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Source Temple and the Great Reset

March 16, 2021 by Charles Eisenstein

March 2021


I recently visited a spiritual community in Brazil called Source Temple. Drawing primarily on the teachings of Adi Da and A Course in Miracles, it comprises about thirty people from about ten countries, mostly Brazil and South America, ranging in age from 20-something to 60-something. I will neither endorse nor criticize the spiritual teachings and lineage; they serve their purpose to inspire the community and anchor it in non-ordinary thinking, perceiving, and relating.

The first thing to make a deep impression on me at Source Temple was the architecture – if “architecture” is the right word to describe the improvisational artistry of its twenty houses and other buildings. Everything was built on a low budget using mostly scavenged, upcycled, and donated materials. No two doors or windows on the entire property are identical; all are hand-made. A lot of the windows aren’t even rectangular: someone built the window around whatever piece of broken glass was available.

Yet there is nothing sloppy or haphazard about the buildings. They are devotional. They embody the impulse: “I will make use of whatever is available to create the most beautiful, functional environment that I can.” They also embody a kind of precision that belies their irregularity. It is the precision of knowing what is meant to go where, what is in service to the building-to-be, the people who will use it, and the land that surrounds it. This consciousness guides the construction. None of the buildings started with architectural drawings or blueprints. They were not designed; they grew, with the builders as agents of their growth, implementing each next step as the final vision gradually resolved into clarity.

Source Temple and the Great Reset

I saw in those buildings something reaching for the ideal of the classical Taoist temple. The temple is not an imposition on the landscape, it is an enhancement. It belongs there. It is a service to creation. What would human society look like, what would technology look like, if we devoted ourselves to service to creation?

Every building is more beautiful than it has to be – “has to be” for any obviously utilitarian function, that is. Staying for a few days in and among those buildings, though, I realized that they met a deep need and provided a deep nourishment. What is that need? It is to be surrounded by objects that have soul.

Source Temple and the Great Reset

To have soul is to be real. To be real is to be fully unique and fully related. In a virgin forest, no two trees are identical, and everything is in constant, interdependent relationship to everything else. Thus we feel a kind of homecoming when we are able to be fully present in such a forest. The eyes rest easy.

In the modern built environment, most objects have been stripped of uniqueness and relationality. Every window in my house is identical, or of at most two standard types. The modern environment abounds in precise right angles, the elements of standardization and sameness. The products of the commodity economy are also remote from their origins and relations. If I cut a tree to build a door, I can see the effect of my action, and I may be careful to choose the right tree for cutting. The enormous distance between manufactured objects and their original context helps make us oblivious to the ecological harm they may represent. What is less obvious is the aesthetic harm, the psychological harm that comes from living among alien, standardized things. The eyes cannot rest easy; they are ever searching for the soul of what they see. It is a strain for a living soul to live among soulless things.

In his four-volume opus, The Nature of Order, architect Christopher Alexander explores the question, “Why do some buildings (and other made objects) have a quality of life or soul, while others do not?” He illustrates the question with striking photographs contrasting modern buildings with older ones – think Grand Central Station compared to Penn Station. It is obvious what he means. The list of characteristics he develops bears a striking feature: in its totality, it is not amenable to formalization. No formula or algorithm can replicate soul. This conclusion is not mere metaphysics; it offers a guiding compass for our economic and technological future.

Source Temple and the Great Reset

The buildings and objects of Source Temple convey a kind of wealth. I don’t think people would be greedy for bigger houses and more money if they were immersed in an environment like this. The unmet needs that drive greed would be met. The tragedy of greed, of course, is that it no amount of money or anything else can ever sate it. No matter how much they consume, the greedy person remains hungry. That isn’t due to a moral flaw. It is because they are starving – starving for what money cannot buy.

It is nourishing to live inside the object of someone’s devotion, especially if it is someone you know well. The residents of Source Temple participate in the construction of their own houses, and switch houses from time to time when they feel stagnant, adding their imprint to their new domicile. Because the houses grow with the community and its members, they exemplify Christopher Alexander’s insight:

A house is not just a shell for habitation, it is also an unfolding of our experience. A house is not an act, but a series of acts; it is not an object but an experience; it is not a commodity to be bought and sold but an activity essential to life. Instead of being the unfolding of our existence and the expression of our freedom, our houses have become the imprisonment of our existence, the denial of our lives.

