The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism Book 2)

by Charles Eisenstein

We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day. And as my horizons broadened, I knew that millions were not supposed to be starving, that nuclear weapons were not supposed to be hanging over our heads, that the rainforests were not supposed to be shrinking, or the fish dying, or the condors and eagles disappearing. I could not accept the way the dominant narrative of my culture handled these things: as fragmentary problems to be solved, as unfortunate facts of life to be regretted, or as unmentionable taboo subjects to be simply ignored.

Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.

seeing human cultural evolution as a story of growth, followed by crisis, followed by breakdown, followed by a renaissance:

On the collective level the same is true. As we awaken to the interconnectedness of all our systems, we see that we cannot change, for example, our energy technologies without changing the economic system that supports them. We learn as well that all of our external institutions reflect our basic perceptions of the world, our invisible ideologies and belief systems. In that sense, we can say that the ecological crisis—like all our crises—is a spiritual crisis. By that I mean it goes all the way to the bottom, encompassing all aspects of our humanity.

For the religious, to be sacred is to be otherworldly; the soul is separate from the body, and God lives high above the earth. Despite their superficial opposition, science and religion have agreed: the sacred is not of this world.

The harnessing of fossil fuels, the miracle of chemicals to transform agriculture, the methods of social engineering and political science to create a more rational and just society—each has fallen far short of its promise, and brought unanticipated consequences that, together, threaten civilization.

We once thought economists would fix poverty, political scientists would fix social injustice, chemists and biologists would fix environmental problems, the power of reason would prevail and we would adopt sane policies.

In the case of the Holocaust, the explanation of evil obscures the mass participation of ordinary people—people like you and me.

Who could have foreseen, two generations ago when the story of progress was strong, that the twenty-first century would be a time of school massacres, of rampant obesity, of growing indebtedness, of pervasive insecurity, of intensifying concentration of wealth, of unabated world hunger, and of environmental degradation that threatens civilization? The world was supposed to be getting better. We were supposed to be becoming wealthier, more enlightened. Society was supposed to be advancing.

what we do to another, we do to ourselves.

How much of our dysfunctional, consumptive behavior is simply a futile attempt to run away from a pain that is in fact everywhere? Running from one purchase to another, one addictive fix to the next, a new car, a new cause, a new spiritual idea, a new self-help book, a bigger number in the bank account, the next news story, we gain each time a brief respite from feeling pain. The wound at its source never vanishes though. In the absence of distraction—those moments of what we call “boredom”—we can feel its discomfort.

Advertisers play on this all the time, selling sports cars as a substitute for freedom, junk food and soda as a substitute for excitement, “brands” as a substitute for social identity, and pretty much everything as a substitute for sex, itself a proxy for the intimacy that is so lacking in modern life. We might also see sports hero worship as a substitute for the expression of one’s own greatness, amusement parks as a substitute for the transcending of boundaries, pornography as a substitute for self-love, and overeating as a substitute for connection or the feeling of being present.

If I appeal to Dr. Eben Alexander’s status as a professor of neurosurgery to get you to believe in extrasomatic near-death experiences, then implicitly I am affirming that you should trust that status generally, along with the edifice of academic science surrounding it.1 But generally, those of that status and of that edifice deny his arguments.

Remember this when you encounter a harsh, cynical critic (whether inside yourself or outside). If you remember that the cynicism comes from a wound, you might be able to respond in a way that addresses that wound. I can’t tell you in advance exactly how to respond. That wisdom comes directly from hearing with compassionate ears and being present to the hurting.

Absent conclusive evidence, you will have to decide on some other basis, such as “Which story is most aligned with who you truly are, and who you truly want to be?” “Which story gives you the most joy?” “From which story are you most effective as an agent of change?” To make such a choice on something other than evidence and reason is already a huge departure from the Story of Separation and its objective universe.

the money system is not aligned with the Story of Interbeing, enforcing instead competition, scarcity, alienation from nature, dissolution of community, and the endless, nonreciprocal exploitation of the planet.

