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.
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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.
Thank you Charles. Your essay was exactly what I needed to hear in this moment. I doubt you remember me but I was the guy who came to the Space Between Stories workshop a year ago outside Asheville, with my old friend Marcie Christensen. I was also the guy who was so emphatic about wanting to “go big,” and gave you a copy of my recently published book Mindfulness Meditation in Psychotherapy. You were very kind, though I can only imagine what you must have been thinking!????
Your essay touched me deeply, helping me at an important moment in my life to confront with much less shame my conflicted motivations to help save life on our planet, and my self-aggrandizing craving for fame, money, and admiration. Your willingness and vulnerability to share your own similar conflict will, I am certain, help me and many others to be present with and work through our own conflicts, and to respond to our hearts’ and lives’ true calling in the future.
Much metta and gratitude to you, Stella, and your sons.
Sincerely,
Steve Alper
Beautiful, all around. I join you Steve in a deep bow to Charles for his important voice. As one of my spirit guides once kindly said to me, “Constance, humility is the first step on your spiritual journey. Kabow! he got me. My self-confident presence was sadly a poor cover for the insecurity I felt as an aspiring spiritual educator. Who did I think I was to follow in the footsteps of the revered role models, I so wanted to be? while his message to me set me on a far sweeter course, I began noticing all the ways my ego was standing in the way of my hopes to fully understand the sacrifices of service in a new light. Once I began to extinguish the false beliefs I was carrying around like, proving myself to others that I was not ego-involved in my dedication to service, but wanting only to be a generator for greater self-wareness and the importance of spiritual understanding and eduction. Thank you and Charles for your openness and kindness.
Tenderly, Rev, constance
Some have said the next Buddha, Maitreya, will be community…..may it be so.
Yes!!!!!!!!?
Amen!
yes! I crave community.
Yes, Nancy………..Check out Share International Magazine/ http://www.share-international.org. Charles has given permission for some of his work to be printed in the magazine.
Bethel Evans
Eugene, Oregon
I can’t see it any other way, but I’m willing to. I believe the Christ is community, we all just don’t know it yet.
Without referring to Christ or Christianity, Charles has brought Christ’s real message into the 21st century. If all Christian churches could humbly absorb Charles’ thought that everyone and everything shares interbeing, what a force for good they could be!
Charles may not refer to Christ or Christianity by name, but he makes a direct quote from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5.45, “the rain falls on the just and unjust alike”, which is part of one of Jesus’s significant teachings about God’s unvarying benevolence and generosity to all.
????
Thank you for this article, Charles. I feel also that those working hard to heal themselves from trauma, addiction, etc. are creating a larger space for all to heal. I used to think that working on myself was selfish , but now I see how my healthier choices are creating a positive effect for those I care for.
For example, if my unhealthy and negative thinking goes unchecked, it can potentially affect everyone I come in contact with, causing stressful interactions. However, if I become more mindful of my thoughts and how they affect my moods, energy, words and actions, then I can make the choice to shift my thinking. I can practice a more peaceful way if interacting with myself, my inner dialog, which softens the outer dialog I have with others.
This personal shift has the capacity to affect everyone I come in contact with. A small movement that begins at home can send ripples out into the world.
It is not selfish bring the focus inward. Self care gives us the nutrients we use to care for others.
Yes, yes, dear Donna. As I love to say, we cannot give what we do not have!
I really like what you said
Wonderful!
WOW.
This REALLY resonates…
with soul purpose…
and my own journey.
A former sweetie bought one of those first Ascent of Humanity books…
and HIGHLY recommended it me.
I immediately sensed real depth in it (without reading past the first few sections).
Eisenstein came into my consciousness several times this past week…
when friends forwarded similar or complementary work from two others that resonated with me years back (but hadn’t read in years):
Riane Eisler and John Perkins.
Something big in emerging here.
Rising out of the ashes of despair?
Whew.
I sure hope so (having spent much time their in recent years… re both planetary and personal failures and disillusionment).
Rev 2
WOW.
This REALLY resonates…
with soul purpose…
and my own journey.
A former sweetie bought one of those first Ascent of Humanity books…
and HIGHLY recommended it me.
I immediately sensed real depth in it (without reading past the first few sections).
Eisenstein came into my consciousness several times this past week…
when friends forwarded similar or complementary work from two others that resonated with me years back (but hadn’t read in years):
Riane Eisler and John Perkins.
Something big is emerging here.
Rising out of the ashes of despair?
Whew.
I sure hope so (having spent much time there in recent years… re both planetary and personal failures and disillusionment).
Yes. Many of the parts are just the regular, dedicated acts of kindness. I taught in prison here in Asheville for 99 months. I hoped I was supporting people to be different: to change. What I know I successfully did was to show humanity 5 days a week to people who had shown inhumanity and were known for doing so. I have no idea what amount of change I effected. That’s not my job to be concerned about.
I write poetry. Occasionally something gets published. That audience is quite small. I have no idea whom it touches. That’s hilarious!
Have fun with your new fame; )
So beautifully written. Thank you for saying many feelings I hold about my path in this life.
“Acts of kindness strengthen the field of kindness, acts of love strengthen the field of love, acts of hate strengthen the field of hate.
Nor is scaling up necessary when we trust that the tasks life sets before us are part of a larger tapestry, woven by an intelligence that puts us in exactly the right place at the right time.”
I’ve not put it in your words but they feel exactly Right!
My job is selling mattresses on commission. My mission is to kindly help each person get their best night’s sleep, healing sleep. To be kindly present with each person, with joy and Lightness.
Just today I had 2 elderly customers come back in tears, frustrated with delivery issues beyond our control. I tended to each with focus, kindness, physical and emotional care, as much help as I could summon. I felt as if something ‘around me’ was shifting.
As an energy channel, I have often felt I’m hiding in plain sight, wearing the costume that allows me to be among these who I’d probably Never meet otherwise in my own life. Last winter 3 diverse women sat in a unattractive work break room, bonding over cookies and cats. Cookies and cats were possibly the only things we had in common but we enjoyed our time together and left with our hearts lighter, warmer. Our field of kindness (I like this expression of yours) enriched, warmed.
Thank you for enriching my sense of what I’m doing day by day. Thank you for your lovely phrasing, the clarity with which I received your words.
I’ll also tell the friend who forwarded this to me Thank You for sharing this gift with me. As I’ll now share with others.
“Acts of kindness strengthen the field of kindness, acts of love strengthen the field of love, acts of hate strengthen the field of hate.”
This quote brought tears to my eyes! Thank you for this!
So excited to see you are on Oprah! I love her work & yours. Hope you enjoy both reclusiveness & the enjoyment of your work getting to more hearts & minds.
Just beautiful thank you x
I love you, Charles.
Dear Charles,
Yet again your words fill me with belief and hope for us all. Thank you.
It’s a tough one allowing oneself to remain small (not that I suggest you are so) My one small article a month seems like nothing. My joy of solitude in nature and not wanting to be surrounded by people all the time creates a sort of guilt. Yet my love for all that surrounds me and the way I make people smile when I am in town, I hope is enough. So thank you for reminding me it is.
I have included the website for a house I have for sale, not from a selling point of view, but for somewhere you might like to stay (Before it is sold). It will be available in September as it is booked for holiday rentals for July and August. It’s definitely a place of solitude and I think your family would like it!
See you at the GEN conference.
With love
Conrad
Another straight from the heart sharing using the gift of words and flow that you have. Blessed to read this and all of your work.
Is a source of inspiration and course correction for me in my own work and life.