One way in which the buildings of Source Temple telegraph wealth is that, in terms of hours of labor per square meter of floor space, they are extremely inefficient. It takes many long hours to assemble a window or a door from scratch, compared to a few minutes to buy one at Home Despot. Yes, someone’s labor contributed to the factory-made window too, but the whole industrial system and its economics are geared toward minimizing the labor, a goal achieved through technology and standardized processes. The result is a cheapness, a poverty, because all of these products embody the precept of not enough time. That is what efficiency encodes. We have to hurry. We have to do it quicker. Efficiency embodies a mentality of scarcity. We can’t afford the time to really make it beautiful.

At Source Temple it is evident that someone wasn’t in a hurry. Someone could afford the time. Someone thought it important to make things more beautiful than they had to be to keep out the rain, and they had the time. During my stay, this environment softened my own habits of hurry and invited me into an abundance of time.

This abundance is our birthright. It is not a function of privilege, as if only those who have made it to the top of the economic hierarchy can afford to take the time to live devotionally. It was universal in hunter-gatherer and traditional peasant cultures, and is still visible where those cultures remain intact. People in the less developed parts of the world always seem to have more time. True, in the modern economy leisure is available only to those in its top strata, But I am not speaking here of leisure – a rest from working – so much as a different approach to working. Absent socially-supported opportunities for devotional labor, society’s members compete for its artificially scarce substitute we call leisure.

Today, automation and artificial intelligence are making it easier than ever to manufacture vast quantities of alienated, standardized commodities with a minimum of human labor. One job category after another is becoming obsolete, threatening a future of chronic mass unemployment. Machines can do our work much more cheaply and efficiently than we can, leaving humans with less and less to do except to consume.

Historically, the solution to this problem in the industrial era has been to increase consumption so as to maintain nearly full employment. The ecological cost of this tendency is obvious; less noted is its spiritual cost. Increasing consumption of that which is produced efficiently, i.e., that which embodies scarcity, meets only a narrow subset of human needs while increasing the hunger for the unique and relational. It cannot meet the need to live devotionally and to see that reflected back at you in the physical environment.

Source Temple and the Great Reset

It would be impossible to mass-produce the buildings at Source Temple. Even if machines could imitate their hand craftmanship, the buildings are unique to the land and community they serve. An exact replica relocated to a different environment would no longer be the same building. Objects cannot be separated from relationships. If we really digested this fundamental implication of quantum mechanics, we would have a very different society.

The market economy as we know it depends on the separability of objects from relationships. That is the nature of money itself: it is pure, abstract value. My dollar is the same as your dollar. It works well to mediate exchange of other dissociated, alienated objects, but when it interfaces with the relational, the unique, and the sacred, it tends to reduce them to itself. If you are a home-builder, for instance, you have to defy the logic of the marketplace to spend that extra time to make it more beautiful than it needs to be, beyond the contract. Why would you do that, in defiance of money? Well, for love. Aesthetic perfection too is a relationship, a service, a devotion to something or someone you love beyond the thing itself. Because the object is itself only in relationship.

The devotion manifest in the buildings at Source Temple mirrors the devotion I saw in members toward each other. It was a balm for me to see people overflowing with easy laughter and easy tears, serving each other in ways that might not even be noticed, gazing with love upon each other’s faces, sitting in circle. In covid isolation I’d on some level forgotten such basic expressions of humanity still exist. Here too is a kind of wealth. The self is relationship. How tragic that in order to preserve that self, we cut it off from its relationships. Something persists in that isolation, but it is a shrunken being compared to what can thrive in full relationship to community. The poverty of isolation mirrors the poverty of the modern built environment.

* * *

We live in the time of the ballyhooed Great Reset, a time following when great destruction has cleared the way to build something different – or to lock in the gains of big corporations, central governments, and the super-wealthy. What vision of human development might we hold that expresses devotion to that which we love? Source Temple offers a glimpse of it, as do certain other intentional communities and, in particular, many indigenous and traditional societies. One thing they have in common is that they stand outside modern economic paradigms of wealth, progress, and development. In fact, they ask us to reverse much of conventional economic thinking.

