoke about the two mythologies of our time, what he calls “the story of separation” and “the story of interbeing, ” and how often we feel like we’re occupying both stories at once. We talked about cynicism about our collective future and how this cynicism really comes from a wound and the vulnerability it takes to give ourselves completely to serving the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. We also talked about how the question of identity is really at the root of bringing together our inner spiritual life and our life of activism in the world. Finally, we talked about Charles’ new book on climate change and why he believes that positive change will come from the margins. Here’s my conversation with Charles Eisenstein:
Thank you, Charles, for making the time for this. I’m excited to talk to you.
Charles Eisenstein: My pleasure.
TS: You write about a certain reordering of your world that happened when you were 36 years old. I wonder if we could start there as a way to bring our listeners into what was really a huge transformation in your life at that period of time. Can you take us to that time and dial us in? What was going on for you?
CE: OK, 36—that was when I started writing my book, like the first book I really, really cared about and put my heart and soul into. It was about a kind of change in our mythology, like a deep systems change, but it corresponded also to a personal process where the mythology of myself—like the kind of unquestioned stories that told me who I was and what a life was supposed to look like and what a good man was, all those things began to break down. It was almost disorienting, the feeling of not even knowing who I was anymore, or what I was supposed to be or who I was supposed to be, or what reality was. There wasn’t a sudden dramatic event that caused that, but it was the buildup of the past 10 years, I guess, that led to this dissolution of my identity and worldview.
TS: I wanted to start here, and I want to hear a little bit more about it because I think oftentimes people go through some type of passage that might be a type of dissolution, and they don’t really know what to make of it and they don’t know if they’ll come out on the other side. As I was reading about this period in your life, you wrote that two things were answered at once for you. One had to do with your own vocation and way of being in the world and a way to bring your gifts forward. The other had to do with a sense of wrongness that you had felt about the world. That’s your word, “wrongness” with the world that you had felt from a young age. So help me understand the dissolution that you went through—what brought that on and what did it feel like? How is it that you emerged from it?
CE: I think it’s related to the wrongness. I’m sure that—in fact, I know that I’m not the only one who goes through life with a deep understanding that the world is not supposed to be this way. There might be a metaphysical teaching that it is supposed to be this way, that it’s all perfect, everything is happening for a reason, et cetera, et cetera. But that larger metaphysical view has to include the experience of perceiving a wrongness in the world.
So there I was with this feeling that the world is supposed to be more beautiful, more intimate, more authentic, more alive than what had been offered to me as normal. At the same time, every authority figure, as well as the society and economy [was] saying the opposite, saying things are fine. If you’ve got a problem with it, then you’ve got the problem. It pathologizes this feeling of not wanting to participate in what’s offered. So I was like many people, kind of half in, half out, going through the motions, trying to make myself do what a successful, well-adjusted person is supposed to do and at the same time fighting myself.
Eventually that tension causes a breakdown—eventually, and for different people it’s a different kind of breakdown. For some people it’s a sudden, like an illness or an accident or some kind of catastrophe. For others, and for me, it was more of this way, just an exhaustion of energy to the point where I just couldn’t make myself do it anymore, regardless of the consequences.
That’s how I came to understand what I call “the space between stories” that so many people are going through, when the old story breaks down of who I am and why am I here, and the new one hasn’t come yet. Our society pathologizes that and tries to drag us back into participating in the old story and in the social structures that it sits in. So maybe if there’s anything useful to people in what I’m saying, it might be that yes, maybe there’s nothing wrong with you if you’re going through this process. Maybe it’s necessary and there is something on the other side of it.
TS: Interesting that you talked about the space between stories. What’s the new story that emerged for you—just right now here in the beginning of our conversation, for you personally, Charles, that oriented your life as you emerged from this dissolution?
CE: I will try to put it into words. At the same time, any words that I put to it are little less than what it really is. I could describe it as an understanding of, I am here to serve the birth of a more beautiful world. I’ve received everything I need to be that servant, to be an effective servant. I’ve caught glimpses of the future, of a possible future that almost—it was almost like they awoke memories in me of something that my biographical self has not experienced, but almost memories of the future. It’s not that I project or believe that a more beautiful world is possible, it’s that I have a knowledge of it that sustains me even when my mind doubts that it’s possible or practical or feasible, and maybe I’m just being naive or irresponsible and I go through all these phases of doubt. But the knowing of why I’m here, why was I born here is strong enough, with the help of other people who hold it for me also, to keep me at work through those spells of doubt.
