• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Charles Eisenstein

  • About
  • Essays
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
    • Charles Eisenstein Random
    • A New and Ancient Story Podcast
    • Outside Interviews
  • Courses
    • The Sanity Project
    • Climate — Inside and Out
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course One
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Two
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Three
    • Dietary Transformation from the Inside Out
    • Living in the Gift
    • Masculinity: A New Story
    • Metaphysics & Mystery
    • Space Between Stories
    • Unlearning: For Change Agents
  • NAAS
  • Books
    • The Coronation
    • Climate — A New Story
    • The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
    • The Ascent of Humanity
    • Sacred Economics
    • The Yoga of Eating
  • Events
  • Donate

Institutes for Technologies of Reunion

April 5, 2017 by Charles Eisenstein

April 2017
You can find a translation of this essay in Czech here.


When I graduated from high school in 1985, college was the unquestionable next step for an intelligent, middle-class or upper-middle class young person. I entered an elite school not out of any particular ambition, but because the story that surrounded me said that this is how to do life. College, and probably further degrees thereafter, was the path to full participation in society.

The problem was that deep down, I didn’t want to fully participate in society. I sensed a wrongness at the base of things. As I learned more about the workings of the world, I didn’t want to be part of it. Even the public service paths that elite education could prepare me for seemed themselves to be still part of the same system.

I didn’t know of any alternative to university however, or perhaps I wasn’t brave enough to find one. And besides, at that time I couldn’t identify the cause of my lassitude, my passive rebellion, my lack of motivation.

Now two of my own sons have reached college age, one 18 and one 20, and neither has yet gone to college. The nebulous intuition that led my unconscious rebellion has become, for them, an outright refusal to follow “the program.” Moreover, they have alternatives that were not on my radar screen in the 1980s. Jimi has spent some time in ecological, spiritual, and permaculture programs in the U.S. and Costa Rica that prepare people to participate in a future that is not just an extension of the present, but a different world with different values and different ways of seeing.

Programs like these exist all over the world, yet still they are scattered and lack a unifying narrative that might present them as a solid alternative to traditional higher education. Young people must luck into them or know enough to seek them out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this kind of education – education in what the planet needs most right now – were more easily accessible?

Imagine a worldwide archipelago of land-based institutions of learning for people like my sons, sanctuaries of alternative technologies of earth, mind, matter, and body that are marginal or absent within conventional universities. So much of the most exciting work whether in medicine, agriculture, or social change is happening outside academia, invisible to many of the young people who might otherwise follow them into a career, and lacking the financial support and community of research that could propel them to the next level.

We need a parallel system of technology development that can guide society as conventional systems unravel and conventional technologies fail to adequately address our problems.

We need, to use Ken Carey’s phrase, to establish islands of the future in an ocean of the past. For reasons I will describe soon, let us call these places Institutes for Technologies of Reunion. They have two main functions: research and learning. For learners, especially young people who would otherwise go to college or graduate school, they are places:

  • To obtain knowledge unavailable at conventional universities
  • To acquire skills that will be useful and valued in a transformed world
  • To acquire skills to help that transformation happen
  • To deprogram from conventional education and have a sanctuary in which to develop a calling
  • To bond with a cohort who share a common vision of what the world can be.

For researchers, they are places:

  • To develop knowledge in an environment where you aren’t thought to be crazy
  • To collaborate with other cutting edge workers in unorthodox fields
  • To clarify knowledge by teaching it
  • To pass knowledge to the next generation and mentor its development
  • To test, incubate, and develop technologies to prepare them for wider application

What is Technology?

What kind of technology are we talking about here? The word usually brings to mind things like computers, robots, lasers, nano-scale fabrication, gene editing, chemical engineering, and electronics. These we think of as “high tech.”

All of these share certain characteristics in common. They depend on a high degree of specialization; they depend on a vast industrial infrastructure to produce; they are derived from scientific research; and they are based on the application of energy to manipulate and control matter. Accordingly, the standard dictionary definition of technology is “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.”

These technologies have utterly transformed the world in the last few centuries, but they are proving incapable of solving the problems we face today, many of which, ironically, are caused by the very same kind of technology we hope to use to fix them. Whether it is agricultural chemicals degrading the soil and creating the need for even more chemicals, or medical interventions causing side effects that require further medical interventions, technology often becomes a “fix” in the sense of an addiction, requiring more technology to manage the results of previous technology. On a broader scale, the entire scientific-industrial system has created ecological degradation and social atomization that we attempt to fix from within the same technological mindset of quantification, engineering, and control. It follows the dream of techno-utopia: that if only we could exercise precise control over every bit of matter, if only we could quantify and label and digitize every object with its own IP address, then we could manage the world rationally, eliminate uncertainty, and maximize human wellbeing. On the social level, the same ambition translates into the program of total information awareness, so that each economic transaction, each social interaction, and all physical movement is tracked and saved in a database.

Yet it is becoming obvious that despite continuing advances in our ability to control matter and society, the promise of utopia is receding into the future, and indeed has passed the event horizon called cynicism. No longer does anyone believe that material and social engineering is on the verge of ushering in a perfect world.

For these reasons – the failed promise and worsening crisis of technology as we know it – I would like to offer an expanded conception of technology. The kind of technology described above is but a subset of all technology, a subset I’ll call “technologies of separation.” These will always have their place, but at the present historical moment we need to shift our collective will and energy toward a different kind of technology, which I will call “technologies of reunion.”

To expand the definition of technology, we can simply return to the original Greek roots of the word, which means “a logos of crafts.” Technology is a system of techniques for applying human will to alter the physical world.

A Transition in our Narrative

Technology is not just a haphazard collection of techniques. As a “logos of crafts” implies, these techniques are interrelated; they grow from a common logic, a unifying narrative or worldview. This narrative determines what we consider to be real, possible, and important. It answers the questions “What can we do?” “What should we do?” and “How can we do it?”

The technologies of separation that dominate the world today draw from the story of separation, which includes:

  • Humans separate from nature
  • The self as a separate individual
  • Full selfhood (consciousness, sentience) existing in humans alone
  • Competition as the defining characteristic of life
  • Domination and control over the other as the key to wellbeing
  • That all things are composed of generic, identical building blocks
  • That to be real is to be measurable and quantifiable
  • That the forces of nature are basically random, so human progress depends on insulating ourselves from   their dangers and harnessing them for our purposes
  • Linear and reductionistic thinking as the basis of technology
  • Force-based causality
  • Human destiny to conquer or transcend nature

These are the threads of the mythology that has overtaken civilization over the last few thousand years, and especially the last few centuries. It is rapidly becoming obsolete though, giving way to new and ancient story, the Story of Interbeing. It holds that:

  • The self is relational at its core
  • Humans are not separate from nature
  • What we do to the world, we do to ourselves
  • The basic qualities of a self (e.g. consciousness, intelligence) are ubiquitous and universal; everything is     alive
  • Each being is a holographic mirror of all
  • Cooperation, sharing, and symbiosis are defining characteristics of life and evolution
  • Morphic resonance is the primary causal principle
  • Each being has unique and necessary gifts to give toward the wellbeing and evolution of the whole
  • Human destiny is to use its unique gifts to serve the health and development of Gaia

Technologies of Reunion draw from the Story of Interbeing and contributes to its emergence in world civilization.

