Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve conducted over 390 of them by now and if you’d like to look at previous ones go to batgap.com and go under the past interviews menu where you’ll find all the previous ones archived and organized in four or five different ways. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners and so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it there’s a donate button on the site. My guest today is Charles Eisenstein. Charles is a speaker and writer focusing on themes of human culture and identity. He is the author of several books, most recently “Sacred Economics” and “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.” His background includes a degree in mathematics and philosophy from Yale, a decade in Taiwan as a translator and stints as a college instructor, a yoga teacher and a construction worker. He currently writes and speaks full-time, and he lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and four children. And that little introduction doesn’t really explain why I have Charles on the show. So let me say a couple things and as we get into our conversation it’ll be very clear why I have Charles on the show. You’ve often heard me suggest that spiritual development is not in any way divorced from the real world and the problems that beset us in our world, both individually and as a society, and that the various problems such as global warming, economic problems, political problems, health problems, all the things that humanity confronts are symptomatic of the consciousness of the individuals that make up the world, just as let’s say the the color of a forest if you flew over it would be symptomatic of the healthiness of the individual trees in the forest. It might be gray, it might be green, depending upon the overall health of the trees. So I find that Charles thinks along similar lines and at least I hope I understand him to be doing that if I understood him correctly, and he does so very eloquently and very deeply. And I’ve just finished reading his book or nearly finished reading his book, “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible,” and he delves you know really clearly and deeply into a number of points that relate to what I’ve just said. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Charles and I think we’re going to cover a wide range of topics related to what I just said. So how did I do Charles? Did I do justice at all to you know where you’re coming from?
Charles: I don’t know. I always feel a little bit embarrassed about the official bio. I’ve been trying to erase it from the internet, but I mean what does it really tell you? You know like the whole thing about introducing myself to people I don’t know. Like normally you say you only say the good things about yourself, you know, but like that’s not actually even honest. But if I tell the bad things about myself that’s a little bit you know too much information and not an appropriate boundary, so it’s kind of weird.
Rick: Charles used to take candy from babies because he knew it wasn’t good for the babies and but it made them cry and we can go into things like that. Well let’s just for the sake of people getting to know a little bit better who you are and what your background is. I know that you know you mentioned that you’re a very sensitive child, which is often characteristic of people who later get interested in spirituality. You got bullied in school and that had a big impact on you. Give us your background. I mean just you know what five-minute background, what led you to where you are now and the way you see things.
Charles: Hmm, my background is not actually that unusual. I’m not, I haven’t done anything especially heroic. You know I don’t have any really dramatic story and I was saying it’s nothing special actually, which I think is a very good sign because if it were only the very unusual special people who were resisting and trying to transform the deep stories that run our culture that would be bad news if it’s only the special people. But like actually I’m not going to say I’m an ordinary person but I’m not like that unusual or that extraordinary either.
Rick: Well you know the subtitle of this show is “Interviews with Ordinary Spiritually Awakening People” and the title of the show “Buddha the Gas Pump” the implication is that in this day and age all kinds of people are waking up and it’s likely that you’ll be encountering a Buddha you know at the gas pump, some guy who is living an ordinary life or some girl or woman is living an ordinary life appears ordinary but has got something really interesting going on inside.
Charles: Yeah yeah I think that’s a really accurate kind of depiction of our times whereas maybe 50 or 100 years ago it was only profound visionaries that saw through the illusion of our civilization but now everybody’s waking up to it. So you know there I was a kid, stable home, loving parents, you know good school as far as that goes and I still maybe because of the sensitivity I still felt a very intense presence of a wrongness in the world that I couldn’t identify but it was obvious enough to prevent me from fully going along with the program. So I kind of limped through childhood and adolescence kind of half in half out doing just enough to get by. You know went to an elite university but didn’t really apply myself you know and maybe there was a voice that said well there’s something wrong with you for doing that you’re lazy you’re not motivated what’s wrong with you for not complying with the instruction set of the system but from another perspective there’s something right with you and anybody who is listening to this if you were procrastinating or if you’re lazy that may not be a problem if that’s your unconscious way of resisting participation in something that is not really what you want to participate in and that’s happening to a lot of people because the kind of overarching story of our civilization that says here’s where we’re going here’s how to participate in it here’s how to be human. That story is falling apart and a lot of people but there’s a lot of pressure to conform to it but then there’s this inner kind of rebellion this soul rebellion against it so we’re kind of a lot of people are in that place half in half out resisting unconsciously with addictions and or something like that and so I think that my story is really many many people’s story and more and more so as the instruction set becomes less and less relevant.