Let me draw out some economic principles for a Great Reset that will help make love visible in our physical and social environment. They are reversals of globalization, growth, and productivity.

1. Localization

Until very recently, globalization has been widely accepted as an unstoppable – and desirable – trend. It is indeed a natural consequence of mass production and the alienation of materials from their originating matrix of relationships. It doesn’t matter where something comes from; all that matters is the price. The myriad interactions that produce a consumer object – the ecological interactions that produce the raw materials, the human interactions of production – funnel into the single, one-dimensional relationship of buyer and seller. We feel alien ourselves surrounded by such things. A subtle feeling of not being truly at home eats away out our insides.

Source Temple and the Great Reset

In contrast, something produced locally by human and non-human beings that you know and with whom you relate in multiple ways contributes to a feeling of belonging, a feeling of home. To look at a door and remember that the wood came from an old pallet and the branch of a tree that was once right over there – do you remember the lightning storm that felled it? – and that Julio and Miguel built that door, just when Julio was breaking up with Claudia, and I helped with the sanding, and… the door is entangled in my world, my constellation of self. And I can see the social and ecological impact of its production, something largely invisible in the global market economy where normally only the price and the objective specifications are visible.

To live surrounded by things of meaning and beauty is hardly possible without connection to local community and to place. Because, again, beauty comes from relationship. Whether we speak of Source Temple or a traditional peasant village, relationships were material. People make food for each other, watch each other’s children, make each other’s musical instruments, create music and drama together, grow food for each other, build houses together. Where people source all these functions from a global market economy, local relationships atrophy. There is little to do for one another or create together. Yes, globalization and the division of labor allow much higher efficiency of production – a lot more things with a lot less work – but is mainstream society with its high consumption actually happier than the people in remote indigenous villages? Those who have never been to one may think, certainly we are; they are mired in miserable poverty without AC, TV, Wifi, 5G, KFC, or XYZ. But that is a projection based on what modern life is like without those things.

This is not to advocate the complete dismantling of global economy, mass production, or the division of labor. Certain things that we may want to keep, such as the computer on which I’m writing this, require it. But huge realms of human material life may be reclaimed for the local, such as most food, shelter, entertainment, and clothing. On the policy level, this requires reversing free trade treaties, ending subsidies for transport infrastructure, strengthening environmental and labor protections globally, and erecting tariffs to protect national and local economies. It also means ending modern-day colonialism, implemented through Third World debt, which forces nations of the global South to orient their productivity toward exports.

Localization does sacrifice efficiencies of scale. To take an extreme example, it takes a lot more time and effort to spin, weave, and sew our own clothing than it does to make it in a factory. But the end result is something meaningful and precious, not something alien and cheap. Immersed in such things, even if they are fewer in number, one feels rich. Amassing quantities of cheap stuff, one experiences cheapness, not wealth – even if that cheap stuff is very expensive. Real wealth is to belong. It is to have a wealth of relations.

2. Degrowth

Already it is clear how localization is incompatible with economic growth. Economists define growth as an increase in the volume of goods and services exchanged for money. Building windows from upcycled, scavenged, or donated materials, using community labor rather than paid labor, contributes nothing to economic growth as economists define it. Conversely, any place where people still build their own houses, care for their own children, grow their own food, sing their own songs, make their own medicine, and help each other following misfortune is a ripe “undeveloped market” where these functions can be replaced, respectively, by the construction industry, day care industry, agribusiness, the entertainment industry, the medical industry, and the insurance industry. Development means to transition out of a local, gift-based culture to a global market economy.

Degrowth goes beyond replacing some portion of global exchange with local exchange; it also entails reclaiming part of life from exchange altogether. Contrary to popular belief and to economists’ mythology, pre-market (and post-market) societies do not operate by barter or any other alternate means of “exchange.” They are gift cultures. I help build you door, but you don’t necessarily give me a hand-sewn shirt in return. You feel affection and gratitude toward me, and you (and everyone who sees what I’ve done) recognize me as a contributing member of the community. Out of this affection and respect, or perhaps seeing my need, you or someone else gives me the shirt. Knowing each other over years, hearing stories of each other, we know what each person likes and needs. We feel generous towards those who are generous, and stingy toward those who are stingy, thereby pulling everyone toward the culture of gift.

