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.
Lots of love to you, Charles. This has been a source of profound reassurance, for me personally as well.
Thank God someone called the lies and deceit we all can choose to rescript narratives by practices🙏 into thoughts that will feed the Spiritul World
Extremely well expressed. I concur. I’ve been working on a play to express same sentiments. Thank you.
Beautiful, I am looking forward to seeing your vision!
Here is one of mine that I will share.
I met a feathered serpent recently, from within, who assured me that we are loved by the sun, the earth, the soil, the plants, the animals, all of life.
It went on to explain, “How the world is structured- how things grow- is a guide, a map for you. It shows how everything works. There is nothing you need outside of this. Watch the roots, the vines, the leaves, the soil- these are your teachers. When you can learn from the plants how to grow- how to operate independently and interdependently- you will no longer be afraid. You will be part of life. Your nourishment comes from all that is around you. There is no need to kill to survive. Spread love wherever you go. Be the peace that so many are longing for.”
I was left feeling deeply rooted, connected and in possession of a heightened discriminatory faculty.
When we sit quietly, and ask, the answers come.
Reading this has ignited something inside of me. Thank you so much Charles, I have a lot of respect for your work and I cannot wait to see what you create!
Ps, CTRL F to find “the the” (trying to be subtle)
The The; an excellent band from the 1980s…….
and another excellent piece from Charles…… thank you
Thank you, as always, for putting words together that draw out the latent thoughts in my head and point out the larger, underlying story going on. SO inspired by your seeking to go even deeper with story and listen for what emerges…thank you for all you are and do!!
Marie, I love your vision and will join you in learning what the plants have demonstrated to us. As humans, we have only to feel our connection and commonality for love and peace to preside.
Beautiful Karen, yes!
This is beautiful, Marie – thank you so much for sharing it.
💙Thank you Rachel
What sane and beautiful advise from the feathered serpent within..
I found it to be so as well! I would love to live in a world where it was considered normal and reasonable to share our revelations, our visions, our deep knowings that reveal themselves. I am so curious to hear the intuitive wisdom others hold back from sharing🌿
Marie, many thanks for sharing your vision and for the invitation to share! I’ll share a dream I had about a week and a half ago. I was driving with my partner through busy streets filled with construction, speeding cars, much horn-honking etc. and we had no idea which way to go. We were going to turn but almost got hit by a van speeding through the intersection, so decided to keep going straight ahead. In the next scene, we were hiking on a trail with some others, and came to a high point in the trail. From this vantage point we saw a beautiful green valley flanked by a misty mountain. The scene was gorgeous in itself but then one of the trees (they looked like huge flowers) in the valley began bursting into bloom. A second later, another one bloomed, then another and another, each blooming more quickly than the last, until they were all gloriously blooming in unison. It was awe-inspiring. I had the feeling of hearts opening – after the chaos comes opening. As some others in the comments have noted, there are many dreaming such things. This dream has made me so curious about the phenomena of social dreaming. Is it possible to dream a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible into being? Maybe we are already doing it?
This is inspiring! I love to think of the cascade of heart openings like blossoms opening to the sun through the valley – like Indra’s net- gorgeous! Thank you for the vision✨
Hey Elizabeth your words touched me too, I sure hope so!
May the dream world inspire us all in our task of bending the arc towards justice and healing in this world! One of a few dream visions I recall well, from when I was about ten years old, had me flying above the hills and valleys of land where people lived in harmony, with everyone’s needs for energy were supplied locally, through natural sources.
A beautiful and inspired teaching. Thank you for sharing your vision.
Moving and esquisite Marie. Thank you so much for sharing. What a gift to receive an insight of that depth and beauty. May I share those words elsewhere? We are working within Philanthropy to activate Love as a core driver, and I’d love to share this with some of the people within the growing community we are building around the world.
I would love for you to share – the message was for all of us💙
That’s gorgeous Marie! 🙂
Congratulations Charles! I think you work way too hard. And could probably use a break. Get some rest and take it easy for a change. Let others pick up the slack. I think you’ve already secured your place in heaven.
beautiful!
Beautiful sharing.
It is the opening into the vastness of Consciousness that will keep us, as a race of humans, being, listening, going deeper into our own soul to bring back the truth of ourselves more and more clearly, and the truth of how to bring that to others as well, with compassion, kindness, and the ability to change minds and hearts without force, but through the power of the language that goes beyond all languages—love. Not as an idea or concept, but as an underlying truth from which all life arises and will return.
Beatutiful!
❤️🙏🏻
Yes!
Sounds like a good tactic. It reminds me of shifting, as described in NVC, from strategies to feelings and needs, in a way that elicits empathy. FYI, an inspiring book with some true stories is From What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y8JNKQR/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
You echo in better words than I have my not yet coming to terms with he futility of people’s opinions. I try to warn people about the COVID vaccines because I see harm and want to protect them from it, but they see a different reality. I think they see through a lens of fear of what will happen if they don’t comply with the dominant narrative. They see me as extreme and “fringe.” Our worlds are divided. They in theirs and I and those like me in mine. Family and friends are in that other world and the chasm is getting bigger.
Thank you for describing all of this so well and thank you for coming up with a way to possibly bridge this.
That’s my story too, Christa. I feel like I’m out on the fringes, waving my hands to no avail. The people who ought to know won’t listen. In their world, any dissenting health information has been successfully discredited. And if the vaccines harm them, they’re likely to attribute it to something else. How many will be warned by experience who can then warn others? Wouldn’t it be amazing if whatever was toxic to us would make us glow in the dark or would glow different colors depending on how harmful? Like PFAS, glyphosate, nuclear radiation, etc…would we ban them or bask in the glow?
Christa, you said it all for me. Thank you….
Dear Christa. I like that you are so real that you take a position in the debate. And I melt by your willingness to distance to the division that is created. It gives me hope for the world! And I wanted to say: Especially if and when the same willingness is found in those of us, who take a pro-vaccine stand
Go, Charles! 🙂
Thank you so much, Charles. I look forward to what you end up creating and sharing. And I too will move forward ‘being the peace that we long for.’ I will continue to do the inner work this requires.
Brilliant! I was thinking earlier this week about how movies influence our culture. They are our cultural myth sharing device, therefore we need to be starting stories that support the more beautiful world.
I watched the movie High Ground the other day. It’s a retelling of events in Australia 100 years ago. It tells a tale that has long been held secret, the shame filled unspoken that is now being uncovered. It’s not perfect, but it is starting to unwind the horrors of our history. https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/how-historically-accurate-is-the-film-high-ground-the-violence-it-depicts-is-uncomfortably-close-to-the-truth-154475
Thank you Charles. My heart sings to read of your plan. ♡Ellie
Thank you Charles
As I read this essay Charles, much of what I’ve been feeling and thinking was mirrored.
So much so that if I had written down my own fleeting thought on the cult-like quality of the ruling (Covid et al, which you seemed to deliberately steer clear of, … so that I didn’t have to?) narrative, as recent as this afternoon, I might not have been able to tell them apart.
And by seeing this expression of futility so reflected … your writing has served as an encouraging reminder of the power of the creative word in giving that power away. A give-away that I myself over the past year had turned my back on, after feeling burnt repeatedly in my attempts to communicate, reduced to a cartoon. Your words here Charles have served to remind me of my essential voice.
The question of what manner of voice to speak in, you raise in me as well, echoing something a favourite poet, David Whyte, said a few months ago in a live webinar (here approximated) regarding poetry. That is, as a language of the heart, poetry is often poor when it sets out to speak politically, even as good poetry will oft be put to good inspirational purpose amidst genuine justice (/political) issues.
I can hear your storied poetry now Charles … towards that fictional reality of a more beautiful world!
Thank you, Mark!!
ps if you wanted copy editing feedback on this essay (if I’m reading it aright?) : “… the (‘that’?) the earth is hollow …”
Thank you Charles. I look forward to reading your story about what’s possible when we believe in our better selves personally and collectively. I too have grown weary of all the fault finding, fact arguing, and general polarizing. I trust the love, light, and wisdom within you, will happily dance onto the pages of this literary endeavor.
Thank you, Charles, for sharing your thoughts and feelings. I’m glad you’re excited by your vision of a new direction, or, rather, avenue for your work. Here in Australia I am also very saddened by the polarity and absolutism of public views and the suppression of information that doesn’t match the endorsed mainstream views and agendas (mainly with regard to Covid) and I feel concern for the results of the force of ignorance that in some instances seems to be imposed and in others all too willful. But I don’t think that adding to the volume of voices raised in opposition to the mainstream is going to help, as it just exacerbates the polarity and separatism that seems evident. I am tending to take a ‘higher view’ that humanity is collectively going through a time of transition that will, in time, result in the release of a lot of outmoded energies that have been embodied in now-dysfunctional approaches to life, and the dawn of a new era, and anything that stimulates or contributes to that, as I’m sure your efforts do, is gold….gentleness, understanding, compassion go a long way toward healing as we stand in our truth.
Two personal view points as a response:
I have discovered that we are not divided as people on which religion or political belief system we are following but instead there appear to be a basic human divide on being/having “authoritarian” or “non-authoritarian” mentality/thinking. Whereever we go (country) there seem to be an app 50% divide. It seems to me that this is a core point to pursue. Where does it come from and why this divide.
The other point… I think if we read the story of Moses with an approach of someone with an awakening to his conscience there is something different to learn. No individual can or should carry the responsibility of saving the world on his/her own but assume a humbleness to receive the divine guidance for his or her individual task.
Oh, one more point. There is no way we will ever understand the ultimate reality as it is. It has been designed to be a driving force for our development as human beings but to always be out of reach. Otherwise our ego would be tempted to try to control it.
Good luck and all the best!
I think that authoritarian mindsets are the result of trauma. Trauma produces a fearful mindset, and those who are fearful are disconnected from their own truth, and thus they experience the essential problem of separation. Fearful people look to leaders who appear strong and protective. We see this throughout society and on both sides of all issues, but, to me, it seems stronger in Trump supporters as they are attracted to (or at the very least not revolted by) his supposed strength which actually is a complete illusion born of his narcissistic personality traits.
I wanted to cry reading this
This sounds exciting and an obvious (now you’ve said it) progression – walking the talk as it were. It did make me wonder though – do such stories not already exist in ancient cultures as fiction or poetry perhaps? It also made me wonder whether what you needed was to take action in another way than writing – engaging with and creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible in a practical, physical way. You’re probably doing that already anyway though… I look forward as ever to reading more of your work if/when it comes. Thanks for all the inspiration that has come to date.
“It did make me wonder though – do such stories not already exist in ancient cultures as fiction or poetry perhaps?”
The tower of babel is coming to mind…
Although there are certain observable patterns in the rise and fall of civilizations/paradigms I personally think it is a mistake to assume the current metaphysical make-up of the universe is the same as in previous epochs… ergo our current time is, at least in a certain sense, unique. Add to this the idea that in some sense stories “shape” our reality – obviously not in actually changing the fundamental physics/metaphysics — but by forming a “revelatory lens” on reality which potentially changes… well, *”everything”* … as you know Charles, you’ve already been doing this (forming lenses that re-frame reality), but especially since covid hit your essays have run up against the limits of your perspective — the turn to fiction does indeed seem a good way to (potentially) break out of this impasse… I look forward to your offerings (always gratefully received)…
However…
“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” Matthew 11:12
“A key theme of my work has been to invoke causal principles other than force… Ironically, many of my essays are themselves of a forceful type.”