Rick: Yeah you were born in 1967 which was the summer of love first time I took LSD and the whole things were going wild that summer the Beatles came out with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Jefferson Airplane came out with Surrealistic Pillow and the Haight-Ashbury thing was at its height and people then were saying some of the same things you just said that you know the old system isn’t working the world is falling apart I’m gonna tune in, turn on and drop out if I got those in the right order but now here we are people felt like well it didn’t happen you know it didn’t change and the world is getting worse and worse. I mean how do you kind of reflect on people’s expectations back then vis-a-vis you know what’s actually panned out.
Charles: Yeah most of those people became lawyers and dentists. But so what they learned is that I mean they were seeing something real they were seeing I mean this is what I call the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible they were seeing something real but what they didn’t realize is that they were carrying a lot of baggage a lot of wounds a lot of habits of the old story so when they went to make their perfect little societies and their communes and and all of their other visionary projects the hidden baggage of the old story came with them and then came out to the surface and had to be dealt with and so they you know it’s like you get I mean LSD is kind of like that you know you get transported to a place but then after it’s over I can get a glimpse of something and in that moment you know that you’re seeing something profound but then it’s over you’re back to who you were and like yeah you could try to take it again and again but eventually you realize that the only way to get to that place is not to be picked up and put there but to walk there and to try to traverse the entire territory in between and so that’s what we’ve been doing on a cultural level after this magnificent glimpse of hippie planet you know what the world could be then we realize you know there’s a lot of stuff to work through to get up there. But we have an advantage today like yeah I am saying some of the same things that were said in the 60s but the advantage we have today is the 60s the advantage we have today is that we’re standing on the shoulders of the people who tried and failed to create the world that we want to live in but we can learn from their wisdom and they’ve also created kind of an energetic template that makes like when they were telling their parents about this stuff it was like they were aliens from another planet like there was no possible way for their parents, for the society to even understand what they were talking about. That’s not true today. Like my parents were born before the hippies I mean they were before baby boomers you know they were born like during World War two or before but they you know still heard about it an awful lot and and so these concepts are not foreign to them so I think that we are making progress toward a collective enlightenment but it’s yeah it’s not like all of a sudden it happens.
Rick: No, things never do either individually or collectively you know.
Charles: You get a glimpse all of a sudden but there’s still the stuff to work through.
Rick: Yeah, one thing I heard you say I listened to quite a few hours of your podcast in addition to reading your book and I especially like the ones with Rupert Sheldrake and one of the things I heard you say was that when things are about to collapse they become exaggerated you know on our current political, these were made before the recent presidential election you predicted correctly that Trump was going to win and you kind of like saw that as a indication that things are really coming to a head because of the sort of exaggeration of certain qualities that they don’t have a place in a more enlightened world. You want to reflect on that a little bit?
Charles: Yeah, like so the farcical nature of politics for example that’s not new. It’s been growing for decades now so but you know you could still pretend until last year. You could still pretend that the system was fundamentally working okay with just a little bit of self-delusion. You could say that the political system is functioning we have a functioning democracy and you know it’s working but with the election it is now it’s like so in your face that and not that there’s some people, even the people who voted for him though it’s not like they think that normal is working either. A lot of them voted out of this kind of nihilism or fatalism or this like really kind of I don’t want to psychoanalyze everybody but nobody thinks now, it’s almost impossible to think that the American democracy that we learned in civics class in high school is functioning that way. The story is broken and yeah it’s taking on a very extreme like the farcical nature of it is the farce is at an extreme now.
Rick: You probably don’t consider yourself a futurist but and you probably don’t want to make specific timeline predictions but however long it takes you know what do you see the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible actually looking like and whether it takes five years, ten years, thirty years, what do you see it actually looking like and what sort of changes, earthquakes do you think that we’ll have to undergo in order to get from here to there?
Charles: Well that’s a pretty broad question.
Rick: Yeah, you know broad strokes, broad strokes answer.
Charles: I think that on one level things are gonna get a lot worse before they get a lot worse before they get better and that will be it’s crisis and emergency and sometimes suffering that brings forth the gifts that are needed to transition to the next level. So we are going to witness because of crisis we’re going to witness the emergence of human qualities, modes of interaction that have been marginal up until now but they will come forth according to the need. So on one level things are going to be worse but we’re gonna say I think in my lifetime and I’m not I’m not saying five or ten years but saying you know 40 years maybe we’re gonna be able to say yeah things have gotten much worse on every measurable level but we’ve turned the corner. We as a civilization are now basically in consensus about why we’re here on Earth and where we have to go and the consensus will be that we are here on Earth to bring healing to the biosphere and after that has been accomplished who knows why we’re here on Earth but right now we are participants in the healing of nature.
