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

by Charles Eisenstein

Like an animal, when a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life. So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. Here are a few examples: • Villages in Bangladesh where half the people have just one kidney, having sold the other in the black-market organ trade. Usually this is done to pay off debts. Here we see, literalized, the conversion of life into money that drives our economic system. • Prisons in China where prisoners must spend fourteen hours a day playing online video games to build up character experience points. The prison officials then sell these characters to teenagers in the West. Here we see, in extreme form, the disconnect between the physical and virtual worlds, the suffering and exploitation upon which our fantasies are built. • Old people in Japan whose relatives have no time to see them, so instead they receive visits from professional “relatives” who pretend to be family members. Here is a mirror to the dissolution of the bonds of community and family, to be replaced by money. Of course, all of these pale in comparison to the litany of horrors that punctuates history and continues, endemic, to this day. The wars, the genocide, the mass rapes, the sweatshops, the mines, the slavery. On close examination, these are no less absurd.

The year 2012 ended with a small but potent story-piercing event: the Sandy Hook massacre. By the numbers, it was a small tragedy: far more, and equally innocent, children died in U.S. drone strikes that year, or by hunger that week, than died at Sandy Hook. But Sandy Hook penetrated the defense mechanisms we use to maintain the fiction that the world is basically okay. No narrative could contain its utter senselessness and quell the realization of a deep and awful wrongness. We couldn’t help but map those murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto ourselves. For a moment, I imagine, we all felt the exact same thing. We were in touch with the simplicity of love and grief, a truth outside of story. Following that moment, people hurried to make sense of the event, subsuming it within a narrative about gun control, mental health, or the security of school buildings. No one believes deep down that these responses touch the heart of the matter. Sandy Hook is an anomalous data point that unravels the entire narrative—the world no longer makes sense. We struggle to explain what it means, but no explanation suffices. We may go on pretending that normal is still normal, but this is one of a series of “end time” events that is dismantling our culture’s mythology.

The science is beginning to confirm what we have intuitively known all along: we are greater than what we have been told. We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world. Our society runs in large part on the denial of that truth. Only by interposing ideological and systemic blinders between ourselves and the victims of industrial civilization can we bear to carry on. Few of us would personally rob a hungry three-year-old of his last crust or abduct his mother at gunpoint to work in a textile factory, but simply through our consumption habits and our participation in the economy, we do the equivalent every day.

Many of you might doubt that we live in a “sea of pain.” I feel pretty good right now myself. But I also carry a memory of a far more profound state of well-being, connectedness, and intensity of awareness that felt, at the time, like my birthright. Which state is normal? Could it be that we are bravely making the best of things?

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.

We seek our medicine according to the configuration of that wound. To judge someone for doing that would be like to condemn a baby for crying. To condemn what we see as selfish, greedy, egoic, or evil behavior and to seek to suppress it by force without addressing the underlying wound is futile: the pain will always find another expression. Herein lies a key realization of interbeing. It says, “I would do as you do, if I were you.” We are one.

Using this tactic, we might win the battle, but we will lose the war. Audre Lorde said it well: The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

In keeping with that, I must offer you my doubt and conflict along with my insight. Those spiritual truths—and I feel squeamish about that phrase—trigger me too, nearly as much, I daresay, as they trigger the most splenetic defender of scientific orthodoxy. The only difference is that my derision is turned inward.

The cynic mistakes his cynicism for realism. He wants us to discard the hopeful things that touch his wound, to settle for what is consistent with his lowered expectations. This, he says, is realistic. Ironically, it is in fact cynicism that is impractical. The naive person attempts what the cynic says is impossible, and sometimes succeeds.

Are you committing spiritual bypass? One way to tell whether your belief in oneness and its associated paradigms conceals an unhealed wound is whether the derision of the skeptic provokes outrage or personal defensiveness. If so, then something beyond a mere opinion is being threatened. Skeptic and believer are not so different, as both are using belief to shelter a wound. So, whether you feel indignant at my mention of UFOs, or feel indignant toward the skeptic’s doctrinaire rejection of them, I encourage you to reflect on where this emotion comes from. We want to see what is hidden inside us, so that we won’t blindly replicate it again and again in what we create.

