• 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

Security and Fate

December 9, 2004 by Charles Eisenstein

December 2004


You may have noticed a near-universal compulsion in our society to achieve “financial security,” which, conventionally, we might see as an extension of the biological survival instinct. Of course, as we all know, the basic need for food and shelter is met with very little money, hinting that perhaps financial security might be a surrogate for other needs. Chief among them is the deep need to feel loved, cared for, and accepted by the world.

While no amount of money can protect us from most of life’s great calamities, it is nonetheless true that wealth can insulate us from some of life’s dangers or soften their impact—though to a much smaller extent than most people assume. Money cannot protect us from disease, divorce, stress, injury, fights with teenage children, addiction, or many other sources of misery. So while money can indeed confer some measure of security, objectively speaking that security is very limited.

Why do we feel so insecure? After all, objectively speaking our odds for a long and healthy life are no less today than they were during any other period of human history (though neither are these odds as much higher as we think). Never before has a society put so much emphasis on safety and security–a point which I will illustrate in a minute. But first let’s examine what it really is to be secure.

A secure child trusts that the world is safe, nurturing, and fundamentally good. She trusts, moreover, in her own innate goodness as well. While many unforeseeable, accidental factors may affect a child’s perception of the world’s goodness and her own goodness, I think the most important factor is whether she receives enough unconditional love and unconditional acceptance from her parents.

As adults security means beliefs like, “I am fine the way I am,” “I am capable,” and “Things are working out for the best.” “It is okay.” “I am okay.”

While a secure person will not tempt fate, neither does she feel a need to constantly insulate and protect herself from life’s uncertainties and dangers. A secure person is willing to plunge into unfamiliar territory, to try new things, to expand beyond his present self; he is not afraid of the unknown, because he knows the world is fundamentally good. I think most of us at least have moments of security, for example when we realize that “everything is working out according to God’s plan,” or that “things will work out for the best.” Sometimes we sense a wisdom and a purpose behind the superficially random events of our lives, and realize that everything that ever happened to us was necessary to create who we are today, and furthermore trust that this wisdom will continue to shape our lives. When we trust in this higher wisdom shaping the events of our lives, then it is no longer necessary to try to stave off every negative eventuality. Cultures that have a belief in fate spend a lot less energy trying to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of life; because a certain span of life is allotted to each of us, and because the key events, the key encounters of that life are foreordeained, the emphasis shifts from trying to control life to simply living as best we can the lives that are given us.

Much more than we realize, we live the lives that are given us. While it is up to us how we respond to certain situations, we have little direct control over the events of our lives. Important people come into our lives seemingly at random: a sneeze on a street corner, a late bus, can easily bring us together with a new friend or life partner. From a rationalistic, mechanistic point of view it seems that if I had not wondered into a Chinese class my freshman year I would never have ended up meeting my wife; my three sons wouldn’t exist right now… a series of most unlikely coincidences brought us together. I didn’t know and could not possibly have guessed when I changed my mind and decided to stay for one more band at a certain concert in Taipei that this decision would lead to a chain of events culminating in marriage and babies. This is why human beings believe in fate. The coincidences were so trivial, the choices so unrelated to the results, yet the results nonetheless seem to possess their own inevitability, purpose, and logic. In other words, to believe in fate means that these coincidences are illusory. My meeting Patsy did not hinge on taking a certain bus or listening to a certain band or just-so-happening to be at some place at some time—she was bound to come into my life anyway, somehow.

Of course, most scientifically-oriented philosophers would say believe in fate is just a projection of meaning and purpose onto events that are in fact random. They would say there is no meaning in coincidence. I agree that my view is profoundly at odds with conventional science, but it agrees with the teachings of most if not all major religions. Whether we are speaking of “God’s plan” in Christianity or karma in Buddhist and Hinduism, religions share this idea that the events of our lives, in their content if not their details, are guided by a necessity beyond ordinary human comprehension. Animistic and shamanistic cultures take this realization to an extreme, assigning symbolic significance to every event and encounter in life: the circling of a hawk, the sighting of a bear. All are woven into an unbroken wholeness.