Technologies of Reunion contribute to the reunion of human and nature, mind and body, thought and emotion, matter and spirit, modern and ancient, masculine and feminine. They reunite all that which has been made artificially separate or even placed into opposition in the civilization of separation. It is not the erasure of binary opposites, nor is it the dissolution of all boundaries; rather it is the understanding the each includes the other, that the part includes the whole, that the inner mirrors the outer.

Examples of Technologies of Reunion

Almost any practice, whether in medicine, agriculture, energy, or education that is called “alternative” or “holistic” exemplifies a technology of reunion. Here are a few examples to illustrate how these practices draw from the Story of Interbeing.

Regenerative agriculture, for example no-till organic horticulture. This practice is motivated in part by the understanding the the health of crops and of people is inseparable from the health of the soil. It seeks therefore to serve the wellbeing of the soil, confident that the health of one is the health of all. Secondly, regenerative agriculture sees the soil not as a mere repository of chemical nutrients, but as a living being possessed of its own kind of intelligence, and as part of a larger living being that is the entire farm ecosystem. Therefore, instead of merely imposing a methodological template on a piece of land, the farmer carefully observes the land until she intimately knows it as a being unto itself, so she can ask, “What does the land want?” The relationship is intimate, personal, and unique, irreducible to any set of quantitative data on soil composition and rainfall distribution.

Homeopathy, based on the realization that every condition of a human being is mirrored by some material substance. Self and world are not separate. Homeopaths believe that introducing the informational signature of that substance into the body will unlock that disease pattern and bring healing. Furthermore, the medium for conveying the information signature of a substance is water, which in homeopathy is understood not as a generic substance defined merely by its chemical formula, but as capable of holding information and structure (a view supported by recent scientific thinking as well).

Truth and reconciliation processes. Story of Separation says, “If I were in the totality of your circumstances – biographical, economic, cultural, etc. – I would not do as you did. I am better than that.” Punitive justice comes from that belief: people do bad things because they are bad people and therefore must be deterred by threat of punishment. The Story of Interbeing says the opposite. It says, “If I were in the totality of your circumstances, my brother, I would have done as you did.” Truth and reconciliation processes change those circumstances. They come from the belief that if he could only be connected with the full impact of his actions, he would no longer want to do that. They rely on the healing power of the truth made visible. Brutalization depends on a cutoff of empathy, on the dehumanization of the victim. By sharing their stories to the witnessing of the perpetrators and the surrounding community, the victims reclaim their full humanity in the eyes of all.

Universal basic income (UBI) and community-based forms of resource sharing. In the Story of Separation, which says human nature is to maximize rational self-interest, this is an insane idea. If everyone’s basic needs were met, what would compel people to work and contribute to society? But if we believe that human nature is to want to contribute to something meaningful greater than oneself, UBI and resource sharing becomes a way to support that impulse. It also validates and supports the kinds of contributions that are hard to quantify, such as giving loving care to children or old people, making art and music, bringing healing to land and water in ways that don’t increase economic output, and so forth.

So, Technologies of Reunion include material technologies, social technologies, and also non-material technologies based on a different understanding of what is real. A partial list might include: mycoremediation of toxic waste; composting toilets and graywater/blackwater recycling systems; herbal medicine; therapies using psychotropic plants; earth building techniques; sacred architecture; sound healing; hypnosis and mind/matter techniques; nonviolent communication; compassionate listening; sociocracy, holocracy and other group decision-making methods; council processes; restorative circles; family constellation work; tantric sexual practices; communication with other-than-human beings; nonviolent methods of political direct action; implosion motors; over-unity energy devices; worker-owned cooperatives and other forms of economic cooperation; biodynamic agriculture; silvopasture; perennial-based horticulture; wetlands restoration; Montessori education; Waldorf education; technologies of voice, dance, and mask; the use of trance and dream states…

In various ways, all of these draw on the new and ancient Story of Interbeing. Even if they might also embody aspects of separation in their real-world application, they are also steps toward a new story. That is why you might feel a sense of kinship or alliance with workers in areas that seem entirely unrelated to your own. What does crystal therapy have to do with composting toilets or attachment parenting? On a deep level they are related, because their “what” and “how” draws from the same overarching story.

In perusing the list of examples of Technologies of Reunion, the reader may have felt uncomfortable with several of the items. While all of them transgress some aspect of consensus reality (social reality, economic reality, medical reality, material reality…) some of them are more at home in conventional scientific worldviews than others. You might be ready and willing to accept composting toilets, biogas systems, and solar collectors, but draw the line at astrology, free energy devices, and the use of copper braided disks to structure drinking water. I will not venture my own opinion on the authenticity of such technologies, except to say that just because an altered worldview no longer holds them impossible, does not mean that they actually work either. Regardless, a new story does motivate different avenues of research. These may or may not bear fruit – just as has been the case with familiar technologies. Whether or not they end up being usable, if you like I are still somewhat conditioned to the old story, then some of these technologies will sound outrageous. That is because they come from outside the boundaries of what we as a society have agreed to be real. We need to explore beyond the bounds of what is comfortable and familiar.

Alternative Research & Development

Unlike conventional technology, which enjoys a vast research infrastructure and powerful economic incentives to propel its development, technologies of reunion are usually quite marginal. They benefit from very little if any institutional support, but often face hostility instead. For some technologies like herbal medicine or regenerative agriculture, there exist substantial communities of research and practice, and even a little bleedover from conventional academia. Still, the career prospects for a humanure engineer or an animal communicator are seldom as secure as for a petroleum engineer or corporate communicator.

There are good economic reasons for this: technologies that do not further the extraction of resources from the earth or their consumption are less easily monetizable in the current system. They are not likely to result in a positive return on investment capital; therefore, they require funding from people not seeking a profit.

There is tremendous support for the technologies that have brought us to our present situation, but little support for the kinds of technologies that are most necessary for our society to transition into an ecological age. The technologies of reunion need communities of practice, and they need patronage from visionary holders of financial wealth and other resources.

As with conventional technology, Technologies of Reunion need their own incubators and R&D parks. These are already appearing in various guises on the edges of society. Ecovillages, herbalism schools, schools for traditional Chinese medicine, holistically oriented colleges and universities, land-based institutes, and other centers provide places where researchers can develop technologies sheltered, at least in part, from hostile external forces and economic pressures. Some technologies are better supported than others: probably the best supported are various forms of regenerative agriculture and permaculture, practiced in thousands of ecovillages and intentional communities worldwide, and still present to a degree in traditional villages that have not fully succumbed to mechanized chemical agriculture. Even so, these approaches are marginal in university agronomy departments.