Rick: Yeah you speak Chinese and as I recall doesn’t the Chinese symbol for crisis contain the symbol for opportunity or some such thing? I’ve heard that.
Charles: That’s like such a cliche but in fact there is like a lot of cliches have a little truth in them and it’s that the word that is used in the word for crisis, “ji” is also used in the word for opportunity and it kind of can mean either one. It can be like a turning point, a fulcrum kind of.
Rick: Yeah I think I might have heard that point from Elizabeth Sartorius who is a futurist and an evolutionary biologist and I guess she was saying like you know the caterpillar goes into a real crisis when it turns into mush but you know the imaginal cells within the cocoon begin to form a butterfly and it comes out a completely different thing. One thing I heard you say in one of your talks is that if you look at the many problems besetting humanity, I mean global warming, nuclear waste, many other things, take any one individually and we can’t figure out how to solve it and the fact that there are a multitude of them makes it all the more overwhelming and somehow I think you use the word bewilderment when you brought up that point and how being cocksure of the answers, you know, “I know how to solve this, I’m going to get jobs for everybody, you’re all going to mine coal again,” I mean that kind of attitude doesn’t really lend itself to going deep enough to actually solve problems that we need to sort of enter into a phase of not being so sure of ourselves. You want to elaborate on that?
Charles: Sure, so when you don’t know what to do and I think right now we’re facing a time where we really don’t know what to do, then the most positive step forward you can take is to stop pretending that you know what to do and to say like I would love to see a political candidate say, “You know, I have no idea what to do about the economy. I just don’t know.” Why does everybody have to know? I mean it’s a habit that we got in school where you are supposed to know everything because the answers are made available to you by an authority figure and your job is to reproduce those answers on an exam. So we have an ingrained habit. Also it’s built into the scientific worldview that says that phenomena are fundamentally predictable if you know the initial conditions and then you can apply the equations. If you know where every mass is and how every force is operating, you can calculate what’s going to happen. So in principle the world is controllable and so therefore if something that you don’t know why is happening, you try to understand what the causal forces are and then you try to counteract those forces. This is in its grossest form, this is war mentality where you see a problem. And this is a habit of our culture. You see a problem and you try to find the perpetrator. You try to find the cause, the linear proximate cause, the thing that’s making it happen as if you see a car moving and so you say well who’s pushing the car, what’s driving it, something that’s a force that’s making it happen. And then you counteract that force or you go to war against that force. So you see that thinking throughout politics. You see a problem, crime. What’s the reason? Criminals. Solution, lock them up. Problem, terrorism. Reason, terrorists. Solution, kill the terrorists. Or problem, disease. Reason, germs. Solution, kill the germs. Problem, climate change. Reason, greenhouse gases. Solution, cut greenhouse gases. Problem, I mean I could go on and on and on. Agriculture, medicine, weeds, you know, insect pests and the solution is always to kill something, lock something up, suppress something, control something. But that eliminates or blinds us to the complex web of causes that we ourselves are part of. In the example of terrorism, yeah I mean it’s really convenient to just blame it on those evil terrorists who hate our freedoms. But when we understand where terrorism is coming from, how it is involved with neoliberal economics and the imposition of austerity and free trade policies that are making farmers in Syria and Libya unable to continue farming because of the influx of cheap foreign goods, so then they become radicalized.
Rick: Not to mention drought due to global warming that exacerbated the problem in Syria.
Charles: Right, or deforestation caused by the entry into the commodity system. I think actually most drought is caused by deforestation, which is a lot harder to stop than … anyway, that’s a whole other … I’m writing a book now on climate change. But so this web of causes, it’s less convenient to go there, one, because when you see how big it is you don’t know what to do. Secondly, because it includes you. It includes that economic system. It includes our tax dollars paying for drones and bombs to bomb them and radicalize them. Right, so then that’s a place that we don’t usually go. So this … I can’t remember where I started here, but this …
Rick: Well essentially you’re saying problems are not solved on the level of the problem. There’s a deeper structure and if we just, you know, attack the surface level of the thing, we’re not really getting at the root cause.
Charles: Right, and it leaves out how that problem reflects something in ourselves, either collectively or personally. Yeah, and so then if you don’t go to that level, if you don’t see how a problem … most of the problems are symptoms of something so much deeper, then you’re forever chasing the symptom. Forever, fighting an endless supply of enemies that are being created by your fighting of enemies. And that’s, for example, agriculture is a perfect example of that. You know, one super weed after another after another that are caused by the application of herbicides. And then that creates other problems. The soil gets destroyed. You have to make more and more inputs and those inputs are causing the very problem that you’re using the inputs to solve. That’s a general pattern throughout our culture.