When we give up the illusion of control over our lives we are free to focus on the one place where we do have some control—our selves, or more precisely, our responses to the events of our lives great and small. The pressure is off. In the yoga tradition it is taught that it is much easier to wear shoes than to attempt to cover the whole world with leather.

Nonetheless, on another level our control over the events of our lives is total. In deistic terms, we can say that God’s plan for our lives is not impersonal, but rather precisely tailored to who we are. The plan is made for you, personally, and it will change if who-you-are changes. And Who are you? You decide that—in your responses to whatever is happening to you right now. Your power to decide who you are is absolute; in fact, this is the only real power you possess. But it is enough. Everything else stems from that.

The same reasoning follows from non-deistic spirituality as well. Our thoughts, beliefs, actions and expectations generate the reality we experience. Our perceived lack of control stems from the non-linear, mysterious nature of he pathways that bring these experiences to us.

Let us ponder an intriguing paradox: We have much less control over our lives than we think, yet we also have complete power to determine what we will experience. Our power is zero and our power is total. The origin of the paradox lies in an incomplete understanding of cause and effect. I will spend a number of pages explaining the dynamics of fate, karma, and God’s plan for us, because one of the main causes of our separation from God, creation, and the rest of humanity is our attempts to control and manipulate them, in ignorance of their true nature and in ignorance of our true power. I will start with some examples, but before that let me comment a little on religious terminology. Christians look askance at teachings such as karma, believing them to imply reincarnation and to contradict the possibility of redemption by grace. Buddhists, on the other hand, deny that “God” has anything to do with determining the events of our lives—karma, cause and effect, explains it all. Disagreements like this are what happens when people bandy about concepts like “God,” pretending to an understanding which is not theirs. While contortions and misinterpretations of the original teachings have made their way into all religions, I have found the core principles, encoded in various terms, in all religions I have studied. All the important features of karma, for instance, can be translated into Christian concepts. In the present essay I will use mostly deistic terminology; equally I could restate everything in psychological terms: the unconscious and so forth. But I prefer not to do this, because to do so implies the primacy of that conceptual system and plays into the trend of explaining away spiritual experiences in material terms. This reflects a prejudice. We could equally say that all the various neurological phenomena associated with mystical states are merely the vehicle of their enactment in the time and place which we call physical, and that all the jargon of psychology is merely an attempt to recast spiritual truths in a more palatable language.

Now let’s consider a few examples of illusory cause and effect versus real cause an effect: futile attempts to control the world versus the exercise of real power. Suppose John decides to have an affair without telling his wife, Mary. He takes all kinds of steps to avoid certain consequences—that is, to not get caught. He signs up for a credit card and puts his office as the billing address. He arranges fictitious “overtime.” He hopes that by being careful enough he can control the course of events.

From God’s perspective, all of these machinations are invisible. What God sees is the state of being from which John’s actions spring. God sees a belief that terrible things will happen if Mary finds out—fear. He sees a life divided by lies and secrets. He sees unmet emotional needs that tempted John in the first place. He sees Mary’s denial in the face of the increasingly obvious. Or maybe God sees some other set of circumstances, but whatever they are, what God sees is a whole pattern of being that demands certain experiences for the people involved. Nothing they can do can prevent these experiences from happening once the original decision to have an affair has been enacted. And when Mary eventually finds out, perhaps John will blame it on some specific lapse on his part, or on some certain coincidence, but actually it was inevitable, written into the fabric of reality long before. John’s care to hide the expenses only means that Mary won’t find out that way; his care to avoid certain places only means she won’t run into them at those places. These details of when and where are, again, largely invisible to God. The perfection of God’s plan is this: you will experience the ideal consequences of all your actions. The wisdom of God’s plan is that these consequences spring from the intent and feelings behind them, and therefore are only predictable to the extent we know ourselves.

God honors the power we have as creators. An unscrupulous businessman might get rich, temporarily, through his scams, but the belief behind it all is probably something like “It’s everyone for himself in this world,” “More for someone else is less for me,” “It’s a cruel world out there,” and “It’s okay to cheat people because [everyone does it] [they’re no good anyway] [they’d do it to me if I didn’t do it to them].” These describe the kind of future he is creating for himself when he acts them out. Each of his clever swindles might be successful, but somehow events will conspire to create the experiences his “sponsoring beliefs” imply.