Some examples of incubators for technologies of reunion include The Land Institute, devoted to perennial agriculture, The Farm in Tennessee, which pioneered the renewal of midwifery in America, Tamera Ecovillage, dedicated to healing human sexuality (as well as water retention landscapes and peace work), and the Damanhur intentional community in Italy, with its astonishing experiments in sacred architecture and plant communication. There are also growing linkages among institutions that are part of this movement, for example Numundo and the global network of Ecoversities.  These institutions are each edgy in their own way, and perhaps conventional in other ways. Each chooses its areas of exploration in the vast territory of Reunion. In a sane future on a liveable planet, places like these must no longer be radical outliers; they must be the new normal.

The Starseed Generation

The blatantly new-agey term “starseeds” just popped into my head to describe the current generation of young people coming of age today, who do not fit into dominant models of higher education. The rewards and threats that bring most people into conformity with the old story do not sway them. They cannot be bribed into a normal career. Therefore, most of what conventional universities offer is unattractive to them: both the curriculum content and the form in which it is offered.

Some of these young people muddle through university anyway, engaging themselves in political activism as an outlet for their passions. Others, the lucky ones, find new-story content in the margins and crannies of their institutions, provided by professors who are adept at sneaking things under the radar. Many more drop out of college or refuse to go entirely. It is not that they are uninterested in learning; it is that what they want to learn is not easily available. They are here on earth with a purpose and cannot tolerate spending years of their lives on something that isn’t aligned with that purpose.

When these youth get their first glimpse of permaculture, or gift economics, or herbalism, or some other technology of reunion, they come alive. Their eyes light up in recognition: here is what I was looking for. Or at least, Here is a signpost that tells me that what I am looking for is out there somewhere.

Equally powerful for these young people is to come across others of their tribe, allies in the purpose of serving the healing of Gaia, and especially elders who model an alternative life path. They realize then that they are not crazy and they are not alone.

All of this speaks to the huge need for an alternative university system. Can you see it? It is just over the horizon. It looks very different from today’s institutions. It is an organic, decentralized network of programs; a distributed university, organizationally diverse, united by a common purpose. Young people spend a month here, a summer there, a week somewhere else, a year in another place, exploring different programs and weaving them together into a coherent education. Over four years, they develop the skills to find a place in a regenerative, holistic system.

Also in this time they forge lifelong bonds with people who will be deep allies. The coalesce into a cohort and socialize into a group culture that is part of an emerging parallel society, entwined with the mainstream to be sure, yet also forming a distinct identity..After a ritual of transition (i.e. graduation) the graduates may not bear credentials that are acceptable to mainstream institutions. However, the parallel society honors and values their training, accomplishments, and courage to follow this path. Graduates carry forward the Technologies of Reunion they have learned into careers that are marginal today but that a healing world will hold in high esteem.

The parallel society I have mentioned will not stay “alternative” for long. The central structures of our society are in a state of deep crisis. When they collapse, we will be grateful to have something wholesome that is ready to enter the ensuing vacuum.

For a young person to follow this path does take courage, because it is preparation for a world that does not yet exist, a world that values Technologies of Reunion. Yet, paradoxically, it will never exist if we don’t prepare for it. The technologies that serve an ecological future also serve the transition to that future. And, to risk following this path is to make an offering of ones life, and that is a powerful prayer.

In Alliance with the Earth

I recently spent some time with a friend who has founded a (K-12) radically alternative school on a magnificent piece of land in North Carolina. She said that on her first visit to the land, the land whispered to her, “Marry me.” I’m not sure if she heard a literal whisper, or if she was speaking metaphorically.

In any event, she said “OK,” and from there something grew that she would not have been able to establish through her own contrivance.

One technology of reunion has to do with communication with land and the building of alliances with the powers of the earth. Today, as the dominant culture turns gradually toward healing, special places on earth are sensing a new possibility of alliance. They are calling their partners to them, whether through dreams, synchronicity, or by answering a long hard search. These are the places that are ideal locations for Institutes for Technologies of Reunion.

Many of these places telegraph their specialness in obvious ways. For example, I recently visited some land near Santa Fe, over 600 acres in a valley with an old Christian Brothers retreat center that is for sale. At the end of the valley is a gorgeous waterfall gushing from a nearly vaginal crevice in the boulders behind it, an oasis in a very dry region with old ponds and orchards…land that is begging to be used for a sacred purpose and, like many such places, is also under the gaze of developers. Which way will it go? It seems almost to symbolize a wider choice for all humanity. Will we continue to exploit and extract until there is no beautify left on this earth? Or will we enter into an alliance with the earth powers that are inviting us to rejoin them?

I believe the vision I have outlined is impossible without the aid of these special places on earth.

These places could be urban or rural, depending on the type of technology to be developed. There is sacredness in all places; indeed, many cities were founded on special spots on earth. It is important though that there be a physical location and not just a digital presence. We are currently at or near the historical peak of abstraction of knowledge, of disconnection from place, and we are ready for a return.

I have come into contact with many visionary people who have financial wealth, or land, or rich social capital, and a desire to serve the birth of a new story on earth. These are people whose vision goes beyond conventional ecological or political boundaries. They understand the need for a revolution in means, not just a revolution in ends. They understand that present orthodoxies – whether in science, money, politics, and relationship to the planet – are all part of the same matrix. They take seriously alternatives to standard scientific worldviews; perhaps they have had mystical experiences, or have engaged indigenous worldviews, and they understand that to heal this planet these cannot remain in the realm of “alternative” or “spiritual” but must be integrated into every aspect of life. What would an education look like that took these seriously, not as mere objects of psychological or anthropological study, but as valid and important ways of engaging knowledge? What would it look like to bring these in to nuts-and-bolts politics, economics, agriculture, medicine, and community governance?

I am offering the vision of Institutes for Technologies of Reunion as a next step beyond the “intentional community.” Like ourselves, a community thrives when it has a mission, a reason for existing beyond itself. That reason might be to hold and host an Institute for Technologies of Reunion. Each might have a unique mix of technologies that it serves, but an overarching purpose unites them: to usher in the Story of Interbeing to our civilization. That is what will join Institutes for Technologies of Reunion (whether they call themselves that or not is unimportant) into a global community of communities.

The purpose of this introduction is not to invent an idea; it is to report on something that wants to happen, to name what has yet no name and thereby bring it into greater visibility. Right now, Institutes for Technologies of Reunion exist mostly as a field of potential. It is my hope that the description I’ve offered will be like an ideational seed crystal around which a latent possibility can take shape.



Previous: Brushes with the Mainstream
Next: The Age of We Need Each Other

Filed Under: Political & Social Tagged With: education, Essay, Featured Home, new story, technologies of reunion

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Christine Grace says

    April 6, 2017 at 10:34 am

    Absolutely perfect … Thank you for sharing and speaking out loud my experience and my vision that i live and share to the best of my ability ….

  2. Diana Smith says

    April 6, 2017 at 10:50 am

    This resonates so deeply with me….and reflects my commitment to offer and serve.