Rick: Yeah, or medicine. I mean these ads we see on television all the time, “Ask your doctor about such and such,” and then more than half the ad is all about the side effects that you’re gonna get if you take the thing, you know, and then there’s drugs to deal with those side effects and probably those drugs have side effects. So, you know.
Charles: Yeah, the farce extends beyond politics. Right. And so people are just kind of not really believing in the system anymore. Not like they did when I was a kid or when my parents were a kid, you know, when it was just taken for granted without question that science and technology were gonna bring on a perfect society, a technological utopia, and we would be the masters of nature and it’s just gonna be great. Unquestionable that we would have, you know, have conquered all disease by the impossibly futuristic year 2000. I mean, do you remember how futuristic the year 2000 was? Oh yeah. Like it was gonna be robots, you know, and bubble cities and space colonies.
Rick: The Jetsons.
Charles: The Jetsons, yeah. And so that was part of our story. That was part of our narrative or our mythology even. And the mythology says, I mean, that’s how we learn how to be human. The mythology says here’s who you are. Here’s how you participate in the world. And that’s breaking down. People don’t believe in that anymore and that’s dangerous, you know, because then somebody like Donald Trump comes along and offers some kind of version of a mythology or some version of the old mythology and says “here it is” and people cling on to that. But that’s also part of the transition process in personal life too. Clinging on even more tightly to what hasn’t been working. That’s part of the process. And if you try to surrender prematurely then you’re gonna end because some spiritual teacher said the path is of surrender. Okay, yeah, I’m gonna do that now. Like that becomes the new to-do. That premature surrender is actually a fake surrender and you end up realizing actually I was still holding on. I was trying to use “surrender” in quotes in order to avoid truly surrendering and it doesn’t work. So anyway, just saying like this the process that our society is going through now is kind of normal in psychological terms and it’s a symptom of a pretty advanced stage of breakdown.
Rick: I think Winston Churchill said something about, you know, Americans cannot always be counted on to do the right thing after having tried every other alternative. And it kind of is implicit in what you’re saying that we have to really sort of have it demonstrated to us very, very concretely that obsolete approaches don’t work before we’re really ready to let go of them.
Charles: Yeah, but I think it’s kind of good news because even though on the surface our social, political, economic institutions look more entrenched than ever, more dominant than ever, more inescapable than ever, the core underneath them, the ideological core, the core of buy-in has really eroded. The elites don’t even believe in them anymore. But in the 50s they did and they really believed in America. Now it’s become brand America. It’s become like this cynical kind of PR ploy that core of belief is gone. So it’s just a shell that’s left that everybody thinks … I mean I get that impression … I don’t watch, you know, much TV or anything. In fact I’m on a news fast right now. But I remember like, you know, occasionally I see some pundit, you know, I’m in the airport and I’m watching a pundit, you know, and they’re you know, mouthing the establishment dogma about foreign policy and containing Russia or this that and the other thing. And I’m like, do you really believe that? Do you actually believe that Russia is this big threat now? Do you actually believe the things you’re saying? No. Like I’m sure if I got the guy in a private moment and there were no cameras and no mics, I’d be like, “Come on dude, you know, you don’t actually believe all this crap, do you?” And he’d be like, “No, no, no, this is the game I’m playing and I’m playing it well and I’m getting rewarded for it.” And if you play it well, then yeah, you get the status, you get the rewards, even though no one else playing the game believes in it either. But if you deviate from it, then they’ll pile on and call you irresponsible and not serious and they kick you out of the club. So it’s not important. And I think that to some extent it’s true of the entire public. Like no one even believes the mass media or thinks that the things that they’re being told are important are actually important. It’s more of a thing where everybody thinks that everybody else believes and privately doesn’t believe. But it looks like everybody believes because everybody’s pretending to believe because everybody thinks everybody else believes, you know what I mean?
Rick: Like the Emperor’s new clothes.
Charles: Exactly, yeah. It’s exactly the Emperor’s new clothes, except when the little boy says, hey, the Emperor is completely naked, everybody says, shut up, because they don’t want to look like a fool.