Fate or fortune is much like a road stretching out ahead of us, a road with straight, smooth stretches and tortuous curves, uphills and downhills, potholes, ruts, and bumps. Although by driving carefully we can perhaps avoid some of the smaller potholes, soften some of the smaller bumps, and keep our balance around the gentler turns, there are also giant pits and jarring bumps that are completely unavoidable. These represent the major challenges of life. We cannot contrive to live a life without them. They are built in. Excuse me for stating the obvious, but no amount of careful precautions and prudent behavior, and certainly no amount of money, insurance, retirement accounts, and medical benefits, can possibly prevent the major shocks and crashes of life from happening, much the less extend the road forever into the future.

I only state the obvious because in many ways our society behaves as if, with enough effort, the road of life can and should be rendered perfectly smooth. This assumption manifests in very diverse, seemingly unrelated ways, and has disturbing consequences for individuals.

Perhaps the most damaging consequence is that we believe that our misfortunes and traumas reflect some personal flaw—that we are unworthy of a smooth life; that we are not as good as the rich, healthy, beautiful, and successful people we see all around us. But another equally damaging consequence is that when everything is going well we imagine ourselves more worthy, more deserving than those poor benighted fools who’ve screwed up their lives. Not that there is anything intrinsically bad about believing yourself to be superior—the problem is that inevitably your own standards will be turned against you when the run of good fortune is over. Believing oneself to be superior because of this or that reveals a profound lack of unconditional self-acceptance. But even if this describes you, please don’t feel too bad; the conditional self-esteem originates probably with the manipulative rewards, such as praise, for outward performances that more than likely weren’t even something you would have freely chosen to do at all.

The logic beind this self-congratulation and self-blame is that we have the power and the responsibility to smooth out all the bumps and kinks in the road of life, and therefore any misfortune means we have failed. On the societal level, we find a metaphor and a model for this assumption in how we look to technology to eliminate all calamity and even all discomfort. The Technological Program, as I call it in The Ascent of Humanity, seeks to make life perfect, to put an end to uncertainty, to pain, and eventually even to death. According to this program, life is getting safer and better all the time: with dams, we are no longer at the mercy of floods; with antibiotics we are no longer at the mercy of bacterial infections; with air conditioners we are no longer at the mercy of uncomfortably hot weather; with bug spray we are no longer at the mercy of mosquitoes; with irrigation we are no longer at the mercy of the weather; with SSRI’s we are no longer at the mercy of depression and anxiety; and, we are promised, someday all the other scourges—and inconveniences—of life will be wiped out as well: no more cancer, no more unhappiness, no more death.

Complementary to the technological program, our political culture also behaves as if it were possible, and desireable, to make life as safe as possible. There is a strong hidden connection between our disbelief in fate, karma, and the divine plan on one hand, and our obsession with homeland security, “defense”, and so forth on the other.

Here’s a more mundane example. Has anyone else noticed that all the fun equipment has vanished from children’s playgrounds (at least where I live)? Gone are the seesaws, the big fast slides, and the high jungle gyms, because such equipment violates local guidelines dictated by the insurance companies. “Safety” is also the main justification for the numerous prohibitions we levy on youth, from the banning of skateboarding in almost all public places, to the age-21 drinking laws. Gone also are the days when pre-teens rode their bikes all over town—a parent today is deemed negligent if a child under thirteen is without supervision. Many parents won’t even let the children out of the yard. Contrast this to the roamings of young boys in tribal, village, or colonial times, whose only limit was their own daring. Remember Tom Sawyer? Actually there is no need to go that far back to see the trace of this longstanding trend. My sister tells me that when she was nine she and her friend Meg would wander down the road to a swimming hole along Spring Creek, and play in the water for hours without supervision and without any adults even knowing where they were. How many parents today would let their nine-year-old do that?

These trends are not entirely a product of irrational paranoia. They do reflect an increasing fear of the world, an increasing desire to protect and insulate ourselves from the world and its dangers, but it also reflects the fact that in some ways, the world out there is indeed less friendly and more dangerous than it was before. Mostly we have just developed greater fear of dangers that have always been there, but new dangers have arisen as well. And again, the culprit here is fragmentation, fragmentation on a social level. In former times when people were more strongly rooted to their communities, and knew every neighbor on the block and half of them in town, they knew their children would be taken care of.

