85 - Charles Eisenstein on Living in the Space Between Stories
This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.
Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:
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Our New, Better Life?
https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/7061-2/
Why I Am Afraid of Global Cooling
https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/why-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling/
Discussed:
“Participation begins with listening. And that listening is motivated by accepting that there’s something to listen TO. That there’s something that wants to happen. What wants to happen and how can we participate in that? How can we exercise our gifts in service to this larger thing?”
“Law, Medicine, Money, and Technology: those are the most powerful realms of ritual that we have.”
“I’m not a story fundamentalist. If I say the world is built from story, I also recognize that that itself is also a story. I look at the story of inter-being, for example, as really just the ideological layer of an organism that is far deeper than story.”
“There are many ways to know. And we’re conditioned by a story that says only the measurable is real. So we’re conditioned to give priority to ways of knowing that have to do with putting things in categories.”
“Progress as currently formulated is not real progress at all. We’re not getting ANY closer to the fulfillment of human potential. Well, aybe we are getting closer on one very narrow axis of development. But there is so much more to a fully expressed human being…and we’re moving away from it in a lot of ways.”
“The more empathic our participation, the better off we’ll be.”
“I think on some level, we all DO feel what all beings are feeling.”
“We have to be cognizant of the inevitable reduction that happens when we assign values to things…one way to translate the humble awareness of the limitations of quantified value is to design currencies that do not need to grow in order to survive.”
“Property is an agreement. It’s not an absolute objective thing…as much as libertarians would like it to be.”
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