Rick: Yeah, I saw a cartoon about that the other day. Trump was the Emperor and he was walking down the street naked and everybody jumped and started beating up the little boy when he said he’s naked. So let’s get back to the sort of the mechanics of problems and in doing so I think we can make it more clear why this is relevant to spirituality and to enlightenment and awakening and all that stuff. You know what you were saying a minute ago is that take any problem and the kind of the conventional way of dealing with it is to attack it on its own level. You know, you got weeds, kill the weeds. You got terrorists, kill the terrorists and so on, but what you were indicating is that there’s a deeper mechanics to any problem. It’s more like a symptom than a problem, it’s a symptom of something deeper. So it would seem that the way to really solve a problem is to kind of trace it back through its more and more fundamental causes to its source, whatever that source might be, and if it could be dealt with there, then the problem might just be found to disappear. Like dry leaves on a tree would be seen as a problem. What do you do? Well, you water the leaves obviously, they’re dry, but you really need to water the root in order for the leaves to flourish because that’s where they get their nourishment from. So play off that point a little bit.
Charles: Sure, yeah. I hesitate to use the word spiritual to talk about such things.
Rick: Maybe as long as we define it clearly, maybe as we go along we can see.
Charles: Maybe talking about the inner level, you know, the inner dimensions to things or the personal level. Like, yeah, the same patterns, we reiterate them personally too, especially I’m making a kind of an online course now about food and diet, and this is one of the areas where the war on nature gets mirrored internally as a war on the self. So you have a problem, say the problem is overeating or obesity or something, and again it’s finding the pattern is to find this linear quantitative culprit that you can go to war against and try to control. So it could be that you say, well, you know, fat is caused by intaking more calories than you burn, so obviously I’ve got to burn more or take in less, so I’ve got to control, I’ve got to make myself do something or make myself stop doing something. And then, so then it’s like, okay, so the problem is that I’m overeating, I’m eating too much and I’m gonna try to control that. Instead of seeing overeating perhaps as a symptom, like why would you eat more than you need? Why would you eat more than is even giving you pleasure? Like it doesn’t even feel good to stuff yourself, especially ten minutes later or half an hour later. Why do you, so why would you do that? Odne of the things I’m developing in this course is essentially saying that for a lot of people, the desire to overeat or the desire for sugar or the desire for whatever other thing that you’re taking in, and it can go way beyond food, but whatever you’re taking in to your being, the desire for that is displaced from something else. It’s a secondary need that you’re meeting. So maybe the real desire is for connection, because modern society leaves us cut off from community, cut off from nature, cast into this world of strangers, and we need, and when we don’t have these intimate relationships ongoing, when we go outside and we just see cars going by with people we’ve never seen before in the cars, and we go to the supermarket and or shop online and it’s just abstract data points or random strangers, you know, we feel like cut off, we feel like we don’t even belong in the world. In order to meet that need, sometimes people might overeat because food is a direct experience of being at home in the universe, a direct experience of connecting with that which is outside of ourselves, but food cannot meet our full need for community, for intimacy with nature, or it can’t meet our full need to feel like we belong in the world. So when someone is overeating and stuffing themselves and still feeling hungry, it’s not that they’re actually hungry for food, it’s that they’re hungry for connection or whatever other need. Food can meet a lot of different needs. Hungry for intimacy, hungry for excitement, hungry for a break in the humdrum routine, hungry to challenge their boundaries, whatever it is, different addictions meet different of these needs. So if that underlying hunger is not met and you simply go to war against the desire for food, then that desire is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger as long as the underlying need is not met and eventually it will burst forth as a binge or something like that, and you’ll think that the problem was that you didn’t control yourself hard enough, when actually what you’re seeing is the bursting forth of an unmet need which takes the form of a desire that finds whatever is available to meet it. That would be an example on like a personal level of how these patterns play out.
Rick: I think you mentioned in your book that people who have bariatric surgery where they have their stomach stapled so they can’t eat as much, very often end up getting into other addictions, you know like drugs or gambling or something like that. I’m just reminded of a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which is, “The objects of sense fall away from him who does not feed upon them, but the taste for them persists. On seeing the Supreme, even this taste vanishes.” So in other words, you can suppress the indulgence in various things, but the craving is still going to be there and can only be satisfied by what in this case they’re saying the Supreme, the pure being or whatever that’s going to provide the fulfillment you were actually looking for.
Charles: Right, that’s interesting because that passage is not saying that you should fight the taste for the sense impressions, you know, it’s not saying that you should go to war against those things. It’s saying like you were saying, they fall away when you have the connection to the Supreme.
Rick: There’s another verse which says, “Creatures act according to their own nature. What can restraint accomplish?” So they’re saying, don’t restrain, just take recourse to that which is the wellspring of all fulfillment and then you know these unnatural cravings will fall away.