“It is time for me to deploy this technology fully, in service of a new mythology.”
Notice how the use of the word “deploy” here could be seen as symptomatic of an intellect conditioned by “war mentality”…
Two cliches for you:
1) The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
2) The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist…
In short, we need to become better versed in the nature of the beast m, within and without…
Beautifully expressed. Thank you, Andy and Charles.
Thanks Charles. Love a good paradigm shift! Your idea made me think maybe there was some additional wisdom in what at face value seem like quite simple Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories. They did after all keep the worlds oldest continuous culture living in harmony with the earth for 60000+ years. I might read a few and think about why they were so successful. Thanks
An interesting eassay. But isn’t the control of narrative and perception always been the case. It’s just more of us aware of it. Maybe to use a astrological term, processtion of the equinoxes (age of aquarius) And as Paul Kingnorth or John Zerzan might argue the nature of cilversation. Earlier in the early in the eassay you say it is only the right that is being persecuted. May I point out it is also true that the far left is also facing that persecution. As many anarchists organisation have had the Facebook and Twitter profiles have also been removed at the same time. Using the same excuses.
Dare I say that it’s not so much that anything’s changed, but the digital age introduces new layers: exposure on an unprecedented scale, which serves as an amplification of what Jung might have called the collective unconscious. The novelty itself then feels amplified. It is the amplification that we all feel and respond to while at the same time frustrates are efforts at participating in a meaningful way. Anyone with a public voice is scrambling to stay relevant at the realization that no one or nothing is safe. Whatever we once had, or shared collectively is in collapse. And yet, in the background, what little of it is left that can possibly remain unseen, continues on.
No one can be said to be THE villain, we all play our parts.
It feels like to pay attention, or participate at all is akin to attending a concert in which all we can hear is the feedback from a broken sound system.
Yes, thank you Debra, well said.
YES.
They say truth can be stranger than fiction … and surely, our present world is beyond ‘strange’. I look forward to what you write in the future, for surely yes, this world is at a time of ending and rebirth – a painful, labouring birth, but one that perhaps may bring a new and more beautiful world that our hearts do indeed desire, beyond all human imagining. Dr Jacqueline Hobbs speaks of these things in amazing ways as well.
Sending love … we all need this!
wonderful! I can feel the joy and excitement in my own being and look forward to reading (or watching) the resulting play, as well as feeling inspired to writing and publishing my own stories of this genre. Let’s create and share new stories, reforming our culture into one of connection and curiosity. Let’s resurrect a sense of wonder and mystery and happy endings ever after.
Yes, Charles.
Oh Boy a new direction, Fiction, Literature! Best to you. I think I got here originally because Ursula LeGuin took my hand in high school and led me along. then met Doris Lessing later on, when she turned to “science fiction” (Canopus in Argus Archives-Shikasta oh my word) she was so sharp and challenging, provoking, changed my view of everything too. May be a hard road for your very analytical mind. I bow to you accepting the challenging
Maybe story is not a mode, a device, a bridge between fact and fiction… maybe there is only story. There is only how we tell it, hide it. How we embody or disembody it. How we listen, wrestle, share it. All of life: Story.
I’ve arrived at a similar understanding, Ellen. The heart of reality wherein the seeds of both freedom and responsibility germinate.
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” –Muriel Rukeyser
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56287/the-speed-of-darkness
Oh yes. Every movement we make, every sound we utter, every choice taken. In Service to the Story. That is why listening is so important – in order to make sure we are hearing with clarity – knowing which story claims our devotion.
This is a very good observation!
Thank you, very appropo essay. Been thru the despair and exhaustion that you mention. Sense a huge need to be outdoors, away from all the chatter, but hard to find space in the city. Realizing I need to go inwards.
Godspeed to you and all of us as we move forward in these uncharted waters.
Godspeed to you as you write this epic piece beyond culture; beyond evil being defeated by good which becomes evil. We are all so on the brink of opportunity to step off the gerbil wheel that goes round and round.
I love your wisdom to slow down or stop explaining or defending the madness of the moment where one side is the only one that is right because the other side is so obviously wrong.
I love freeing myself from finding the “truth” in someone else’s words that I can find in a book or on the internet;
Blessings to you and to us all as we allow the real to be.
My mantra, “Live the New Story into Existance” to help me work towards a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
So this is what I do and will continue to do. Of course I do other things like work towards reversing climate change, etc but the mantra above is the most important thing I do.
Thank you Charles for your guidance and encouragement.
Yes, live and live the new story into the world through who we be and our actions!
Dear Charles, it might be interesting for you when I tell you that we in Germany also have a problem with totalitarism, with left and right and media and irrelevance. I am worried that I am not doing enough, but am also currently thinking of new ways. But I read this from you today and dreamed of THE SAME IDEA tonight !! This shows that we xan trust in our creative concious being. Then there must be a lot more of us working and dreaming in this direction!! Yipeee*
I’ll be there 👍 Also from Germany greetings and Deep gratitude in these dark and frightening times.
A wonderful, wonderful idea Charles. I look forward to it.
It is rather hard sometimes to find things to watch that are not violent, dystopian, etc etc, yet also not sickly sweet either.
Many thanks for all that you do.
Charles after reading this I was jostled by the image of you as a dark farmer planting dark seeds, “ripening until they are real” 🙂 Bring the rain! Let’s get this forest growing! Woot!
If you haven’t already done so, Charles, and you can stomach one more person suggesting you read something, you might want to check out or re-check out a work of fiction from the First Gilded Age, a novel nearly as popular as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It engendered almost instantaneously, albeit only briefly, the profound effect upon hearts and minds you hope to help engender in our Second Gilded Age. The novel is “Looking Backward,” and the author is Edward Bellamy. If the book grabs you or re-grabs you, “Equality,” the less-read sequel which expands and improves the original vision, is
also freely available on the net. As one reader/reviewer confessed, the books were so powerful that she found herself crying almost from beginning to end. For me, a liberal clergyman who came across Bellamy late in life, these novels provided my first concrete conception of what I believe Jesus was praying for when he asked that the Kingdom of God/Heaven come on earth. Bellamy not only makes you see and feel what it would be like to live in a better, more beautiful world, but he also lays out in vivid detail much of the socioeconomic foundation upon which such a world must be built. I and many others will be looking forward to the wisdom and inspiration no doubt to emanate from your new “fictional” focus.
I’m looking forward to Charles’s efforts. He seems to be in the right frame of mind… In the meantime I’ll gladly have a read of ‘Looking Backward”. I have found it here http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/624 . Thanks.
Writing imaginative fiction is really fun, especially that of the more beautiful world. I’d love to see what’s to come. I could be a real bitch and point out the (copy) edit in the above piece, but I’ll let you find it if you want to. Doing one’s best feels good.
XO
Best wishes with your endeavor, Charles.
Thank you Charles. It feels like a synchronicity that I recently reached the same conclusion, and am excited and nervous as I begin. Perhaps there are more people who have come to the same point, and there will be a new renaissance of story, even a new genre… looking forward to all that emerges!
Hey Nina and Charles! I came to the same conclusion a couple of years ago. I’m not a novelist by any means, but I felt and feel divinely guided to bring forward the novel that I’m working on. Charles’ writing always resonates with me deeply, so it also felt like a synchronicity to read that he (and you and others!) are also embarking on this journey of being of service in this new way. I also think there will be this new renaissance of story and of art in general that brings healing and loving truths forward. It will be interesting and exciting to see 🙂
Story is so natural. I think they sit in some Platonic field waiting to be midwifed in. Very much look forward to meeting this one.
Thank you Charles for continuing to share the gift of your words, feelings, thoughts and spirit with us. I could really feel energy behind your new project. Reading about it produced physical and emotional reactions in me. I felt chills, my heart quickened and a warm smile radiated out from the same place it does when I see my grandchildren (or anyone really, but especially them) being their beautiful selves. I am including the fruition of your project in my manifestation visioning work. You are loved and supported by many. Your new project is much needed and will emerge in exactly the right way at the right time. Gratitude and Love to you and your family.
Very exciting Charles. Write on! It IS vision we need at this point… to see a way forward that is more beautiful, nourishing and just.
This is exciting, and I look forward to reading your story.
I wonder if you are familiar with Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing and the sequel City of Refuge? They are a blend of dystopian and utopian, but I found them inspiring.
I was thinking of those two books myself while I read this essay, as excellent examples of what Eisenstein is trying to create. Highly recommended.
I was just going to suggest The Gift Sacred Thing!
Yes, as waves of fear and sadness, grief and uncertainty pulse over the planet, lets make our own waves of joy and faith and sing the future vision into life. I know we can make it happen, I know darn well….
May it be so. Let’s create!
Seems like the times we’re in, the circumstances we’re experiencing, the search for deeper truths is causing a lot of us to shift our focus right now. To be in coherence with our spirits requires we do what we have to do to love ourselves. Something beautiful will grow out of this deep fatigue.
Yes! Thank you, yet again dear Charles. May the Unfolding be Beautiful.
Hi Charles. I wish to thank you for all the amazing work you have done to date. Perhaps the world hasn’t changed much, or maybe it’s even gotten worse with its various non-democratic tactics and the incredible amount of deception that continues to rule a great many of its people. I dunno. What I would like to say is there are a large number of people who have heard your message and see you clearly through your books, podcasts, essays, speaking engagements and so on. I know for myself and a few people others – the narrative of Charles Eisenstein has been a godsend bringing a heavy sigh of relief and an inner voice that says “finally – I can actually see a little light into the way I truly feel surrounded by all this craziness”! All of your work to date has been more than amazing and beneficial.
I wish you well on your continued journey and I know those of us who are searching and wondering and questioning look forward to whatever you bring in our direction in the way of a breath of fresh air, a point of understanding, a message through whatever medium you are comfortable with. If we can experience and understand “A More Beautiful World That Our Hearts Know is Possible”, in part or in whole, it’s a much experience than the reality we are currently subjected to. Even for a minute to two.
Thank you Charles.
Amen!!💛
I wanted to say same things. I’m living in Turkey and I can’t think what would be today if i couldn’t read The More Beatiful World That Our Hearts Know is Possible. I was in lack of trust what i feel. I couldn’t think it just not happening to me, it’s also happening to our world, our reality. Everyday, literally everyday people i speak try to convince me my ideas are not usefull, valuable, beneficial, practial and too much spritual, naive etc. I felt more centered and more grounded after read the book. I want to throw the book faces of every people i speak. You did very well and it still mesmerize me over couple years.
Dear Charles, I have been following your work for many years and your words always resonate deeply within me. May your vision of the heart bring peace and compassion to many. Good luck with your new work!!!
Thanks so much, Charles (and Marie) for your deep deep work. And I imagine this next phase will be one that includes a certain amount of more complex and beautiful collaboration than essays lend themselves to. Not an accurate quote from Vaclav Havel but relevant. “We are operating in an Auto Totalitarian System. No one is in charge, and the elites are as much in the grips of the system as the obvious slaves.” Something like that. Much like the conversation you had with Danial Schmaktenberger about “Paperclip Maximization” I loved that interview!