TS: That’s very helpful. When you said you caught glimpses, tell me what the glimpses were.
CE: Glimpses like people in my world healing from diseases thought to be incurable or moments of love and forgiveness that violated what I thought humans are, or some of the stuff that people are doing with earth healing. These didn’t necessarily all come at that moment of my life. I mean I had been—I lived in my 20s in Taiwan where I saw a lot of things that I had thought were impossible, that my college-educated mind brought up as a rational atheist would have dismissed as a bunch of woo-woo nonsense. But then, am I going to believe that or my own lying eyes as the saying goes? I had these experiences that showed me that what I believed to be normal and possible and real was a very small segment of what reality actually is.
At the same time, I was very highly educated in the problems of the world: the effects of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, et cetera, et cetera that paint a picture of despair. So I had these experiences, say, with Chinese medicine or with Taoism, things like that in Taiwan that I said, “OK, does my despair, this impossibility, take into account these things that I have experienced?” That violated where I thought was reality or violated what I thought was human nature.
In a way, it’s like witnessing an act of generosity—if you want specific examples, there are times that are very tiny these things that pierce the shell of the world. My wife—at the time, her ex-boyfriend was this guy named Douglas who was just so generous that you almost wanted to cry. Even if he got taken advantage of again and again and again, he would—I’m not saying that he was necessarily having good boundaries or something, but he had this—where is that coming from, that generosity that just doesn’t stop no matter what? What is he seeing? What is he feeling? There’s something in there that pierced the shell and that guy who had a lot of problems and eventually died of a heroin overdose or something like that, he’s in me. I met him a couple of times and just hard to put into words what that warmth and humanness and openness told me—that data point changed the math. So that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It doesn’t have to be some gigantic spiritual opening or some dramatic miracle. It’s something that doesn’t fit the story.
TS: OK, Charles. So I’m with you in terms of these glimpses that you had of what it would mean for you to serve, and then this is the title of a book you wrote a few years ago, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. Just for a moment, I want to talk about the language of that title, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, and how that evokes in me, when I see the title, a feeling of heartache, actually. Like, “Yes, I do ache for this beautiful world that is not present every day in my experience, but that there’s a sense that it’s possible. ” I wonder here, towards the beginning of our conversation, if you can talk some about that heartache that I think many people feel?
CE:Yes. I don’t know about you, but did you ever, when you see something really, really beautiful, does it make you sad?
TS: I think I know what you mean, a kind of poignancy that feels like—
CE: Yes, yes. Even if I look at a beautiful sunset, I feel some sadness. Or if I see a beautiful human interaction, or a child, some children playing freely. Maybe because it casts into sharper relief the fact that for a lot of children, it’s not like that. Or the sunset—it brings into my awareness that we’re ruining the sky, ruining the earth. So, yes, there is an ache in that title that’s very present for me, the kind of a sadness that’s [a] very different quality from depression or despair. It’s a kind of a fullness that says, “Yes, I’m going to take into account everything that’s happening in this world, and speak from that place, come from that place.” Because without bringing together and integrating the totality of the—it’s like the pallet of colors in front of us, if we’re all artists who are trying to make something beautiful of our lives and beautiful of the world. We can’t ignore the flaws on the canvas, we can’t ignore the limits to the pallet we have available. This is what’s in front of us. This is what we are here to make something beautiful from.
So for me—and I guess it also keeps me honest, in a way, to be aware of, again, the wrongness, to be aware of the suffering, to be aware of the last white rhinos going extinct. That awareness prevents me from going off into some kind of inconsequential thing that might make sense if—you know, I was really get a math in school and I was good at chess, stuff like that. I could see if that stuff weren’t happening in the world, I might devote myself to the beauty of math or the beauty of chess. These are not bad things, but somehow my particular set of gifts and skills isn’t for that right now. To survey the entire landscape reminds me of why I’m here, because I know that I’m brought here—and this is true with everybody—that I’m brought here for the times that we are in. So the more that I understand of the times that we are in—the good, the bad and the ugly, the beautiful and the ugly—the more able to connect with my purpose and to know why I am here and to know what I serve. Does that makes sense?