Oh Charles. I love you. Thank you. Tears are streaming down my face reading this. As always, your humility and manner to speak for ‘us’ is beyond words – you are an antenna! The tears are deep gratitude for the gift you share on behalf of us all. From my heart – thank you
Praise the spirit and may we all be used to serve this imperative message!
Thank you Oprah for heeding the call!
Charles, you have changed this one woman in Australia immeasurably. Just by your words, your thoughts, your behaviour. If I could only have, say, five books on my bookshelf, Sacred Economics and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary would both absolutely be there. I think you are a wonderful man and your way of living gives me heart.
Charles,
What a beautiful evolved soul you are. Many Years ago I had you come do a seminar on “The Yoga of Eating.” You ignited consciousness in each one of us.
Later I enjoyed your book “The Assent to Humanity”. Your brilliance and soul are inspiring!
Carol Howe
Thank you so much, Charles
I have never read anyone else’s perspective/experience of life that so keenly related to my own. Thank you so much.
Time is running short for me, in this moment, because I have to get to work, and the Internet is so nebulous I can’t guarantee that I will see your article again, so I write a bit now, just to make a dent.
I am Shiana Seitz, and I wrote, and ultimately self-published two books. Both on Amazon. (If you’re curious, please check it out and you’ll better understand my response.) Your first publishing experiences, and mind sets and intentions relate to my own.
Now, I’m in the place of sharing Joy with elders as I teach chair exercises at a beautiful retirement home development in San Luis Obispo. I am sharing Joy and Love every day in ways I could not have possibly imagined when those books of mine went nowhere. What’s funny is that the words in the books still inspire me. They remind ME, and that is the being that chooses to be an inspiration to others – to those people within my circle of daily interactions.
Life is a Mystery is it not?
Thank you for sharing. It is a validation for me, and undoubtedly for many others, too.
Namaste,
Shiana
Wow, Charles, I enjoy your vulnerable sharing of your inner struggles. Your book “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible” inspired me greatly, along with the numerous videos that have featured you, and I have been through almost exactly the same process as you. I wrote a book, self-published, sold a few copies, and now realize that my greatest pleasure arises from knowing how many free PDF copies have been downloaded. I enjoy a few solitary notes that dribble in from people who thank me for my writing. Even when I wrote my introduction, I realized I write to hear myself tell myself the very things that I need to hear and remember. What “winds my clock” more than anything these days is working directly, face-to-face, with people in conversations, convening people to community conversations about things that trouble them, asking them to collaborate, form networks of sharing resources, information and wisdom. My goal is to be part of a team that builds localized resilience. Right now, it’s focused on the thousands of unhoused people. This is my service, and I’m learning by doing, one day at a time, inch by inch.
Touched a resonating place in my heart. Keep on keeping on. Love and hugs.
Hey David, I did not know about your writing. I do know that you are a shining light in Lane County. Keep up the good work!
Isn’t Charles’ work inspiring? I saw him a few years ago in Eugene.
Hi David! Like Charles, you walk your talk, and keep listening (as you say) to your talk so you remember what your walk is. As I was reading both Charles’s and your piece and the responses to it, I get the sense of why I like telling my story of hope and inspiration. It is to remind myself of the essence of that story – stories – so my cellular awareness and my biome recognize my dedication to helping the story unfold – both my story and the bigger story of collaboration and as Charles says; We need each other! I am so blessed! Thank you.
May the Oprah interview open new doors ( hearts and minds) for your hopeful and encouraging message, so necessary for those of us who struggle in this parenthesis between a dying civilization and a more beautiful world yet to be born. Your personal story provides a lift, and I LOVED “The Ascent of Humanity,” all the more when I now learn about its self-published background. Along with the wise words of the Zen master, you allude to a saying of Jesus about the rain falling on the just and unjust. While Christianity has become such a mess over the centuries, and it’s natural for us to look to the East for enlightenment, there are other sayings of Jesus that echo the thrust of your latest essay. That mysterious thing called the kingdom of god or heaven has a couple of interesting aspects. It’s small and insignificant, like a mustard seed or pinch of leaven, but leads to large, significant results. It’s also hidden or easily overlooked, like buried treasure or a precious pearl, yet once found is worth the devotion of a lifetime. I, too, happen to be a self-publisher who put a little piece on the Kindle a few years ago, also in answer to a spiritual question I was asked. For those who may be interested, I hope you don’t mind if I provide a link to the booklet’s description and free sample. They make it clear, I hope, that it’s not a money-making or self-promoting endeavor. If I’ve crossed a policy line here, I apologize, and please just erase the comment. Either way, thank you for “The Age of We Need Each Other.” I’ve been checking your website every day for a new short piece, while eagerly awaiting your upcoming book with a unique take on climate change and related environmental issues.
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Truth-synoptic-gospel-Theophilus-ebook/dp/B00NIZOJ4C
Thank you.
Estimado Christer: La lectura que me has enviado de Charles Eisenstein(al que no había nombrar),me ha gustado y se ajusta mucho a mi pensamiento de cómo ver el mundo y mi misión mientras me quede un hálito de vida.Aunque me cuesta un poco entender todas las palabras que,al ser traducidas al español, nunca reflejan lo que deben decir en tu idioma.aunque en el fondo entiendas su significado.Es lo mismo que me ocurrió cuando,recién jubilado me puse a traducir del catalán al castellano el libro del mallorquín Joan Mascaró titulado ” Lámparas de Fuego” o ” Llánties de Foc” como el lo titula.En el encontré bastantes palabras que no entendía,del catalán,pero creo que al final,la traducción quedó “bastante decente” con la ayuda del ex-profesor del Seminario D. Sebastián Mesquida.Te quiero manifestar mi agradecimiento,porque para mí tienen un valor especial,que se centra en ayudarte a conocerte a tí mismo y reafirmarte en que tu misión es ofrecerte a la humanidad en todo aquéllo que le puedas ser útil.
Thank you. Much love.
I am not one bit surprised at this intersection. Oprah has long had a strong sense of what was needed for healing. She has built trust with her viewers over the years so that when she would present them with something a little ‘out there’ that she resonated with, they were open to receiving it. She has always been all about healing and it makes perfect sense to me that a next ‘stage’ for her would be about transcending healing to move towards creating the ‘more beautiful world’.
Not to toot my own horn, but I have noticed over the years (I work in a library) that often when I feel like I am ‘discovering’ a new, great, voice, shortly later, Oprah discovers it too, and brings it to her audience. This is because what is great and needs to come ‘out’ will find its way one way or another. It is also because I believe that Oprah and others like her have a strong sense of what is ‘real and good’ and what resonates with highest truth and great integrity and authenticity so it makes perfect sense that she would ‘discover’ Charles after he had come to the place of knowing his own highest purpose.
This, to me, personally is awesome. Being one of those people who have been thinking ‘I wish everyone would read/know the world of Charles Eisenstein’ (and also recommending it whenever it seemed appropriate) I am THRILLED that Oprah is making this happen in a way that I could do only on a very small scale. Small is good, yes, but sometimes bigger IS better, when it is at the right time and right place with the right people.
Yay, Charles! Way to go, Oprah! How cool that you found Charles! Wonderful.
Many blessings to you for the sacred work you are doing. Your gifts of empathy and eloquence are so needed during these troubling times.
Dear Charles,
I met you through your written work a few years back and have been following you since. You capture and articulate with such clarity my own current life experience as one who has come through the community development and humanitarian assistance world into Transformational Conversation (Living Awareness through Personal Life Coaching), which is where my heart has always been taking me. Your authentic and courageous writing has helped me make sense of my own experience and to live more boldly into my highest soul commitment. Thank-you, Charles!