The planet we live with has so much to offer, as Marie’s dream revealed. Lately, when I have been talking with people about listening to the life of soil about the possibility of using our collective consciousness (because we are all painfully coming to understand that we are quite hopeless doing much if we think we can do it alone) in service to life – the more beautiful world.. So taking glyphosate as a ‘what if’, those atoms that make up that molecule have been combined under duress, placing them in the domination system as slaves as any, and held in that prison at great economic, physical emotional and spiritual expense. And when I think and talk about this, i get a resounding agreement from that molecule and so many others that have been manipulated in service to scarcity and separation. They want us to succeed in this collaborative act of liberation starting with our own collaborative freedom from extractive domination system. They want us to succeed and will assist us as we request it. And they are eager for us to free the bonds of servitude to that system so they can actively engage with us in in a system of service to a life and love’s evolution.
I imagine this may be some of what emerges from you, Charles as you go deeper into your service! Thank you.
Hello Charles,
thank you!
These are the words that touched me so delicately:
“stories touch a deeper place in the soul.They flow like water around the intellectual defences,and soften the soil so that dormant visions and ideals can take root”.
In a dualistic world of perception,Oxford Dictionary: western education has addressed itself almost entirely to the “left brain”
I must start by saying Gracias!!!
Thanks for your essays that until now have not only kept me sane in this transition in which I never imagined myself capable, but also give me hope in a better word and so much strength.
I can’t wait for your next creation! I’m so excited! It was funny to read about us crying when we’re about to finish reading your book, because often I find myself crying with your work.
I moved to your country 5 years ago and between reading your books, watching your chanel and reading essays gives me answers to my many questions, also sometimes makes me so worried due the increased amount of stupidity in this world, people just don’t care anymore! That’s why I recommend your work to people every time I can!
Take your time! I’m sure thousands of us are sending you the best of the energies in this our beautiful home!
Loves to you and your family!
Nubia
Thank you for putting words to my exhaustion too. I have felt great waves of grief at the madness and discouraged at the directions we are collectively moving. Your last lines spark me, though. I’ll join you in this intention to engage with the world non-forcefully. May we choose differently.
I too reached some kind of burn out with all of this and have ended up doing some deep dive on my own stuff. Its like we’ve all been put on fast forward with our spiritual evolution. Like many of you I thought I was helping by pointing out the inconsistencies/science (what ever that is now). I have worked in Holistic health for over 30 years and for most of that time was tortured by the ’emperors clothes’ of medical system but the fracturing of reality is now complete it seems and I have realised the only thing I can do is operate my own reality and respect others. Charles, your phrase ‘a more beautiful world….’ has been my screen and life saver for most of the last year and I am so grateful to you for all that you have given so far. What ever you do, we know it will be what is needed and it will be real. I know that I am not alone in saying thanks and wishing Blessings to abound for you and yours.
Yes! stories and rituals that allow people’s bodies to experience a new way of existing in the world… that might allow an opening for their hearts and minds to follow.
Only last week I was hatching the idea for an immersive experience hopefully for the local regional art gallery (east coast Australia). The intention is that it be an experience of eye-filling and heart-filling joy… an experience that will perhaps indeed leave the viewer in tears and wanting to come back over and over… Yes story and ritual, which to me are intertwined, are a way to get past entrained ideologies and beliefs… Our bodies need to feel what it feels like to be in joy in order to be brave enough to try a new thing.
To read about your intentions has provided me with a growing sense that there is a gathering of waters from many small trickles that will spread life-giving joy across our planet… While I do not like to be delusional I do have to hold a sense that the life that wants life will provide the means… and I think that is in the us(es) that think it is worth it.
I have one of your quote in the footer of me email stationery, which in a sense says the same as the above paragraph:
“Every act of service to life aligns with a world that is more alive. No effort is wasted, even if we cannot see how it is going to make a difference.”
…there is nothing else we can do…
I look forward to reading or seeing your story…
Thank you Charles. I’m feeling better after reading this… more reassured. Can’t wait to experience your vision at some point in the future. All the very best. With love, Katie
Good luck Charles on your journey into story! Be brave and allow the darkest, most uncomfortable images to surface so that we can also benefit from your brightest light.
May it be so – for the benefit of us all!
The other day I sat down to write an article for the spiritual magazin I am doing, some reflections on the situation we are in. Under the working-title «Caught in the Trap» I started by telling a story.
Thanks Charles, as I take a deep breath into me of all that you have said.
I am thankful for all that I have read from you in the past (I am a relatively new admirer) as I have been deeply touched by your heartfelt words and the atmosphere you weave between them. I share your vision for a different way and have been experimenting for some time in my own way with different groups of people; how to touch them with and without words, as I too feel that we need a deeper level of touching in. We all have our own degrees of trauma and our own inherited archetypes which we are living out. We are a little like wild animals in a way, wary inside while hungry for a morsel of truth.
Lies have come to dominate our world and this is a grave ‘problem’, as with the trauma, direct words or actions can serve to incite or aggravate that which we seek to survey. ( an interesting series of talks by Dennis Klocek is exploring the physiological effects of lies on our bodies. (dennisklocek.com. Truth lies and illness)
I have been experimenting with language which is more qualitative than quantitive as a means of getting around the analytic side of our trained mind. This type of language is malleable and tends to explore the wide range of space within polarity; the world in which we find ourselves, yet in which we can feel entrapped. The essence of feelings in qualities, enables them to be shared more easily as they are “felt sense” and not intellectual concepts which become categorised (separated) in our mind.
I would like to share more with you as not only do I admire your writing but I also feel privileged to have shared a fertile space invoked by you and Orland, which I feel is a key to our communication in these times of planting seeds; In preparing for another face of humanity which draws again from a shared invisible. I actually believe that the internet etc have been ways we have been preparing ourselves for a level of communication that we are to reclaim and share together. Regards Pete
I empathise deeply with this e-mail post, despite my vast qualifications and experience, I still struggle with the concept of fighting for peace or being intolerant to intolerance. We know politics is a dirty game, and that has to be because human psychology is post trauma on top of trauma (Gabor Mate). The populace vote for the most traumatic leader that is charismatic, a reaction against the grey suits.
Trumps presidency is a ‘stumble’ of ordinary people to be free from the endemic unfairness. Better the devil you know than be subject to those that give you the illusion of fairness. Trump voters know, if it’s going to be unfair, at least it’s on my terms. They’d prefer to die free than live as a slave. That’s the choice they are facing. Vote for the overtly insane or the illusory sanity. Both are the same Pill, and its illusion of choice is Red or Blue. Live in illusory bliss as no more than a battery or live destitute underground running from Sentinels (or should that be Senators?).
As you rightly say, this is about keeping power where it is now; divide and rule AND unite under conspiracy; is always the ‘go to.’ And it’s as simple as uncontrolled greed.
MAGA; problem is America was never great, unless might is right. I assume you’ve read Touching the Jaguar?
I blame the liars, not the lied to cults. Those delusional cults are just in touch with what is all too human; ‘man’s inhumanity to man’
We are already in a mental civil war, a “functioning hypocrisy” as Robert Kurzban would say.
As with EO Wilson’s quote “We have Palaeolithic emotions, with medieval culture, with God-like technology”.
We want our individual freedom to be led by a benevolent dictator. For me this the source of the problem, and the historical roots of that are clear. The eternal child as Clive Bromhall said. Within the human, Denial is a river in Egypt.
If Wilson and Bromhall and many others are right, then it is not about going towards sanity and away from insanity. What is real is, those two states are on either end of the reality of a see-saw, the human condition. Unless we accept what Anya Kubrick said, “the only evil is the belief we couldn’t do evil” for me is the acceptance that ultimate power would corrupt even me, even the best of us. We all have a little Trump inside us, “there but for the grace of god go I”.
Ah yes, whether a mass of humanity will ever progress to where they grasp the contradictions in their own thinking is dubious. We are too limited in perception to ever be a “tribe of the whole.” Just living in varied local ecologies assures that. One size cannot fit all. One culture cannot fit all.
But whatever is the trajectory of our current strife, respect for Gaia is the way out. Pay much more attention to Gaia; much less to the destructive glories of our own technical and economic achievements. Despite our own inevitable differences, a coming universal doctrine has to be “live with Gaia,” not revel in destruction of Gaia. Otherwise we exterminate ourselves.
Lots of truth here, especially:
“…human psychology is post trauma on top of trauma (Gabor Mate). The populace vote for the most traumatic leader that is charismatic, a reaction against the grey suits.”
Trauma begets fear begets separation. The solution is a mass healing movement and collective cooperation, which I believe is possible through a new type of social network. It’s merely a matter of putting together the right technology and the right marketing effort. Love could very well go viral. We just need to build it.
Very excited to hear you moving into fiction, makes so much sense, good luck.
Love you, Charles. You’ve given expression to what I’ve been sensing for awhile. Thank you for that gift. It opened up a way through this morass of culture where Im frustrated with both sides of the debate. My friends think I’m a bit nutty too as I’m not dancing in the streets with the Biden/Harris win. I look forward to your new story of what’s possible for humanity.
Hi Charles. I feel the same. We are offered the choice between Gilead or the Matrix by those in power, while outside, all is fading away. I wish I knew what to do. Walk away, perhaps, like the Aborigine guy at the end of the film, who just takes off the clothes of modernity and walks off into the wild. But he was in his culture, whereas I’d be dead in three days. Maybe we can just do what we can, where we are, and that is good enough.
Hey Charles, I appreciate your decision to change your direction and am cheering you on! Your published work, podcasts, and courses have been a source of life and reconnection for me, and I feel deeply grateful for your willingness to share. Agree that story is more powerful than any argument, and anything I can do to help you articulate that story, I will! I’ve mostly just watched and listened, and felt stretched and beckoned on to embrace my own insights through experiencing you embrace yours. I feel like you are my smarter older brother, we have so much in common in terms of our world outlook and approach. My humble monthly patronage of you has nothing to do with “how much you produce,” either. You go, man!
Thank you for this, Charles. Have you seen the talks by Elif Shafak i.e. The Politics of Fiction, in conversation with Wole Soyinka etc.? I believe her take on the power of stories aligns with your new undertaking of writing fiction.
Also her talk with the New York State Writers Institute on ‘How to stay sane in the age of division’.
What a beautiful evolution in your work, Charles: you have been calling for a new story and now you will create one. Thank you for sharing your process so candidly and I wish you the best on this new journey.
I am living in Rwanda right now and I’ve been reflecting a lot on the role of stories in influencing people’s behaviour. While the widely-held cultural stories were an important part of what led to unimaginable violence here, there is also a recognition that in order to achieve sustainable peace, the much deeper roots of collective madness must be addressed: injustice, poverty and a history of trauma/violence. (This is a simplification – the genocide was complicated – but these cannot be ignored).