The current economic system is a growth system, requiring economic growth to function. Without growth, the mechanisms of money creation stall, debt levels rise, inequality intensifies, and the system lurches from one crisis to the next, hollowing out the lower and middle classes each time. I analyze this process in detail in Sacred Economics; here I will just observe that the ideal of local, gift-based economies asks for a reversal of the systemic growth imperative. A Great Reset in that spirit must include a significant jubilee – a cancellation of debt – and from there, a money system no longer based on interest-bearing debt for money creation.

3. Slowing Down

For centuries, at least since the Industrial Revolution and arguably long before, the main goal of technology has been to increase productivity, whether of production or in everyday life. It takes less time to weed a field with a mechanical cultivator than it does with a hoe, and less time still to douse it with Roundup. It takes less time to drive ten miles than to walk, to add a column of figures by spreadsheet rather than by hand, to use a computer database rather than a file cabinet. We can get a lot more done a lot faster than ever before. Yet somehow, despite centuries of labor-saving inventions, we seem just as busy as ever (and more busy than hunter-gatherers who spent around 20 hours per adult on subsistence).

The people at Source Temple never seemed to be in a hurry. They always had time for each other, showing that the Dogon I quoted in one of my books (“Urgency is not something we have here”) are not exceptional. You too may have noticed that the less developed a place is, the more time people seem to have for play, art, and ceremony. The experience of the abundance of time is perhaps the most primal form of wealth, because time is life itself. What else do we have, but our time here? Scurrying from one thing to the next, servant of the schedule, the modern human never feels quite sovereign. One has not the time to do things precisely as they should be done.

Lewis Mumford named the clock – not the steam engine – as the crucial invention that launched the Industrial Revolution. Factories run by the clock; computers even more so, a precise coordination on the scale of nanoseconds. However, what humanity needs today is not more and more, faster and faster. The needs that can be met that way have already been met. (Yes, there are many people on earth still in grave material want, but that is not due to aggregate scarcity, it is due to maldistribution.) It is time to change the economic logic, habits, and systems that compel us to grow ever more efficient, productive, and, therefore, consumptive. We have overall a hyperabundance of the things that can be made efficiently, side by side with a crying scarcity of the things that can only be made slowly, lovingly, and devotionally. These meet the very needs that, when not fulfilled, drive overconsumption. The person wealthy in time, beauty, and relationship has little hunger for mass-produced substitutes for those things.

Source Temple and the Great Reset

On the level of economic policy, one way to slow down is through a universal basic income. I am aware of its dangers: replacing economic self-determination with dependency on the state (whose dole-out may be conditional on the citizen’s compliant behavior), locking into place the destruction of small business and independent livelihoods. However, in a world where the labor of fewer and fewer people is required to meet society’s quantifiable needs, logically, more and more people will have to devote themselves to meeting qualitative needs. Factories can produce large quantities of cheap food, but they cannot produce food made with love by someone who knows me intimately using ingredients from living beings with whom I’m in relationship. No standardized construction process using standardized factory materials can grow a house around me, that is an extension of myself and my relationships. Because these things are inalienable from a specific creator and receiver, market forces cannot produce them.

* * *

People call a community like Source Temple “spiritual.” Why? The word has connotations of the unworldly. It isn’t that the residents claim to be in communication with supernatural entities or unseen forces. Yet, their way of life is unworldly – in the sense that it contravenes important conventions about life and work. The reader might find it odd that I have combined a travelogue about a spiritual community with a set of economic proposals, but it is this division between the spiritual and the worldly (money is the very essence of worldliness) that is the cause of much harm on and to this earth. I am fond of saying that excess materialism is not the problem, that we actually need to be more materialistic not less; that is, to hold matter sacred in all its forms, especially its living forms. Banishing sacredness to a non-material realm, no wonder modern society desecrates the material.

Spirituality, in other words, is not about that which is beyond materiality; it is about what the modern worldview does not recognize or cannot see. It therefore has everything to do with economics. Customarily modern people think of spirituality as something outside of relations of money, matter, and the flesh, but it should be about reclaiming their sacred dimension. What other Great Reset is worth attempting? Can we reset economy, and human relations beyond money, according to the knowledge held for so long in the world’s spiritual lineages, countercultures, and indigenous societies?