That is why to live in the new story can be at times arduous and lonely. In particular, 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. If your life’s work does not contribute to the conversion of nature into products and relationships into services, you may often find that there isn’t much money to be made doing it.

In a way, it is insane—insofar as sanity is a socially constructed category that serves the maintenance of dominant narratives and power structures. If so, it is time to be insane together! It is time to violate consensus reality.

You might say I am preaching to the choir. Yes. But as a member of the choir myself, I am grateful for the wonderful preachers whose words have kept me here, kept me believing. Without them I would have quit long ago and found a job greasing the wheels of the world-devouring Machine. That is also why conferences, retreats, and communities for alternative culture are so important.

From this universe we must take, within it we must control, and onto it we must project our own designs, harnessing more and more force, applying that force with greater and greater precision, to become ultimately the Cartesian lords and possessors of nature.

For example, in the world of separation, if you want to change the world, stop global warming, or save the sea turtles, then it would be a waste of time to volunteer at a hospice, rescue a lost puppy, or give food to a homeless person. That old lady is going to die anyway. What does it matter if her passing is a little more comfortable? Maybe you should have spent those hours educating the young to imbue them with ecological awareness. To base our decisions on their calculable, measurable effects is itself part of the Story of Separation. We might call it instrumentalism, and it rests on the belief that our understanding of causality is complete—that we can know with reasonable certainty what the full effects are going to be. But this certainty is increasingly unjustified.

Winston, it is shown, is really no different from the Party in putting an abstract and unreachable goal ahead of any means. It is significant that the Brotherhood is phony, a fabrication of the Party; it is the Party. In the same way, only perhaps more subtly, the social or environmental crusader who sacrifices human values for the cause is no true revolutionary at all, but the opposite: a pillar of the system. We see again and again, within environmental organizations, within leftist political groups, the same bullying of underlings, the same power grabs, the same egoic rivalries as we see everywhere else. If these are played out in our organizations, how can we hope that they won’t be played out in the world we create, should we be victorious?

It isn’t simply about demonstrating one’s virtue by being egalitarian or inclusive. It is that who we are and how we relate affect what we create.

An excellent source by a prominent academic biologist is Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2011), by James Shapiro.

We have all those behaviors written into our dominant worldview and, therefore, into the institutions arising from it. Cut off from nature, cut off from community, financially insecure, alienated from our own bodies, immersed in scarcity, trapped in a tiny, separate self that hungers constantly for its lost beingness, we can do no other than to perpetuate the behavior and systems that cause climate change. Our response to the problem must touch on this fundamental level that we might call spirituality.

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One’s own actions are not enough—one must write a book that reaches millions. How quickly this turns into a competition over whose ideas get heard. How it invalidates the small, beautiful strivings of the bulk of humanity; invalidates, paradoxically, the very things that we must start doing en masse to sustain a livable planet.

The contradiction between small, personal acts of compassion and steps to save the environment is a straw man, a contrapositive rhetorical device constructed by the cynic to voice his wound of powerlessness. In truth, the habit of acting from love will naturally apply to all our relationships, expanding alongside our understanding. Acts of ecological or social healing, so long as they are in earnest and not secretly designed to establish an identity or prove oneself good, are just as senseless as the small, personal ones.

We think, “What if I’m just a fool? What if I don’t deserve such a blessing? What if humanity doesn’t deserve it? What if we missed our chance? What if something beyond my control happens to ruin it?” Indeed, the more beautiful the vision (whether for oneself or the world), the more painful the doubts that arise. The radiance of that which wants to be born illuminates the shadows, bringing them into the light of awareness that they may be healed.

The first step in creating change, then, is to receive a vision that feels true. The second step is to heal the wounds and doubts that that vision illuminates. Without doing that, we will be conflicted, simultaneously enacting both the new story and the old one that accompanies the wounds. The third step is to bow into service to that which wants to be born. This process is not linear. Usually, the vision comes more and more into focus as we heal the doubts that obscure it; that, in turn, allows us to enter more deeply into its service. Deeper service, in turn, brings up new dimensions of the vision along with deeper wounds. The path of service is a path of self-realization.