Peace, Light and Love
Brian
Charles, your gracious telling of this posts humbling message is deeply inspiring. It plucks a cord that feels familiar to me as I walk a somewhat similar path in Australia. Thank you for this simple, yet powerful, goodness.
Erin
Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia
I felt tears come at the end when you write, “We will not be alone here much longer.” Thank you, Charles.
Respect Charles. Thank you for your part in the ripple effect of kindness in this world. I resonate.
Beautiful Charles, thank you so much for writing this. I’m sure many of us who face similarly conflicting motivations will be well served by this essay. I certainly relate. You are the conscience of our generation.
Charles, – it’s Rosalind, now aged 75, from the U.K.
Do you remember how we stood and looked at each other at the end of a Schumacher course? I said ” no words” and you said ” it’s O.K. by me”.
Long may this inter-connected presence inform the world of the centrality of respect, love, gratefulness and co-existence, as we journey onwards.
Love this!
I am on a similar professional path. Thank you for continuing to circulate the clarity you have received from The Spiritual Being. I needed that.
This May I graduated from Columbia University with a Master of Science degree in Sustainability Management. I pursued it part-time while working at various NGO’s and as a substitute teacher, and kept coming back to your book Sacred Economics in the past 3-4 years. You are right, there is a significant (enormous) gap between your (and my) vision for the planet’s survival and of the mainstream. And you are right about this gap beginning to shrink. Thank you for your work.
According to my ambitions and the expectations of my family and friends, as a Columbia alumni, I should be working at a prestigious company and earning an impressive salary. However, I haven’t been able to find what fits my beliefs and a desire to produce an impact of a much higher scale. Your post helped me recognize the conflict of my motivations. Thanks again for being a mentor to me and many others.
Humbly stated. Looking forward to your interview with Rush Limbaugh 😉
Like many others, I needed to hear this right now. I struggle to balance the impulse to “find that one thing I need to do to help bring a better world into being” with letting the presence of awareness inform every movement in every moment.
I want to know that I’m making a difference! But my heart tells me that there is an intelligence working through all of us, and I need only let that move me in the way it will.
Thank you for your presence in the world.
Thank you for this, Charles.
It so reminded me of a wonderful book by Margaret J. Wheatley: So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World (2012)
Highly recommend this book to you and all your readers.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13590007-so-far-from-home
“I wrote this book for you if you offer your work as a contribution to others, whatever your work might be, and if now you find yourself feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and sometimes despairing even as you paradoxically experience moments of joy, belonging, and greater resolve to do your work. This book describes how we can do our good work with dedication, energy, discipline, and joy by consciously choosing a new role for ourselves, that of warriors for the human spirit.”
Don
I thank you for your openess and vulnerability. I know your way of seeing things is powerful and good.
Charles, I struggle with the same issues! I have even held myself back from writing another book until I was doing it for the right reasons… i.e. not for fame, but only for service — and to trust that “success” would come if that is what is supposed to happen. After a few years of really working on my lifelong need for achievement and success and recognition, I can report that I have made a lot of progress. I’ve also worked on a lot of other personal issues over the past year, many emanating from childhood. I’ve increasingly seen how almost everyone I know is driven by factors that began in childhood — usually as a way to survive and win love from one parent or another or both. I am also learning to love and have compassion for myself! It is a hard, slow process. But now that I feel I am seeing lights at the end of the tunnel — at least this part of the tunnel! — I feel I am emerging as a new person getting ready for a new life that now begins for me at age 61.5. And finally, I feel like a new book is growing in me too. But I have much less attachment to it. It will come as it comes. Charles, kudos on the Oprah interview and your humble attitude about it. If this is a portent of bigger things to come for you, I pray that you retain this attitude! I know it will probably be challenging, but I’m so impressed that you remain cognizant of the issue at all. Blessings on your success.
Thank you.
Imagine an Oprah show (or whole season) that just tells the stories of the millions of ordinary people doing powerful daily work. The threads in the fabric. The everyday heroes. Thank you for being one of them Charles. If you should go big, thank you for remaining, in your own way, small.
Also a big thanks from me, Charles.
I could have written those first few paragraphs myself, albeit from a much ‘humbler’ place.
I could also have asked all those questions that you ask.
Would I be willing to make that same deal? Good questions!
I never read ANYTHING you write without being renewed and inspired!
This time, it was or is the path you are choosing in doing the small things.
But, it is heartening to hear about Oprah and we do need some messages of hope at times.
Warm wishes,
Brian
Hi 🙂
You, and The Ascent of Humanity, have been at the center of many wild, deeply life-changing synchronicities over the past few years. Right out of college, on my first day in San Francisco, I got a big, hardcover copy of The Ascent of Humanity at a little bookshop. I wasn’t sure why I needed it, but I knew that I did… long before I had even the slightest inklings of a spiritual sense.
Almost two years of full-time work, burnout, and a deep depression later, I was on a disability leave from work and went to Lightning in a Bottle 2016. I was in a workshop you gave there (we traveled in time :D), and then hung around the space for a bit. The next workshop in the space was Paradox Pollack’s monkey chant. It was a powerful, magickal experience in itself, and through it I connected with Danielle – a powerful connection that blew the doors off of… just about everything for me and set me on the path of awakening and healing. After the festival I connected with Paradox again, which brought me to one of the most deeply nourishing and stable connections of my life, a person who has been really instrumental in my growth and healing.
After that I quit my job and started traveling. You and I crossed paths at the Beloved festival later that year. I was nervous to say hi, and you were resting (in a biiig, wide-brimmed sun hat), so I didn’t say anything and went to lay down in the shade myself. About a minute later, Paradox literally stepped over my sleeping body, which led to us connecting again and opening some new pathways in my life. BIG WEIRD MAGICK.
I still haven’t finished the book! Nonetheless, it’s been a powerful engine of synchronicity and anchors an important energy in my life. Now I’m on new adventures in Berlin, healing, growing, and showing up for the Work. Thank you for being you and for the work you do! I hope we’ll have an opportunity to speak some time 🙂
<3
Hey Charles,
Well and honestly put, as is your way and talent.
Too wordy, too- but you already know and suspect that.
I subscribe to you – not so much to all your bleating and blessings of heady logic and counter-logic and third thing logic, and even when you stumble into the Fourth Way of disappearing logic and logos for the “astonishment of the soul” moments your writing/something to say creates, I love you despite your backasswards aggressive-passive aggressive humbleness.
But there’s the rub.
I’ve nothing to critique about your intelligence- astounding, astute and growing- nor about your home-base points, once you finally get there. Good stuff!
What sings out behind your voice in your writings is too much “I” – both denying-while-inflating yourself, and some kinds of cultural trappings of mind – of which you are aware.
Also, that your working these things out in this process of writing for others is clear. And I wish more power to you in your clearing.
This reply space is not the format to go into detail about what I see and hear in you, and any way, it’s what you (eventually) give us as viable new knowledge and new POV viewing – what we hear from you- that is significant. So only two things – that are really a fusion of one thing – I’d like to add here about your take and make regarding this communication, and what you communicate as who you (think you) are.
One, I sense a blind spot in you – that you’re being too good – too “goody-goody” – that somehow walking the razors edge like you are – like many of us are – doesn’t get our souls bloody really often. I say, let it bleed. In your silence… then, when you’re blood cleans, write. Not before.
The blind spot is in how you fold into and upon yourself so many times trying to cover your tracks – as though you hope not to offend telling us we don’t get a lot of what we are doing/thinking- and that we also don’t get we are each other and the world.
It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t get. What matters is saying it with your sword and rose as is… thorns and shine all. Don’t “protect” us by being Mr. Nice Guy. You’re not him. Your rage and fume have a place to help communicate unto communion – I trust you in this because you are transformed- and transforming.
