Charles Eisenstein
We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.Collection: Agency
We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.Collection: Beautiful
How do we change the world? Change the story.Collection: Stories
We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.Collection: Greater
We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.Collection: New Relationship
An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me, too.Collection: Love
Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%.Collection: Pain
When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.Collection: War
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?Collection: Healing
We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overly large houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness; media surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In the ubiquitous world of money, we hunger for all that is intimate, personal and unique.Collection: Motivational
We have to create conditions where people feel safe to feel and to care. That goes against a lot of our programming about how to make something change in the world. Sometimes you can pressure people into changing, you can force them, but the powers-that-be have more force than we do. I don't think we're going to win in a contest of force. I think we need to induce a change of heart. The narrative of "us versus them" is ultimately part of the problem. Traditional activism, which is about overcoming the latest bad guy, isn't deep enough. It just brings us another version of the same.Collection: Heart
Trust your intuition and be guided by love.Collection: Intuition
Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a timeCollection: Choices
I think most kids have a sense that it's not supposed to be this way. You're not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don't have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love.Collection: Monday
Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.Collection: Attitude
The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.Collection: Community
Ultimately, work on self is inseperable from work in the world. Each mirrors the other; each is a vehicle for the other. When we change ourselves, our values and actions change as well. When we do work in the world, internal issues arise that we must face or be rendered ineffective.Collection: Mirrors
Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Procrastination
The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.Collection: Wall
How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.Collection: Beautiful
True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary.Collection: Health
When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Such is the life of the slave—one whose actions are compelled by threat to survival. Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time.Collection: Survival
No one's ever completely broken. It's just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.Collection: Grief
More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture’s relationship to nature.Collection: Agriculture
When you understand that everything happening in the world mirrors something that's happening in yourself, then you can work on the self by working on the external manifestation of that thing in the world. And in fact, there may be no other way. You can sit in meditation for a long time and be blind to huge wounds in yourself, and it's only when you're engaging with the world that the wounds become visible, externalized.Collection: Long
You could ask: Why are people attracted to narratives that justify the terrible things that we're doing to the planet? Why are people attracted to narratives of control and fear and hunting down the terrorists, and this uncaring attitude toward nature? These come from what I call the perceptions of separation and the experience of separation, the experience of alienation, the experience of scarcity and anxiety and competition, and a world in which everybody is out for themselves and nobody cares.Collection: Attitude
Are the problems of the world caused by bad people who need to be crushed? Or do people do bad things when they are in a certain situation? If it is the latter, then we can go around crushing the villains for another thousand years and nothing will change.Collection: Crush
The cynic thinks that he is being practical and that the hopeful person is not. It is actually the other way around. Cynicism is paralyzing, while the naïve person tries what the cynic says is impossible and sometimes succeeds.Collection: Thinking
The present convergence of crises - in money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, the environment, and more - is a birth crisis, expelling us from the old world into a new.Collection: Water
I can't give a formula for how to spread joy, but I know that the source of the joy is one's own joy, and that that is not distinct from pleasure and fulfillment of desires. So I ask: What makes me feel alive? What is the expression of my inner wild? What would really feel good? What if what makes me feel alive leads me toward the deeper joys, which are found in generosity and service, in creating things that are beautiful to me? Maybe the world needs more of that. How many petroleum company executives are doing their work because it's beautiful to them? Not very many, I bet.Collection: Beautiful
The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it.Collection: Doing What You Love
The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable.Collection: Corrupt Power
We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.Collection: Ego
Community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors for anything. You can just pay someone to do it.Collection: Independent
Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.Collection: Earth
I'll start with where we are right now. The map that I'll use is this birthing process, this kind of profound transition that we're going through, where the old narratives, the old story, the old mythology is wearing thin, beginning to fall apart. And as it does so, people hold on to it even more tightly. They haven't let go and won't let go until it becomes simply impossible to hold on to it anymore. And we're nearing that time, but not yet. Right now you can still pretend everything's normal, even though it's greatly hollowed out.Collection: Letting Go
Traditional spirituality often made pleasure, joy, good feelings. the things to overcome. It said you couldn't just indulge in your desires; that would be selfish. Anyone who has been in a spiritual community recognizes the dangers of this kind of joyless spirituality, where everything is somber and heavy and serious. We recognize that as kind of a trap, a false path.Collection: Spiritual
A woman recently told me a story about her descent into chronic fatigue. She was sleeping sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and feeling more tired when she woke up than when she went to bed. She really wanted to go to a workshop and she went anyway. And when she was there, she felt much less tired. So she decided, "Maybe if I continue to follow what I really want to do at all times, I will feel less tired." This was her spiritual practice - - to only do the things that she wanted to, and to not make choices based on anything else. That is an embracing of pleasure, of joy, of good feelings.Collection: Spiritual
Sometimes people will have a heart attack or some devastating personal loss, and after that, their political views change completely, and their behavior changes completely. It's not because somebody persuaded them to look at the graph on CO2 and temperature, and they finally saw the evidence and were persuaded. Something else changed that allowed them to see and to hear. What is that something else? How can we cultivate that in people without them having to go through a heart attack? The interpersonal things we do change the substructure of our systems. They are political.Collection: Heart
Enlightenment is a group activity.Collection: Enlightenment
Real change doesn't come without crisis. Childbirth doesn't come without crisis. I think that's happening with humanity now. Our growth has generated multiple crises...and these are the contractions that are propelling us into a new world, whether we like it or not, but I think we're going to like it.Collection: Love
When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.Collection: Crazy
The primary method by which governments increase their control is by creating fear.Collection: Creating
Narratives that were taken for granted when I was a kid are still there, but they don't have the same depth and fervor anymore. Even the makers of the propaganda don't fully believe the propaganda. The surface structures are more frozen than they ever were, but the core is hollowing out, and it's becoming very fragile. People don't believe in the system anymore. But they're still going along with it because, one, they don't know what else is possible, they don't even know anything else is possible. Secondly, everybody else is doing it. So they go through the motions.Collection: Believe
We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption - anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Healing
Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.Collection: Stories
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. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.Collection: Turtles
You can't have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other.Collection: Community