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. Many leaders today are weak, because they don’t really believe in what they profess.

The deeper our service to that which wants to be born, the more it is able to arrange the synchronistic encounters and fortuitous events that allow us to accomplish that which lies beyond our understanding of cause and effect. We might say that the primary “technology” of the Age of Reunion is service.

We offer our time, energy, skills, and lives as gifts, stepping into trust, letting go of the habit of looking first and foremost after one’s self. Only then can we fully align with the vision. From that alignment, a tremendous force is born. Our expanded selves are far more powerful and less fearful than the discrete, separate individual who, separate from the world, can only manipulate it by force, and looks with wariness and wonder at the amazing coincidences that line up as it lets go and plunges into service. Obviously, since these are not things that we know how to “make” happen, they happen as gifts, confirming the universal principle of the gift: that giving and receiving always come into balance in the end.

It should be no surprise then that as our dominant institutions collapse, our spirituality goes through a transition as well. It is under way already, as the long-buried esoteric core of mainstream religion emerges into mass consciousness.

To take a recent example, Eben Alexander’s account of his near-death experience in the recent best seller Proof of Heaven asserts that his experience must have happened independently of his brain, which was in a deep coma.

To this powerful critique, the spiritual folks offer an equally powerful rejoinder. “Without deep work on yourself, how will you avoid re-creating your own internalized oppression in all that you do?” So often we see the same abuses of power, the same organizational dysfunctions among social change activists as we do in the institutions they seek to change. If these activists were to emerge victorious, why would we expect the society they create to be any different? Unless we have done transformational work on ourselves, we will remain products of the very civilization we seek to transform.

That is why political activists and spiritual teachers are equally mistaken when the former say, “It is a frivolous, self-indulgent escape to focus on changing your beliefs around scarcity when the systemic compulsion toward real, life-and-death scarcity continues to oppress billions regardless of your beliefs and lifestyle choices,” and the latter say, “Just work on yourself, and the world will change around you. Don’t escape the real, personal issue by projecting the problem onto society, the political system, the corporations, etc.”

Today, our economic environment screams at us, “Scarcity!”; our political environment screams at us, “Us versus them”; our medical environment screams at us, “Be afraid!” Together, they keep us alone and scared to change.

What kind of people take refuge in sprawling suburbs? What kind of people work at jobs that satisfy no desire but the desire for security? What kind of people stand passively by while their nation prosecutes one unjust war after another? The answer is: fearful people. Alienated people. Wounded people. That’s why spiritual work is political, if it spreads love, connection, forgiveness, acceptance, and healing.

Don’t worry—I’m not going to pin my optimism on the hope that some miracle technology is going to save us. If it were up to technology to save us, it already would have. We have long possessed the technologies to live abundantly and sustainably on this planet, but we have used them to other ends. We could live in an earthly paradise using perfectly uncontroversial technologies: conservation, recycling, green design, solar energy, permaculture, biological wastewater treatment, bicycles, designing for reparability, durability, and reusability, and so on.3

It is quite natural to react defensively to the falling apart of the world, to cling to it all the more tightly. If you react emotionally to my aspersions on one of your sacred cows, it probably means that something beyond mere opinion is threatened. Perhaps you disagree with me about the efficacy of acupuncture or the authenticity of crop circles. Is it just an intellectual disagreement, or are you a little bit angry? What emotionally tinged judgments accompany the disagreement? That I am a simpleminded dupe? That I am ignorant of basic science? That I have neglected to examine contrary evidence that would spoil my wishful thinking? That my beliefs are outrageous, contemptible, or shameful? Do you justify the contempt with reasoning like “These beliefs give people false hope and distract them from solutions that might actually work”? If so, is that really why you are mad, or is it something else? I have found that when I react emotionally to an idea that contradicts my beliefs, usually it is because it threatens my story of the world or my story of self, creating a kind of existential unease. I feel a sense of violation.