Charles: Right, of course that still leaves the question, how do you have that experience of the Supreme or how do you find what unmet need is driving your addictions?
Rick: That’s a whole train of conversation. I mean there are obviously all kinds of spiritual practices which can give you access to that and so on. I mean in my own case, I was you know taking a lot of drugs, doing all kinds of crazy things, I learned to meditate, all that stuff just fell off, you know, I never had the craving again. I felt better all the time than drugs were making me feel temporarily, therefore there was no interest in them anymore.
Charles: I mean we could talk about that and I could ask you, would you turn that into a formula for like a universal prescription or did that happen because on some level you were ready for what meditation was giving you and that just offered as a blanket prescription may not work for everybody.
Rick: You’re right, I mean I knew people who were meditating and were still alcoholics and you know and ended up dying from that and so on. I had definitely bottomed out, you know, dropped out of high school and all kinds of other stuff and so for me I was ready and other people maybe not so much, but I think there is also a blanket prescription which is that however you do it, if you can find access you know, I mean all the scriptures say the kingdom of heaven is within, Sat Chit Ananda and so on, if you can find access to that realm within yourself then a lot of stuff on the surface level of your life is going to change.
Charles: Yeah, but even when you say if you can find it, you know, it feeds into this general formula again that spirituality or enlightenment is something that you do and that buys into a key precept of what I’m calling the old story or the story of separation that says that who you are is this separate self in a world of other. So it could be the technological self manipulating matter, it could be the economic man maximizing self-interest, it could be the biological, you know, phenotype maximizing reproductive self-interest, it could be the Cartesian soul encased in flesh, any of these things. So this separate self goes out and does stuff. So part of that is, yeah, well what about enlightenment, what about spirituality? Well that is also an accomplishment of the separate self and I think that we’re kind of waking up from that and realizing that, for example, enlightenment is a group process that anybody who you judge is not getting it or being unenlightened or something like that or not awake, like that person is reflecting something in you that is not awake and that your further unfoldment depends on how you interact with that person, like they’re showing you something. Or another way that we’re awakening from this delusion of the separate self is to understand that a lot of what we would like to take credit for is actually happening to us. So it’s not that you can find necessarily something, it’s that you search and you search and you search for that being etc. However it’s named, you search and search and you can’t find it and in that moment where you’ve given everything and it hasn’t worked and you give up then it finds you.
Rick: Yeah.
Charles: So I’m just starting to kind of wrap my mind around that because part of me just rebels against that and it’s like, no, no, no, give me something to do, make it hard. Give me and therefore if it’s hard then I get credit for it because I did something hard and you didn’t. That guy didn’t and that guy didn’t. They didn’t really try, they didn’t in their work, they didn’t wake up at 4 a.m. and meditate, they didn’t do all this stuff, but I did. So I’m better than you.
Rick: Well you bring up several points. Firstly, when I learned to meditate I learned in such a way as it was very effortless and I don’t think I would have stuck with it if it hadn’t been because I wasn’t a terribly disciplined person. In fact all my friends said, “Oh yeah, Ricky’s off on his new trip, he’ll be off of this one in a couple weeks and on to the next one,” but you know I’ve stuck with it for 50 years and it was always very helpful.
Charles: Is it TM?
Rick: It was TM and I’m no longer associated with the TM movement but it was effortless and boy it really worked from day one for me and I had no trouble sticking with it. Second, another point you kind of bring in and there are techniques which are very hard and which is like, “I’m doing this, you know, and by golly I’m gonna break through,” and you know that to me is like an inception of individual effort whereas some kinds of meditation are more of a relaxing, a letting go of individual effort, sort of like a surrender. You’re letting nature sort of run the show and getting out of the way. And another thing you bring in is the sort of point of spiritual ego, it’s like which can befall anyone. It’s like, “Oh man, aren’t I cool? I’ve been doing this so diligently,” and this cashier at the grocery store, boy they’re so ignorant, they don’t know what’s going on but here I am and they’re so lucky to be interacting with me. And you know that’s something one has to look at in oneself I think. But the guy I’m going to interview next week, John Yates, who goes by the name of Culadasa, apparently coined the phrase “Enlightenment may be an accident but spiritual practice makes you accident prone,” which kind of implies that it isn’t something you do and yet paradoxically you appear to be doing something which brings you more and more into the possibility of this accident happening, and yet when it does happen you realize, “Well, you know, it wasn’t really anything I did. In fact, I’ve never done anything and never not been in this state. I just failed to recognize it.” Anyway, those are just some thoughts on what you just said.
