Charles Eisenstein

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?

I am saying that there is a time to do, and a time not to do, and that when we are slave to the habit of doing we are unable to distinguish between them.

It is the cry of the separate self, __hat about me?_ As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn__ matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature__ gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart__ desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature__ gifts, to use them well.

One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.

Utopia is a collective shift of perception away. Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment.

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby__ face, and in the adult__ face behind the mask. We find it in each other__ eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death.

When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.