By hedging your insights as you do, you’re telling us you don’t trust us. Nobody wants to read that, nor feel that from a brightness.
This fuses into your Oprah bit. Oprah is perhaps more lost than most- and it is this quality in her – that is of her compelling to seek in such Darkness – that blesses us with a needed mainstream of stuttering toward wakefulness. My take is ” Thank God for the OprahChoprah SuperHighway!” Without her carving out this path of hers in front of out TV minds, we’d still be stuck enmasse back at “I’m angry as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” And meditation and mindfulness would still not be in the national-lowest common denominator vocabulary across all demographics. But it is now. Thanx to that SuperHighway.
And the razor you walk is reminding you to that we are all in a quickening, so there is no time to bow to OprahChoprah left. Acknowledge, thank, hold in gratefulness and still cut the wheat from the chaff. It’s your job – without the wordiness obfuscation effort Inga to get everyone into the boat. Remember, people are quite capable – and many will swim on their own even just by seeing the boat. Yes, many will also drown.
That’s the nature of the razor.
But giving even those who are drowning the dignity of their own place to do that for themselves is more respectful, and more real.
Keep it real, Charles. Catch the cultural/org. religious stuff before it injects/infects into your truth-telling and valuable insights. You really do have something to say, to share, and to communicate unto communion – now Zen it out. Cut off your own Buddha head and let us hear it! Trust us… we will grow. It’s soul’s trajectory. And we will quicken as needed across the land when you stop babying the Godscape and luv the blood and mud that challenges our ego-minds.
Now is the time. Let the good times roll! You’ve nothing to lose but your head????????❤️????????!
Much Aloha
Satya
I was worried about being the contrarian in this sea of accolades and was relieved to come to this response. Satya, your nuances are so layered (fascinatingly so) that I’m not sure I got all of them, but am in tune with you about the gist. Charles, who are you to be so damn humble? We lack for heroes and you are blessed with that capacity. Don’t cheat everyone with the ordinariness you are dabbling with. It’s not about craving recognition but taking the job you were given. We so need the community you call us to that I encourage you to keep shining that light as you do in the video clip from Occupy Wall Street I have in Inspirations on my new site: scroll down on http://suespeaks.org/inspirations. I‘m under some orders, too – this is on my archival site: http://mightycompanions.org/suzanne. It’s the directive that got me making a Heroes Gallery and I’m hoping you will find yourself comfortable there.: http://suespeaks.org/featured-heroes .
Satya, I’m finding myself feeling quite frustrated after reading your comment. When I read your comment about staying silent until the blood is clean I was reminded of something Martín Prechtel said in his talk on grief and praise about criticising people when they have an idea of how to make life better and are pursuing it, “If you’re trying to talk him out of it, you’re slitting your own throat!” Prechtel said.
When you criticized Charles for being too wordy I felt confused because I don’t experience his writing as too wordy, and valued everything he said in this essay. I had no idea what you were talking about with your discussion of his layers of logic, because there were no specific examples. I was fairly deeply irked when you used the phrase “backasswards aggressive-passive aggressive humbleness” because it was accusatory without givng any evidence of what in his writing you are referring to, what it even meant, or what could be done to remedy whatever it was that you saw as being that. Criticisms in this form have a tendency to just shame and inhibit people rather than helping them remedy anything if there truly is a an area which could use some attention for improvement. Please, give specific examples, and how it impacted you. Your message will be easier to hear.
Are you hoping for Charles and his writing to be more like you and yours, and you felt frustrated when reading this that that’s not the case? I wonder this because it struck me that I find each of the problems you point out in his writing to be present in this one example of your writing that I have to know you by, and I personally don’t see the things you spoke of in Charles’s writing. I think that’s why Charles uses so much “I”, and it’s one of the reasons I try to also. At least when I talk about myself I know I am not committing what Jesus decried as hypocrisy, pointing out the speck in my brother’s eye when I have a log in my own. I may not be seeing everything perfectly clearly when I talk about myself, but it feels better to me to be mistaken when talking about my own shortcomings than to be mistaken about someone else’s shortcomings.
Your use of “you” statements impacted me in such a way that made it difficult for me to find anything helpful or valuable in what you were saying, and it also made me also not care to search, because your overall message left a foul taste in my mouth. I am writing only because I treasure both Charles and the perspectives that come through his writing, and it is important to me to speak up in their defense. If you feel compelled to comment again in the future will you please form your criticisms in the form of “I” statements, and give specific examples?
And Charles, if you read this, please don’t heed the confusing advice to stay silent until your blood cleans?
Down the street is a center for the blind,
where folks who can see,
lead around those who cannot.
Those who hold the sticks,
smile bigger and longer,
darkness into light,
and I wonder,
who’s really blind here?
Your words at the Slow Living Summit accompanied by that superb cellist put your message into my bones. A million times Thank You. This essay was just what a needed in a time of crisis of purpose. With gratitude. Rachel
Wowza – your writing provided the grounding mat I needed to hear – AGAIN!. I half wrote my draft book ‘Life’s a Load of Balls!’ about 7 years ago. I actually reached out to you at the time to ask if you would help out with a review. You bowled me over by saying ‘Yes, if the timing was right with whatever else was going on in your life.’ It’s sat perculating on my computer and just two weeks ago, I picked up the threads to bring it to life. I am now ready to bring it into the world to be of service and not for the fame. Like you the anticipation, the dreaming felt exciting. The universe had other plans to align my teaching with my values. It’s humbling and fulfilling when you take time to sit and listen to other peoples wisdom – the philosophy of the older fok and the fresh, innovative, raw wisdom of the young.
Thank you for your heartfelt muse; it has served as a mouthsmacking affirmation to pursue my witing with love and vigor.
Congratulations on being invited to be Oprah’s guest, I look forward to listening.
Huglets
Philippa
It’s heartening indeed to know there are so many. Thank you and best to you.
Thank you for this essay. It is a joy to read about the smallness of a real life. My real life often feels very small. I am a composer and music teacher in a town with a population of just over 20,000. I’m in the process of restoring some lost work-life balance and that involves weeding parsnips!
I found you by way of the short film trailer “Sacred Economics.” I ran across it on Gaia as I was trying to use yoga as an antidote to too much time spent at my computer making music. After I watched the film, I read the book and have slowly been making my way, as I dare, into treating some of my music life as gift. Here’s an example of a project I’m undertaking this summer. I thank you so much for spelling out the philosophical underpinnings to this new way of thinking. You inspire me to have the faith to offer my own work as a gift.
https://ellenschwindt.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html
Also, I’m big fan of your podcasts. Thank you for them.
Dear Charles,
I am looking forward to seeing you and Opera together! So curious about what will evolve – both in the interview and the after affect on her audience. I love her curiosity and ability to connect with people. She has good questions to bring out interesting aspects of the people she interviews. And I always enjoy listening to you interacting with another person as you often do – great stuff emerges..
And thank you for this article, it touches my soul and ignites my imagination about the “coming age of we need each other”. Like an evolutionary shift from single cells to organism. Who know where that will lead.
I discovered your work very early when I bumped into The Ascent , loved it and spread the word far and wide. I was so excited when I saw you were doing a workshop in Bali just when it was possible for me to attend. To me it felt like a miracle and my memories of that week are still clear and strong. You have touched lives – not just by your words but by being your self. What a gift to all of us to understand that aspect of making a difference.
These days I mostly sit home, write and draw, and feel bad that I am no longer teaching. You remind me that my work continues even if I don’t know how or why – just by being myself.