Sentiments like those behind Sacred Economics seem naively idealistic without exemplars like Source Temple, which can remind us that our secret longing is no fantasy; that it is possible here on earth and not even very far away. Not very far away collectively, and not very far away for oneself. The more we see love made visible around us, the more our own love dares to express itself too. There are places in the world where people live devotionally, holding that intention consciously in community. Another way I like to describe it is that they live in the gift. To live in the gift is to live in the knowledge that the world is a gift (unearned, unforced), that we each are a gift to the world, and that we are here to add our gifts to the ongoing gift of Creation.

A friend today told me of a psychedelic journey, “There was nothing that wasn’t love.” That is obvious in a devotional environment. It is hard for me to remember it sometimes, living in my box, surrounded mostly by alienated objects, relating to other people through screens, dependent on money and independent of the people, animals, and plants around me. I am grateful to Source Temple and to the many other places, people, and moments of grace that reawaken and sustain the spirit of the Gift. I hope that the glimpse I’ve offered here arouses your knowing of it too. May each of us recognize and take the next step into living with devotion. And may we accept nothing less in our collective agreements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Next: The Death of the Festival

Filed Under: Money, Gift, & Economics Tagged With: Essay

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. James R says

    March 16, 2021 at 7:17 pm

    One day soon we can all have the freedom to experience social interaction with the love we desire. I hope you see well Charles especially as you have visited Brasil during the covid era. Be safe.

  2. Sophia says

    March 16, 2021 at 8:20 pm

    Thank you Charles, this is such a beautiful piece, you share with such wisdom & truth. As a practitioner of Adi Da Samraj, and the way of Adidam, I felt so happy reading of your visit to Source Temple, and your observations.

  3. Jamie F says

    March 16, 2021 at 9:19 pm

    This is beautiful. Just beautiful! A gift that was meant to be given. No wonder this essay grabbed hold of you and wouldn’t let go Charles.

    Wondering how many other communities like Source Temple exist? How many in the US? How does a community like this get started? How connected does Source Temple (and other similar communities) remain to the traditional money system?

    • Kathy White says

      April 19, 2021 at 11:46 pm

      Check out the Global Eco-village network https://ecovillage.org/

  4. Paulina Kay says

    March 16, 2021 at 9:25 pm

    Beautiful Charles!! Love reading you. We have built a Culture from a Economic Perspective and not Human perspective. We built cities that don’t serve the people and this makes life so dependable on the System. Modernity and technology took over our conscious mind unexpectedly in a way that we let our values drown. Big government and organizations guided us mischieviously to the idea of the need to remove the
    Family as the foundation of Society and instead declared it on Indociduals .
    After this, came our humanity downfall. Removing the Family from the picture, helped drastically the global agenda. Their next step was to put men and women against each other. Changing sex became easy. If You debilitate what it meas to be Woman and Men, it will be easy to debilitate society and control it.
    The 1% in power manage and dictate how our life suppose to be and they know perfectly our weakness and use them agains us. Whoever challangr
    the system gets destroyed – I
    Am of them. What Humans being are capable is incredible and I am very hopeful that we will overcome the 1% who does not care for us, it is here where we will be able to transform Humanity and Unite.

    Love to
    You Charles. You have been pure inspiration and one I respect the most.

  5. Sue Stevenson says

    March 16, 2021 at 9:29 pm

    “Home Despot” is possibly my favourite typo ever. Please don’t fix it 🙂

    • Vicky Edwards says

      May 21, 2021 at 5:02 pm

      Yes, hilarious!!!!

  6. helen russell says

    March 16, 2021 at 10:51 pm

    beautifully said Charles – i could feel my nervous system settle and relax the more i read and my soul deepen into that relaxation of the ‘truth’ you speak and my spirit sing ! in recognition of our need to reset into our communities our homes and our environment – thank you <3

  7. Jyly says

    March 16, 2021 at 11:16 pm

    Thank you, yet again, Charles. Deeply appreciated. With love.

  8. Gayle Borst says

    March 16, 2021 at 11:25 pm

    Awesome! Inspirational! Charles Eisenstein, you never cease to amaze me with your deep insight, wisdom and understanding. I must find my Source Temple – It is what I long for. Thank you for giving me the hope that it is possible.