I think in America we are biased to look to stories as not only the cause of our collective madness but also as its principal medicine. It can be helpful to remember that in those moments when we feel despair about the seeming impasse of finding a common collective narrative and therefore the impossibility of healing a broken society, we can remind ourselves that healing will also come from fixing injustice, lifting people out of poverty, building supportive communities etc. Fortunately there are a lot of Americans doing this work, coming from all sides of the political spectrum, and we must hope that their ethos will prevail until devisive stories will no longer be useful.
I remain hopeful … Truth may be falling apart, but even without it we can continue working to treat the other beings we encounter with kindness and compassion and to answer the calls to improve our collective lives and in particular the lives of those who suffer from injustice, poverty and trauma. I even suspect that this work will lay the foundation necessary to eventually create a unified collective narrative.
Perhaps this is not the best audience with which to share these reflections, since many of us are here because we find some kind of salvation in the idea of a New (and ancient) Story … I guess I’m also in the process of changing my focus. I still love a good story and I still think they can be immensely healing, but these days I’m starting to place more importance of just moving forward in society-building in the absence of a satisfying, shared story, rather than putting so much of my energy into trying to piece one together or to defend it to others. I seem like the Rwandans have inspired me in this regard.
Robin, thank you, especially for this insight: “to look to stories as not only the cause of our collective madness but also as its principal medicine.” It helps me understand my own rejection of fiction after a childhood of loving stories. Stories can be a beautiful way of spending time immersed in someone else’s vision, a way to experience possibilities and other viewpoints. But for every story that describes a world I want to live in there is another that describes a world I do not want. And every story ends, leaving me in reality. By that I mean the reality of being a living being on planet earth, subject to gravity, breathing the air, dependent on clean water and food to continue the life I am living. And the reality of living that life embedded in a specific place and time of human culture (for me that is New Mexico in the US) and embedded in the cluster of human stories that informs it. What is real? If all else fails (the internet, the electrical grid, TV reception, phone service, access to gasoline, my human community and our stories) what is left? The earth story is left – the earth and all her systems (rain, wind, sunshine, sunrise and sunset, the full moon and the new moon, summer and winter, the mountains and rivers, the cycling of nutrients and elements). And each other – by that I mean all us living beings who evolved here together. I find my sanity there. By touching the earth. By planting a garden. By growing food.
By saving seeds. By sharing those seeds. By supporting and learning from others who are growing food. This is my very small way of addressing injustice and poverty.
Charles was talking about the two sides of our current political story. I am looking for a third way, something to drive us past the impasse, something beyond them both. Maybe service to each other, addressing injustice and poverty as you say, is the work that can propel us there.
I think our human stories are vast and powerful and beneficial and harmful and limitless. But maybe the next step is to reach beyond human stories. To live embedded in our earth story, with everyone sharing the abundance of the earth, for that is a true place of common ground for all humanity and life. I intuit that Charles is way ahead of my thinking on this and that his new direction in fiction will take a step beyond what we have seen before. I can hardly wait!
Your essay has inspired a story in me, that has been asking to be written for a long time now, to come to life again and in a new form. Your voice matters, Charles. The idea of living our purpose as being our responsibility to life, has recently come my way. This is an important change in direction for me: we are not asking the world for permission to exist as we do. We exist as we do because we have been given gifts that are ours alone to share. Without us, they will be missing from the world: a note unsung; a beauty unspoken; a world not yet realized.
This is a beautiful essay, Charles, as always. Yes, myth and story reach places that ‘mere logic’ the the power of argument cannot. You have given me new insights into the problematic of using the force of logic to ‘win’ an argument. Thank you.
Ahead of your times as always!
May I add a comment which can easily be mistaken as critic, but is rather meant to show admiration and highlight a tradition?
There are many examples in history where poetry and fiction have been the last resort to progressive criticism. Especially in systems of dictatorship, sometimes even the only vehicle for thoughts to break through prison walls.
It is in the light of your article that I now see a new meaning for the interpretation of the inaugural poem. I couldn‘t really understand why people said it was the beginning of a new area and times for the rebirth of poetry. Now I do!
In times of post-democracy beauty is one of the last arguments where we can find common-ground. Shocking. But a starting point. Thanks Charles Eisenstein … nothing else expected, you have lifted another veil on reality.
We at The Lissome are very much looking forward to your book. Best of luck and endless train of thoughts…
@thelissome
Thank you so much and good luck!
And don’t forget to have fun. 🙂
You have put into words so much of what I’ve been feeling but didn’t know how to express. Thank you Charles.
Charles your timing is impeccable, or cosmic- or something else- completely heartening to my mind, body and soul. Godspeed.
Charles, your voice is a voice of reality in a world gone psycho. Not because you’re the only person with the “answers”. No, it’s because you give language to the silent voice inside myself, that is, and has been saying the same things all along. Ego? Echo chamber? To prefer the voice of one who speaks what you already think?
Maybe? But it’s not so much that you say what I’m thinking, but that you say what I can’t quite think, because the understanding, the stream of awareness is below the threshold of language, for me. It lives at the level of dreaming, of symbols and imagery and feeling. I’m grateful that you’re able to put it into language, for me. So that I can think about it. And talk about it with others. And know it better through both of these activities.
The way that your work is able to language the forms within that deep realm of non-thought, for me, tells me that you may well be able to write a story with some power in it. I wish you very good dreaming on it.
Dearest Charles,
As ever I bow to your willingness to dig deep. To not have easy answers and not shy away from the impossibly big questions. This essay speaks to my soul. To my own life path asking me to rise as my own archetype of Divine Feminine energy of the Empress working with Leaders and bring that powerful willingness to embrace ALL in a world that rejects the other so easily. There is no other!
It’s the fight itself that is the problem – how can we stop othering and start being what we are – the Human Collective and listen deeply through the version everyone’s stories to our shared humanity.
I so love you Charles for being willing to keep going in the not knowing and lack of clarity – being with what is, without answers and yet humbly and sometimes stumbling, staying to ask and inquire versus shutting it down to be right about something – always looking in the direction of truth, hope and our interbeing.
I truly believe you are literally one of the GREATEST thinkers of our time. Keep doing you, being you and doing whatever makes sense. It’s working.
As Gandhi said: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’ In this case ‘the win’ is for us all. So much love and respect to you x
Charles, your words strike deep chords within me. I have been finding myself living more in a ‘mythology’ as this lockdown continues and I cannot do my work as an acupuncturist-laying my hands on people to try and relieve some of their pain. My shaman, who I have never met, came to me in the form of a photo of a crow shaman that I used to draw a picture from. Crows have been with me as teachers and guides for most of my life, but I did not recognize them as such until lately. Reality has many faces and I am hopeful that your story will help others understand that history is not (pre) written in hate and violence. The other beings are powerful and belief in this (again) may help humans continue on this planet.
Thank you, Charles, for your life’s work. I have gained much insight from it and I wish you joy and success with your newfound inspiration!
As I read your essay I felt myself becoming emotionally moved to tears. I can’t really say why. But I can tell you the idea of some type of screen play sounds wonderful! I feel we need more art, poetry, story, theater, music to bridge the gap & to touch the human heart. I applaud this vision and effort. I have experienced these modalities to be bridging for me personally. It did not have that element of “force” as you speak of. No, they felt more like invitations. Invitations for curiosity and openness. Not the force of trying to convince and be right or maintain a upper hand. I so support you!
Awesome! I’m reminded of another of my favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote, in part, with a purpose to evangelize through the imagination, which is much less guarded than our reason. He says that the Lord of the Rings began implicitly Catholic and ended explicitly so. Story can touch us in ways that our reason cannot, as it impacts our imagination and helps us to get glimpses of that more beautiful world.
Living in the UK and watching events unfold in the US last month was horrifying and terrifying. I have almost no understanding of your political system so it is very helpful to read your words. I can only imagine the levels of dismay and helplessness people feel at this time. As I watch events unfold from an apparently safe distance, I am minded that every culture displays its own sickness in its own characteristic ways. We all need to find a way towards health, both personally and collectively. May your path be lit before you as you follow your heart.
Charles- Robert McKee is considered the most knowledgeable coach in writing “story” that has all the elements that truly engage and move people. His book STORY is considered the Bible of really good fiction writers and his seminars have been filled with some of the most successful screenwriters and novelists. Becoming familiar with his work may save you lots of time and deleted work. Good Luck!
Thank you, Charles … as alway, at least in my experience of your across several of your essays, you get to the essence and essentials of it. So, perhaps “invitation” seeded out there in the “Matrix” is what will lure more of us to a shift in the flavor of our energy whenever it comes time where enough of us let our closely held believes and opinions die.
If you have not already read it, on of Star Wolf’s books, The Fifth Sacred Thing, has one variant: “There is room for you at our table.” It feels like radical compassion in a beautifully crafted polarized “future” that seems now right around the corner.
Bon courage Charles! We were born two months apart, back in ’67. It’s possible we came in on the same cosmic wave. And we are now riding the morphic kind you allude to at essay’s end. In my experience there’s magic in that space of allowing and flowing. One day I’ll get good at it! Meanwhile, let the party wave grow. PY x
Thank you Charles for this. It brought a bit of sanity into what is fast becoming a world out of control. Could it be that it is not a choice between left or right but that there is a third option that has been here from the beginning and has been predominantly overlooked?? IF the dominion of this world was given to another and we have been deceived and duped into fighting each other, well then the enemy has truly won the battle here on earth… BUT GOD said(and here is the secret).
2 Corinthians 6:16,17,18
Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you,
Do Not Be Unequally Yoked
…16What agreement can exist between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will dwell with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be My people.” 17“Thereforecome out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you.”18And: “I will be a Father to you, and you will be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”…
God has rescue plan for His children. Would make a powerful conclusion to the movie. Just sayin!!!
The direction you are beginning to look reminds me of the words of poet & philosopher David Whyte – “poetry is language against which we have no defense”. The problems we face, I believe, will always remain in the logical, rational, analytical part of ourselves. To find true home, true north, true self, that part of us must either be turned against itself so it can be seen for what it is, not what it creates. Or, circumvented. Poetry, art, and it sounds like in your case, this promising idea of fiction, are that circumvention. They often can do more for truth than facts, stats, and reasoning. My thoughts anyway. I look forward to your creation. Much love.
I just don’t know Charles. Though I appreciate your willingness to courageously speak from such shifting and unstable ground, your tolerance of psychopathy, to the point of nearly embracing it with malignant compassion, I don’t find healing for the world. I could be wrong, heaven knows that is a well trodden personal path.
Disavowing the appropriateness of saying “No” to the manifestation of harmful “demands”, even if and while judge and jury still continues the search for understanding the “interest” level causation for that individual, or group, might be a bridge too far for me to cross. Those natural and rightful impulses, or interests, which chronically face societal obstruction, truncation, diversion and manipulation for so many, must be liberated and satisfied, but accommodation of an unconscious malevolent drive for such rectification seems wistful, echoing “can’t we all just get along”. Simultaneously, you minimize the warranted polarization between truth (yes, I know the relativity of that beast) and dystopian unreality – really, Fox vs CNN/MSNBC is the spectrum you want to critique and challenge? Onward, we’ll see where we end up… .. .