With warmest wishes,
Mara
Charles – thank you for your humility, for your deep caring, and most of all for continuing to serve as an antenna. Your words are like rich compost in a global field where I pray human consciousness keeps growing, expanding, mutating. This piece is a particularly profound gift and an inspiration.
Wonderfully humble. I relate to it. Thank you for sharing from the depths of my Soul.
Thank you, Charles. You inspire “little people” to keep the faith!
Thank you Charles for the reminder to those of us who are writing and need to be writing:
“After all, the work I do isn’t “my” work. These are ideas whose time has come and they need capable scribes.”
For too long I’ve held back on publishing even my blogs on ideas that shift the course of humanity – many of which resonate with what you write about. – because of my fear of being mis- understood – or my fear that I’m unable to express these ideas clearly.
But your clarity encourages mine, and this essay is an important reminder that we need to do the work we’re called to do.
Thank you for this essay. Yes, it is important with the comminity and be together with others. If I ever wanted to do anything in life, my father used to always ask me – why do you want to do it? For fame? For influence or to help? No matter how small or big the project was. And I do try, to find out what motivates me. This essay has put much in prespective for me. And I love the expression of – Age of needing each other.
caregiving is being of service. I am a caregiver and I am so burnt out. Please pray for me that I find new work. You have reminded me that my work has value which will help as I look for new work. blessings. Clare I also liked reading your essay and I am looking forward to seeing the video.
Thank you Charles for sharing your experience, it is touching. I am beginning to see a growth in the connection of us all and although there is a lot of tragic things happening in the world, all that is happening is waking us up to the need to become closer together.
Your words resonate with my experiences, I have become a servant to others over my lifetime and many times have thought that it was not right to be this way. I have tried many times to be different and perhaps more selfish to achieve my own ambitions but have regularly heard that voice telling me, “you are here to serve” now I know what my purpose is, I do what I’m here to do, and I know that it makes a difference.
Thank you for having the voice that has once again confirmed that the path we are on is the right one.
Kindest regards
Andrew
Hi Charles,
Another wonderful essay from you. Who knows whom or what we may influence, we can only trust fully that we are guided along the way. I did find your thoughts on the need to be important and big so very helpful as I muddle along in my own life, however. Thank you! Certainly in this small corner of Aotearoa I remember your teachings, the Space between Stories weekend and they have given me ongoing guidance in the months since February, with a slow unfolding in my own life.
Thank you for having made the time to come here this year as I continue to be amazed at the synchronicity that allowed me to be there too. So here is for impact in unexpected ways!
Be well, Britta
Charles, Thank you for all your wonderful books, talks, podcasts and essays. Your messgaes have enriched my life.
Wayne
Love this. I believe our (yours, mine and all the people who have similiar journeys of questioning and surrender) multifaceted motivations and accompanying self doubt are part of our transition to the ‘more beautiful world’. Birth can be long, drawn out, painful and difficult and/or blissful and beautiful. Transition is where we wanna give up in birth, lack self belief etc before the more active pushing stage where we get right down into our full power and push… And we are – rising and shifting and unmistakable gaining momentum. I agree, your moment with Oprah is a a sign. The good news of the truth of interconnection, and the path out of this mess that it offers is spreading! How wonderful. Thanks for your contribution – both Charles and anyone else who is reading!
Thanks for that metaphor!
Hello Charles,
It’s been quite some time since we met. One of the last conversations we had, you spoke of the knowing of how you could change Oprah Winfrey’s Life.. and that was with your book
“The Yoga of Eating”. I wonder if you were able to present her with a “sacred copy”. Wouldn’t that have been a nice manifestation, if she of course reads it… I did read the book. You know Charles,
The Yoga of Eating book was the only book if I recall that I couldn’t download for the easy gift of immediate reading without having to order or pay online. My friend Wcagner, asked me one “What book would you like me to bring back for you from a Conference that Charles is having in New York”? Of course I told him “The Yoga of Eating”. I even believe you signed it. I read that book on a 4 day gifted vacation in North Carolina with my ex-husband and only Son “Taylor”. I since then gifted it to my friend Paul J.. (PJ for short). You see Charles, your books are finding us.. somehow…
I am so happy, an idea with passion has manifested for you… It is truly so that not only does God see everything.. but also hears everything… In my daydreams, I think I’m alone.. I wanted to meet a certain person.. I intentionalized it with my passion.. and it did manifest… Was it worth it? Of course, my dream came true!
Thank you for all you do!
Charles, this is great news! And your words help me strengthen my commitment. We do all need each other.
indivisible = indi-visible whatever we see, imagine, think, feel, do is only ever part of what our individual i carries… just so each individual carries its parts of the greater whole from which we all come and into which we all immerse ourselves – living and dead, remembered and forgotten to become re-membered again…
Thank you so much once again Charles. I love your candour, your honesty and your willingness to share your life of not-knowing if what you are doing is having any effect at-all. My life even though I am now 70 is still the same, I do what I do to the best I can, and have to let go of craving to know if what I do makes any difference at all to others or the world. Like you, I have come to see that when I teach , give talks, see clients or babysit my grandchildren, if it fills me with a warm glow, then something is happening somewhere, even if only within my own once closed off heart.
Due to trauma and fear I closed my heart as a child to anything but study and work. Both of those I have excelled in, in my own little way, but getting close to people, be it partners, friends or family has felt beyond me until recently. Yes it truly is the time of seeing that it is time to acknowledge we need each other just as much as we need the air we breathe. And I have recently realised that “Fear is Letting go of Love” just as much as the reverse is true, so its time for me to give up fear, separation and going it alone, and embrace everyone equally, no matter if they think I am mad or the best thing since sliced bread! Thanks Charles
Emma Mary Gathergood
Dear Charles,
It would appear that the work I am called to do – as a writer and “a capable scribe” as you put it, also isn’t “my” work. We writers in the realm of the “spiritual” or “personal development” are but vessels for communication to remind people what they already know but may have simply forgotten. From reading this article, it is clear that you and I share an understanding that” ideas whose time have come” simply Call to be expressed, are heard by whomever’s antennae picks them up and then, feel “called” to manifest the “message” into the words that are authentic and true to them.
My new book, “Survive To Thrive 11 Keys To Unlock Your Thriving Life” has been exactly that experience for me, and I am grateful to be it’s humble scribe. I resonate with your thoughts about sacrificing your peace and quiet after your interview with Oprah. I too will put my book out on to the altar of consciousness this fall and then simply let. it. go….for whomever ultimately it is meant to serve to find it….or not. As you pointed out, the pleasure and service was in the writing, and I don’t feel responsible for who finds it or how. That will be God’s job, not mine.
I also loved your story of your friend Roy. Truly being present for someone, even if it is only one person in need, is more than enough. I am more and more convinced that every kind word and deed does affect the level of consciousness of the whole, and no positive energy is ever wasted and is never considered a “small” thing in the eyes of God/The Universe/Ultimate Consciousness. As you pointed out, living in a way where you know “God Sees everything” changes your perspective totally.
Thanks for a very thought provoking blog. I look forward to reading more of your writing in the future. One day, I suspect our Paths will cross….
Warm regards,
Mary Anne Dorward
http://www.wordstothriveby.com
Can I please share a piece of poetry that I created from an experience I had with a “homeless man”? I think this is the most appropriate place right now to share. You see, it’s rare to be touched… to the point that we get inspired to write about it. Here we go.. The poem in its story, says it all about what is really going on with homeless people. I know you think they have the “pick up money lines”.. and I’m sure some of them do… the true ones you meet, who we think don’t enjoy being homeless, perhaps do enjoy it and may actually have a message for you!