TS: It does. Now you mentioned, Charles, the space between stories that many of us feel at times and the unfolding of our personal lives. In your book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, you talk about how collectively we’re finding ourselves between stories. You describe two stories: an old story, the story of separation, and a new emerging story that you call “the story of interbeing.” I wonder if you can take us into each of these stories for a moment and tell me what the story of separation looks, feels, smells like, what are the institutions that support it; and then what does the story of interbeing look, feel, smell like, and what institutions would support that? I know this is a big question, but I really want to get into both of these stories.
CE: Yes. I’ll be somewhat brief. You could even call the stories a mythology because they answer the deep questions. Every culture has, that I know of at least, has a mythology that answers these deep questions like what is self, who are you, why are you here, what is humanity here for, where do we come from and where are we going, what’s real, how does change happen, what’s important, what’s valuable? These are the deep questions that different cultures have different answers to.
So the story of separation answers them—I say the “old story,” but it’s actually not as old as the more ancient story that is also a new story for us. Anyway, so the story of separation says, “You are a separate individual in a world of ‘other’ and a world of atoms and void, particles and masses and forces, [and] that this separate self, therefore your well-being, depends on how well you can insulate yourself from the random forces outside of you and dominate the other competing selves that are in this objective world.” So in that story, since I’m separate from you, then more for you is less for me or your well-being certainly need not impact my well-being if you get sick; as long as I don’t get infected, that’s no skin off my back. If people in Uganda are suffering, then that’s not going to affect me either. If we can build a good enough wall to keep them out, a good enough system of drones and surveillance that if they get angry and want to hurt us, we can protect ourselves.
That’s what the story of separation is and it comes down to who am I? It’s not just a scientific or—it spans all institutions of thought. So science might identify the separate self as a genetically programmed biochemical machine seeking to maximize reproductive self-interest; a philosopher might say it’s a mote of consciousness inside of a flesh robot; religion might say it’s a soul encased in flesh. They all agree, essentially, that the self is separate.
So we have then economic institutions that reinforce the separation, the competition, the impulse to dominate others. The economy grows, more and more enters the realm of the owned. We have technology that seeks to impose control onto the world and to imprint the world with intelligence. We have medicine where it’s about controlling, killing, dominating bodily processes, killing the germ and so forth. I can go on and on, through education, politics, law, et cetera, et cetera.
So the story of separation is woven into all of our systems, all of our institutions, and very much into our psychology as well, because we’ve been brought up in it. I was brought up to see other people, especially other men, as competitors, as a threat. So in a social interaction, still to this day I have an impulse of, “How can I protect myself from you, what can I get from you? Rather than in the story of interbeing, my first question might be, “What I meant to give and what I meant to receive from you? Why are we together here? What is the purpose drawing us together?”
So maybe I’ll just [discuss] the story of interbeing. I believe interbeing was a word coined by Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s so natural to describe this new and ancient story, because it’s more than just interdependency or interconnection. It’s to say that my very being is part of your being; who you are is part of me. Therefore, what happens to the world, inescapably is going to happen to me in some way, in some form. And on a collectible level, too—anything that happens to nature is going to affect humanity in some way. If we make species extinct, then we’re going to have a kind of an impoverishment. It may not be that we go extinct, but there’s a mirror there.
If we visit—as a nation, say we visit violence upon other nations. Even if we have a complete surveillance, total information awareness, and a full-spectrum dominant state, that violence is going to come back in, and maybe it will take the form of domestic violence. No wall can keep out domestic violence. Maybe it’ll take the form of violence to self, self-sabotage, suicide. And in fact we see this happening—the drone operators have an incredibly high suicide rate. This would be—in the story of interbeing, this would be totally expected, that what you do to the world, you do to yourself. What happens to another person in some way is happening to you, that every relationship that you have is a mirror of something inside.
Another really important piece of it is that the qualities of a self, like intelligence, consciousness, subjectivity, agency—those are not only in human being,s but they’re in the world in different forms, in different ways. Animals, plants, soil, wind, water, clouds, the earth, the sun: these aren’t just things, they are beings also.
So you can see this is not really a new story. I mean indigenous people as far as I know universally believed that animals, plants, rocks, water, the sun, the moon, were conscious, experiential beings. I haven’t gotten to what a society might look like that’s built on that.
TS: I’d love to hear that, because I think for many people, they can appreciate interbeing in their own direct experience, but when they try to live it in the culture as a whole, they feel at odds.