This is wise, I’m glad you realized you can’t talk sense to nonsense, although I applaud you for trying. After the unceasing, increasing chaos and insanity of the last couple of decades, after these recent several years of my own efforts – writing thoughtful essays, literally pleading and begging and pulling my hair out trying to talk sense and to awaken loved ones and friends to their own suffering, and in general pointing out the false narratives – patriarchy, capitalism, racism – that have created suffering and oppression (to no avail), I have let go, too. Not only is it exhausting, it is just another way of trying to control, I realize. And, control is not the answer: controlling others is what got us stuck here in the first place in these hierarchies of domination and oppression.
I surrender control. The only person I have any sway with is myself, so I work on myself – knowing I have the privilege to do so – for the betterment of all, to clear away the debris of generations of conditioning. And, I surrender the bigger work of the world to a higher power, knowing the higher power is wiser and more powerful than me, but that my small work supports the higher.
Though I do believe every little thing will be all right in the end, I also know there will be grief and sadness and suffering, too. Dark times are here and darker ones are coming – but there is always hope. Meanwhile, we continue to live and really feel this grief, to bear witness with remorse and regret for the part we humans played in the destruction that is birthing a new reality. May our collective witnessing of grief bring us greater wisdom to create a brighter future.
I know this: a brighter future is possible only in a world built on caring and sharing. My work for the remainder of my time in this plane is to live with caring and sharing as my tenets, and to dismantle within myself all the limiting stories that taught me caring and sharing was impossible, stupid or naive. Only from that clear place am I able to choose again and again to bring my best self forward in every moment. Only from that clear place can I personally embody and express loving, caring and sharing – vs. control, anger, despair, or violence – regardless of the ideologies of the people or the beings I encounter. Only from that clear place can I believe and hope that life will continue, even in the midst of times of great sorrow. Only from that clear place can I help build a new world.
This resonates deeply with me. Love is the answer, and I think it has to begin with self-love and understanding what that is. Healing is a key part of this because trauma is an essential problem. Healing allows us to grow into mature, loving, responsible humans, and that alone is sufficient to complete us, but it is also necessary if we are to have a deep, lasting, positive impact on the world. I am hopeful because I sense a large collective shift occurring. I also believe that light inherently illuminates the darkness. We merely need to seek truth. That’s the beauty of reality. The truth is that love exists, and it is magical and powerful, and maybe Nature even intended that we should have to go through a difficult process in order to realize this.
Yes, Michael, all of this! I am glad my words resonated with you. Thank you!
I see that you have discovered my strategy. Exhaustion brought me to the same place – and I made a similar choice.
Thank you…your work helped me to make this choice.
Hi Charles, I agree with many others here who are gleeful at the prospect of a new creative genre from you in days to come! Often when I read your thoughtful prose, I have the sense that in far future days when humans read the important works that lead the way out of the maelstrom of the early 21st century, your works will be on the top shelf.
I, like you and many others, am also at burnt out and exhausted level now. Also feel beyond despair when gazing at the mess we call our world. And realizing, finally, that your and our vision of A More Beautiful World ruled by the Heart of Compassion, will take much, much longer to manifest than most of us realized twenty years ago when we still felt hopeful.
Somehow today, here on this page with many like-minded dreamers, stating this simple fact gives me peace. Humanity clearly is going through a purging of old energies like never before, at it’s core level. There will be much more shouting, fighting, ugliness and violence.
Yet, I, like you, still hold the vision that your new venture will prove out– one fine day in the future, We will arrive on the shores of that New World that our current, weary hearts know is possible.
Thanks and blessings to you, Charles!!
Dear Charles,
I found this essay very interesting. I have read several of your books and essays, starting with The Ascent of Humanity. The ideas you conveyed helped guide me in my fiction writing. My most recent novel is Bountiful Calling and if I can figure out how to send you a copy I will. It is about people’s resistance to fracking in Pennsylvania but also much more, chief among them is the transference of mythic power from 1960s style activism to the types of behavior young people are expressing today. If you’d like to learn more you can look here: https://www.fredfburton.com/blog/
The thing I try to do when writing fiction is fill myself with the content, build the scaffolding until it is sufficiently supported and then work along, waiting for those times when the language just bursts free from me. I think those are the times when you could accomplish the goals you’ve set for yourself.
I want to thank you for all you have given me and hope this new direction provides you the opportunity to make the statement and create the beauty that you seek after.
I’m not sure why, but this essay reminded me of a thing I wrote a while back. I too have been discovering that place of connection, of ‘interbeing,’ which renders all prescriptive ideologies somehow irrelevant. So for what it’s worth, I’m sharing this here, because of that sense I had while reading your essay, that there is a deep understanding of what is real and true, in all our hearts.
Jesus Loved the Wind
What is it about the wind, anyway?
It comes and goes like the things you missed out of the corner of your eye—
The things you wish you hadn’t forgotten:
Things that weren’t there when you woke up in the night, but you so wished they had been;
Things that once turned your heart upside down, making you stop in your tracks for just one second.
Things that you laid to rest and walked away, when it didn’t matter whether you looked back or not.
What is it about the wind anyway?
It cuts through the buttons on your coat, leaving the smell of wind in your clothes—
So that when you pass by, people pause for a moment without knowing why.
It bends things that have no choice but to bend, or else they’ll break.
It breathes over the hill and down, bringing a faint, thrilling breeze to where you sit, waiting.
It goes where you’ve never been, and where you’ll never go again, blowing past all your regrets.
What is it about the wind anyway?
It brings the most momentous messages, reminding you of all you know and all you never knew—
but always in a language you don’t understand.
What is it about the empty wind?
Why does it remember all the things that never came to be?
Why does it take all the truth you ever knew and sweep it away into the unfilled air?
Why does it chill the tears on your face, as if cold comfort is all it knows?
Why does it walk where it walks—
Down the turning years, and down the days of your life, always going past, never stopping?
It’s as if all the things we always knew were still things that we needed to be told—
As if Love, riding hidden in the wind, doesn’t care what we know and what we don’t.
Thank you, I feel and share your weariness. I feel that the simple maxim ‘what we restist persists’ is apt for now and that to go within and accept with an openess is an invitation to a space for healing. This is the way of deep healing, as oppositional medicine rarely yields longlasting effects, whereas to meet with compassion amd space is what is needed now.
Beautiful and inspiring Charles. Much love in your and Our endeavor.
Thank you, Charles, for your honesty, your essay, your tuning in to your own deep fatigue and looking in for a new direction to tell our story. I honor your incredible storytelling and I don’t know what I’d have done in this time of insanity without your voice.
Thank you Charles. I support the shift you seek and feel a synchronicity that arose just yesterday.
At one time I did a lot of research into the teaching of history even tho I don’t remember my motivation. I do know or remember find some famous college profs suggesting that history be taught/shared as fiction. And s a search one finds this seems to be a trend and I tried to explain this to a friend who I feel to be very smart. Turns out he actually did history as a college major and as I felt unable to make my case I apologized yet when I was advising him on his own amazing family history I almost got thru to him that I longed to hear him in the story. And that it really seems a fabulous story.
2 of my deepest influences in life have been fiction. Island by Huxley and The Kin of Atta by Dorothy Bryant. They are both quite utopian.
Switching gears this showed up today, a very touching interview by a former qanon follower. I find her lucid and normal sounding even as you and I feel the left will become the right. https://youtu.be/QHOK_9hWU5U
Life to me us dynamic and always becoming. I send you all the best for your new direction.
I am grateful for the thoughts you have put to paper, for the expository essays, books, online courses, and interviews you have put into the world with your messages. May these ripples continue to emanate throughout our world, and invite change in a way that none of us may individually understand.
Thank you, Charles. Your efforts are deeply appreciated.
I’ve had a rough year, too, characterized by a far lower level of engagement as both my outer and my inner worlds fell apart, bit by bit, leaving me, like many here have already described, exhausted and depleted. This essay has been like a Welcome Home. Thank you for writing it, Charles.
I almost made it through a two-week intensive training to be ordained as a shamanic minister. Aside from a couple of essays I have yet to write, there is the matter of my vision board which was impossible to create while transient for logistical reasons. But it’s been brewing in my heartmind for the past month, and I like to think it exists in the same morphic field as the creative output described here.
What it is is a miniature microcosm of The More Beautiful World in which I would live here in the mountains of western North Carolina. I’ve been collecting materials to bring this vision of a quasi-autonomous hamlet into 3-D reality. The central focus is Water, and that’s simple enough to render with a colored marker. The next most important feature, which speaks to the new direction described in this essay, is an outdoor performance and demonstration space with an amphitheater-like bowl on and near the bank of a curve in the course of the creek that’s steep enough for seating to potentially watch a play or hear a concert or see kinesthetic art forms or share a fire circle but gentle enough for stationary installations or sharing circles. Yes, even more important than dwellings, right up there with gardens, there is a primary intention to provide a venue where stories can be shared in a wide range of formats or media.
The other feature of this essay on which I want to comment is the allusion, sometimes subtle, sometimes explicit, to the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Very apropos! Another classic I’ve been using in my pleas to knock it off with the othering is the 150-year-old story of The Blind Men and the Elephant, a poem by John Godfrey Saxe.
There were six men of Indostan, to learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant (though all of them were blind),
That each by observation might satisfy his mind.
The First approached the Elephant and, happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side, at once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant is nothing but a wall!”
The Second, feeling of the tusk, cried: “Ho!—what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp? To me ’tis mighty clear:
This wonder of an Elephant is very like a spear!”
The Third approached the animal and, happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands then boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant is very like a snake!”
The Fourth reached out his eager hand and felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like is mighty plain,” quoth he.
“‘Tis clear enough: the Elephant is very like a tree!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, said, “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most! Deny the fact, who can?
This marvel of an Elephant is very like a fan!”
The Sixth no sooner had begun about the beast to grope
Than, seizing on the swinging tail that fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right and all were in the wrong!
So oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant not one of them has seen!
Less hubris, more humility; less logic, more intuition; less intelligence, more wisdom; less work, more play – we’ll be OK!
I feel there is a small minority of people who see the challenges as you do Charles. The membranes of the bubbles of illusion feel like they are getting both thicker and the bubbles themselves bigger. Thank you for writing this particular essay – it has inspired me also to go to source, rather than head – and from there, listen to “what next”.
Dear Charles,
I send you love and wishes for inspiration in this important endeavor!
Charles
This is a brilliant essay. I feel much the same way. I’m writing a piece about reality now for http://www.conscient.ca/ that explores some similar themes, and includes quotes from some of your work.
I thought you would enjoy this meditation by Richard Wagamese from Embers : One Ojibway’s Meditations (Embers : One Ojibway’s Meditations – Douglas & McIntyre)
To tell. To use the act of breathing to shape air into sounds that take on the context of language that lifts and transports those who hear it, takes them beyond what they think and know and feel and empowers them to think and feel and know even more. We’re storytellers, really. That’s what we do. That is our power as human beings. Not to tell people how to think and feel and therefore know – but through our stories allow them to discover questions within themselves. Turn off your TV and your devise and talk to each other. Share stories. Be joined, transported and transformed.
All the best with your creative work.
I’ll read anything you write…
Claude Schryer
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and inner process, Charles. The world needs new stories! As a nonfiction writer who once hoped his writing would help heal the world, I can identify with your calling to storytelling.