Charles: Well, I’m not saying, you know, in fact I do practices that are extremely demanding of willpower and effort. You’ve done a lot of yoga and stuff. I do Kundalini yoga, you know, where you’re holding your arms out for like 15 minutes or whatever. I do some Qi Gong that’s pretty physically intense, but even that it’s like, “Okay, I’m doing something that requires a lot of willpower and discipline, but where did I get the willpower and discipline? Did I generate that myself?” And if so, then what about those times in my life where I just couldn’t get up off the couch, where I couldn’t make myself do anything, and if someone said, “Just get yourself together and make more of an effort,” like that was ridiculous, you know. The day ahead of me, the year ahead of me just was so forbidding that I could not. I was not in this. I didn’t have the willpower. Like, willpower, does that come from you? And I think it doesn’t. I think that these things are all gifts and that when you are in a phase where you are doing diligent practices and making great efforts, that’s wonderful, and the proper or the accurate, the truthful attitude toward that is, “Thank you. Thank you for the conditions of my life that have enabled me to do this,” and then to realize that these conditions may not last forever and that many people do not have these conditions. Therefore, your practice is on their behalf as well.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Charles: Because the collective has elevated you to a point where you can do these practices on behalf of everybody and you’re being used as an instrument of the collective evolution.
Rick: Yeah, beautifully put, and that gets us into morphogenetic fields, you know, that your friend Rupert Sheldrake talks about. You know, there’s that poem by John Donne, “No man is an island, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” We’re all interconnected. What’s the phrase you use? Interbeing or something like that?
Charles: Interbeing, yeah. Yeah. That’s Thich Nhat Hanh’s word, I believe. That’s what I’m told and I’m happy to bow to that lineage, but yeah, it just means it’s kind of the shorthand I use for the emerging story that’s new to our civilization but also very ancient that says, yeah, we’re not a separate self in a world of other. We are the totality of relationship. We are a holographic mirror of everything and not not separate.
Rick: That’s kind of what I was alluding to earlier where I was saying that problems are just symptomatic of trends in collective consciousness, you know, global problems and that everyone is contributing one way or the other, one influence or another. And so, you know, people might say, what can I do about the whales or what can I do about, you know, the slavery or whatever that’s going on? Well, you know, it definitely helps if you’re doing something to elevate your own consciousness, but that may not be enough. A lot of people talk about sacred activism. I think you use that phrase quite a bit that, you know, if we all just sat on our butts and meditated, it may not be enough to change some of these problems. There need to be people who are out there in the trenches also, Doctors Without Borders or whatever, and yet the point you just made, you know, it might be that we’re not in a position to do something like that, but we’re actually kind of helping Doctors Without Borders by elevating our own consciousness, you know. I mean, the people who are actually doing this stuff, if we’re not able to, are kind of instruments of a positive quality in collective consciousness that we are helping to enliven.
Charles: It’s not necessarily just a magical connection where you’re, you know, your meditation in a cave generates a mysterious field that makes the Doctor Without Border wake up more energized that day. I mean, it could be that.
Rick: Could be that. It could also be … Might help to donate some money or something too.
Charles: Or it might be because you’ve done your, you know, after you meditate you feel really good, you go to, you know, buy something at the liquor store and the clerk there is really nasty and because of your meditative practice that you’ve been fortunate to receive, you respond with humor.
Rick: Yeah, isn’t this funny? I just finished meditating and yet I’m in a liquor store.
Charles: Yeah, well I was kind of just attempting to be funny myself. Yeah, like you go, like maybe you respond with humor and compassion, you know, and “rough day at the liquor store, huh?” you know, and then he’s like, “Yeah, and then maybe he’s a little bit … and the next guy walks in is the Doctor Without Border and he’s more friendly to him and it just, you know, like things can spread in very mundane ways too and we don’t know what the ultimate effects of our actions are gonna be.
Rick: Yeah, that’s very true. We just don’t know. Mm-hmm. There have been some movies made about that sort of thing. So, I have about three pages of notes here. I want to make sure to get to them, all kinds of interesting points. I’m gonna just read some little passages from your book and formulate questions from them. Some of them we may have covered and maybe we’ll just cover them, respond to them again briefly and others we might delve into more deeply. Well, this phrase is a … this one’s very popular in the collective consciousness these days, at least the spiritual community, that the planet is a living being and the health of anything is essential to the well-being of the whole. We’ve kind of just been touching on that. Anything you want to say about that?
Charles: Yeah, yeah, there is. Okay, good. You know, I’m writing this book on climate change, which on the one hand, it seems at least to be giving people like a really good reason why you should care.
Rick: Climate change does?