CE: Yes, right, because the culture as a whole is still based on the old story. We are moving, our consciousness is evolving, and we don’t feel at home in that story anymore. That might have been different 50 or 100 years ago where it seemed like, “Yes, I am at home in participating in the conquest of nature and developing new machines.” That might have seemed in that time maybe a healthy story, or at least a young, robust story. Now we don’t feel we fit, and so we’re looking for—we’re craving, even, institutions [and] forms of human interaction and community that embody or enact the story of interbeing.
So for example, let’s just take the example of criminal justice. Today we have a deterrence-based criminal punishment system, that basically says people do bad things because they are bad people so we need to deter those bad people from doing these bad things. Interbeing says that people do what they do because of the conditions that they’re in. If I were in your conditions, I might do that too. If I grew up in inner city where the only economic opportunity was the illegal drug trade and I didn’t have a father at home, and, and, and—yes, I could be in a gang also. So what would criminal justice—I’m not even sure we would we call it that anymore, but what would it look like if we came from that place? Understanding, asking, “What is it like to be you and how can we change those conditions that make what you did natural, and how can we heal those conditions?” and to see someone as, “I know that you are here for the same reason I am here. You have a service to offer the world. You were born for a reason; what is that reason?”
So you get to things like restorative circles, restorative justice, truth and reconciliation commissions, like they had in South Africa. You’re not going to punished 20 percent of the population. In Rwanda, they did this too. You’re not going to punish half the population. And we’re facing this too with the “Me Too” thing and seeing just how prevalent misogyny and abuse is. Are we going to punish half the population—I mean, all men, or maybe not all men but a lot of men, or is there some other way to bring healing rather than punishment?
That would be one way to apply the story of interbeing to actual political and social conditions on a mass level, but also on a personal level or on a community level. Say you’re in a community and someone violates the norms of the community and hurt somebody else. What are you going to do with that? Are you going to reflexively enact the punishment training that we were brought up in, or are you going to go the empathic route? “Why did you do that?” Not “Why didn’t you do that, what’s wrong with you,” but [being] curious why did you do that? Let us understand so that we can—because maybe I’m a part of why you did that.
What would foreign policy look like if instead of seeing terrorists, say, as these kind of insanely evil, gibbering monsters, if we said, “Why is terrorism happening and how are we a part of that?” Pretty soon you get to imperialism, you get to neoliberal economics, you get to the conditions that make life unbearable in places that breed terrorism. Then there are not necessarily any easy answers, but there’s a period of, “Wow, I don’t know what the answer is, because the only answer was easy. The old answer was bomb somebody.”
When you externalize the problem—and that’s part of the story of separation: the enemy is out there. It’s us against nature. It’s me against a competitor. When you externalize a problem, the solution is easy. At least, you know what the solution is: you try to win. When in the state and the story of interbeing, you can’t externalize a problem anymore. You realize that there is a reflection there. There’s a mirror, that I’m part of it too.
TS: I think many people, Charles, would say, “I connect deeply to the story of interbeing, but I don’t have a lot of hope or optimism that our world is going to move from the story of separation any time soon when I look around me.” I wonder what your thoughts are on how the culture as a whole moves from one story to another. What does it take?
CE: I agree with that, that it’s not going to happen any time soon. I personally work on a 500-year timescale, because the root conditions are so deep and the trauma is so ancient that we act from that it’s just not going to heal overnight. I mean, I’m open to it healing overnight, but I’m not counting on it. A lot of the things that I do in my work don’t make sense on a 30-year time scale; all the more [reason for] the things that people’s hearts call them to do.
One of the people I worked with she has an autistic son. For years and years and years, 10, 15 years, she’s been working with the system to try to, just on a very small level to see her son not as someone who needs to be kind of warehoused in a special-needs box and managed and dealt with. To see his special gifts and bring those out and have them recognized. And that work is thankless. People don’t understand it. It’s hard, and the result isn’t going to be that the world changes. The result is going to be one young man, and maybe those around him, are going to be giving their gifts to the world. Who knows what the ripple effect of that will be in 500 years?
We are walking around with such deep-seated traumas and conditioning from many, many, many generations of living in the story of separation. This isn’t just some philosophical thing—this gives birth to horrors. On the systems level, you could say, “OK, in 20 years, we could institute universal basic health care,” or something like that. Or we could have diversity programs in the universities. Those kind of changes are possible. As for the deep, root conditions of our civilizational malady, those are not something that you can change overnight. So I think it is going to take a long time. I say this because I want to validate the kind of work that people are called to do that just doesn’t make sense in a short timeframe.