Greater fear and greater danger form a self-reinforcing vicious circle that demolishes trust in ourselves and trust in the world–the hallmark of insecurity. Naturally, we apply this mistrust to our children as well, as the examples above confirm. All three—greater fear, greater danger, and mistrust—are symptomatic of fragmentation on all levels of being; as well, all three exacerbate that fragmentation.

First, the fear and concomitant craving for security drives us to wall ourselves off from the real world into a cocoon of safety, a separate little world where even the air must be conditioned before it enters and everything is kept perfectly clean; that is, free of “dirt,” which is nothing more than little pieces of the world. Fear also prevents us from getting fully involved in life, which always requires taking risks. Fear implores us to stay in control as much as possible. When we try to wall off as many aspects of life as possible into a private, controlled space, the realm of the private inevitably grows—the expansion of private homes in the last three decades to an average of 2000-3000 square feet for new construction demonstrates this. Our homes have expanded to encompass more and more of our lives.

Second, to the extent that the world really has become more dangerous, this is largely a result of social fragmentation—the dissolution of communities. In the old days it was much safer for kids to roam the neighborhood or even the whole (small) town, because everyone knew them. “That’s so-and-so’s kid. Remember, we met them at your cousin-in-law’s barbecue last summer.” In today’s mobile society, people don’t stay in their communities long enough to grow such roots; in an economy of superstores, franchise outlets, and long-distance commutes, people have little to tie them to a place-qua-locality in the first place.

The rise of litigiousness also reflects the breakdown of communities, which has rendered ineffectual many of the social mechanisms through which we once resolved disputes and enforced responsible behavior. These mechanisms have given way to the impersonal enforcement of the law. Today the ostracism of the community, for example, means very little because we hardly depend at all on whatever communities still exist. Except perhaps for a few vestigial—and dying—small towns scattered around the country, in most places we can still do all our shopping and commute to our jobs and live perfectly normally no matter what our neighbors think of us. Equally easily, we can simply move away. We no longer put down deep roots in a place, which makes it all the easier to “uproot” ourselves. Moving away is a nuisance, but modern living is nearly the same anywhere. The driving directions to our supermarkets and box stores change, and we must find new friends. But unless you and your friends all live in the place where you grew up, then your friendships are probably of the superficial adult type I describe elsewhere, and easily replaced.

Third, our mistrust in the intelligence and freedom of children points to a mistrust of the spirit of youth in ourselves. As many spiritual teachers have pointed out, children are closer to God, and so distrust or hostility toward our own youthful spirit is tantamount to distrust of that of God within us. Joseph Chilton Pearce has named three key features of adolescence that are relevant here: youth are idealistic, they have a sense of their own greatness, and they carry a “great expectation”—that something tremendous is supposed to happen. Our culture’s socialization process, by which it instills “maturity,” ruthlessly suppresses all three of these. Each child embodies a potential too magnificent and a soul too enormous for our society to tolerate in full blossom, so we make them into something smaller. Just as we fear the liberated transformative powers of young people, so also do we fear these same qualities in ourselves, because despite all the efforts of the powers that be to extirpate it, the spirit of youth remains latent within us, its blossoming truncated perhaps, but still vital and always waiting to germinate when conditions are right.

Our fear of the first of these qualities of youth, idealism, manifests as a resignation toward compromise and practicality, and leads to a learned powerlessness toward changing the world. Our idealistic impulses are frightening because they threaten the security of whatever life routines we have constructed: an unsatisfying job or relationship, perhaps, that is “good enough” or better than what might happen were we to give it up. Idealism is an insistence on living the way the world ought to be, or the way life ought to be. It is the recognition that on some things there is no compromise because they are more important than life itself. Throughout our youth various social forces conspire to tell us that our ideas of how things ought to be are silly and ignorant, and even if they are not, that they are impossible to achieve; that we are wasting our time and threatening our material security by even trying. This, despite numerous examples from history of individuals who lived their ideals splendidly even when they seemed impractical.