  9. Daniel L. Pelzl says

    March 17, 2021 at 1:47 am

    What part does the nuon particle play in the “new-old” economy? If wealth were identified with ability to help other creation, our need for speed would be attenuated. Greed depends on unconscious behavior. Become conscious and greed will find other prey. We exist to create beauty, the foundation of happiness.

  10. Ingvild Vinje says

    March 17, 2021 at 3:26 am

    This is so beautiful. Thank you very much. Just what I needed! Just what we need.

  11. Dragomir says

    March 17, 2021 at 7:07 am

    Great lines, they shoot right into the heart. Essay arouses deeply buried truths that we all instinctively know.

  12. Julie Horsley says

    March 17, 2021 at 10:24 am

    Oh my. This is food for my soul and my soul is now singing its songlines. This is the kind of way of being in community; creating and living in beautiful, original, devotional structures that offer sanctuary and healing for our bodies that I truly long for. I am tenderly holding this intention that this more beautiful way of being is possible in this lifetime. Thank you Charles.

  13. Sandra Yvonne says

    March 17, 2021 at 11:08 am

    This is SO beautiful! It makes me cry, because it resonates so much and my whole body and soul are going YES!! YES!!! YEEEESSSSS!!!! Thanks from my heart for your gift, Charles, that you’re giving the world!

  14. Christine Grace says

    March 17, 2021 at 1:09 pm

    I am ever so grateful for your presence Charles. Thank you for being here and for offering me hope in the space of Grace that is here for us all when we awaken and live the love that we are.

  15. Teresa says

    March 17, 2021 at 1:58 pm

    I have bookmarked this essay as I have a feeling I will be re-reading and sharing it a great many times. I aspire to find small ways to live the way you described and keep it as an ideal while I pay down debt and work to create a more deliberate and devotional life for myself, my family, and my community. I’ve found that growing, sharing, and preparing food is a natural starting place for me. I’m lucky to live in a small town in Alaska where there are so many wonderful people who set an example of authenticity, and being near them is an inspiration as authenticity is contagious.
    Thank you for this beautiful essay. That you wrote it after you said you were going to take a break from writing essays makes me think of how many people find a soulmate after swearing off relationships. Sometimes when we’re not striving, a thing materializes on its own.
    I appreciate you, Charles. Your work is an example of the authenticity you describe in the essay.

  16. Bruce says

    March 17, 2021 at 2:36 pm

    I was reading about Zapatistas communities, 350,000 people in Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Zapatista_Autonomous_Municipalities
    What do you all think about using a Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) app as an expression of our individual (and collective) vision?

  17. Yin Paradies says

    March 17, 2021 at 5:17 pm

    I experience your work as deeply inspiring. I wonder if you have considered that this wonderful community you visited in Brazil exists without ending treaties, subsidies, erecting tariffs or a universal basic income. You seem to take for granted the ongoing existence of institutions and nation-states. I think it unlikely that these aspects of the story of separation will exist after the Great Reset.

  18. Marie Blaine says

    March 17, 2021 at 5:54 pm

    Such truth here- beautiful, insightful and wise💛
    And every decision we make in our lives, in our homes, in our day, can be one where we choose simplicity and wholeness and beauty and quality and time-spent over the quick, the premade, the convenient, the shoddy. It really is a choice we have. Even in this very society we inhabit. It is a matter of reorienting again and again to what matters and what really brings a sense of joy and peace and satisfaction. I think about this a lot. I once, years ago had a housemate who was a painter, and she said to me that she had vowed to never bring into her home anything that she did not truly love. That stuck with me- to have a relationship of great admiration and love for each of your belongings. To only accept those things that are beautiful to you, and in so doing, you want to treat them with care and your home becomes a sanctuary where attention is given, where there is a sense of stuardship and thoughtfulness. This is something I have been slowly working toward over many years- to be aware enough to say no to those things that will not last, or that are not really useful or that I will not love enough to care for.

    When a place is tended, it truly exudes a certain light. I have noticed this particularly in monasteries and japanese gardens and the homes of certain people. It almost seems as if the plants perk up around them. And the surfaces come to life a little. Everything is uplifted. I believe objects respond to our care on some level.