  3. Suzie Heumann says

    April 6, 2017 at 12:49 pm

    Thank you for this uniting vision Charles. I live in a small intentional community, in a northern California location, that is home to numerous well known future-oriented teaching facilities like those you mention. Though I know that they all have some national and international connections nothing is unified and inter-connected enough – but the seeds are there none the less.
    A friend of mine was just telling me yesterday of an idea that she holds of a new “Prophecy” – a vision to hold that counteracts the depressing ones that we are all feeling we are “supposed” to believe.
    I’m currently working on a book with a working title of: Creating Community on Your Own Block. It takes the principles and actions we do in our own 18 person community and extends them to people who may have small and local possibilities of creating a close, connected helping network without the difficult step of actually finding one piece of property to live on. The combinations of finding the land, building the buildings (often illegal to build more than two buildings), figuring out a unified purpose, gathering the people, creating equitable money situations, and on and on makes the Dream of an intentional community very tenuous. The fortitude to continue in the face of all of this and still love the people you are trying to start with is daunting. I say “Just start”. Be the connected people you know you are and start creating right where you live. No matter if one household is conservative, or even liberal (!), and you don’t think you’ll “groove”. Just start. We are all humans and we all need to feel we belong and that we are contributing to a more beautiful world. All of us…
    Thank you for all you do!

  4. Felipe Tavares says

    April 6, 2017 at 12:56 pm

    Thank you, Charles. This just came in the right moment. You are such an inspiration!

  5. Zoe says

    April 6, 2017 at 5:05 pm

    yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes
    thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou

  6. felipe mardones says

    April 6, 2017 at 6:38 pm

    ufffff beautiful!!! resonates as truth!!

  7. Jesse Gros says

    April 7, 2017 at 12:23 am

    Right on. Love it. Thank you.
    Jesse

  8. J says

    April 7, 2017 at 5:15 am

    I left high school for university in 2013 but I was in the same situation as you. I also “didn’t have a particular ambition” or desire to go down a certain path. Going to the best university in the world, which others would salivate at, was just what I had to do to “do things properly”. It was expected of me; because it was so “easily” within my reach (just do well on some technical mathematical questions), it would have been embarrassing not to go. I also wasn’t aware of alternatives. It seemed like the thing to do. But I was also not entirely happy about it. I didn’t positively enjoy it, it wasn’t what I myself wanted to do.

    Maybe I will have to “wait for sons” for my own “nebulous intuitions” about what’s really worth doing to solidify. Maybe not literally sons, but it reminds me that it may take some cultivating and fermenting and
    “…a long long time, only time can help
    and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
    long difficult repentance …”

    • Yuri says

      April 30, 2017 at 1:23 pm

      I’m in a similar boat J.

      -Yuri

  9. Dean Edward Niemeyer says

    April 7, 2017 at 10:56 am

    Thank you Charles….I just read a post from another of my favorites, Otto Scharmer, that seems to complement your article as well: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/transforming-capitalism-seven-acupuncture-points_us_58e006cce4b03c2b30f6a6fa

  10. Noah Skocilich says

    April 7, 2017 at 10:59 am

    To echo what several others have already said here, this resonates with me so deeply and describes beautifully just the way I feel called to serve.

  11. christopher holvenstot says

    April 7, 2017 at 1:06 pm

    ooof! takes my breath away. these thoughts are as clear and practical as they are visionary and inspirational. thank you for the boost of morale i am feeling!

  12. Tom Atlee says

    April 7, 2017 at 9:45 pm

    A new technology of reunion (which I think of as a technology of wholeness) is the evolving knowledge around “wise democracy” – power, participation and wisdom of, by , and for the whole. What does that mean? How do we DO that? A few of us have sorted various dimensions of this into a fabric of design principles/considerations each one of which has about a dozen different practices or resources attached to it. We don’t yet have a curriculum or “place” where people can learn and develop this technology together, but we have created a great starting place at http://wd-pl.com to which readers are invited – to which we have added freely downloadable cards to use to learn and apply the associated ideas. Folks will find LOTS to explore there and an opportunity to become part of a “community of practice” (or “transformational learning community” = TLC) into whose hands/minds/hearts the whole project will evolve. This is a strand of social DNA awaiting your exercises in replication and evolution…

    • Kerry Lindsey says

      March 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm

      Tom, great new page. We’re still cooking on this end. Are getting pretty close to a curriculum that would include technologies like Wisdom Councils. I’ll keep you in the loop.
      Kerry http://www.highlandlakecove.com

  13. Nathalia says

    April 8, 2017 at 12:50 am

    I have this dream every now and then. It started a couple years ago (that I can remember) and it keeps evolving over time every time I dream of it. I’m touched to read this and find such resonance with what’s being built in those visions…indeed feels like “something that wants to happen”. Cheers!

  14. Curtis says

    April 8, 2017 at 8:40 am

    Amazing. I have actually just been imagining lately an “Institute for Sacred Economics.” Who knows, maybe this is something that will actually be born soon!!

  15. Brian Smyth says

    April 8, 2017 at 1:32 pm

    Thanks Charles. Had never thought of this! Some of it I initially and predictably found new and strange….a good sign! Now it makes great sense. It is great that you have opened up this path, this possibility.

    I

  16. Deborah H Yemm says

    April 8, 2017 at 5:00 pm

    I have recently become aware of something called Nature and Forest Therapy (Shinrin-Yuko) and a possibility of becoming a Guide right here within the forest we steward so that people could come and connect with the forest and natural world. The forest is the therapist. I feel strongly drawn to this concept and will continue to explore this possibility.

    It probably is not a coincidence that I recently read your book – The Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible – while being the support person for my family’s annual reforestation project. My 2 sons (self-educated free spirit style at home) and husband and I plant about 3,000 seedling trees each year on land that was previously pasture for cattle. We will probably complete that effort in another 2 seasons.

    We have created a special trust for this forest to protect its wild nature and hope to obtain a conservation easement for it before our lives have completed.

    Please keep sharing your thoughts about tomorrow’s world that our heart’s know is possible. I believe it will inevitably arrive to create a world that works for all of us.

  17. Antonio says

    April 8, 2017 at 8:50 pm

    Thanks for this inspiring writing. I am part of an effort to create something very close to what you define as a ‘Institutes for Technologies of Reunion’ it is called UniTerra. very close to Barcelona (Spain). The web isn’t yet available.

  18. Kike Godoy Forno says

    April 9, 2017 at 2:29 am

    Thank you! This is so clarifying! I have had this in the back of my head name-less, form-less, word-less, but you have made it as clear as day. This is the path I want to offer to thousands hopefully millions in my country, Guatemala. I would love to focus them (the research centers, at least 12 across the country) on Urban Reunion Technologies. Thank you from the wholeness of my heart!