Saints and heros do not possess super powers unavailable to the rest of us; their way is open to all. Nor are saints and spiritual leaders the only humans to have successfully lived their ideals—in our own communities we can find such people as well who exhibit a contentment, joy, and solidity that surely does not come from being more clever, more ruthless, or more pragmatic at assuring for themselves a secure place in the world. On the contrary, constantly worrying about whether we can afford to do what the spirit guides us to, always watching out for our interests, calculating risks, weighing the potential gains and losses—this is an unhappy life, a restless and anxious life. In the end we therefore find that idealism is the only true practicaliy. But despite readily available examples to the contrary, our society denigrates idealism to the point where the very word has a negative connotation. We dismiss our expectation of a better world as “youthful idealism,” implying that as adults we know better. Maturity, then, is to go along with the way things are; as I said, it is resignation and learned powerlessness.

Yet, the truth will out. Sometimes, despite our deeply internalized inhibitions, our idealism bursts out as an uncontrollable impulse to do the right thing—and damn the consequences! Discarding all thoughts of “Can I afford to?” and “What will happen if?,” we quit that demeaning job—just because it was wrong to be there, or we refuse to go along with something, just because it wasn’t consistent with who we want to be. And when we do this, when we allow idealism to rule even for a single decision, we feel joyful, powerful, energized, in tune, invincible, on the top of the world. Usually the negative consequences, the “what ifs,” never even manifest, and if they do it might not matter as much as we thought.

The second of Pearce’s characteristics of adolescence is a sense of our own magnificence, that we are here on earth for a great purpose. Few of us can envision the entirety of our purpose—at best we catch hints and glimpses—but we do receive guidance to move in the right direction: longings and yearnings to do something better, something more meaningful; an irrational, oft-dismissed, yet persistent feeling that we are better than this job, which somehow seems only temporary, as if we were waiting for our real Life Work for which we could unbind our energy and devote ourselves fully to. Adolescents often speak of a feeling of standing at the edge of tremendous possibilities. Although already by their early teens this feeling is already inhibited by fear—resignation to giving up on ideals in favor of something practical—and self-rejection—I am not lucky enough, smart enough, good enough to hope for anything more than “making a living”—still the feeling remains that “I am meant for something great.”

I am great! It usually takes 22 years to beat this knowledge of our own greatness out of us completely. From a certain point of view this is necessary—society as we know it could no longer function if people were not somehow broken into accepting a greatly diminished version of themselves. Most of the work that the modern economy offers would be intolerable. And so, in the interests of the status quo, our sense of greatness has been crippled to the point where, when it manifests in our thoughts, we react with shame, thinking ourselves arrogant or conceited. We think this because we assume that our own greatness implies the diminishment of other people; in our age it is hard to conceive of greatness except in comparison to the no-so-great.

We tend to associate greatness with power, fame, and fortune, which stems from publicly-recognized success in science, politics, business, or the arts. Yet everyone knows that true greatness doesn’t require the validation of money or fame. Even in the culturally-validated realms of achievement, such as the arts and sciences, for every Da Vinci and Einstein there must be dozens of equally brilliant men and women whose work was dismissed, lost or ignored through the vagaries of history, racism, sexism, academic politics, or simply because they were too far ahead of their times. All the more invisible are those kinds of greatness that will never win wealth or public acclaim. One person’s greatness might be to rise above alcoholism to be a fine father, extraordinary grandfather, and eventually the patriarch of a vast extended family, who is everyone’s favorite uncle and trust confidante, whose influences contributes to many generations of happy lives, but whose fame never extends beyond the clan. Another person might contribute a lifetime of serene labor as a kindergarten teacher, doing what she loves and remembered half-consciously by hundreds of her former pupils in association with a happy year of childhood, not realizing how much of their self-confidence and assurance is thanks to her. This great teacher will probably never become rich and famous. If we are lucky we might come across angelic beings such as this schoolteacher, in hospitals, hospices, service charities, and unlikelier places as well. I have even met them in prison! These people have never surrendered their potential for greatness to practicality and security; paradoxically they exhibit a far deeper security than can possibly come from power and money.