In 2010 I received a vision of a mythic story and with my wife as co-creator I began transforming it into a book. We finally finished it just a few months ago. I hope your story-writing journey brings you the soul-restoring joy that we experienced.
“Human Earth Awakening: A New Story for a New World” is now available at http://www.humanearthawakening.com.
Just a thought, while you feel your efforts have been futile, people like me who have never resonated fully with one side or the other have been “shook” awake this year. It has allowed me to find you and your extensive wealth of prose. The divide and the utter hopeless that is America today has accelerated the connections of all of the tireless fringe “US foreign policy critics, Israeli/Palestinian peace activists, vaccine skeptics, holistic health researchers etc” that have been screaming from the top of your respective lungs for ages. We are finally ready to hear and to seek you out. Hopefully we can work together, stronger united for something better. So thank you for all you’re already done and I can’t wait to see what’s to come.
Hello Charles,
Your work has been a candle in the wind for me for years. I’m excited to hear you feel compelled to write dystopian fiction with the seeds for healing, etc. I highly recommend four such novels that have deeply inspired me: Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed; and Star Hawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge.
Oh, yes, wow, thank you, Charles! As you and so many others here, I have felt the weariness that comes from long holding a vision that seems to ever recede. I have long held that fiction is as true, in its own way, as what we call reality, and that it is our humanness, our stories, that can bring us together in ways that our ideologies never could. Bless you, and might your new endeavours begin to open for all a way to that more beautiful world that our hearts *know* is possible.
Charles, I whole heartedly agree that we need many more images of the world we want to see. This is why I strongly believe artists may be some of the best prepared to help us into this next reality.
You’ve laid a solid groundwork of books and essays that have inspired countless people, and me to take action in actually creating that “more beautiful world…” and so I am eternally grateful. And if you are tired of beating down the same path, I am sure you will find by creating a fiction/art piece you will be filled with a new level of energy you have yet to experience.
I am very excited to see what you create!
Charles, thank you for your honesty as always. Always a great reminder for me about stepping outside the polarization. Your essays and podcasts have been inspirational for me and my family. They have made a great impact on me, however sadly not enough for our society as a whole. Looking forward to your future works. I want to believe that you are making a bigger impact than you may believe. Lot of love, compassion and care
Hey Charles, when can we watch your fictional story on Netflix?
I love your writing Charles. It always feels like a blessed relief, a voice of sanity in the cacophony. Thank you SO much.
One correction for you regarding water getting increasingly turbulent just before a waterfall. It doesn’t. It goes smooth and glassy. (1950s??) Where it DOES get increasingly turbulent and fractured is once it starts falling. I reckon the metaphor holds, and that’s where we are. Well over the edge. A whole new paradigm already. New ways of ‘together’ required.
How thrilling then, this new growth that’s coming through you! May the Force be with you!!
Charles, you are so tuned in and brilliantly perceptive. You are so, so right. Thank you. 💗 Maybe I will write with you. Maybe many of us will.
Charles, Super inspiring essay! Godspeed
A profound examination of the 3 myths that prevent realization of Reality, which IS prior unity, an essay titled, Right Life Is Transcendence of The Three Great Myths of Human ego-Culture, from Not-Two IS Peace, by The World Friend Adi Da. (Pages 213-218, 4th Edition)
The 3 great myths: myth of separate self, myth of separate world, and myth of separate God.
Creating a new myth is no substitute for realizing Truth.
Love
Helen
I second the suggestion to read Looking Backward by Bellamy. More recently, The Overstory by Richard Powers. Read those, then go write your own thing.
So excited for what’s next! Thank you for all you do!
Charles,
I’m so happy to hear you are turning your energies to a new and unexplored realm. As a filmmaker and screenwriter myself, and someone who has bounced around a ton in my short life, I can tell you that pursuing a long-form story of fiction is an incredible teacher. Before I finished my first screenplay and film, I wanted to and seriously considered giving up so many times. The most important thing, which you already have, is to hold strong to the core of your vision and trust it to the greatest depth. It’s easy to dismiss what motivates us for diving into new work, but I know you Charles! And I know you will trust that. I think your creative mind is unique for fertilizing this new ground of storytelling. I believe you will grow something beautiful and real.
I’m looking to start on a similar project soon, and I can’t wait to see where ours both take us. I look forward to yours.
Best,
Thank you for this essay, Charles. To what we observe: democracy under threat, fracturing reality, a culture of control/dominance/separation producing more subversion, may I offer an idea?
I offer to see everything that happens in the world as an act of love. I understand that it may seem nonsensical at first to view the cultural maladies listed above as love but what happens if we do?
As an act of love, reality cleaving in two (or perhaps being broken along multiple fault lines) could be seen as an invitation, or catalyst, for us all to choose our own path, our own affiliation. Does the ground on which we stand fall toward service to self, service to fiction, service to control/separation or does it fall toward service to others, service to truth, service to love/free will/unity. And how comfortable are we on the ground on which we stand?
I agree with you that stories and mythology are better a better means for the job than logic. By offering inspiration I hope that more people will recognize that we are all one, and choose the ground of love and service to others, for as one, what’s the point of separation?
I look forward to hearing more about your new work and wish you ease and joy in bringing it into being.
Dear Charles,
your thoughts and feelings expressed in your latest essay are deeply familiar in my own heart and I understand and know first hand of your spurs of despair. Let me tell you though that your work has deeply touched me and a lot of people all over the world and never think for a moment that it was all in vain. You plant seeds of hope, awareness and compassion in everything you write and speak and we are immensly grateful for who you are and what you do. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and I wish you all the best for your new endeavours.
Hi Charles, about half way through the essay something in me started getting hooked up on ‘the thing’ you overlooked – and then you circled right around to it in your conclusion, which was beautiful. “The thing” I was referring to in my mind is how all this mess we’re currently experiencing in ‘the media’ – the polarization, the distortion, the biases – are not much else than the ‘making visible’ of the deletions, distortions and biases of our own individual minds. The internet, and with it, the opportunity for EVERYONE to make visible what’s going on inside their mind (sometimes with great visual skill, creating fake videos of events they BELIEVE could have happened) is also an opportunity to take a look at our human condition in all it’s insanity – and, if we are open – start healing it. We’re all driven by habit, by fear – by over 179 brain biases that pretty much make it impossible for us to perceive ‘objective’ reality (whatever that may be). All we’re seeing now is that becoming visible. And if we look at it at a macro scale, as you like to do, it will drive us crazy – because it IS crazy. There is no reconciling it, there is not making sense of it, there is no solution. But I think what we can do is appreciate the fact that we can now SEE it – when previously we couldn’t. Which brings me to your conclusion. No ‘mind’ was ever changed by facts the same way no one was ever ‘healed’ by therapy. What changes us are powerful stories – experiences. Connection. Getting out of our heads and into our hearts. I believe what is needed now is to leave the debating, the arguing, the analysis, the intellectualization – all those expressions of the ‘Freudian’ defense mechanisms – and do the one thing that we feel least inclined to do: connect with our heart, with each other – and start dreaming. And while that is a trigger in itself – it feels unsafe and – to the competition minded among us – feels like we’re ‘losing’ – but we’re at a point where there’s almost nowhere else to go. And that is an absolute blessing in a way – because it’s an opportunity to understand that there’s nowhere to get to either – there’s only what we can dream up. And while it seems like it’s the macro scale that is falling apart at lighting speed, posing an existential threat to us all – I believe our only way out of this is to turn to the micro scale – and deal with all our individual healing, one story at a time. I’m excited to see yours.
Right on, Charles, write on! Tweek your ease with writing into a new form.
I have a gripe about Science Fiction. It uses unusable mechanisms to solve or further plots, unrealistic magical thinking.
Rather, how about utopias/dystopias built of Science Possibility? It can be visionary but built on what we already know is true and what works. Given what we know, how could it be?
“the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” I’m all in and ready.
Thank you, Charles, for staying true to our conscious evolution.
Knowing is not a story itself, and is rarely imparted directly by story.
Creativity is behind every story, but isn’t its product.
Love inspires story and encompasses all story, but story can only remind us of love.
Human awareness is due, now, to evolve beyond story.
Yes, invoking causal principles (and virtual experience) will be the keys ….
But to take a break from all this work, I’d suggest that you find a sunny beach, and learn to surf. Consult Jiro Taylor, from Byron’s Bay, Australia, for tips. I’m sure you’ll enjoy sharing ideas with him.
As I read your essay I could feel something stirring in me, a recognition and resonance.
You’ve affirmed a sense I’ve had too, that there are no reference points from our history on this planet which we can draw on now to be able to move into the fray of this new emerging world; glimpses of which shimmer through the cracks and decay of the world we are leaving.
Thank you as always for coming from the coal face of this massive shift in consciousness.
All Love to you and yours
Incredible. I have also been meditating on creating a work of fiction in which the protoganist’s character arc is not represented by the hero’s journey, per se, but rather a discovery of the universal truths that bind us (all forms of life) together in beingness.
I’m very excited that others are thinking along these lines of creativity as well. I agree that fiction has ways of permeating the collective unconcious that other forms of writing may not.
Best of luck to you and look forward to hearing about your endeavors.
My favourite “feel good” movie and story is La Belle Verte. Anyone know it? It was so inspiring that it was banned in 1996.
Hello Charles and appertaining Tifosis ,
What came to my mind as a cellular biology scientist fan of cytokines & Arthur Rimbaud and moreover inhabitant of the Waffle capital of the Universe (within) …
“What extraordinary and improbable verbiage !!?”
Waiting in great anticipation for the follow through!
Heavens to Murgatroyd.
Exit stage left! Or is it right?
Nobody really knows anymore.
Even fakers are fakes … But a Pascal is not a Newton…
It was easier to figure thinks out in Galileo’s time.
There were Torquemada style Cardinals, the Pope and basta …
You knew what you were up against! Obey or burn with your books!
Today it’s back to the Doldrum’s and the Alchemist’s The Abyss
(French: L’Œuvre au noir) a 1968 novel by the Belgian-French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. The dark ages. How much will they last?
The invisible viruses and their puppeteers are running and ruining matters and abusing people’s gullibility in view of the new new reckoning…
I am sure you can do as well. Be looking for your revival.
To the loo…
Your words ring with truth. I honor you. Thank you….
You and yours have a place by our fire…
Look at the amazing community of people who care for you, as well as for your ideas and your inspiration! Your writings and podcasts have been extremely influential for me in a desired period of isolation and revisioning of my life – wanting to be in alignment with what the earth and consciousness want now. The Buddhists would find the source of your suffering in the illusion of ego. Perhaps underneath it all, you hoped to see the the full fruits of the transformation you are indeed helping to usher, or that is ushering forth through you and through all these commenters and the planet. Give yourself time to feel your way next, perhaps. I think the river will carry you where it will. You don’t need to make the banks as you go. Or more prosaicly, you don’t need to produce earth-changing shifts in consciousness to be worthy of enjoying this life. Unless you can’t stop it!