    • greg marquez says

      April 18, 2017 at 4:25 pm

      Thank you, Charles
      As usual, when you point to your life experiences they bring up and reflect my own. The system you describe to address the failings we felt when we were “getting educated” fits the needs quite precisely: Each must come to his and her own about what their own personal interests are, and – more importantly – how to go about satisfying them while keeping alive the enthusiasm that such personal curiosity generates.

      Several days ago, I began my 9th decade, and the one acre property where I live continues to evolve into a working/living area where – when I leave – it will become a place used by residents for the benefit of the community. Essentially, the land is to be a resource of learning and doing. innovating, and creating; the very stuff I wish were around when you and I were growing up.

      Kike,
      Having spent nearly 3 years in Panajachel, Solala, (“dropped out” from the USA in the early 70s) I’m very interested in the groups of 12 innovators you know in Guatemala. Perhaps we might connect, and spread the Reunion.

      peace,
      greg in altadena, CA

  19. Peter Merry says

    April 10, 2017 at 5:01 am

    Thanks Charles. Great articulation of the reasoning behind Ubiquity University. Check out http://www.ubiquity.university. We’d be happy to have your sons join the revolution :-). All the best, Peter

  20. Drew Hansen says

    April 10, 2017 at 7:20 pm

    A beautiful articulation of the alternative university which is in the process of being born:

    “an organic, decentralized network of programs; a distributed university, organizationally diverse, united by a common purpose. Young people spend a month here, a summer there, a week somewhere else, a year in another place, exploring different programs and weaving them together into a coherent education. Over four years, they develop the skills to find a place in a regenerative, holistic system.

    Also in this time they forge lifelong bonds with people who will be deep allies”

    I left my conventional career track to nurture the emergence of this new interoperable system of loosely connected learning opportunities. I call it Gilded, a marketplace for on-demand skill development, which connects learners with employers and training providers. I use that language because the initial entry point is community colleges and trade schools that are in a position to respond to industry workforce needs, specifically vocational skills. We push many people into a college track who would do much better in a hands-on learning environment. They even find greater economic empowerment and financial security with these skills.

    But the goal isn’t to stop with developing this new infrastructure — or interstate highway system — for vocational career pathways. Once the infrastructure is in place, it can be opened up to other segments. It simply becomes a distributed network of learning opportunities, where learners discover pathways as they emerge and support their peers.

    I agree that distinct moments of transition need to be ritualized, but the whole notion of four years of learning and graduation is dead. It’s not a part of the alternative narrative, in my opinion.

    • Tony Pfeiffer says

      August 13, 2017 at 7:28 am

      I appreciate your description “a marketplace for on-demand skill development, which connects learners with employers and training providers. I use that language because the initial entry point is community colleges and trade schools that are in a position to respond to industry workforce needs, specifically vocational skills. We push many people into a college track who would do much better in a hands-on learning environment. They even find greater economic empowerment and financial security with these skills.”

      This part really resonates with me “it simply becomes a distributed network of learning opportunities, where learners discover pathways as they emerge and support their peers.”

      I dream of a sustainable ecosystem where the joy of learning is ignited and protected from birth to death. Masters mentor, mentors become Masters.

  21. Beau says

    April 10, 2017 at 11:11 pm

    The egocentricity experiment with human design has run its course – its climax is our confluence of crises. Virtually all system solutions and ascension paths proposed by even the most enlightened among us fail to breach egocentricity’s stronghold. The forecast for our imminent extinction is well founded and arguably certain unless we become something new. Metamorphosis is appropriate terminology here. At this Moment in history, ages of humanity can be metaphorically distilled into a litter of newborn kittens, blind from birth, whose eyes are now poised to open onto their world for the very first time….are we ready? This is our evolution.

    Relieving humanity of egocentricity’s bondage by consensus is impossible. Political proposals are hopelessly impotent. We need metamorphic catalysts immediately – means and methods to efficiently transmute egocentricity and profoundly evoke our innate senses of interdependence and compassion. Accelerating selfless (ego free) Love for oneself, one another, Gaia, and the Universe is the principal component at the root of all such action. Progress must manifest virally – just as news that ‘War is Over’ will spread like wildfire. Time is ticking. This is our evolution.

    …..well?

    https://bohobeau.net/2016/07/24/care-to-evolve/

  22. Newton Finn says

    April 11, 2017 at 1:06 pm

    While Christianity was severely distorted by early marriage to empire, and thus did more than its fair share of helping to create the mess we are in, what about the possibility of transforming the numerous dying churches, unfortunately often the more open-minded ones, into centers of alternative learning and wisdom along the lines you envision? Just a thought here about one option, immediately available, for finding sacred places to ground some of these new transformative communities. I make this suggestion as a member of the clergy who belongs to such a church, which is close to either closing down or reincarnating as something other than a mainline Protestant institution. Indeed, there would even be some continuity to strengthen such a transition from church to institute for technology of reunion, because at the unorthodox margins of the Christian tradition can be found bedrock for blending spirituality with ecological passion. Has anyone come up with a better meme for a sustainable and compassionate world than Schweitzer’s distillation of all religion into the elemental, universal value of reverence for life?

    • Daniel Smith says

      May 11, 2017 at 9:44 pm

      Newton, this is a very interesting idea. Where is it that you are a member of the clergy? Daniel Smith, Leverett Mass.

  23. Daniel Smith says

    April 13, 2017 at 5:09 pm

    Yes, this is great. As important as they are, I think this idea can go much further than intentional communities, because it opens the effort up to much more diverse and indeterminate networks, more experimentation, exchange, and working with relationship at all scales–i.e., all scales expanding out from a given institute or network of institutes.

  24. Medicine Story says

    April 15, 2017 at 12:05 pm

    Thank you, Charles. I am again amazed by the depth of your thinking into all these areas. I have wanted to connect just to let you know that from before the time I met with you in Germany I have been recommending your last book to all my supporters and everyone I meet, and I am now recommending it and your website to my sons , 41 and 37, beneficiaries of our standard university education, Tokeem an engineer out of MIT who has made his own business translating German technological materials, and Tashin who graduated from an early ed. college at 18 Summa cum laude with a thesis on “Marx and Feminism.” It is such a relief to read you and know you are there and helping re-union along when at 88 I am not sure how much I will see of that before I check out. Meanwhile I have just finished the first draft of a new book ‘A Permaculture of the Heart’ about all the good work being independently developed in the last 3 decades in the area of helping people and relationships to flourish at their best.

  25. Bimal says

    April 19, 2017 at 4:51 am

    A wonderful and timely article. Thank you Charles. My sons are signed up for the conventional university route. If I can help them see the narrative we live and breathe for what it is – just one narrative – then the possibility of others naturally arises. Your work helps enormously.

    On a different note I wonder if we should set aside and celebrate a reunion day. A sacred day to enjoy and give thanks for all that reunites. I can see downsides too (commercialisation and attendant cheapening) but thought to throw it out there as an idea.

  26. Wellness Gangster says

    April 20, 2017 at 12:44 am

    You help give a voice to what is a screaming silence in this world.