    I love the ideas in A Pattern Language and have been long dreaming of a courtyard home, (most recently ogling the colonial courtyard homes of Granada, Nicaragua- gorgeous with old tile and lush tropical gardens) where the rooms are situated around a central outdoor courtyard gathering space full of plants and south facing for sunshine, as well as incorporating more nooks and enclaves in a single room, for individuals to be doing their tasks in comfort and seclusion while still together with others- it is a real
    joy as a family to be quietly enjoying time alone together.

    Thanks for the great essay!

  19. Ivan says

    March 18, 2021 at 6:19 am

    Hi Charles, a timely newsletter indeed… Just working on a business plan using the same principles as part of the business model. Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

  20. Rishika R.Devi says

    March 19, 2021 at 9:33 pm

    Yes….a ‘house is not an object but an experience’! And as the houses were a territory for both the Adidamins and the Course in Mircacles-folks, we may add that the houses are nothing but Experiences indeed yet NOT built in Time per se, neither reflecting Time but indeed are Time- Melted into sweet Eternity! Da Datva, I say!

  21. Ian says

    March 20, 2021 at 3:17 am

    Charles when you said you were easing up on essay writing you were right: this essay already existed in the Imaginal realm, or the More Beautiful Place – as you describe it – fact. Its ring of truth as felt by my beating heart tells me so. You didn’t write it, it was a transcribing of gift into form, your unique “service to creation”. Thank you for this gift. It encourages me to act from that same sacred place.

  22. Jennifer Comeau says

    March 23, 2021 at 10:12 am

    Charles:
    Thank you. You’ve written a deeply resonant message about place and space — the atmosphere of the heart that surrounds a home. I have little trouble with your applied 1) Localization and 2) Degrowth. Here in Maine, people put things out by the road with “FREE” signs. It’s part of the culture. My husband is a master at “free-by-the-side-of-the-road” finds. He built what we lovingly call a barnette (too small for a barn, too big for a shed) all from reused/recycled/repurposed items. The energy in the space, which is where I hold my workshops, is INCREDIBLE.
    Where 3. Slow Down comes in is my learning edge. I have been feeling such resistance to perpetuating the arms and legs of my own “doing machine” these days. One of my gifts is producer/conductor — of creative workshops, songs, events, offerings. “Getting things done” has always been my go to talent. Over and over again, I’m drawn into the mysterious place of the unknown “being self” now. Frankly, it feels uncomfortable to give myself the space, but once I do, I LOVE it! It’s a muscle I’m building, and I believe all my producing will benefit from it.
    Warm regards,
    Jennifer

  23. Colin says

    March 23, 2021 at 9:05 pm

    Thank you Charles

  24. Frank G says

    March 26, 2021 at 12:27 pm

    Charles,
    Thank you for another moving essay. As always, I am in agreement with your sentiment, and as ever, I wonder how it could be brought to reality. While reading this, it occurred to me, one of the barriers to anyone wishing to participate in a gift economy is our tax structure. Any type of valuable exchange of a certain size, in theory at least, requires some form of tax to be paid. Even if you wish to homestead in complete self-sufficiency on your own property, you still have to pay property tax. It’s nearly impossible to forgo the need for money in our culture.

    I wonder if you have considered in addition to some form of UBI, a taxation plan in which all individuals are exempt, and the tax burden falls solely on corporations. After all, these are organizations formed with the sole purpose of earning money. Individual human beings have no such imperative. Those who wish to band together for the purpose of providing goods and services at scale could pay for the privilege, and those who wish to barter could do so freely. I think most people would choose a hybrid. I realize how politically unpalatable such a scheme would be, and maybe it’s already included in your Sacred Economics text. If people could be motivated by the vision of a more beautiful world, and could find some rational path to getting there, maybe it would happen. Anyway, thanks again.

  25. Pierre says

    March 28, 2021 at 12:52 am

    I stopped reading after I read “recently visited…Brazil.” Was this a joke? You suck for traveling at all and you especially suck for traveling there. Thanks for potentially bringing home that tasty variant. I don’t care how spiritual or enlightening your visit was, it’s entitled, self-centered bullshit that you chose to travel at all.

    I have read your work for many years and thought you had wisdom but now realize you may be just another set-centered white, American author who thinks he sees the big picture but can’t see through his own reflecting bubble of entitlement.