It was a balmy afternoon as I left the store
To drive the one mile back to the Movie Theatre
I had left my Friend and My little One There
To grab a coke for us all to share
Only half way back to my car I was called
“Sweet Lady can you lend me a helping hand”?
His name for now let’s call him Mister
For I do not know and I did not ask
I was too enthralled by the glow behind the mask.
I walked toward him and there he stood
The physical appearance of a withering bud
“I know the economy and all is bad but please please can you help me
I’ll work if you have”?
“What do you need? I don’t have long. I have to get back to my friend and Son”
“A Dollar or two will do if you have it.. I’ll be honest with you I need a beer and some nuggets”.
Some change I gave him non-grudgingly as something inside me said “Ask him about his life story”…
“So what is your story.. we all do have one.. share with me please I shall gladly listen”.
He looked at me and I was deeply touched at the kindness in his eyes and for his trust.
He knew I would listen and I knew he would share… why were we truly both there?
“My life sweet lady I shall tell you this – has not been one of happiness and bliss
I’ve had opportunities all throughout my life
But never took them – experiencing instead sadness and strife”.
“My IQ is 141 and my ASVAB Test was a 92 I could choose any job I wanted to”.
“I became an Aviation Mechanic and tendered 4 years in the Seals
but I was young and dumb and thought I would always have time so I left. Looking back it’s all so surreal”.
“Sweet lady if I had stayed I would be retired now with a house and a pension
but look at me I am a nobody begging to you for some change and attention”.
“I have never been married and have no kids.. I am 47” he said heart broken.
“When I was 36 I met my girl.. I asked her to marry me.. “Of course I will”
“We were happy in Love and we mailed out the invites
I Love my Bethany and always will”.
“An officer knocked on my door to give me the news – my lovely Bethany had died but murdered by who?”
“I hit the bottle and have been like this ever since – Love lost and my life awashed” he cried full of released emotion..
“Oh yes my friends try to comfort me by telling me their family has died of cancer
but this is not the same.. my Bethany is gone and I never had time to grieve her”.
“Bethany will always be with you” I said and I knew
And we hugged him together and at once he knew too.
I walked away back to my car.. sensing a shift even in the air
I turned around to give him one last glimpse
But he was gone!
The healing had indeed begun.
Bright Eyes is now playing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGyQmH9NZcw
The first movie I ever saw.. I was 10 years old.
Hi Charles,
I just wanted to note that I love your use of the word logic. As a computer scientist I know there are so many different kinds of logic just within that domain. How refreshing to hear someone speak of other logics of the mind.
But the question is real. What will happen to (“your”) ideas as they enter the mainstream? What distortions will they face?
It’s scary how success can be so much more dangerous than failure.
Slavoj Zizek in “The Courage of Hopelessness” quoted Lenin and Trotsky before the October revolution:
Lenin: “What shall happen to us if we fail?”
Trotsky responds with the counter-intuitive:
Trotsky: “And what if we succeed?”
I wonder what will happen. I hope you find the strength to remember. But to know that the strength comes from others who hold the ground and not just yourself! This is a great learning, one that we all need to learn, in an age of an individualism that prevents us from recognizing the contribution of others and makes us think that we alone have the answer.
I hope you find the right path between your more settled existence and a possible more widespread visibility and that each informs the other.
Charles, brother. Your message of interbeing and morphic resonance, has resonated deeply within me and in my service to healing. You are a beacon to the awakening of our collective consciousness. Much gratitude to you brother. Aho.
Thank you for sharing with such authenticity and vulnerability Charles. I don’t know how I found your article today, but it was the perfect mirror of my own process, as I piece together a book that has been a lifetime in the writing. All are as drops in the ocean…
For whom do we write? For millions, or for that one, who on reading the lines we penned in our hours of both darkness and light, remembers, and dares to dream again.
Where our love touches their love, in that moment, hope is ignited deep in heart of the world.
I trust, as you say, that Oprah’s invitation to you represents a deepening and a readiness within the collective that she serves. That we all serve.
Dearest one, thank you
Boy, do we certainly need this now. Thank you
Charles, I too am torn between solitude and the “requirements” of a public life. So far solitude seems to be winning and so does obscurity! I can’t believe that my connection with all that is not here to serve in a much bigger way. I’ve written the articles, the books, the Global Humanity Bill of Rights, created the Foundation and a new trickle-up economy, Heaven on Earth, but it remains mostly in the realm of the invisible. I’m learning to accept and let go of ambition myself. Our love to all the everyday heroes for they are each and every one of us… And much love and gratitude to you. Christine
Lovely!
I really connected with your talk on Oprah! It is my first time becoming aware of you and your teachings. (Just ordered your most recent book after watching the episode) Sometimes, I feel I see the world a lot differently than many of the people I know. You were able to put into words many of the things I feel. I had similar feelings about school and looking outside thinking, “Something is not right, why aren’t we outside”. Currently I am both a high school teacher which just isn’t fulfilling my soul completely and I started my own business as a mindfulness coach. Hopefully this new path will help to create the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible. Thank you again! I look forward to reading the book when it arrives!:)
Beautiful! Your words speak the truth of the heart, keep doing your job Charles, cause’ we’ll give you the energy, but you’ll be the harbinger for the whole world to know it.
Yes, you and your message were catapulted into my world by way of Souped Soul Sunday.
Thank you !
pat mcclendon
@savingnurses.com
Charles, Thank you for speaking into the universe what many of us have been collectively thinking and feeling for sometime, but were not able to verbalize it. I saw your interview with Oprah on a rerun of Super Soul Sunday this morning, your words had that essence of truth that my soul recognized. Your conversation with Oprah on our desire for connection to each other and nature reminds me of the African principle or philosophy of Ubuntu which is recognizing our connectedness and humanity to all including nature. Thank you also for your comprehensive website and resources.
Lanita
Just a brief note to thank you. I watched you talking with Oprah and I must be one of the people you’re meant to reach. Your message amazed me. I’ve struggled with my response to the hate and polarized society that is our current political reality. I knew intuitively I was hearing the truth as you spoke. I’ve become very reclusive myself and wonder if in part it’s an escape from the dysfunctional/unnatural way of life now. I hope everyone on planet earth will embrace your words.
So please let me share with you all today, a thread that I have kept alive since 2012 in the annals of this timeline… a memory, a message, to be shared, and remembered! I think it’s appropriate here, as it echos along the times of line…
Please take the time, to see all of the video clips and listen and here to all of the messages that ring to you now!
http://www.themistsofavalon.net/t3895-charles-eistenstein-january-8-2012-the-revolution-is-love
copy and paste the above into your web browser. Control C [highlight] and control V to paste
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PbBBsu-4kOc
Lover Earth Original Song.. Is So Beautiful To Me!
YES you are on to something Charles – My mouth dropped open when I saw your interview with Oprah. You summed up the very thoughts that I have been trying to articulate this past year and touched my soul (and obviously so many others) in a deep way. You are so right when you say ” our culture validates and celebrates those who are out there with big platforms speaking to millions of people, while ignoring those who do humble, quiet work, taking care of just one sick person, one child, or one small place on this earth.” That’s where the heartfelt, life giving, soul inspiring work is being done.
The statement of “humble, quiet work” is the perfect summary of those who choose motherhood as a career. They serve their family and communities on purpose. Thank you for speaking to the hearts of millions and indirectly giving a quiet nod to the mothers of the world. There is no better quote for you than this one: “Admiration for what you are building when no one sees.” Much Love, Elayne
exactly – as i write – recently on service – and always reminding people that in service is not about the reward nor is it about the number – but that you BE and in that – all life changes around us.