    It is my life’s work to be a part of creating an ‘alternative university’ as you describe it and I truly believe it can be the one thing that ‘saves the world,’ as cliche’ and naive as that may sound.

    Looking forward to bumping into you in the process, brother.

  27. Tessa maskell says

    April 28, 2017 at 3:46 am

    What a marvellous dissertation. What a wonderful explosion and expansion of my consciousness. Thank you so much for writing like this.

  28. Max says

    May 9, 2017 at 12:59 pm

    Very inspiring, thank you!

    Does anyone here know of an intentional community of the type that Charles describes in New York or New Jersey? Or even a town where these kind f values are practiced..

  29. Jessica Swanson says

    May 17, 2017 at 7:12 pm

    I feel deep appreciation and excitement that you put these ideas out in a substantial way. I have recently been in the same field of consciousness and weeks ago (probably synchronized with your thinking on this, Charles) I compiled a list of qualities that would be embodied in a school where I would want to teach. Many of the qualities you list are the same ones I’ve included – and you have some great new ones for me to ponder. Something you didn’t write about, but I think resonates with the Institutes for Reunion is to not isolate or “mono-crop” by age but rather create diverse learning communities where elders and children can learn together with college age students (One of the best teaching experiences I had was the most diverse one, at a community college with diversity of every sort including age – high school age to senior citizens in the class, and it was a generous class spirit due to this diversity.)
    I have been dreaming of starting such a school in a very small, organic way but dream that it will eventually include abundant light, plants and animals, and a totality of experience that nourishes the body, mind, spirit, with the whole result of revitalizing and invigorating (rather than depleting and competing). It breaks my heart that our typical institutions are not sustainable for our mind/body/spirit. Still, I wouldn’t want to “throw the baby out with the bath water” when it comes to “higher” education. For example, I think about how I got to where I am and see that it included some moments I liken to an old-growth forest. Because we so often consider learning to be encased in time (a semester) we limit ourselves. My moments of educational nourishment were not confined to time. When a giant tree falls and becomes a nurse log it creates life that extends beyond the scope of the duration of it’s “lifespan.” For me, my transformative education moments included love within/beyond a nourishing intellectually rich community where teachers and faculty saw who I really was and empowered me to choose my path and articulate my vision. They included spontaneity and joy – a faculty who broke out dancing when that was not the point of the meeting! These qualities still exist in education, and are embodied within many of the faculty with great, generous heart who remain committed to giving back to the next generation. Yet I also see fear of lawsuits and threats of job loss as a way that these spontaneous, heart felt moments when faculty get “weird” or “out there” as a major loss and something I want to bring back. It is not a coincidence that this mentor of mine also taught classes on Wildness. The aim of mainstream academia to perpetuate the status-quo, with pseudo “breakthroughs” that come from things like military grant funding, is ripe for deep and substantial transition. I was recently a lead administrator at creating a new major that was interdisciplinary and restorative for the environment and social justice (one in the same.) The institution I am a currently part of couldn’t really see this through because of a budget crisis. It was deeply troubling that the initiative exists to transform education from within and yet it’s not where the money is, per se. Not yet anyway. I appreciate your giving articulation to these vital ideas around helping youth to fully emerge into their power as adults in a way that restores communities and our sacred earth. I am on this journey along with many of you. May we all more fully re-connect and allow our heartfelt vision for a revitalized form of education to bear many fruits.

    • Miles Stirewalt says

      June 1, 2017 at 2:51 pm

      As a current high school and community college educator, I am so excited for opportunities like this! I would be really excited to begin this journey with some folks who share this vision.

  30. Amy Lansky says

    May 18, 2017 at 7:09 pm

    Yes, Sign me up as a teacher/participant! I’m aching to participate in something like this!

  31. Saiko says

    July 23, 2017 at 11:22 am

    “Each being has unique and necessary gifts to give toward the wellbeing and evolution of the whole”

    I see that as “Each being has unique and necessary gifts to give toward the wellbeing and evolution of self and the whole. There is no separation between self and whole.”

    The step that few seem to take is to realize that interconnection is not in opposition to individuality. We are each unique beings and our flowering as individuals is of utmost importance. Seemingly paradoxically that genuine flowering is couched in the actulaity of interconnection. However interconnection is not groupism. Groupism is a substitute for the realization of interconnection. It comes about because an individual is tuned to separation and therefore feels isolated.

  32. Ben says

    September 13, 2017 at 8:29 pm

    While I am hugely enthusiastic about the ideas in this article and in your other publications, especially Sacred Economics, I am troubled by your expression of interest in the idea of free energy machines (“implosion motors; over-unity energy devices”). Although many economists are likely to approve of your economic ideas, any serious physicist could easily refute the possibility of such a machine. So when you express interest in exploring such machines, you risk demoting your brilliant economic ideas into the realm of kooky pseudoscience (which “free energy” machines are strongly associated with), which may in effect damage the credibility of the movement.

    While I don’t think you should suppress the expression of personal beliefs for the sake of reputation, you should at least re-consider whether you take the idea of “free-energy” machines seriously, and if you still do mention such things with a degree of skepticism so that people don’t automatically question your other, more brilliant, ideas as a result.

  33. Paul says

    April 29, 2018 at 10:40 am

    Hey,
    thanks for putting this out – there are a bunch of such places – starting right now – but often they are not well connected and offer just a puzzle piece of the transformation needed!

    We are since 2015 in the process of creating such a Institutes for Technologies of Reunion in the most holistic way we can think of and based in a Intentional Community: “The Academy of applied good Life” in the Middle of Germany.
    http://www.gutes-leben-akademie.de
    or with english-google-translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=gutes-leben-akademie.de

    We allready learned a lot on our way in intense groupprocesses as our group is the Generation which would have loved to study at such a place (mostly 22 – 35 years old) – currently we live in a prototyp house near Marburg and are about to decide for a final place – One out of three great but all not perfect opportunities has to be choosen until this June 2018.

    Our Mission:
    Our aim is to train young people in a real laboratory to develop competencies in order to become active as pioneers of change for a good life on this earth.
    Within our intentional-community, we build common-good-oriented companies in five specialist areas (human, ecology, technology, culture, systems) to offer apprentiships to young people.
    In the department of ecology for example: are we about to set up a regenerative agriculture-farm.
    All 5 domains together are the most holistic approach to transformational education and reasearch we could think of. The are strongly connected and interwoven and ther common aim is to further develop sustainable economicly viable solutions for global challenges together with universities and research institutes. All 5 departments are complemented by modules from the three basic areas of the academy (system analysis, communitybuilding and potential development). These 3 areas support new students when they enter the acadamy to find their own gifts and unfold them in the context of our global challanges.
    If new students decide after 3 Months for a 2-3 year apprantiship in one of the 5 above mentioned departments they will still be constantly accompanied by the other 3 fields:
    -potential development: spiritual inquiry: who am I? Consciousness-development tools, Shadow-work to overcome old habbits, Integral-Life-Practice.
    -community building: how can we co-creat something in deep authentic mutual supporting relationships, sociocracy…
    -system analyses: how do systems and transformation function – how is my field releated to the big picture?