I just wrote a book on climate change that’s coming out later this year. I was confronted one time by a leading environmentalist who said, “Charles, someday you’re just going to have to decide if you’re going to be relevant or not.” What he meant was all these things we care about, like healing the relation between the masculine and the feminine, or forming the criminal punishment system, or saving the whales, or bringing holistic health into—I mean, all these things, these aren’t going to matter because we’ve got a shrinking window of action to stop climate change. We have to institute a meaningful carbon tax within five years. Otherwise, it’s hopeless and none of this is going to matter if we don’t do that first. So direct all of your attention onto this, please, Charles. Otherwise, you are irrelevant.
Basically, I can understand his logic, but my heart says no. Those are not the only things that are relevant. Are you saying that the nurture and care that mothers and grandmothers and friends are giving to people, that that doesn’t matter? I know that that’s not actually how the world works, that the causal system that’s given to us in the story of separation, where you exert a force on a mass and that’s how the world changes. That is very limited; there is a deeper principle at work. Rupert Sheldrake calls it “morphic resonance.” That’s one way to understand the story of interbeing. It says that what you do, any change that happens in one place creates a field of change that makes the same change happen more easily somewhere else, so no action is wasted. If you buy into that, then how do you orient your life? How do you make choices? Not necessarily by, “Is this going to scale? Is this going to go viral? Is this going to have a lot of leverage and a big impact?” If you think that way, you’re never going to visit your grandmother in the nursing home. You’re never going to take care of a lost puppy. You’re never going to be there for a friend when you could be out campaigning.
Anyway, I could go on and on about this, but I think that that’s some mentality that’s gotten us into trouble, to deny and ignore and brush over what calls to our care that’s right in front of our face in the pursuit of some abstraction, in the pursuit of some external reward. I mean, that’s what the money chase does; what do you sacrifice that’s right in front of your face and call into your heart because you have to, because you can afford to care, because it’s about the money?
TS: Now Charles, how did you come up with 500 years? Meaning you could have come up with three hundred years, a thousand years? I’m curious.
CE: Well, it kind of has a good, poetic ring to it.
TS: OK.
CE: It doesn’t necessarily mean exactly 500 years. It means, I don’t know, 10 or 15 generations, 20 generations, but not hundreds and hundreds.
TS: OK. Now, when it comes to inhabiting the story of interbeing or the story of separation, you talked about how you can feel competitive with other men, that there may be ways that each of us, by implication, is living a bit in both stories. I think many listeners to Insights at the Edge would be like, “Yes, I’m living in the story of interbeing, except when I run into that one person who I clearly don’t ‘inter-be’ with. That person is outside my circle.” There are these moments that are exceptions to the story of interbeing. I’m curious, what have been the hardest aspects of the story of interbeing for you to fully embody?
CE: I mean, I would say I probably maybe inhabit it like 10 percent, maybe 5 percent. It’s not I have a personal self-improvement program where I inventory the ways I’m in separation and sort of work on those. I can just pick one thing that’s kind of alive for me; I would say that it might ben trying to please people and gain approval, which I guess you could say is a version of separation, because it’s a way of managing and controlling people. I’m not saying I didn’t learn it from—I mean, I had wonderful parents, but still, they enacted the cultural program of you control your child through conditional approval and rejection. So this deep feeling of not—it’s feeling of not being at home in the world, of things not being OK. I’ve got to always be on my guard. That even if I—sometimes I’ll have an experience where for a few moments or even for a few hours, I feel deeply belonging, deeply at home. It’s like this leaden cloud has lifted. I’m not saying I’m walking around like—I think I’m generally a pretty positive, happy person by our standards, yet these experiences of what it’s like when that’s lifted, the ease and the freedom, the flow, the connection—like, “Wow, what we think of as happy or healthy or well-adjusted is just a glimmering of what’s possible.”
I mean, it comes down to not feeling fully at home, and that comes out of the manipulation, trying to make you like me, trying to say the right thing. Someone might ask me a question—and maybe I’ve done this in this interview, you ask me a question, and the habitual calculation is, “OK, what can I say that will make me look good? What can I say that maintains my own image of myself? What can I say that will make you, Tami, approve of me, and whoever is listening to this? How do I conform to the archetype of the good guy who gets mommy’s approval?”