I am an outlier here as I tend to view stories –narrative in general– as analogous to sugar, something modern homo sapiens has developed an addiction to, leading to its ill-health. Our attraction to each was necessary to survival when our environment imposed hardship and danger upon us and our need for each was critical. But once we were able to obtain access to sugar at will, and make it into an essential ingredient of nearly all we consume, sugar became toxic. Likewise, I think, stories. We get addicted to the sensations they give us –of reassurance, of delight, of belief, belonging, and hope. The sensation becomes sufficiency, relegating curiosity, exploration, and effort moot.
For me, the need isn’t for a new or better narrative; it’s for a recognition that our real challenge is to move beyond the need for it.
very good thanks
Excellent, thank you Charles E. you said so much of what I’ve felt and thought. I am attempting the same sort of thing. Why the way, loved your book The More Beautiful World . . . I just kept thinking YES, this is the book I would have written if I’d gotten off my ass and written it (and been capable of doing so). Thank you.
Beautiful essay, Charles. I’m encouraged to see you reference Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi here, as I hold them as rare examples of courageous truth-tellers in the miasma of corporate-captured media and journalism. Another important voice to add to this short list is Chris Hedges. His piece here on the dangers of censorship and deplatforming is worthy of our attention:
https://scheerpost.com/2021/02/15/hedges-cancel-culture-where-liberalism-goes-to-die
Time to enter the NON-rational and bring these two streams together. Wonderful!!! There is a book called The Way of the Screenwriter by Amnon Buchbinder. Story as a living thing. We work with story not on it. Also ( Amnon Buchbinder again) The Biology of Story ( there is a course from this work of interviewing over 200 people on how story is at the centre of their work!!). There is a course that goes with this. These may be inspiring and of interest as you work with this artistic path. From the friend who sent the email inviting you to distinguish between irrational and non-rational. ie Elyse Pomeranz ( http://www.thetreeconversations.com)
Thanks for this essay, Charles. It lands for me like a crack where the light is coming through. I remember talking in our podcast conversation a year or two ago about this need for these kinds of stories and wondering where to find more of them. I’m thrilled you’re heeding the call to let them come through you. All blessings on that endeavor! Looking forward with joyful anticipation.
Thank you so much for this Charles. I’ve been a huge fan of your work, words and honest and authentic ongoing enquiry for many many years but this is the first time I’ve felt moved to comment. YES!!!!!!! Your words and process resonate so much for me too. This feels like a clearing in the smog. A breath of fresh air. The smell of the new. . . . A campfire of clarity calling us away from the fog of despair. I honour and salute you Charles in ALL that you do. Thank you so much for your process. So many of us are with you in this. . . . . . . The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible IS here and is beating within us. Thank you for the beacon and reminder that you are for it – over and over and over. A-ho to your words and your process and the siren song within it for all of us. YES!!!!!!
This is strange! I have just released my new fiction book a month ago that describes a positive future just like Charles encourage us to do! In the future that the book describes, life is brighter, nature cleaner, and our problems mostly solved.
And in Charles spirit it’s free. Here goes:
Message from the future: WE MADE IT!
https://www.gaiainnovations.org/book/we-made-it
First time commenting – You are like the waves crashing on the rocks turning the boulders into grains of sand. The ocean never wearies. Even though you say you are weary I don’t see you as quitting. I see you changing the direction of your flow. Overall I feel history supports the human race as improving. So, I am hopeful. Yet, the ocean endures catastrophe and maybe we will, too. We keep reaching for better and crashing on those rocks.
I feel your pain Charles, your sense of futility and your dispair, as they are mine as well. And I am looking forward to your stories. They will be filled with wisdom and love and truth. As all your essays were/are.
Keep up the spirit and keep showing us a way out of this mess!
Light, Love and Power from the Netherlands.
Wow, i had to scroll down for miles so i could say Thank You Charles
I appreciate your words, heart, and efforts. I feel I am just now getting into your work – and am off to read all the essays you mentioned here.. but am more excited for the work to come. 🙂 Love to you all!
Dearest Charles,
This is your elderly ‘great auntie’ Rosalind making contact with you.
Thanks to the seeds you sowed in me many years ago ,when I first ‘met’ you as I read an interview with you in a free newspaper, in a cafe in Petersfield in the south of the U.K., this is what is growing from beneath the ‘compost heap’ of my earlier life’s scraps: ” In Transition.”
“I find myself opening up to ‘the Space Between’, which is the ‘Unknown where all Possibility lies’. It is the “BEYOND”, which I feel drawn to Trust, as I know I am in the ‘Field of Inter-being’, – the ‘Communal Soul of Life’, – created at Source, and the source of Creativity.”
This comes with my thanks to, and love for you, Charles.
Yes, go ahead and do it! I’m sizzling with excitement while reading about your intention for this year.
You are obviously a Qanon anti-vaxxer Russian agent racist for doubting the neoliberal reality projection. But I’m sure you’ve been informed of that already. The comparison to late USSR is the most apt, imo, and most predictive of the fate of this USSA regime. 😉
Thank you Charles for this essay and the wonderful essays that you’ve written over the years. They’ve been a wealth of insight, and I can’t wait to read your fiction!
I just wanted to say, as an aspiring writer, after reading this heartfelt essay, I’ve never felt more confident in my decision to write primarily fiction. I’ve been struggling with this exact thing. It’s tempting to write expository essays because I feel the need to articulate the inconsistencies in everything happening right now, but the crippling resistance it invites among readers is almost too much to bear emotionally, and arguably not even useful. Story and fiction cut straight to the heart and bypass the filter of reason. They’re better at breaking the language barrier than essays because they’re viewed as art rather than an invitation to an argument.
Beautifully put and exciting to read Charles. As an actor who works in the commercial sphere, I have grappled for years with the feeling that maybe I should quit and do something “useful” like join a permaculture collective. In recent years I’ve tried to envision telling stories that resonate with the New Story, and I have to say that more and more of those stories have come to me. I’m putting myself at the service of the New Story as an actor, (but will also carry on with my tiny Permaculture garden!)
When all paths forward were filled with confusion and shouting, he turned to the stillness within; the keeping still that is the teaching of the mountain. Slowly, once again, through the seasons the words of the Green Mother reached him again; a voice so quiet, it cannot be heard in the shouting of the world.
Beyond a time of words, arguments and politics, we are entering the Elemental Time, when the Elemental angels of Earth, Air, Fire and Water will shake every life and seize all attention. We will have no choice but to listen…in the coming year, the Angel of Water already has the most penetrating voice…how little we have treasured this precious gift of our Mother.
Please find your story Charles…I am glad you have heard the whisper at the center of your spiral.
Like the the Blue sky, like the green, flowing hair of Our Mother Earth may you find the mountain stream
of Living water that will fill our hearts with growing balance that heals all things. Let others say words…you Charles…you write the song, the story. If it flows from Her, it will be perfect beyond measure. Breathe deep…forward.
All song…all love…all. Light. With Gratitude, Mark Whitman
‘Amen’ Mark Whitman. Dadirri (Official Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Video,) on YouTube , gives another powerful offering for you Charles, and others who are receptive. Blessings to all on this transformational journey towards ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible’. Rosalind.
Charles, you are on to something with your ideas for story-telling. I am exhausted from my efforts to bring about change through conventional, scientific and political channels. I know how you feel. Story-telling, if done well, as I’m certain you will do, is a deeper way to connect with people. Our salvation, and that of the earth, will happen when good science merges with our innate spirituality. Poetry, painting, story-telling, music, dance, and all the creative arts, are every bit as important as scientific and technical fields in bringing this about. These connect with our emotional bodies and stir our souls with feelings of love and our sense of beauty. We need reverence for people and nature to save ourselves and the world. I am excited for you, and I wish you every good fortune in tapping into that bountiful cosmic flow to produce works that will continue to inspire us! David
Inspired by your inspiration Charles! Have fun with your journey and continued blessings 🙏🏼❤️
I have to say that I do not agree with his implication (if I understood him) that banning Trump from Twitter is/involved or is somehow equivalent to demonizing 75 million Trump voters. I personally would only generate demonization images about a small fraction of them… Many of the rest I see as “mistaken” … The vast majority of those 75 million have not been banned from any social media nor prevented from writing letters to the editor, calling in talk shows, nor threatened with economic or social sanctions, shunned in public, etc.
RE: “When corporate-government powers have captured the press and our means of communication (the internet), what is to stop them from quashing dissent?”
IMO this is an exaggeration: The traditional media continues to hold, as best it can, corporations and government accountable. Read the Atlantic, New York Times, New Yorker. MSNBC , sixty Minutes, and even Fox (sometimes) will do serious investigative journalism that does lift up the curtains as to what’s going on in government and corporations.
And despite the fact that Twitter and Facebook are muting some voices on their platforms, I think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that corporate and government have “captured the Internet.”
millions of informational emails (both delusional and dangerous left and right wing, and useful and life supporting) continue to flow pretty freely (except in places like China and North Korea.)
In one respect I somewhat agree with him that there’s a downside/risk to pushing right-wing extremist crazies* off mainstream platforms. See this from a BBC site:
The move away from mainstream platforms poses a risk, according to Mina al-Lami, jihadism specialist at BBC Monitoring, who sees parallels with Islamist militant groups who have been subject to similar crackdowns.
“Members of the fringe far-right may now slip under the radar into closed spaces which use end-to-end encryption,” a very secure method of exchanging messages, she says. “Their radicalisation goes unchecked and unmonitored.”
The social media giants acted to remove QAnon groups after the violence in Washington, but they have quickly rebuilt themselves elsewhere.
———————————————-
I personally believe that Twitter was more than justified in closing Trump’s account.
He violated their terms of use multiple times starting years ago. Just for example, their terms of use prohibit harassment. Many of his tweets (such as, for example, since 2010 multiple times claiming Obama was not born in the USA) in common understanding of the word constitute harassments.
IMO he should’ve been throttled on social media long ago…. not wait until the proverbial mushroom cloud (incitement to overturn the US government by violence) appeared.
Here’s my take: Mainstream media and social media gave him billions of dollars in free publicity during his candidacy. As a VP at CBS said (this is close to an exact quote) “Trump is bad for the country but is good for CBS [ratings].” I’m not suggesting I would have wanted him censored or actively suppressed in the press (he certainly was and should have been free to buy advertising and write letters or even an occasional opinion piece) but they gave ever nutty comment he made front page and sound-bite coverage. Without that I have some doubt he’d have even gotten the nomination.
Thanks! Keep your attention high!
Ode to Joy
Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity [or: of gods],
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly one, thy sanctuary!
Thy magic binds again
What custom strictly divided;*
All people become brothers,*
Where thy gentle wing abides.
Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt,
To be a friend’s friend,
Whoever has won a lovely woman,
Add his to the jubilation!
Yes, and also whoever has just one soul
To call his own in this world!
And he who never managed it should slink
Weeping from this union!
All creatures drink of joy
At nature’s breasts.
All the Just, all the Evil
Follow her trail of roses.
Kisses she gave us and grapevines,
A friend, proven in death.
Salaciousness was given to the worm
And the cherub stands before God.
Gladly, as His suns fly
through the heavens’ grand plan
Go on, brothers, your way,
Joyful, like a hero to victory.
Be embraced, Millions!
This kiss to all the world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy
There must dwell a loving Father.
Are you collapsing, millions?
