The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (Sacred Activism): 2

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This book takes a massive, complex and frankly heartbreaking subject and breaks it down into digestible and most importantly uplifting chunks. 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. Some things may not make sense right now to change, but maybe you’ll recognize that the time is ripe to plant a garden, or start a homeschool co-op or babysitting co-op or play group, or to replace on-screen entertainment with regular musical gatherings with friends. Like these things are all steeply on the rise, but there’s no, there’s no like, Oh my God, we’ve got to change our entire way of life to do something about this.

Why do you focus on beauty as such an important aspect of life, and of what’s missing in our modern world, with its “uglification” and industrialization of so much around us? Creative powers, with love at their core, are becoming available to us that make many of the old conversations obsolete. 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. This is a revolutionary and interactive book—in the sense that it inspires the reader to think out of the ordinary. It is beautiful because Charles Eisenstein has the courage to be vulnerable and it is in acknowledging our vulnerability that we will realize our greater humanity.If we as a society hold those activities as worthy, then no one will believe themselves to be above such things. He wants you to overcorrect for your cynicism by letting a little conspiracy into your mind as a treat. 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.

As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn’t matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. Events are happening so quickly that it doesn’t make sense to spend a year or two writing a book, which is then published the year after that. Charles argues that the negative direction that this planet and our species is heading can be traced back to one root cause: the stories that we live by that we use to answer the questions "why am I here? In a sense, the technology is not the substance itself, it is the set of practices that includes it.I had no ambition whatever to become a success, build my resume, go to graduate school, or anything like that. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but, but they especially happen at moments where you’ve let go of being in control of things. 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. 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. Sometimes I feel nostalgic for the cultural mythology of my youth, a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Super Bowl was important, in which America was bringing democracy to the world, in which the doctor could fix you, in which science was going to make life better and better, and they just put a man on the moon.

The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. I also have to credit psychedelic medicines for exposing the narrowness and artificiality of what I’d until then accepted as real.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. The overarching theme of all my work is the transition in civilization’s defining mythology, from a story of separation to a story of interbeing.