Then there is psychological force, a term that is more than mere metaphor. It refers to the leveraging of motivations tied to basic security, in particular the desire to be accepted by the group and by the parent. Our training in the use of psychological force begins in childhood with conditional approval and rejection by the parent, which taps into perhaps the deepest fear of any young mammal: abandonment by the mother. A baby mammal left alone too long will cry piteously for its mother, attracting every predator within earshot—a risk preferable to the certain death of separation from the nursing mother.

Control breeds its own necessity. So, when we treat land with heavy pesticides, the superweeds and superbugs that emerge require new and even stronger doses of pesticides. When someone goes on a diet and attempts to control her urge to eat, at some point the pent-up desire explodes outward as a binge, prompting further attempts to control herself. And when human beings are boxed in, surveilled, scheduled, assigned, classed, and compelled, they rebel in all kinds of ways, sometimes irrational or even

Moreover, the study of ecology is teaching us that species evolve not only to serve their own genetic self-interest (itself hard to define when organisms can reengineer their own genes), but that they also evolve to serve the needs of other species and the whole. This would not have been surprising to cultures who were close to nature, who knew that each species had a unique and necessary gift, but science has come to understand that only in the last generation: to understand, for instance, that if one species goes extinct the whole ecosystem is just that much more fragile. It is not that the rest are better off, absent a competitor. The interest of each is the interest of all.

“Certainly, inclusivity, exposing unconscious racism and classism, giving voice to the marginalized, nonviolent communication, deep listening skills, and so forth are all worthy goals, but we are talking about the survival of our species here. We need to achieve CO2 reduction by whatever means necessary. These other things can come later. None will matter if we don’t stop the six or eight degree temperature rise that our present course entails. Therefore, to devote oneself to these things, or indeed to most social issues, is a bit frivolous.”

I am a bit wary of the conventional narrative about global warming, in which reducing CO2 and other greenhouse emissions is the top environmental priority. This narrative lends itself too easily to centralized solutions and the mentality of maximizing (or minimizing) a number. It subordinates all the small, local things we need to do to create a more beautiful world to a single cause for which all else must be sacrificed. This is the mentality of war, in which an all-important end trumps any compunctions about the means and justifies any sacrifice.

in the language of “spirituality,” hope implies a rejection of the present moment, or perhaps a taint of doubt eroding the creative power of one’s intentions.

choice is only small through the eyes of separation. From the perspective of interbeing, your choice is no more or no less important than any of the president’s. The logic of Separation traps us in a paradox. The world can change only if billions of people make different choices in their lives, but individually, none of these choices makes a difference. The things that make a difference make no difference. What if I do it, and no one else does?

Even if no one ever finds out about your act of compassion, even if the only visible witness is a dying person, the effect is no less than if someone makes a feature documentary about it.

When my elder two children were young I was for several years a stay-at-home dad, immersed in a world of diapers and groceries while trying to write my first book. I often felt terribly frustrated, torturing myself with thoughts like “I have such important things to share with the world, and here I am changing diapers and cooking all day.” These thoughts distracted me from the gift at hand and made me less present with my children. I did not understand that those moments when I gave in to my situation, put down my writing, and fully engaged my children had just as powerful an effect on the universe as any book I would write. We don’t always have the eyes to see it, but everything has its karmic effect, or as the Western religions say, God sees everything.

We have caught a glimpse of our destination, the destination that hope foretells, but we have no idea how to get there. We walk an invisible path with no map and cannot see where any turning will lead.

You may have noticed that very generous people themselves attract more gifts. Therefore, if we are giving our lives in service, we will experience more of these fortuitous events.

Many pragmatic steps, each of which we know how to do, add up to something we did not.

We will not abandon reason in favor of feeling, telecommunications in favor of hugging, symbolic language in favor of song, or money in favor of gift.

it is not ours to decide what is true or possible. Some teachings ask us to start by creating a vision, but this is mistaken; the proper way to start is to receive a vision.

The first step in creating change, then, is to receive a vision that feels true.

To be fully in service to something one has experienced as real is the essence of leadership in a nonhierarchical age. A leader is the holder of a story, someone whose experience of its reality is deep enough so that she can hold the belief on behalf of others.