    We are happy if you reach out for us for networking or support!
    Contact: info@gutest-leben-akademie.de

    warmly ,
    Paul

  34. Sheryl Morris says

    June 28, 2019 at 11:50 am

    This sings to me! Especially, having recently returned home from a Montessori for Social Justice retreat and conference in Portland, Oregon. I was struck, once again, by how much we all have to learn from Indigenous communities; by how much we stand to gain in quality of life by honoring and gently embracing, mind, body, and soul those of the Global Majority. (My own identity: white, senior, cis-gendered female.)

  35. Random video chat says

    August 19, 2019 at 3:33 am

    Helpful information, Fortunate me I found your site inadvertently, and I’m amazed why this fortuitous event did not occurred ahead of time! I bookmarked it..

  36. Four Arrows Don Jacobs says

    September 1, 2019 at 2:02 pm

    The recent UN Report on Instinction Rates (2019) says Indigenous worldview is the best chance for turning things around. I honor that Charles mentions this, but feel it deserves more than a mention. It represents how we lived for 99 percent of human history and is held by people who deserve recognition and support.

  37. Four Arrows Don Jacobs says

    September 1, 2019 at 2:04 pm

    See Four Arrows book Point of Departure: Returning to our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival.

  38. Jonathan Dawson says

    September 1, 2019 at 4:05 pm

    This is spot on the zeitgeist, providing a focal point and powerful articulation to so many conversations I find myself engaged in just now. Thanks for pulling the threads together so well. Now we must act on this!

  39. Josefita Guzmán says

    September 13, 2019 at 7:48 am

    En la actualidad hay muchos proyectos que se mueven en esta tesitura, la diferencia es que se trabaja directamente en la tierra, en la salud, en la tecnología limpia, en la educación alternativa, etc., y poco se escribe al respecto. Debemos tener un solo mundo, uno en que quepamos todos sin fronteras, donde la educación comparta los mismos principios: no hacer nada que dañe a la propia persona y no hacer nada que dañe a otros, estudiar para el bien comun. Que la educación sea una fiesta de aprendizaje y conocimiento y que éste, no este esquematizado, que sea tan amplio como la propia persona lo desee.
    Gracias Charles por este escrito maravilloso, digno de ser compartido.

  40. Paolo Coppa says

    January 9, 2020 at 1:51 pm

    Amazing voice of truth. I am in. When do we start.

  41. Scarlett Chou says

    March 15, 2020 at 2:44 am

    This is absolutely an amazing introductive work, I wonder is it ok to translate this into Chinese?

  42. Shannon McArthur says

    June 28, 2020 at 2:21 am

    The Pause has now happened; people are stuck behind closed doors or risking their lives, and of Elders and friends. It’s cocoon-time. Thank you, Charles and all previous commenters, for all your expressions. We need good ideas, and there are many here. Often, we don’t see the reason for things until we see the patterns in retrospect, but there is always a reason. If that didn’t happen, then this could not have happened… it’s not always good, but always leads to good, imho.

    Retrospection has led me to realize I was destined to be an Oracle and Teacher. My first prophecy was spoken at 9 and came true 40 years later. A lovely surprise that contributed to my awakening and made me realize I experience the magic so I would be inspired with MOM, the Magic in Ordinary Moments… and POP, the Power of People. I’m telling you this because of a vision of a planet-embracing network of repurposed urban buildings, similar to what you describe. Our Heart Gardens (Oh-Gs) was inspired by a crow that did successful surgery on a worm–both ends lived because they each had a heart. Earthworms live in dirt and dirt has medicine in it that relieves the symptoms of anxiety, etc. Communities need hearts that grow food, can provide soil’s medicine, a place and reason for people to gather, share knowledge and experience, healing and caring. The Oh-Gs in my vision are unique, each with specialities (depending upon location, buildings, resources, the knowledge of the people involved) as well as the basics: gardens, kitchens, integration with existing infrastructure and agencies — set up by groups that include all levels of government, owners of appropriate buildings (unused malls, department stores, hotels, zoos, arenas, etc.), private citizens, farmers, educators, counsellors, medical people, homeless people and neighbours. The current Power of People, POP needs to be redeployed, and paid until the Oh-Gs system is able to sustain the masses. Then we can rethink money — with abundant food, few have need of money. Focusing POP on creating gardens to feed us, we can help each other heal and create resilient communities that raise amazing children.

    An idea that excites me atm is an Oh-G Hockey hub… where teams engage their minds, hearts and bodies within quarantine, supported by a permanent self-contained & sustained complex focused around the game and gardening. Teams may come and go but the people are always there, ready and able to welcome them in beauty, love and abundance.

    The Oh-Gs website is — https://ourheartgardens.com
    Tap through my portal here — https://docs.google.com/document/d/11NHISMYysWO9O1wb_74SOu2Ku22ToT5Nx3OEFjhTxF0/edit?usp=sharing

  43. kamir bouchareb st says

    June 29, 2020 at 12:17 pm

    nice topic thanks

Primary Sidebar

Audio Essays

All Essays

Monarchs and Lightning Bugs

Pandemania, Part 4

Political Hope

Pandemania, Part 3

Pandemania, Part 2

Pandemania, Part 1

The Heart of the Fawn

Transhumanism and the Metaverse

Why I Won’t Write on You-Know-What

Compartmentalization: UFOs and Social Paralysis

The Good World

Central Bank Digital Currencies

The Economy Series

Reinventing Progress

Parallel Timelines

The Field of Peace

Love-gift to the Future

The Paradox of Busy

On the Great Green Wall, And Being Useful

Reunion

Division, Reunion, and some other stuff

Volatility

Into the Space Between

Wanna Join Me in a News Fast?

And the Music Played the Band

Comet of Deliverance

Divide, Conquer; Unite, Heal

A Path Will Rise to Meet Us

A Gathering of the Tribe

The True Story of the Sith

The Human Family

Elements of Refusal

The America that Almost Was and Yet May Be

Sanity

Time to Push

Some Stuff I’m Reading

The Rehearsal is Over

Beyond Industrial Medicine

A Temple of this Earth

The Sacrificial King

How It Is Going to Be

Charles Eisenstein, Antisemite

Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed

Fascism and the Antifestival

The Death of the Festival

Source Temple and the Great Reset

To Reason with a Madman

From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope

World on Fire

We Can Do Better Than This

The Banquet of Whiteness

The Cure of the Earth

Numb

The Conspiracy Myth

The Coronation

Extinction and the Revolution of Love

The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?

