Welcome to our collection of quotes by Charles Eisenstein. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Charles Eisenstein
Charles Eisenstein (born 1967) is an American public speaker and author. His work covers a wide range of topics, including the history of human civilization, economics, spirituality, and the ecology movement. Key themes explored include anti-consumerism, interdependence, and how myth and narrative influence culture. According to Eisenstein, global culture is immersed in a destructive "story of separation", and one of the main goals of his work is to present an alternative "story of interbeing". Much of his work draws on ideas from Eastern philosophy and the spiritual teachings of various indigenous peoples. Eisenstein has been involved in the Occupy, New Economy, and permaculture movements. His work has also been popular with countercultural and New Age audiences. An advocate of the gift economy, he makes much of his work available for free on his website.
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.
Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun.
To put it in more shocking terms, it doesn't matter if the skeptics are right or not, because the assumptions on which the debate is based are already enough to doom us to a dystopian future.
We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.
We must remember that purposive change is possible beyond what we direct ourselves. We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting.
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.
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.
The radiance of that which wants to be born illuminates the shadows, bringing them into the light of awareness that they may be healed.
Joint consumption doesn't create intimacy.
If everyone focused their love, care, and commitment to protecting and regenerating their local places, while respecting the local places of others, then a side effect would be the resolution of the climate crisis.
When we chop nature into bits in an attempt to understand it, we lose sight of the relationships among those bits. But ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.
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.
The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.
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.
The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money.
We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.
The primary method by which governments increase their control is by creating fear.
A revolution that leaves our conceptualization of self and world intact cannot bring other than temporary, superficial change. Only a much deeper revolution, a reconceiving of who we are, can reverse the crises of our age.
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?
For a machine to run smoothly and predictably,
its parts must be standard and hence replaceable,
features which contribute, respectively,
to modern depersonalization and anxiety.
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.
The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don't have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn't a global 911 to call.
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.
Non-inflationary economic growth -- an increase in the production of goods and services -- is structurally necessary for the current money system to exist. That is what drives the relentless conversion of life into money.
We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.
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.
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.
The power of attention is much greater than the force of self-restraint.
Trust your intuition and be guided by love.
I would like to propose that the reason our actions have been so manifestly unsuccessful in steering the world away from its present collision course is that we have not, generally speaking, been basing them on any true understanding.
When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.
A miracle is an invitation into a new story.
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.
The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it.
Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a time.
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.
The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable.
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.
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.
True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary.
How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.