My intuitions — my heart- and gut-based modes of understanding — have been cultivated by Eisenstein’s work. And there, that was another of a series of experiences that confirmed my sneaking suspicion that there was a lot more to life and reality than I’ve been told. I mean, one of the things I’ve tried to do is to say, to, to leaders of organizations, all in the same industry, let’s get together.

One of them is, is the power of the truth made visible, which comes from, I mean, there’s many ways to make hidden truths visible. 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.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. Charles Eisenstein is a cultural investigative journalist, questioning the perpetually unexamined assumptions of both conventional and counter-cultural thinking. 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. 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.

The Ascent of Humanity easily ranks with the works of such giants of our age as David Bohm, Julian Jaynes, Jean Gebser, Alfred North Whitehead…. Thirdly, I and many other people who have spent time in less “developed” places on earth have witnessed levels of well-being and happiness seldom seen in modern society. 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.I have not read the book, but from what I’ve seen of the Great Reset, I think it is a mix of good and bad ideas, or at least some of the ideas come from a good motivation. Some key influences were Wendell Berry, Ilya Prigogine, Lewis Mumford, Marshall Sahlins, David Bohm, Helena Nordberg-Hodge, Lynn Margulis… I could name some others, but really this is not primarily a scholarly book, and the list of influences won’t help much to understand it. Not very surprising - the way that these gateways to conspiracy work is that they broadly embrace the feeling of the paranoid mindset and they casually point to other influencers who preach the harder stuff, but they make few claims of their own. I then read his most popular book, published in 2013, and one that may have the best title of any book ever written: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.

The outward structures of misery yet remain, in society, in our selves, but a new self-world-story has formed within both. The dream is that if we could only control every atom in the world, in our own bodies and brains, etc. So there’s always, always a cardigan at the threshold of evolution that needs to be placated by with a gift, with a sacrifice, you know, by letting go of something of who I have been. Could you describe briefly, cause I want to go into it in a lot more detail, but what are these two stories of life, the story of separation and the story of intervene? The chapter “cynicism” of this book is all you need to read: after a chapter of standard new-age handwaving, Charles Eisenstein tries to address cynicism, and he does so in a way summarizes the modern conspiracy mindset.You start seeing parallels between “bullying” and “skepticism” and you start accepting all tinfoil-hat theories because if they’re being suppressed they must be true. For example, in The Ascent of Humanity there is a section titled “The War on Germs,” in which I located conventional medicine within larger paradigms of conquest and offered quite specific critique of certain medical practices. The book that we’re going to be talking about is his most recent books, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.