What a sad, sad inhibition it is, to shrink from living out of fear of not “making a living.” When as young adults or at any time of life we reject our ideals and greatness because it isn’t practical now, because we can’t afford it, or because we give priority to “practical things,” we are essentially enslaved to survival anxiety. It is right and proper that we struggle to survive when our lives and livelihoods are threatened; after all, a dead person cannot realize greatness. If I am starving the hunger for food overwhelms all other drives. But if survival–encoded as “practicality” and “being able to afford it”–dominates life, then we can say that our society makes us behave like a bunch of starving people. In anthropology there is an idea that Stephen Harrod Buhner, writing of the development of fermentation, calls “anxiety theory,” which attempts to explain the behavior of primitive people in terms of the struggle for survival. Now we are supposed to have risen above that. Actually, the opposite is true. Primitive people enjoyed an “original affluence” remarkable free of anxiety and hard labor, while we moderns grow busier and busier as the pace of technological life quickens.

If you accept at all that there is a significance and higher purpose to human life beyond survival and reproduction, then a system in which survival anxiety governs our choices is also a system that keeps us in a low state. If the adolescent intuitions of greatness are true, then certainly there must be more to life than to live, reproduce, and die. This leads to Pearce’s third characteristic of adolescence, that “something tremendous is supposed to happen.”

Throughout childhood our brains develop all the functions needed to further the interests of the discrete and separate self. Gross motor skills, concrete operations, formal operations, reason and logic are all fully developed by the middle teens. In terms of economic self-interest, genetic self-interest, and rational self-interest, these faculties are enough–development is finished. Pearce disagrees. He says another stage of develepment is meant to happen, associated with the mysterious prefrontal cortex of the brain, at the time of middle to late adolescence. This higher developmental stage is one of transcendence–transcendence of the separate, limited, concrete world of individual ego. A tremendous awakening is supposed to happen, a transition to a transcendent state of being that we might call spiritual. The sexual awakening that happens around this time is certainly one facet of this awakening, as romantic love does crumble the boundaries of self and open us in intimate ways to an other. But it goes far beyond that. In the first fifteen years of life we establish our existence as individuated beings, but that is not the culmination of development, it is only the launching pad for the transcendence that is supposed to follow.

The problem in our society is that it never happens. In fact, our society, built upon the discrete and separate self, actively prevents it from happening and traps us forever in the maze of me and mine. Yet inside we know something is supposed to happen, and that this something is as important as life itself. But it never happens, and eventually, after a period of rebellion, we resign ourselves to an incomplete life. Or as my brother put it, “Yeah, it never happens, and then when you’re 28 years old you figure, ‘Gee, I’m a grown-up now, I guess it must have already happened.'”

Nonetheless, however effective the mechanisms by which we deny the urge to transcend the limited selves we are offered, the urge burns inside, unquenchable. It might come out as a feeling of betrayal, or an inchoate rage that has no object. Or, after rage and rebellion prove futile, we might turn the anger inward as depression.

Could it really be true, that we are meant for more than Just This? Well, if it is true, then society must hide that truth from us, because then who would put up with the trivial, meaningless, demeaning occupations that keep society running? Who would work retail? Who would input data? Who would stuff envelopes? Civilization as we know it would end. That is inevitable, when the civilization we know is founded on that pre-adolescent conception of the self.

We project the same self into biology as well when we explain behavior as driven by the genetic imperative to survive and reproduce. Whatever other meaning, purpose, or sacredness we believe in, in the bleak scientific view the real purpose of life is to pass down our genes. I am speaking here of the neo-Darwinist orthodoxy, which says that the genes that have survived to the present day are precisely those that best program organisms with bodies and behaviors that ensure those genes are passed down. Every one of the higher human qualities, we can explain away in neo-Darwinian terms. Take love. The nurturing and protective urges associated with love facilitate the survival of our genes, because our children who share them survive long enough to pass them on. A person whose genes did not “program” him to love his children would probably never have grandchildren, and his genes would exit the gene pool. Similarly, love for our spouses arises first as attraction—a mechanism to spark reproduction—and then again as protective, nurturing impulses, which ensure that he/she is around to help raise the children. So no matter what elevated meanings we ascribe to love, all that’s really going on is a pattern of neural firings and hormonal communications within our bodies, ultimately determined by our genes, that compel us to act out all the behaviors of love. And the feeling, the emotion? That is merely our subjective experience of these mechanisms. It is an epiphenomenonon, while the electro-chemical phenomena are the fundamental reality. They are what really going on.