I’m saying this without condemnation, because that part of the story of interbeing have really deeply taken in; that the part that says whatever we are, whatever we do, that’s because of what we are born into. That’s because of the circumstances of our lives: the social circumstances, family circumstances, genetic. I mean, trauma gets passed down genetically; we’re doing our best here. So forgiveness comes really naturally from what I’m calling the story of interbeing.
TS: Now it’s really—
CE: I’m not condemning myself, but, yes.
TS: Yes. First of all you’re doing a great job and I’m very impressed, so we can inter-be with that together. We can relax with that together. I was surprised, Charles, when you said five to ten percent. I think that that shows me how deep the revolution is, when you talk about the story of interbeing as this emerging new mythology for our time. This is a big deal. This is—I mean, it’s really in a sense, if I’m hearing you correctly, it would be like stepping into an awake society an enlightened society, someplace where we really know all the time in all of our actions that we are part of the whole, loved and related. That’s big.
CE: Yes. The story is just the skin of being a collective being that wants to be born in this world. The story part is just the skin. I’m a writer and I happen to work with words, so I focus on the story. But it’s much more than a story; it’s a way of seeing, a state of being. It’s a way of moving, it’s a way of relating. The story is just one dimension of it.
TS: One of the things that you write about in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible is that our cynicism—perhaps the cynicism of someone listening saying, “OK, really, we’re going to create an enlightened society in 500 years. Come on, whatever,” that our cynicism comes from a wound. It comes from some sense of betrayal. I want to address people who are listening who, part of them wants to come along in embodying and inhabiting not just for ourselves but at the collective level the story of interbeing; And part of them says, “Look, that’s just naïve. We live in the world of survival of the fittest. That’s not going to happen on planet Earth.”
CE: Yes. I’ve interacted some with self-described skeptics who will attack and debunk anything that doesn’t fit a certain kind of hardcore scientific materialism. I mean, I don’t want to say ‘materialism’ because I think matter is much more than we think. In interacting with these skeptics, I get the sense that what they really want is to be proved wrong, but there’s a fear that, “If I believe, if I believe you, if I believe there’s more than just this, if I believe that these miracles of healing can actually happen, if I believe that there is a continuity of experience after death—if I believe all this. What if I’m wrong?”
I believe that we are born knowing that we are in a living world, that we’re not alone here; that the plants, the sun is looking at us. Like a three-year-old child—if you can go back to that time, the sun was a being. The sun was looking at me. That knowledge of a kind of an enchanted world, that feeling of being at the edge of limitless possibility, of limitless mystery, that knowledge gets crushed quite brutally. We kind of give in to the dispiriting belief that that was just a projection, that was just a fantasy, that was just superstition, that was just religious puffery. At least I’m plugging in my birth religion, which was atheism.
Anyone who has a scientific education, even if you maintain religious beliefs at the same time, this scientific education—which is anyone who’s gone to school pretty much—is saying, “Well, OK, but here’s what’s real. Here’s how the world actually works. That flower, even that loving feeling, actually it’s about a chemical cascade.” So yes, like the skeptic, and I guess I have an inner skeptic here, I want to be proven wrong because I don’t want to risk it again. I don’t want to risk that knowledge being crushed. I want proof, and of course there is no absolute proof. Even if you witnessed something amazing, you can always write it off as your imagination, or you can just put it into some category of, “Well, that was weird.”
But are you really going to take that in and say, “What does that say about life, if that happened? If that’s true, then what’s true?” Then everything unravels and maybe that’s another reason for the fear that the world will unravel. Reality will unravel. I will unravel. Who I make myself to be and the sense I make of the world will unravel if I really take in that experience of grandma coming and telling me goodbye the night that she died 500 miles away and we had no idea. You hear stories like that, and people just kind of put that in a separate compartment, but what does that really mean if you really let that in? So that’s another example of these glimpses I was talking about, these data points that don’t fit the story and they invite us—it’s like the shell of the stories cracking and light is coming in, a light from a bigger world. That’s what those experiences are.
TS: You know, part of what’s really sinking in for me in this conversation is that underneath our story of separation, as you said, is this question of “Who am I?” underneath it and the mythology of being a separate self. So much of the programs that we offer at Sounds True are all about inquiring into the nature of identity. What is our real identity? Who am I? I don’t think that until this conversation I ever really got as fully, the connection between recognizing our codependent origination, whatever word you want to use, our interbeingness, and what the world will look like on the outside when that recognition is widely accepted. I don’t think I ever really understood that connection as fully as it seems to me you’re making it in your work. I wonder if you can comment on that.
