It also blew my mind over and over, which led me to then listen to his magnum opus and his first major book, published in 2007, The Ascent of Humanity, a more hefty book that covers the history of consciousness and humanity from prokaryotes to the present. So a couple of things, does that become one more or is there a danger that, that becomes one more element of separation? And also your, your even as I listened to you, I could, I could see myself think like, Oh, so to be successful in the world, you need to follow those synchronistic moments. And it spreads in a con in a way that we rational mind can understand, but it could be that as you’re doing this, someone across the world is doing the same, pretty much the same idea, because it’s like, it’s an idea whose time has come and by doing it, it’s like, you’ve kind of crystallized this, this change in the world.

And the time for healing has come when the underlying wound or trauma that generates the protective, controlling behavior is healed. if we could only quantify and manipulate everything in the material and social world, we could engineer paradise. I wonder how much of this notion affected your attempts to discern your personal response to the pandemic and lockdowns in those early months of 2020 before you wrote the Coronation essay and established yourself as more of a Covid skeptic, at least in terms of seeing the world’s seeming over-reactions to the virus as part of a very long historic arc toward power seeking more power and control?Throughout the book, Eisenstein relates real-life stories showing how small, individual acts of courage, kindness, and self-trust can change our culture’s guiding narrative of separation, which, he shows, has generated the present planetary crisis. And as soon as I take down my walls, I become less secure, but the world hasn’t gotten there yet, so I’m not more secure. When we embrace that principle of change, we realize that there’s no person on earth who’s more powerful than any other person that all of our choices are significant. And I recognizing that you’re also somewhere in between these two things, like how, how do we, how do I I’ll make it very personal? My education, the media, and most of all the normality of the routines around me conspired to say, “Everything is fine.

One influence I can say that Chinese has had on my later work is that it helped me work more comfortably with paradox.I also have to credit psychedelic medicines for exposing the narrowness and artificiality of what I’d until then accepted as real. If you worked hard you could get good grades, get into a good college, go to grad school or follow some other professional path, and you would be happy. And if you don’t have that, then the kind of security that comes from money and power, that’s maybe the best substitute for that kind of belonging for that kind of comfort for that feeling of home, but no amount of it will ever be enough. By doing this, though, we attempt to borrow legitimacy from the very system we hope to subvert, and indirectly enhance its legitimacy by associating our own with its. So what do you do run twice as fast, but then comes a moment where maybe you get tired of building the tower, tired of running to the horizon and you stop.

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. I remember one description of Joe Rogan’s worldview as being literally open-minded, to the point that anyone could walk by and pour something in.

The shell of the old, though cracking, will probably stay intact for a few more years, but its demise is unstoppable now if only we stop holding it together. I see a clear progression in your last four books with each more or less leading naturally to the next. I first discovered him when a close friend of mine really wanted me to read sacred economics and, and I think he knew I had money issues. What, how powerful would you be if you were able to ride those synchronicities, if you had mastered the technology of being at just the right place at just the right time meeting, just the right person, those people who are really successful in the world is that because they are so organized and so together, or is it maybe sometimes because they were in the right place at the right time playing out a story that was written in advance.

He’s he’s like me, I’ll say in that he is thoughtful and has great ideas and also recognizes the challenges of living day to day, the, the ideas that he is committed to and that the challenges we have of, you know, closing that gap and recognizing that we come from a certain mentality and thought process and at the same time you know, kind of stretch and, and aspire to, to more so, Charles, I, I can’t say without further ado, cause that’s a lot of ado. Like I said, in that quote, it’s not that I’m advocating, never doing anything, but it’s to change the ground from which our doing arises so that we’re not trapped in old patterns. In the book I say that even if global warming is not a problem, I still want to end fracking, oil spills, tar sands excavation, and all the other ruin that accompanies fossil fuel extraction. The beauty lens makes it obvious that financial thinking, and quantitative thinking generally, is incapable of producing certain things that the human soul requires. The more beautiful world I inhabit accords with Charles Eisenstein’s vision: a world where we embrace the shadow and give it name so that the healing can begin.The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. I also reject the Spiral Dynamics thinking that locates our own civilization at a higher point of evolution than other cultures, and fancies itself to have “included and transcended” them. How do we bring invisible truths into visibility through the power of our word, through the power of our agreements, through the power of our stories, how do we invoke and summon lost parts of ourselves that if they were brought into integration, we would make different choices.