Quotes from Charles Eisenstein

Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor.

And given how much of the evil and ugliness of the present world can be traced to money, can you imagine what the world will be like when money has been transformed?

Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individual more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it. It is what musicians are referring to when they say "The music played the band

The more finely we divided and measured time, first into hours, then minutes and seconds, the less we seemed to have of it and the more the clock encroached upon and usurped sovereignty over life, until today we are all "on the clock.

But when we recognize that these are not really what we desire, our goal becomes not to suppress desire but to identify the true want or need, and to fulfill it. That is no trivial task; it is a profound path of self-realization.

People tend to conceptualize problems in such a way as to validate the tools that are familiar and available to them. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have are antibiotics, you will always look for the germ. If all you have is a mindset of war, then you will always look first for an enemy.

I remember as a child hearing of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union. There was supposedly only one kind of store, a gigantic windowless dispensary staffed by listless, surly functionaries selling cheaply made, generic goods. It sounds a lot like Wal-Mart.

Only dead things can be reduced to a set of data. A civilization that sees the world as alive will learn to bring other kinds of information into its choices.

Our peaceful hearts change the situation, disrupting the story in which hate comes naturally and offering an experience that suggests a new one.

Almost any time someone gets an exciting creative idea, the thought, "How can we make money from this?" follows close behind. But when profit becomes the aim, and not a mere side effect, of artistic creation, the creation ceases to be art, and we become sellouts.

In the Story of Ascent, a move back to the land would be a regression. We were supposed to be progressing away from labor, away from materiality, away from the dirt. In that story, heavenly was better than earthly, high better than low, clean better than dirty, the mind better than the body, and the highest social classes the ones furthest removed from the land.

in the U.S. during the Second World War, victory gardens were responsible for 40 percent of all vegetables grown during that period: 9-10 million tons...This just goes to show how our notions of what is possible or realistic depend on cultural perceptions. Cultural perceptions change, must change, and are changing. If by realistic we mean keeping everything the same, then we are going to have to stop being so 'realistic.

It is apparent that "practical" isn't working as well as it used to. Not only because what was once practical is insufficient to our need, but also because it is increasingly impotent in its native realm: the practical is no longer practical. Like it or not, we are being born into a new world.

Today's usury-money is part of a story of separation, in which 'more for me is less for you.' That is the essence of interest: I will only "share" money with you if end up with even more of it in return. On the systemic level as well, interest on money creates competition, anxiety and the polarization of wealth. Meanwhile, the phrase 'more for me is less for you' is also the motto of the ego, and a truism given the discrete and separate self of modern economics, biology, and philosophy.

if everyone focused their love, care, and commitment to protecting and regenerating their local places, while respecting the local places of others, then a side effect would be the resolution of the climate crisis.

Evidence and logic are tools we use to justify and flesh out our beliefs, but we are deceiving ourselves to think that they are the source of our beliefs. I will return to this idea, because it is crucial to understanding the process of belief change as well; and clearly, for our world to have a chance of surviving, a lot of beliefs are going to have to change.

Maintaining focus on the breath cannot happen through forcing, but only through allowing. In fact, it is extremely easy; our habit of making things hard is what gets in the way.

Without deep work on yourself, how will you avoid re-creating your own internalized oppression in all that you do?

Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so routine they are beneath conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock us.

As I mentioned earlier, the time to do is when you know what to do. When you don't know what to do, and act anyway, you are probably acting out of habit.

Everyone is a puppet, but there are no puppet-masters.

We must turn away from an attitude of nature-as-engineering-object to one of humble partnership.

The intuitions developed over centuries will be true no longer. No longer will greed, scarcity, the quantification and commoditization of all things, the "time preference" for immediate consumption, the discounting of the future for the sake of the present, the fundamental opposition between financial interest and the common good, or the equation of security with accumulation be axiomatic.

Through a million little choices every day, we are cashing in the earth.