Thankyou for your beautiful words x
Charles,
I watched your interview with Oprah yesterday and I was deeply moved.
I recently took a leap of faith to leave the corporate world, launch my own marketing firm and start a blog focused on trauma. I had a similar experience as you did. My world kinda collapsed and with the help of my amazing therapist (and a huge nudge from the Universe), I chose to release my need to be recognized as successful and the go-to person to solve everyone’s problems.
I launched my marketing firm with my best friend and my traumallama.com blog at the same time. While prospective clients trickled into our marketing firm, my following on traumallama.com took off. The intention of the blog was only to give people a place where they felt like they belonged and to share their stories. It was never meant to be a source of income or fame.
Within two weeks of launching the blog and the Trauma Llama Facebook page, I had over 1000 followers on Facebook alone. I can’t calculate the following on Twitter and Instagram because it grows daily.
I noticed something else was happening, something you alluded to in your interview with Oprah. I found myself spending more time and having more joy working on traumallama.com than on scaling my marketing business. However, I still need to pay the bills and take care of my family.
This coming week I am going to refocus my motivation for launching the marketing firm away from trying to be successful, and selling my expertise, to focusing on how can I help my clients and learn from them. I want to feel the same awe and joy that I feel with traumallama.com when I am working on projects for my marketing firm. I believe that once I make this conscious shift the Universe will provide all that I need.
I’m looking forward to following your journey.
Best,
Susan
Hi Charles,
I really appreciate and grateful to find someone like you, because we always do something to a person with thinking what I am going to get a return. Through your books and net hope everyone can live their life more beautiful. Namaste!
I just saw you and heard of you for the first time on Super Soul Sunday. I have to say that it was a huge moment for me when I heard of all that you spoke about. For the first time in my life, I felt like finally there was another person who had perspectives similar to mine. I have always felt like something was wrong with me because I hoped for a better world and tried to really see people and empathize with them. People would tell me I am too sensitive and as you said “naïve”. When you spoke about being connected, I totally could relate. I feel energies of people all around me, positive or negative. I really feel deep for things, people, the environment, nature. Sometimes it could be very exhausting because most of the time, especially from the news and reading stuff on the internet, it brings me way down. The other day I went to the market, and I could feel everyone’s stress, rushing, and anxiety. No one personally did anything to me but, I sat in my car and just felt overwhelmed. I used to view feeling deeper than the common person as a gift because I got the most out of experiences and relationships but, lately, I just felt of it as more of a burden. I see people seemingly going on in their daily lives as if they don’t have a car in the world and I thought how nice it would be but, after hearing you speak, that’s not what I want. I do care about not just what is going on in my little bubble but, all that is going on. I guess, it’s finding balance. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for taking the courage to speak from your heart and show us your humility. I look forward to hearing and reading more.
Reading obituaries and college alum magazines often makes me feel as if I have not been very successful, in spite of some 53 years of teaching interspersed with years off raising children. I thought I should have accomplished something more, something monumental by 75.
Your thoughtful writing and your words on Suoer Soul help me have a different perspective. Thank you.
I found your book the day after the election “The Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible”, it brought me a great sense of calm. I was thrilled to see you on Oprah and I know your words, and the work of all those who have commented here are part of the new Beautiful World being created, one person at a time beginning with each one of us.
Hey Charles Eisenstein, are you coming back to Gaia.tv? I see something from you published in 2012 around the economy, would love to see you come back and discuss some of these more recent concepts you have learned.
Deep thanks Charles! Exactly what I needed to hear! Thanks again!
Bart
Yes I also have deep thanks!! Charles I am so thankful for you and your writing and have been drawn back to it again and again since I first discovered you, it, some months ago. You have said exactly what I needed to hear. And I’ve read that response here over and over so you are resonating with many many hearts. Thanks for continuing and giving what you do. We are all being changed together, in just the ways we need.
Bobbi
Charles — this resonated at so many levels! Thank you so much for sharing this.
Yes, you and your message were catapulted into my world by way of Souped Soul Sunday.
Thank you !
Thank you Charles for appearing on Super Soul Sunday and introducing yourself to me. I did not know you until that show and the words you spoke about how we’re all breaking apart so we can come together spoke to my heart. I immediately purchased “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible” and began reading the day I received it on 9/27/17. I live in Las Vegas Nevada and on 10/1/17, our largest breaking apart took place. And I watched as we all came together, as one humanity, healing the broken and holding each other together as love worked to heal us. Our bond gets stronger through every evil. Every break brings us closer. And before the Oprah show, I was relentlessly asking “why?” “Why all this rage? Why all this violence and hatred?” You answered me because you speak for a greater voice, the voice of humanity. Thank you.
Charles:
The beauty of whom you are shines through so brightly.myou are a blessing to all.
John
Deep stuff, Charles. I’m with you (or you’re with me, etc.). Thanks!
And I don’t know if this could be something forgotten for you, and it’s certainly terrifically difficult because everything’s hard and “so much is at stake” and so on…
But sometimes, don’t forget to have – when it’s available – a big boatload of fun. A good god-damned (my colloquial for “blessed” perhaps?) fantastic fun time. All your writing is understsandably grave, but just remember, we’re all just whistling in the graveyard, as they say.
Peace,
Kel
Charles, your writing gives me such peace.
When I read your work I feel as though all of the suspicions in my heart about the capacity for people to love one another and to overcome this crazy sense of separateness and dualistic thinking are on track. You describe a middle way through this mayhem with honesty and truth. I suspect we’ve all grappled with this construct of the ego: how big do I want/need to go and why? Your words describe a simple (albeit winding) path through that jungle. I’m so grateful for your writing because it feels like a beacon in a foggy time. It inspires me to keep writing my own simple words in case it touches someone else that same way and to keep speaking up for what I feel is true.
Thank you so much.
Sara
Nice to find a kindred soul – thank you for your writing Charles.
Looking forward to reading much more of your work.
Kindly, Holly
In Grace & Gratitude to you – like i have awoke from a long sleep
x
Charles,
Every word written in this essay is true. What resonated most with me is the evolution consisting of a series of necessary hurdles that we have to go through in order to grow. How else are we to gain strength and wisdom if there are no dragons to slay?
I just finished writing a book on the miracles that happened in my life since I was 19 when I started paying attention and recognizing signs. It too could not have been written without divine aid. I too had to rise above any expectation of recognition for my message, monetary or otherwise. I was basically told that only a wing and a prayer would get me published without social media presence. it matters not if the book sees the light of day or not — writing it has transformed me. It’s already a success!
Growing up, I saw my mother constantly visiting shut-ins and people in the hospital, and thought she was nuts. My evolutionary path has made me understand and appreciate where she was coming from. Knowing that you have truly helped someone, despite the inconvenience, is truly a reward unto itself — a most heavenly feeling (I say the prayer on pg 28 of A Course In Miracles every day). When my father was dying and she was taking care of him at home in Portland, Oregon, I couldn’t deal with it. Working in Pennsylvania, I provided no support for her. Yet, when it was her turn, she got her karma. I had come to a place where I could leave my husband and job, go cross-country and take care of her while she was bed-bound for 10 months until the moment she died. It was the most exhilarating moment of my life — it was when I was told what happens when you die.
“Let go, let God” is not a tired adage but instruction that really works. Thank you for validating it…
And thank you for all that you do,
Sophia
Yes, isn’t it is the most lovely easy we came across recently I am looking forward to reading more?
Charles –
Love your writing. So much clarity and generosity in there. The many comments above say it all.
For many years I didn’t “get it” either. Now I feel there is an adequate reward in the intention and service alone.
Recently I came across the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song which also resonates with me.
I share them here for the benefit of others.