    So disappointed.

    • Chris says

      May 28, 2021 at 7:41 pm

      There are no variants, Pierre. You still haven’t figured out the hoax after more than a year of this lockdown nonsense? You’ve been played.

      As a former fan, I have grown to despise Eisenstein’s glib, pretentious, solipsistic, rambling, pseudo-philosophical writing, but I would never accuse him of endangering life just by hopping on a plane. The whole pandemic is a hoax being used as a pretext for two main goals, to generate an unprecedented windfall for Big Pharma, and more importantly, to usher in Klaus Schwab’s and the Davos class’ Great Reset, complete with digital Vaxx passes to completely control, circumscribe and surveil the masses. It has nothing to do with saving Grandma and never did.

      This is what the fake pandemic is really all about:

      https://wrenchinthegears.com/2020/10/27/who-voted-in-davos-how-data-driven-government-and-the-internet-of-bodies-are-poised-to-transform-smart-sustainable-cities-into-social-impact-prisons/comment-page-1/

      There is no pandemic. Almost all the case numbers are artificially inflated false positive numbers generated by the misapplied PCR test.

  26. Tristan says

    March 28, 2021 at 6:33 am

    Thanks Charles.

    As usual I agree with most of your sentiments.

    I think the Universal Basic Income is folly though. Centralised, globalised anthropocentric money is folly. What pollution, colonialism and environmental destruction underpins every US dollar you get just so you can paint and do yoga and make yourself feel better by growing a cabbage or two? seriously… money, objectification and ownership are our greatest mistakes.

  27. Fabiana Cecin says

    April 3, 2021 at 6:45 pm

    Have you read Christopher Alexander?

    https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-Environmental-Structure/dp/0972652914

  28. Samar Yunis says

    April 17, 2021 at 5:48 am

    Thank you, Charles for this beautiful essay.. I’ve read it a few times and highlighted passages in it to re-read.. it struck chord in me..
    My heart is full knowing there are people that think like you in this world ♥️🙏🏼

  29. Newton E. Finn says

    April 17, 2021 at 1:07 pm

    Again, ad infinitum, a fleeting vision, a winsome glimpse, of a better, more beautiful world, bringing to mind a plant that thrust its way through a crack in concrete and, so far, has not been stepped on. Maybe this is the best we can do right now, utter such “prayers” to a higher power able to hear us, perhaps help us do what we can’t. On our own, we are locked into plutocracy and imperialism, which are in turn locked into exploitation and ecocide. Was Charles right a while ago in suggesting that the pandemic was not merely a wild card suddenly thrown into the mix, but also possibly, albeit horribly, providential?

  30. Jasmin says

    April 21, 2021 at 2:21 am

    What a beautiful, inspiring read.
    We are just about to start a new intentional family-community and your experiences are very inspirational for me. Now I have more clarity about the space that I want to co-create in our future home, with which intention and what I want to bring into the world.
    THANK YOU

  31. Asha Singh says

    June 18, 2021 at 4:09 am

    Thank you as always for your beautiful sharings Charles. I love the simple eloquence with which you express yourself. It would be great to create with you sometime <3

  32. Michael A says

    June 24, 2021 at 11:19 pm

    Again, thank you Charles for always holding up the lantern for humanity to navigate towards through the fog of our times.

  33. Eberhard says

    September 6, 2021 at 11:23 am

    Only when we try not to approach another culture as a visitor, to immerse ourselves as an observer, but rather try to integrate, will we penetrate into secrets that could help us to find solutions to our global problems. Even the attempt at spiritual integration is often sufficient.
    When I say we have to abolish all the money to save the earth, I am being declared insane. For the people you are describing, money has no meaning. They work and get what they need as a gift. As a gift from the earth, processed through voluntary work. Such a revelation could help open our eyes. For example, that a life without money is also possible in today’s consumer society.
    Nothing prevents us from working voluntarily and from receiving everything we need from others. We will deal with it as disciplined as we are dealing with the Corona crisis.
    And since investments in the economy are also free, there need be no more growth. The competition will stop because you cannot make a profit without money and inequality will decrease.
    We give each other gifts and will therefore always feel more like family.

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Charles Eisenstein

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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.

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


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.
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