The scientific foundation of the denial of purpose goes deeper than Darwin, of course, all the way down to the mechanical universe implicit in the equations of Newton and Galileo. Whatever purpose we ascribe to the world, all that is really happening, at bottom, is a bunch of fundamental particles interacting according to impersonal, mathematical rules. The philosophical implications of this were realized in the late 19th and early 20th century by thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, who concluded that any sound philosophy of life must be based on an “unyielding foundation of despair.” I explore these ideas in much greater depth in Chapter Three of my book. For the present purpose, the key implication is that fate or purpose is an illusion, a projection of a pattern onto reality that does not exist, and that security–which is really just the maximization of economic/biological interest–along with pleasure is by default the only purpose to life.

Because this assumption is woven deeply into what we call rational, sober thinking, and into our fundamental understanding of the nature of the reality we experience, I believe it necessary to address the apparent incompatibility of science with a universe of spirit, meaning, and purpose, which is one of the deepest reasons we so easily reject our youthful intuition of our own power and magnificence. Any philosophy that attempts to construct meaning atop a foundation of random, purposeless, deterministic interactions of fundamental particles is bound to be hollow and inauthentic. (As is the case when determinism is replaced by randomness at the quantum level. Blind randomness is little better than determinism; moreover, the conventional view is that quantum indeterminacy cancels out on the macro level.) In other words, it is to be expected that survival anxiety rules our lives when science—the religion of the age—posits the survival and procreation drive to be the fundamental raison d’etre of biological existence. We are here, at bottom, simply to survive and reproduce. Any other meaning we assign to life is merely a comforting fantasy.

To be sure, most scientists, even the most hard-core skeptics, agree that science has not and cannot ever disprove the existence of God or the soul. They say only that such concepts are unnecessary to explain any phenomena so far observed in the universe; that once upon a time, primitive man knew almost nothing and so explained the mysterious world through myth and religion; then as science developed, we explained these mysteries one by one, and God became less necessary; someday science will discover the theory of everything—we are close already—and all phenomena will be explained. There will be no more mysteries, and therefore no need or place for God. Oh sure, even then we will not have proven God does not exist; we will only have made God completely irrelevant to the universe we live in.

This view of God is consistent with the abstraction of spirit from matter that has been going on for the last several centuries, if not millennia. Both the scientists and the religious establishment agree on at least one thing: that if God exists at all, God is in a separate realm from matter.

The reconciliation of science and spirit that I offer takes the opposite approach. Rather than seeing God as an external imposer of meaning onto a dead, mechanical universe, I describe a universe that is inherently alive, inherently purposeful, and inherently sacred, and of which God is an immanent property. In such a universe, all of us have a necessary role to play, a reason why we are here. We can all feel it. Even though the ideology of our civilization denies it, I think all of us have been in a job, a relationship, or another situation where we know, “I am here for more than this!” That is the intuition I am speaking to.

Some people have criticized me for allowing the taint of teleology into my thought. Well, it is more than a taint. My thinking is flagrantly teleological. However, it is an organic teleology independent of an external source of purpose or design. This is hard for people to understand mired in the Dualistic assumptions of Cartesian thought. It is hard for me to understand, sometimes, how the universe could have purpose without a purposer. In my book I devote many pages to explaining how that could be, drawing heavily on examples of self-organization in biology, chemistry, even mathematics.

Instead of going there now, let me just summarize the ramifications of this idea, to see if it rings true for you:

  • The body is not the house of the soul, it is the soul taken physical form;
  • Matter is not separate from spirit, it is spirit as it appears to our senses;
  • The universe, all-and-everything, is not the creation of God, but rather is God in the process of creating Godself.

Spirit is enfolded into matter, matter is the form spirit takes right now, and therefore that all the affairs of flesh and blood, and our worldly lives, are pregnant with spiritual significance. I am just reminding you of what you know already.

 



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

Filed Under: Self & Psyche Tagged With: control, Essay, fear, science, security, teleology

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

Institutes for Technologies of Reunion

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

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.