Quotes from Charles Eisenstein

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?

One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.

When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.

When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.

Ultimately, work on self is inseperable from work in the world. Each mirrors the other; each is a vehicle for the other. When we change ourselves, our values and actions change as well. When we do work in the world, internal issues arise that we must face or be rendered ineffective.

It is the cry of the separate self, 'What about me?' As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn't matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.

The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.

Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?

The things we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from.

These include the need to express one's gifts and do meaningful work, the need to love and be loved, the need to be truly seen and heard, and to see and hear other people, the need for connection to nature, the need to play, explore, and have adventures, the need for emotional intimacy, the need to serve something larger than oneself, and the need sometimes to do absolutely nothing and just be.

Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.

Trust your intuition and be guided by love.

It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar. Fear it or not, it is happening already.

The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don't have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn't a global 911 to call.

The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void; it comes from inaction. When we see it, we realize it was right in front of us all along. It is never far away; yet at the same time it is in a different universe—a different Story of the World.

Regenerative agriculture represents more than a shift of practices. It is also a shift in paradigm and in our basic relationship to nature.

We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.

To conduct a revolution of love, we must reconnect with the reality of our system and its victims. When we tear away the ideologies, the labels, and the rationalizations, we show ourselves the truth of what we are doing, and conscience awakens. Bearing witness, then, is not a mere tactic; it is indispensable in a revolution of love. If love is the expansion of self to include another, then whatever reveals our connections has the potential to foster love. You cannot love what you do not know.

I am saying that there is a time to do, and a time not to do, and that when we are slave to the habit of doing we are unable to distinguish between them.

I would like to propose that the reason our actions have been so manifestly unsuccessful in steering the world away from its present collision course is that we have not, generally speaking, been basing them on any true understanding.

The power of attention is much greater than the force of self-restraint.

When you hear the phrase "rescue the financial system," translate it in your mind into "keep the debts on the books." They are trying to find a way for you (and debtor nations too) to keep paying and for the debt to keep growing.