Quotes from Charles Eisenstein

To condemn what we see as selfish, greedy, egoic, or evil behavior and to seek to suppress it by force without addressing the underlying wound is futile: the pain will always find another expression. Herein lies a key realization of interbeing. It says, "I would do as you do, if I were you.

The procrastination, the laziness, the halfhearted attempts, the going through the motions—all indicate that the old story isn't motivating you anymore. What once made sense, makes sense no longer. You are beginning to withdraw from that world. Society does its best to persuade you to resist that withdrawal, which, when resisted, is called depression.

There are puppet-masters, but they are systems and ideologies, not people. As

The radiance of that which wants to be born illuminates the shadows, bringing them into the light of awareness that they may be healed.

The same interbeingness that makes us so immensely vulnerable also makes us immensely powerful. Remember this! Indeed, the vulnerability and the power go hand in hand, because only by relaxing the guard of the separate self can we tap into power beyond its ken. Only then can we accomplish things that are, to the separate self, impossible. Put another way, we become capable of things that we don't know how to "make" happen.

fighting the enemy is futile when you inhabit a system that has the endless generation of enemies built into it. That is a recipe for endless war.

To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much a part of our experience of life, that we no more know what it is we are missing than a fish knows it is wet.

The science is beginning to confirm what we have intuitively known all along: we are greater than what we have been told. We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.

The institutions that have borne us through the centuries have lost their vitality; only with increasing self-delusion can we pretend they are sustainable. Our systems of money, politics, energy, medicine, education, and more are no longer delivering the benefits they once did (or seemed to). Their Utopian promise, so inspiring a century ago, recedes further every year.

We received it on a cultural level when the Age of Aquarius morphed into the age of Ronald Reagan,

The commoditization of social relationships leaves us with nothing to do together but to consume. Joint consumption does nothing to build community because it requires no gifts.

Usually, destructive pleasure-seeking behavior arises as an outburst of pent-up desire, and not as the expression of authentic desire.

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism

Competition and the accumulation of more than one needs are the natural response to a perceived scarcity of resources. The obscene overconsumption and waste of our society arise from our poverty: the deficit of being that afflicts the discrete and separate self, the scarcity of money in an interest-based system, the poverty of relationship that comes from the severance of our ties to community and to nature, the relentless pressure to do anything, anything at all, to make a living.

When what we offer is sacred to us, then the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift.5 No price can be high enough to reflect the sacredness of the infinite.

reductionistic thinking pervades the entire political spectrum...When no proximate cause is obvious, we tend to feel uncomfortable, often to the extent of finding some reasonable candidate for "the cause" and going to war against that.

Perhaps it is the increasing abstraction of ourselves from the world, to which language contributes, that explains why "fifteen years ago people could distinguish 300,000 sounds; today many children can't go beyond 100,000 and the average is 180,000. Twenty years ago the average subject could detect 350 shades of a particular color. Today the number is 130."13 By naming the world, abstracting it and reducing it, we impoverish our perception of it. Language

Another way to see the unexpected fruits that arise from the mystery is that when we live in the spirit of the gift, magic happens. Gift mentality is a kind of faith, a kind of surrender—and that is a prerequisite for miracles to arise. From the Gift, we become capable of the impossible.

Ultimately, what economics attempts to measure, underneath money, is the totality of all that human beings make and do for each other.

The one who bows into service is an artist. To see work as sacred is to bow into service to it, and thus become its instrument. More specifically and somewhat paradoxically, we become the instrument of that which we create.

The hippies saw it and lived it for a few shining moments, but the old stories were too strong. Instead of the hippies pulling us all into a new world, we dragged them back into ours. The

This book proclaims a revolution of a wholly different sort. It is a revolution in our very sense of self and, as a consequence, in our relationship to the world and each other. It will not and cannot arrive through a violent overthrow of the present regime, but only through its obsolescence

Our intellectual habit is to find the One Cause, our scientific programming is to measure it, and our political gearing is to attack it. When the One Cause is global, we cross our fingers and hand over responsibility and power to distant global institutions. They'll take care of it. We hope. But too often, blaming climate change means not doing anything at all.

We delude ourselves when we suppose than the main impact of speech lies in the words (as opposed to the voice), just as we delude ourselves when we cite logical reasons, which are actually rationalizations or justifications, for our decisions.