Quotes from Charles Eisenstein

To be fully in service to something one has experienced as real is the essence of leadership in a nonhierarchical age. A leader is the holder of a story, someone whose experience of its reality is deep enough so that she can hold the belief on behalf of others.

The truth is, has always been, and always will be that we are utterly and hopelessly dependent on each other and on nature. Nor

To put it in more shocking terms, it doesn't matter if the skeptics are right or not, because the assumptions on which the debate is based are already enough to doom us to a dystopian future.

Accordingly, to create objects with soul, objects for a rich and beautiful world, we must invest them with life, self, and humanity; in other words, we must invest them with something of our selves. No

The key to this paradox lies within you, in the feeling you carry that each of your actions, even your personal, secret struggles, has cosmic significance. You will know then, as you know now, that everything you do matters.

We are born creators, here to achieve the exuberant expression of our gifts. The

When we chop nature into bits in an attempt to understand it, we lose sight of the relationships among those bits. But ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.

we live in a system, an ideology, and probably a wounded psychology that allow full feeling only sporadically. The system numbs us; it also depends on our numbness.

Stories, like all beings, have a life span. In their youth, their immune system is strong, but as time goes on they become increasingly unable to withstand the contrary evidence and experiences that pile up. In the end, I could no longer believe my own story. Who I had to be to maintain it—cynical, dismissive, patronizing, holding back from new experiences—became intolerable.

The kind of taxes.. that we have today are nearly the opposite of what we want to create in our world. We can take from the commons, that which no one should own, without paying for it. Yet the one thing we can be said to own, our own productive labor, is subject to taxation in the form of income tax. Meanwhile, we are forced to pay a tax on the circulation of goods, a sales tax, while there is no tax on the accumulation of wealth not used for exchange.

To be truly rich is to have sovereignty over our own time.

Pleasure, remember, is among other things the feeling we get from satisfying a need. The more powerful the need, the greater the pleasure. To follow this principle requires, first, accepting that our needs are valid and even beautiful. And not just our needs, but our desires as well, coming as they do from unmet needs.

How many revolutionaries have recreated, in their own organizations and countries, the very institutions of oppression they sought to overthrow?

We do not have a new story yet.

We must remember that purposive change is possible beyond what we direct ourselves. We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting.

The things we need the most are the things we have become most afraid of, such as adventure, intimacy, and authentic communication.

And so the second answer: you are everything. Take away even the tiniest relationship and you are diminished as well; add one and you are increased; change any being in this cosmos, and you are altered as well. You are, therefore, everything: a web of relationship, each containing all.

We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption — anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.

In any event, our governing paradigms, rooted in separation and scarcity, are constitutionally unable to encompass free-energy technologies, which are dismissed as impossible, fraudulent, or fantastical.

Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.