Stewart
* * *
GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage
You may be a businessman or some high-degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk
You may be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
You may be living in another country under another name
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may be a construction worker working on a home
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome
You might own guns and you might even own tanks
You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side
You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk
Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk
You might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread
You may be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-sized bed
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy
You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy
You may call me R.J., you may call me Ray
You may call me anything but no matter what you say
You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Lovely article. I am trying to figure out how I can best serve this world and thought about many of the same things the same way. My heart warmed and my passion towards serving the world now burns stronger. With love and gratitude, Nate
YES!!!!
I just watched your segment with Oprah on Super Soul Sunday. I really enjoyed listening to everything you had to say and look forward to reading some of your essays. Keep up the good work. Thank you for sharing.
Hi Charles,
I loved a series of words you putten together to create a magnificent essay. I am sharing this in my community, hope to read more of your posts in upcoming days.
Nice post, and thanks for sharing this with us.
All the information which have you shared with us is very useful for my business. Thanks
Merci pour l’article
merci pour l’article
All the information which have you shared with us is very useful for my business. Thanks
Grateful for most of the tips referenced in this article! it’s for each condition mind blowing to explore things you have heard ahead of time and are completing
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Helpful information
good
thanks
Thanks for another wonderful post. I have a presentation next week, and I’m on the search for such information.
Thanks for another wonderful post.
Helpful information thanks
Nice to find a kindred soul – thank you for your writing Charles.
Looking forward to reading much more of your work.
Hey Charles,
Thanks for another wonderful post. I have a presentation next week, and I’m on the search for such information.
All the information which have you shared with us is very useful for my business. Thanks
I guess it makes sense for the intermodal commuters, but I would probably go for a Dahon if I were in the folding bike market.
You and Trish both get to test the Flik — it will be interesting to read each of your reviews.
That thing looks like a blast to ride. Those wheels are pretty small though. I’ll be waiting for your review of the ride.
Thanks for sharing such a delicious recipe with us.
I think this is one of the best blogs for me because this is really helpful for me. Thanks for sharing this valuable information for free
Nice to find a kindred soul – thank you for your writing Charles.
Looking forward to reading much more of your work.
Kindly, Holly
thank you for this publication . good article
So great to hear about the different home grown venues in Arlington. Thanks OK for such a great article.
Share this article with her, and let her know that it has helped you to see that you may have made some errors in your behavior… Maybe she will appreciate the gesture and come around? Just a thought, from a stranger. I hope that things get better between the two of you.
Thanks for sharing this post,
is very helpful article.
This was amazing. I won’t stroke your ego to much since I understand this is the premise of your argument here but this is exactly what I needed to read as I finish up my master’s project. It’s so refreshing to hear intellectuals from the Aquarian age help us others transition from the age of Pieces. I’ve discovered that my purpose is to help others find their purpose, particularly youth ego often feel lost and misguided. I’m building a platform for them and I needed to be reminded that purpose and meaning is all about being in service to the other, as opposed to the old story that we need to serve ourselves only. Your books have inspired many concepts in relation to what I’m creating, and I couldn’t agree more that these ideas are not mine, they are part of the collective consciousness that I trapped into. Thank you, I hope to connect with you one day!
Thank you for this timely article. I’m currently working as a Senior Instructional Designer and I need to revamp my portfolio. Although I enjoy my current position, I have plans to become a full-time freelancer in early 2017. I want to bid on (and win) a few small projects prior to doing so. Your article will help me as revamp my online portfolio. Thanks!
Thanks for the great article . I’m not finding that poll page
Beautiful article, Thank you!
I think this is one of the best blogs for me
Merci beaucoup pour ce sujet
Thanks
I love the idea of a poll
thank you very nice website article
Seek Aid is a non-profit organization which improves the life of those people who are affected by the causes. The idea of Seek Aid was born very simply bringing the gap between the two sets of the people- people who want to give and make a difference along with those who are going to phenomenal work but they don’t know how to reach out to the people who want to support them.Charitable trust
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thank you
Thank you. Tears are streaming down my face reading this. As always, your humility and manner to speak for ‘us’ is beyond words – you are an antenna! The tears are deep gratitude for the gift you share on behalf of us all. From my heart – thank you
nice topic thqnk you
Reread this article today. And what an impact and a difference it made for my own growing path!
First time I didi so, I was leaving a 20 year long work time in the financial system (whatever that is…). In fact, I left a Bank, for who I’d been working for that long, and decided to dive fully in a different purpose in life, through mindfulness. Of course, I got filled with hopes and dreams of changing things, people, the world, making an impact… And, of course, all that crumbled to pieces! Almost four years later, I am beginning to see what difference I can really make just by letting go of all those dreams of “impact” and “success” and “fame” … Revisiting this essay resonates so much that there is little I can say about it, as it would sound merely circumstantial. All that you wrote, Charles, makes inexplicably sense at this point of my journey. Thanks for your work!
very good
The way you spent so much time justifying why did you accept going to Oprah, shows how much you know how bad this was. It’s so obvious, even though you tried to intellectualize and pretend this and that. Of course you should have said no, period. And moved on. Comparing yourself with a zen master’s dilemma (to further apologetically explain why you said yes) makes things even more ugly! Outch! Big win for Oprah. Again, she bought and got what she wanted. And proved she always can and will. And that is what the 1% do. Bad move Charles.
Dear Charles,
I read your text a few months ago and immediately recognized myself. … I was embarrassed. I too have somehow always hoped to become known with my paintings. I had wished so much to make exhibitions in beautiful large white rooms, to land with the pictures maybe sometime in the MOMA, to have wonderful studios and to do good with all the money. I wanted to bring beauty and what I perceived as “divine” into this world.
The reality was different, so I often had to deal with semi-professional exhibition conditions. Poor lighting, photocopiers or fire extinguishers blocked the view of my works, etc.
One day I also had a miraculous experience. I was totally exhausted, I had just dismantled an exhibition, sold nothing, I was at the end of my rope and for the first time really seriously thought about giving up painting. I lay on the sofa and was so exhausted that I never wanted to get up again. The sofa was against a green wall. Suddenly a spectacle of a very special kind occurred. The low November sun had projected through the blowing branches of a birch tree and the last grasses on my balcony a play of light like a slide show on the green wall. It was so magically beautiful and changed all the time, it sparkled here and there and different shades of green and flashing lights floated from here to there. I was fascinated, sat upright and watched this wonderful spectacle that was happening on my wall… a square of about 2 x 2 meters, a format as big as my paintings. Then I heard a voice… “I paint trillions of beautiful pictures every day that no one sees. I paint countless pictures, so beautiful and people pass by and no one looks. And sometimes I move the whole universe for one person to see one picture.” I was in tears with emotion, this was the lasting healing for me. By the way, I never saw this “picture” again, where the birch tree stood, there is now a house. In the meantime, I have made peace with my “lack of success” and no longer squinted at the art market. This was never my world. Unfortunately, so many wonderful young artists are being disfigured in this capitalistic competition-driven market. I had to give up my studio five years ago and with it my painting. And now I will also dissolve my depot. I asked myself, “what do I actually want with my paintings?” I’m going to give them away and I’m looking forward to it. After this decision I suddenly feel free, relieved and it is also a luxury to be able to make such valuable gifts and to give joy to other people. Your texts have encouraged me to do this, dear Charles. They have created domino effects. I have even copied parts of your texts: “(…)there will come a time when we will move from a profit-making economy to a gift economy…”. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your essays and lectures. They give me a lot. You speak out what I want to say, but I don’t have the clear view or the words. Thank you very much dear Charles. I would like to give you a present!
Kind greetings
Monika
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)