CE: Yes, yes. I mean, I guess a lot of what I do is I bridge what might be called spirituality with politics, even, or systems thinking. What we’re talking about here—and this is kind of what you were saying, like this shift in identity, this emerging understanding of who we really are, this isn’t something that can just happen in a little box called “spirituality,” leaving everything else unchanged, because the story of the self is intimately connected to the story of the world. Our systems are built on those stories, so yes. The example of criminal punishment is one of the ways that the story of interbeing translates into the world of politics, the world of policy, the world of cultural change. I’m not sure what else I could say about that.
TS: It’s good. I think it’s just a good thing to really highlight. Now towards the end of your book Charles, there’s a chapter called “Destiny.” In that chapter, you write that our healing will come from the margins. I wonder if you explain that, our healing coming from the margins. What margins?
CE: Yes. You know the Einstein quote that our problems will not be solved from the same level of thinking that created them? The kinds of solutions that we can produce from within the thinking of the old story are not going to solve the problems that came from the kind of thinking that’s in the old story. So in the climate arena, for example—an example would be geoengineering, which basically says, “OK, here we have ecological degradation this caused by the endless exploitation, manipulation, domination of nature. So we’re going to fix that problem by taking it up a notch and dominating nature even more with big carbon-sucking machines and by bleaching the sky with sulfur aerosols to make it a little lighter so that it reflects more sunlight.” Let’s solve the problems caused by technology with even more technology, and by technology here I mean systems of control, systems by which we project force onto matter.
There are other kinds of technology that I think do, that can and will bring healing to the biosphere. But these are not fundamentally technologies of control; they begin with a listening and a respect and a question such as, what does the land want here? I think I’ve visited a few of these places actually, where they’re practicing regenerative agriculture or regenerative systems where they’re saying, “What does the land want?” How can we serve the soil? How can we serve water. How can we slow down the water so that it doesn’t run off and bring the soil with it but instead sinks into the water table, and replenishes springs that then come alive after being dry for decades?” In the end, they bring even more food too. But those are incredibly marginal today. I mean, even mainstream organic is marginal compared to GMO chemical agriculture. These people are marginal, marginal, marginal, but that’s where the solutions are going to come from; so marginalized technologies in that sense, marginalized cultures, the indigenous.
The indigenous, to varying degrees around the world, have preserved aspects of the ancient story of interbeing. In the dominant culture, the modern civilization, we’ve kind of lost touch with that. We’re attracted to it, but we really don’t even know what to do. That doesn’t mean that we can copy the rituals and practices of indigenous people, but hey can transmit information that’s essential that we’ve lost touch with. So that would be another margin.
Then the marginalized parts of ourselves, like human capacities that were ignored or pathologized in the world I grew up in. Sensitivity to human energy fields, for example, or even something as mundane as the ability to make plants grow. These were not celebrated in school, but that’s what we need a lot more of today, whereas the gifts that were celebrated and encouraged in school, they’re not bad; I had some of those gifts: analytic thinking, a powerful memory, rote memorization. I was good at that, so they called me smart and they give me an A. Those gifts—there are many structures to develop those gifts, but those aren’t the gifts that the world needs the most right now. They have their place, but other gifts, it’s time for other gifts to come to the floor.
More feminine kinds of gifts, for example, that aren’t about—and again the trouble here, because part of the old story is a certain understanding of what masculinity and femininity is. It’s also something that’s obviously these days breaking down. We are, in that regard, also in the space between stories, so that some people think that those concepts are not even useful. I think that a new understanding of femininity and masculinity will emerge in time. We’re in a breakdown phase right now.
So anyway, that was my disclaimer. But that’s what I mean by what had been pushed to the margins. When the center falls, when the center collapses, then these things that have been growing in the margins, in obscurity, even in persecution, then they rush in to the vacuum.
TS: Now Charles, there’s one thing I want to circle around on, especially in light of [that] you’re having a new book coming out on climate change. You mentioned that you’re working on this 500-year timetable and your friend who works in the climate change field was saying, “Hey, if we don’t turn things around the next few decades, there won’t be an earth for this great social experiment of the story of interbeing to be unfolding. There won’t be this age for that to happen.” You said, “Yes, but we can’t ignore the relationships that are right in front of us and what our hearts are called to do in terms of caring for each other.” I completely get that point, but what do you think about your friend’s point that if we’re working on the wrong timescale, there might not be an earth here for the story of interbeing to unfold with?