This whole process of cocreating change starts not with faith but with honesty. We must first catch a glimpse of something that we recognize as real. One kind of honesty is to recognize our delusions and see what is in front of our faces. This can be painful.

concedes that the desolate materialism offered by science is essentially correct: that sacredness, purpose, and sentience cannot inhere in matter itself, cannot be found among the generic subatomic building blocks of the material world. These things, says spirituality, reside instead in another, nonmaterial realm, the realm of spirit.

Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system? If so, then we are misguided if we appeal to a nonmaterial spiritual realm for our salvation from the prison of materiality.

Even though science as we know it is central to the centuries-long or millennia-long program to master nature, even though its approach to gathering knowledge is the very model of “othering” nature and making the world into an object, scientifically oriented people are often fervent environmentalists and supporters of civil rights, equality for gay people, and other compassionate positions. This exemplifies a general principle: our entry into the new story is uneven. In one area of life or thought we may have transcended all vestiges of separation, while being completely blind to it in another.

when we become aware of how the school system is a conditioning agent to instill in children obedience to authority, passivity, and tolerance to tedium for the sake of external rewards, we begin to question school performance as a metric of well-being. Maybe a healthy child is one who resists schooling and standardization, not one who excels at it. Then

one of the hallmarks of the old story is the glorification of change, of novelty, of constantly discarding the old in favor of something new and better, the latest technological marvel in an endless saga of progress that devalues old relationships, knowledge, and traditions. Fixation on the new can also become a kind of escapism that sees existing problems as inconsequential, since we will leave them behind when we enter the “new” world.

we weren’t ready to hear about union, connectedness, interdependency, interbeing. We thought the answer was more control, more technology, more logic, a better-engineered society of rational ethics, more control over matter, nature, and human nature.

On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the “fight” against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet.

Scarcity of time is built in to the Story of Science that seeks to measure all things, and thereby renders all things finite.

In a world of material scarcity, you can never “afford” to rest at ease. This is more than a mere belief or perception: money as it exists today is not, as some teachings claim, “just energy”; at least it is not a neutral energy. It is always in short supply. When money is created as interest-bearing debt as ours is, then always and necessarily there will be more debt than there is money. Our systems mirror our collective perceptions.

Gifts in various forms create bonds, because a gift creates gratitude: the desire to give in return or to give forward. A money transaction, in contrast, is over and done with once goods and cash have changed hands. Each party goes separate ways.

drive past the strip malls and big box stores, the parking lots and auto dealerships, office buildings and subdevelopments, each building a model of cost-efficiency, and I marvel, “After five thousand years of architectural development, we’ve ended up with this?” Here we see the physical expression of the ideology of science: Only the measurable is real. We have maximized our production of the measurable—the square feet, the productivity per labor unit—at the expense of everything qualitative: sacredness, intimacy, love, beauty, and play.

the time to do is when you know what to do. When you don’t know what to do, and act anyway, you are probably acting out of habit.

All things return to their root. Returning to the root, there is stillness. In stillness, true purpose returns. This is what is real. Knowing the real, there is clarity. Not knowing the real, foolish action brings disaster.

While I’m at it, I’d like also to question whether “consciousness” is a unitary phenomenon, something we can essentialize without distortion. I think when we try, we enter dangerous territory, the territory of “some people are more conscious than others.” The toxic consequences of that kind of elitism are all too plain. Or, if all people are equally conscious, then it becomes “Humans have it but animals don’t,” and soon we are justifying factory-style animal barns. Or, if animals have it too, then it becomes “Animals with a central nervous system have it, and plants don’t,” and soon we are justifying monocrop farming and the treatment of trees as things. Or if plants have it too, then what about water and mountains? Enough of that. What if “consciousness” is one name we give to many things? What if, like God or enlightenment, our naming of it always leaves part of it out—the very part we most need to see? As Lao Tzu said, “A name that can be named is not the true name.”

it is Western civilization that is now taking over the world, its science, technology, medicine, agriculture, political forms, and economics pushing all alternatives to the margins.

forgotten social and political technologies: consensus-based decision making, nonhierarchical organization, direct democracy, restorative justice, and nonviolent communication,

the things we neglect in the rush and press of modernity: qualities of spontaneity, patience, slowness, sensuality, and play.