Building a Peace Narrative

Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom

Making the Universe Great Again

Every Act a Ceremony

The Polarization Trap

I, Orc

Living in the Gift

A Little Heartbreak

Initiation into a Living Planet

Why I am Afraid of Global Cooling

Olive Trees and the Cry of the Land

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Opposition to GMOs is Neither Unscientific nor Immoral

The Age of We Need Each Other

Brushes with the Mainstream

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

Transcription: Fertile Ground of Bewilderment Podcast

The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

This Is How War Begins

The Lid is Off

Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy

Scaling Down

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

Psychedelics and Systems Change

Mutiny of the Soul Revisited

Why I Don’t Do Internet Marketing

Zika and the Mentality of Control

In a Rhino, Everything

Grief and Carbon Reductionism

The Revolution is Love

Kind is the New Cool

What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves

From Nonviolence to Service

An Experiment in Gift Economics

Misogyny and the Healing of the Masculine

Sustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same?

The Need for Venture Science

The EcoSexual Awakening

“Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.”

Harder to Hide

Reflections on Damanhur

On Immigration

The Humbler Realms, Part 2

The Humbler Realms

A Shift in Values Everywhere

Letter to my Younger Self

Aluna: A Message to Little Brother

Raising My Children in Trust

Qualitative Dimensions of Collective Intelligence: Subjectivity, Consciousness, and Soul

The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn

The Oceans are Not Worth $24 trillion

The Baby in the Playpen

What Are We Greedy For?

We Need Regenerative Farming, Not Geoengineering

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder, Revisited

Activism in the New Story

What is Action?

Wasting Time

The Space Between Stories

Breakdown, Chaos, and Emergence

At This Moment, I Feel Held

A Roundabout Endorsement

Imagine a 3-D World

Presentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014

Shadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift

A Neat Inversion

The Waters of Heterodoxy

Employment in Gift Culture

Localization Beyond Economics

Discipline on the Bus

We Don’t Know: Reflections on the New Story Summit

A Miracle in Scientific American

More Talk?

Why Another Conference?

A Truncated Interview on Racism

A Beautiful World of Abundance

How to Bore the Children

Post-Capitalism

The Malware

The End of War

The Birds are Sad

A Slice of Humble Pie

Bending Reality: But who is the Bender?

The Mysterious Paths by Which Intentions Bear Fruit

The Little Things that Get Under My Skin

A Restorative Response to MH17

Climate Change: The Bigger Picture

Development in the Ecological Age

The campaign against Drax aims to reveal the perverse effects of biofuels

Gateway drug, to what?

Concern about Overpopulation is a Red Herring; Consumption’s the Problem

Imperialism and Ceremony in Bali

Let’s be Honest: Real Sustainability may not make Business Sense

Vivienne Westwood is Right: We Need a Law against Ecocide

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: A Year that Pierced Me

Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order

Fear of a Living Planet

Pyramid Schemes and the Monetization of Everything

The Next Step for Digital Currency

The Cycle of Terror

TED: A Choice Point

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder

Latent Healing

2013: The Space between Stories

We Are Unlimited Potential: A Talk with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Why Occupy’s plan to cancel consumer debts is money well spent

Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer

The Lovely Lady from Nestle

An Alien at the Tech Conference

We Can’t Grow Ourselves out of Debt

Money and the Divine Masculine

Naivete, and the Light in their Eyes

The Healing of Congo

Why Rio +20 Failed

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity

For Facebook, A Modest Proposal

A Coal Pile in the Ballroom

A Review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years

Gift Economics Resurgent

The Way up is Down

Sacred Economics: Money, the Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Design and Strategy Principles for Local Currency

The Lost Marble

To Bear Witness and to Speak the Truth

Thrive: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Elephants: Please Don’t Go

Why the Age of the Guru is Over

Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age

A Circle of Gifts

The Three Seeds

Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension

Rituals for Lover Earth

Money and the Turning of the Age

A Gathering of the Tribe

The Sojourn of Science

Wood, Metal, and the Story of the World

A World-Creating Matrix of Truth

Waiting on the Big One

In the Miracle

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Invisible Paths

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health (Part 2)

Mutiny of the Soul

The Age of Water

Money: A New Beginning (Part 2)

Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

The Original Religion

Pain: A Call for Attention

The Miracle of Self-Creation, Part 2

The Miracle of Self-Creation

The Deschooling Convivium

The Testicular Age

Who Will Collect the Garbage?

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

You’re Bad!

A 28-year Lie: The Wrong Lesson

The Ascent of Humanity

The Stars are Shining for Her

All Hallows’ Eve

Confessions of a Hypocrite

The New Epidemics

From Opinion to Belief to Knowing

Soul Families

For Whom was that Bird Singing?

The Multicellular Metahuman

Grades: A Gun to Your Head

Human Nature Denied

The Great Robbery

Humanity Grows Up

Don’t Should on US

A State of Belief is a State of Being

Ascension

Security and Fate

Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”

The Ethics of Eating Meat

Privacy Policy | Contact | Update Subscription

Charles Eisenstein

All content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Feel free to copy and share.

The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

* * *

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

  • • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
  • • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
  • • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
  • • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
  • • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
  • • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
  • • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
  • • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

The Coronation

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

Celo: 0x755582C923dB215d9eF7C4Ad3E03D29B2569ABb6

Litecoin: ltc1qqtvtkl3h7mchy7m5jwpvqvt5uzka0yj3nffavu

Bitcoin: bc1q2a2czwhf4sgyx9f9ttf3c4ndt03eyh3uymjgzl

Dogecoin: DT9ECVrg9mPFADhN375WL9ULzcUZo8YEpN

Polkadot: 15s6NSM75Kw6eMLoxm2u8qqbgQFYMnoYhvV1w1SaF9hwVpM4

Polygon: 0xEBF0120A88Ec0058578e2D37C9fFdDc28f3673A6

Zcash: t1PUmhaoYTHJAk1yxmgpfEp27Uk4GHKqRig

Donate & Support

As much as possible I offer my work as a gift. I put it online without a pay wall of any kind. Online course contributions are self-determined at the time you register for each. I also keep the site clean of advertising.

This means I rely on voluntary financial support for my livelihood. You may make a recurring gift or one-time donation using the form below, in whatever amount feels good to you. If your finances are tight at all, please do not give money. Visit our contact page instead for other ways to support this work.

Recurring Donations

Note from the team: Your recurring donation is a resource that allows us to keep Charles doing the work we all want him doing: thinking, speaking, writing, rather than worrying about the business details. Charles and all of us greatly appreciate them!

Donate Below

One-Time Donation

Your gift helps us maintain the site, offer tech support, and run programs and events by donation, with no ads, sales pitches, or pay walls. Just as important, it communicates to us that this work is gratefully received. Thank you!

Donate Below

Cryptocurrency Donation

Hi, here we are in the alternate universe of cryptocurrency. Click the link below for a list of public keys. If your preferred coin isn't listed, write to us through the contact form.

View Keys



What kind of donation are you making?(Required)


Recurring Donation

We are currently accepting monthly recurring donations through PayPal; we use PayPal because it allows you to cancel or modify your recurring donation at any time without needing to contact us.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.

One-Time Donation

We are currently accepting one-time donations with any major credit card or through PayPal.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.
Donation Method(Required)

Name(Required)
Email(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.