CE: Yes. Basically, short answer is I don’t agree with a lot of the science. I think that the science has overestimated the importance of emissions and underestimated the importance of local ecosystems, the water cycle in particular, but biological systems in maintaining climate stability. That the most urgent priority is to conserve and regenerate forests, wetlands, coral reefs, fisheries, and especially soil; that Earth is a living being, and that if we continue to degrade its tissues and organs, which are ecosystems and species, then even if we cut emissions to zero, the planet will still die a death of a million cuts. Also, I think that part of the story of separation is a reduction of the world into number into quantity and the elimination of the qualitative, and that’s what mathematical models, climate models tend to do, but they leave a lot out.
So I don’t think that—there could be global warming, there could be global cooling. I think most likely is [there are] wild fluctuations, gyrations of a system spinning out of control. So yes, I think we should cut carbon emissions, but from the living-planet view, that isn’t the top priority. It would be if you are really sick and you’ve got to support your basic systems. So basically I’m not saying the science is wrong or the science is right. I’m saying that’s not even the right conversation to be having. I don’t know—just to say that in two minutes, I’m kind of stepping into the line of fire here because it’s a very polarized issue. I have a whole book of argumentation and citations and studies and things to back it up. Yes, I think we’re barking up the wrong tree.
TS: What is the right tree? What is the right conversation to be having?
CE: How can we conserve, protect, heal, regenerate life on this earth? Now if we did that, we would probably—this is one thing I came to in my research. Even if the skeptics are right and carbon is not a problem, I still would oppose offshore oil drilling, fracking, pipelines, mountain top removal, Tar Sands excavation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because each one of those things, through whatever—oil spills and pollution—each one of those things also devastates life. So in a way, what I’m saying doesn’t contradict. But it’s a different frame. It’s a different thing.
It’s saying—here’s maybe one more piece if I have time. Back in the ’70s, the ’60s and ’70s during the heyday of the environmental movement, the narrative wasn’t “Change our ways or we’re not going to survive.” It was “Save the whales because they’re so beautiful. Save the forest because look at what’s happened.” It was coming from love. Now the narrative is, “We’d better do something or terrible things will happen to us.” I think that underneath the crisis to begin with is this kind of anthropocentric self-interest, where we’re treating the world as it was just here for us, as if these were not beings in their own right that have worth and sacredness.
So the solution, the transcendence of this crisis isn’t going to come from being just a little bit more clever in deploying our resources, and exploiting nature but with a low carbon, on a low carbon basis. No, it’s going to be to come back to love of all life on earth and to say, “How can we heal together? What are we meant to do together?” Just like the regenerative agriculture people I was talking about, what does the soil need, what does the soil want, what does the water want? When we do those things, climate isn’t going to be a problem. That’s the approach we need to take. That’s why I say that the fixation on emissions is the wrong conversation.
TS: OK Charles, I’m going to ask you one final question here, a personal question, a personal one, which is this program is called Insights at the Edge. Part of it is I’m always curious what someone in their own life is working on, that they see as sort of the edge of their growth and evolution at the moment. I’m curious what that is for you.
CE: Hmm. I referred to a little bit before with the approval-seeking thing. What I’m working on is clarifying when am I just—[as soon as] I have doubt or hesitation about what I’m saying, what I’m doing, how much of that is because of a genuine not knowing, a genuine honesty about what I don’t know? And how much of that is coming from just a shrinking back from what I actually do know? How much am I being authentic, and how much am I just shrinking back from my full power or my full role being here? So I look at that, where am I coming from fear?
TS: Thank you for that very vulnerable answer. Thank you.
CE: Yes. In my line of work you’re not supposed to show a lot of doubt; you’re supposed to be very confident. I recently got a message to my website, someone saying, “Your inner turmoil and your self-doubt, it detracts from the credibility of your message.” It might be true that if I displayed more complete confidence that I would be more persuasive. But I think that what people really need today is a little bit of honesty. I mean, in politics, everybody is pretending that they have a plan, that they know what they’re doing. I would like to see a politician say, “I’ve got no idea what to do.”
TS: Well, I certainly appreciated your honesty here at Sounds True. It sounds true to me, your honesty, so thank you.
CE: Thank you, Tami.
TS: I have been talking to Charles Eisenstein. He is the author of the book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible and also a book on Sacred Economics. Thank you everyone for joining us. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey.