Do you sense the creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy!
Above stars must He dwell.
Charles:
I have been following your essays for a few years, and have yet to be disappointed in what you present. Nothing you have done has been in vain! You come from a place of love and compassion which you freely share from your heart and mind. Although it may appear that the gifts you have shared have not been received. That is the illusion. I suggest to you that love and compassion are infinite and will patiently wait until one is willing to receive. So please continue to share your beautiful gifts in whatever way strikes you as appropriate, for they are never lost.
John
Thanks for that! here is the song that crawled out of my soul a couple months ago. Might resonate. The tune is some sort of throat singing, heavy metal, shamanic something or other, ala the viking band Heilung!!! can’t wait to read your story when its done! Ryan
Awake Arise my sleepy friends
Remain not trapped within the fen
Of lies that come from CNN
And Fox News grinning in its den
Beware the twisted hand they lend
Like digits on a card for you to spend
Good cop bad cop racketeering
Always talking never hearing
Into darkness dimly peering
Unaware of dangers nearing
Patriotic fogs are clearing
Showing us the Beast that’s at the steering
Descendants of Hippocrates
Have lost the forest in the trees
As empires hypocrisy
Has driven reason to its knees
And now all passion seeks to flee
In freedom that’s a fading memory
A wave is crashing Gaia’s shore
With crushing technocratic roar
And life is shaken to the core
Her dance upon the verge of war
Soon crushed to ash forever more
By gears who’s logic we call order
On Armageddon’s withered plain
Apocalypse has come again
Her tears torrential burning rain
Diesel fumes and human pain
Prometheus will stand again
Objecting to the Cancers creeping stain
Awake Arise to glory ride
Resolve to strengthen weary stride
And weep the tears he never cried
Prometheus was never tried
For charges of this matricide
Implying that the beast to us has lied
Awake arise my lonely friends
Our stories not yet at its end
Hold hand in commune once again
And breath our air together when
Our mother leads us round the bend
To battle with the beast of separation
Her weapons are the earth and sun
The web of life so finely spun
Singing dancing music fun
And knowing that we all are one
Transcending all the roads that run
Before us on the journey just begun
Omg! Thank you for this!! Seeing in print what I’ve been thinking myself (no where near as eloquently!) is both difficult and freeing. There is so much bubbling almost to the surface—and yet not seen. Hope is so fragile now and anything that contributes to that is huge!!
Thought provoking and inspiring. Thank you Charles.
Love your book, The Ascent of Humanity is off these times but I think you are completely amiss here, unfortunately. Time will tell (probably before the end of April)… nothing can stop what is coming next. Best wishes, have a great 2021.
Dear Charles, though I am not a “follower” each time I meet you somewhere on the screen in person or by your texts I am deeply touched and feel this connectedness of love among all beings which is beyond all the appearances. Nothing you think, do, write or say is in vain. I deeply believe that it shapes the world of tomorrow and our wish to become “good ancestors” for life on this beautiful earth.
Please go for your wonderful intention ” to produce a story of the first kind, an emanation from a future I like to call “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” We n e e d s shared vision to persevere the hard times waiting for all of us. With an inspiring vision of “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” we will be able “to move mountains” and rebecome human BEINGs.
Thank you for this and all of your deep thinking and questioning…
A suggestion (should you be open to it): seek some collaborators in your story dreaming… Valerie Kaur is an amazing story teller and catalyst for Revolutionary Love. Also Robin Wall Kimmerer.
I look forward to your creation! For years I have been telling fellow workshop/retreat goers when they bemoan ‘now we have to go back to the real world’ -NOOOO. This retreat is a deep dive in to the real world… now we go back to delusion, deception, de-humanizing cutting ourselves off from our hearts and our soul!
I am a fellow compassionista – facilator of Compassionate Listening for decades.
PS. I’ve been rewatching Star Trek The Next Generation – Captain Picard and gang: gives me heart for the world we seek! Watch with your son!
Your analysis of our dilemma is compelling, but I’d like to contribute my viewpoint as a scientist who is committed to the scientific method, an approach to approximating truth that serves us well in all our endeavors, not just “science,” however defined. Most importantly, the scientific method is being applied to many disciplines previously considered off limits: e.g., psychology, the nature of objective reality, even spirituality. The elements of this approach are accessible to all of us: repeatable observation, hypothesis formation guided by reason and the principle of parsimony, disproof of universal statements, and so forth. Although peer review has its unavoidable faults, it is a form of judgement by trusted experts.
All of us have the option to consult evidence-based expert opinion, if we take the trouble to do so. It provides a basis for debate and discussion. We also have the option of rejecting crap that is served up to us by non-experts without evidence.
We all need to exercise those options. Democracy is not possible otherwise.
I could feel the energy of your decision to write the fiction. It will be most FUNderfully amazing. Sending you my responding energy.
Dear Charles – not wanting to cheer your despair, but YAY! Perhaps you are in transition, the time in the birthing process when we feel utterly doomed, which signals the nearness of emergence. In my experience, it is also a developmental stage characterized by extreme discomfort, before a new evolutionary layer unfolds, be it at the level of the individual, the societal, global, or even cosmic (maybe? I can’t say i know anything about that; only that the pattern seems to hold for layers and layers of micromacro). I am delighted to hear the sound of your heart shifting in this way, and look forward to experiencing what wants to come through you.
Charles, I wish you the absolute best for your creative process! I love you, I support you, and your transition now into fully tapping into the power of story , the very fact that you are making this subtle shift of focus, sets a positive psychic blueprint for our society. Godspeed brother.
Hi Charles I have only just read this and am so excited for you! As a screenwriter myself this is fantastic news. I have always seen your writings as putting into prose what I could only say in fiction or poetry. How lovely that you are now going to put your own prose into story! You have been a big inspiration for me in coming up with ideas since I first started reading your books and participating in the inaugural Space between Stories course. So it doesn’t surprise me you are starting with a new type of dystopian fiction- this is what I am currently dabbling in as well. Something that shows what a new story can look like. I was only just thinking the other day of the idea of starting film festivals- online and in local communities around the theme of a more beautiful world. I have been applying for film festivals for my short film and have realised there is a bit of a gap there! I think it’s time for a new genre- MBW films- what do you think?
All the best, Meg
Hi, Charles,
Took another look at this essay and I was reminded of your intention to do a screenplay. I sent you a separate email telling you about a young person I know who does music soundtracks. She is capable of providing music that fits the feel or theme a person is aiming to express in their film. Worth checking out I think.
I hear you Charles. Thank you and bless you.
I swing wildly from a kind of denial and just wishing to wake up from an insane dream of being an alien stranded on a weird planet, scratching my head and wondering “why do they do it like that here” to questioning myself “am I doing enough? What more can I do?” to acceptance that at some level all is very well and trying to live my truth.. No wonder I feel exhausted much of the time! I guess living the new story is the only possibility. Thank Heavens for oases like your website and the comments of your readers!
I want to hear or read that story.
“Finally I would describe how a different mythology of wholeness, ecology, and interbeing would motivate a new politics.”
To reason with a madman– first you must not be one yourself. That is the hard part. Really hard.
Most folks here, I’m guessing, will not like hearing this. Oh well…..
One cannot lead others to a place one has never been. This magical story of fiction Charles aspires to write– of course he dare not write it! To do so would be tantamount to self-immolation. If he dared travel to where he needs to go in order to write it, he would have to give up everything he holds dear in his life. Once there, he would never return because the knowledge acquired there would guarantee his summary execution at the hands of his peers if he did.
Like Andy says, “but hasn’t that story already been written?” Of course it has. It has already been written a thousand times and people are still writing it. It’s not that we don’t have the story/myth/whatever to save us, it’s that we don’t really understand it on a deep enough level. We abhor and loathe this level as standard cultural practice which leaves us entirely unable to give a shit about it.
Charles, this strikes me as the saddest thing I’ve ever read from you. Our hero, at the hour of our gravest need, stumbles and falls to his knees, head in hands, disillusioned by the reality of his own impotence. He can only watch aghast while we thrash about preparing to kill and devour each other. We are deeply moved to comfort him.
(There, there…..your expository writings shine a brilliant, heartening light! Never mind reasoning with madmen. You are loved and appreciated by many of the not-quite-so-mad. As you were, soldier!)
There is this notion out there that all that is needed for us to move beyond this violence-based, sickly kaleidoscopic, dizzyingly endless merry-go-round we love so much is simple recognition/realization of some kind, a bright & shining one-size-fits-all cosmic truth, a magical story that touches our hearts and changes us permanently inside forever, a silver bullet of sorts, “If we could only find it and get it out there to everyone!”
Wouldn’t that be nice? One grand hero, or even lots of lesser ones, living fearlessly devoted to breaking down illusions, slaying all manner of dragons and beasts within themselves and therefore able to bring back the gold within and distribute it outward to save us all?
Nobody wants to do the work! Everybody wants to be saved by a hero. “Bring me the silver bullet! Bring me my gold on a shiny platter!” This is the reality of our condition, is it not?
I would agree that a sufficient number of Charles-esque heroes running around the planet would likely trigger some kind of groundswell toward, at the very least, a less-violent way of living amongst each other. But folks like this are of minuscule quantity and they are generally ignored, rejected and even shunned for the light they bring because, well, sorry about this but, cockroaches flee into the corners when this light goes on.
And if the dummy doesn’t turn it off quick, they will come out of the corners and swarm over you until you do turn it off. This is because the message of the hero is one we don’t want to hear. There is no Great Truth on a golden platter. The hero slays the beast then brings us a mirror and a blade and demands that each of us disconnect from the tyranny of social norms, stand in front of the mirror and deconstruct ourselves, piece by piece, until nothing remains but that which cannot be cut away.
Yuck! This is frightening, painful, socially alienating, seemingly endless work that, for me anyway, takes up most of a lifetime. Who the hell wants to do it? Pretty much nobody and I don’t blame them. If I had known what I was getting into way back in my 27th year, I would never have started.
I would have laid on the couch in front of a TV waiting for a hero to tell me a magic story too.
Thank you Charles sharing your enlightening views and your own struggle as well. I’m sure it will lead to valuable output simply because your source has proven to improve you year by year. Keeping the balance AND bringing razor-sharp pictures of todays situation is what we all need! I will push you on my blog’s wherever I can! Wishing you many enlightened moments!
I am late to the party here, Charles, but I did want to address one thing that was brought up here. I am excited to see your vision/version of a more beautiful Earth, and I also want to point you to another one that is out there that feels quite real to me for reasons which I will explain. This world is in middle earth and the hollow earth as written about by Aurelia Louise Jones and Dianne Robbins. You mentioned this concept as one that is an obviously wrong-headed idea, yet I wonder if you have ever read these books. I actually had the same reaction as you expressed here when I first heard about it. But the reason I can’t deny them is that I have personally experienced these worlds in the dream-state, and even wrote clearly about them in a dream journal I kept for almost two years, long before I read the books. The beauty of these worlds and the wisdom conveyed in these books are even greater than the Narnia books that kept me going in my childhood and gave me hope. If you haven’t read them yet, I would encourage you to do so, and then please give me your honest opinion of what you find there, as I really do respect your perspective!