Charles: Because in the past, someone … yeah, in the past, people would say, “Well, you know, who cares about the forests?” Right. And now you can say, “Well, you know, the forests, you know, mitigate, they sequester greenhouse gases or something.” Like you can give a reason that seems to like put some kind of hard-headed rational legitimacy onto what were these mushy, you know, tree huggers, right?
Rick: Right, right.
Charles: But I think that is a really dangerous argument. It’s a really dangerous strategy because anything that doesn’t seem to contribute to a healthier climate then gets minimized when you’re using the climate narrative to define what green is.
Rick: Such as, give us an example.
Charles: Such as rhinoceroses. Like it’s hard to make a climate-based argument why it’s important to preserve the rhinoceroses. Or you can do it, but it’s a stretch. Or how about …
Rick: Well, there are other arguments for that, though. I mean, it’s known that when species go extinct, it has a ripple effect and with all sorts of unforeseen consequences.
Charles: Right, but it’s very hard to quantify those. Yeah. And if you’re trying to make policy based on the numbers, based on quantified metrics, then the things that are easy to quantify get emphasized. The things that are very difficult to quantify get ignored. So, that’s one reason I think that … And the second thing …
Rick: Which, just before you do the second thing, which sort of presupposes that reality has to fit into our ability to quantify. That’s very anthropocentric, you know.
Charles: Right. And some of the things … Very presumptuous. Yeah. And from like indigenous people, they have a very different understanding of how this planet works and how it maintains its health. And for example, one tribe in Brazil was telling a friend of mine, who’s an activist down there, that they think that the reason that the climate is becoming deranged is that we are taking metals from the tropics and transporting them to the northern hemisphere. And that that does something to the Earth’s energy system. But that’s invisible in terms of carbon metrics. The idea that like the gold, for example, is the sacred heart of the mountain. And when you take too much gold away, the mountain dies and is unable to communicate with the other beings of Pachamama to tell them where the water needs to go and that whole worldview. That is not going to come up in your metrics.
Rick: Right.
Charles: That’s invisible. I think we need to start listening to that. To respect and learn from indigenous worldviews that may have some wisdom that we don’t have. That is not available to us when we’re making the decisions based on carbon numbers. Because where does it matter where the gold is or where the copper is? I mean maybe it takes some energy to mine it, but you know, what if we use renewable energy to mine the metals?
Rick: Usually we get in there and cut a lot of trees down and stuff in order to get at them.
Charles: Right. In practice all kinds of horrible stuff happens. Right. And then the question, the further question is, who’s doing the measuring? And how are those numbers, you know, and are the people doing the measuring somehow involved in the profiting? Usually the answer is yes.
Rick: Right.
Charles: Or the whole system that’s doing the measuring is also dependent on the profits.
Rick: So they’re biased.
Charles: Yeah, maybe on even an unconscious level. But anyway, when we understand that, to return to your question, that Gaia is a living being, then of course anything that happens to any of its tissues or any of its organs or any part of it is going to weaken the whole thing. In my research for this book, it’s becoming obvious that the ability of healthy intact ecosystems to regulate climate is much greater than we thought. The negative effect of destroying ecosystems is much worse than we thought. Which means that even if we cut carbon emissions to zero, if we continue to degrade ecosystems, drain swamps, pollute marshes, develop coastlines, overfish the ocean, kill the whales, etc., etc., if we continue to do all this, then the planet is still screwed even if we cut emissions to zero.
Rick: Yeah, and one point that what the indigenous people that you just quoted are implying, and which I think is really a critical point to our conversation, is that everything is alive, which not always the planet a living being, but all of its bits and pieces, my cup is alive, and by that we mean if you look closely enough at this cup you see incredible intelligence functioning in every atom and every subatomic particle, something that could not possibly happen through random chance or dumb little bits just kind of like bumping into each other. There are laws of nature conducting or orchestrating everything at every level, from the most subatomic to the galactic, and there’s no place you can identify large or small, near or far, at which that intelligence cannot be seen if you look for it properly.
Charles: That’s right. Yeah, everything is alive and that leads to the second thing I was going to say, which is that the whole motive of care about the forest because if you don’t bad things will happen to you. That’s not the motive that we need to tap into. We need to tap into the motive of respect the forest, take care of the forest because we love the forest, because it’s beautiful, because it’s alive, like for the same reason that I take care of my sons. You know, like no one has to say, “Charles, you better take good care of your four-year-old because otherwise you’re gonna get charged with child neglect and even if you get away with it, when he grows up, he won’t take care of you in your old age.” And I say, “Okay, you’re right. I better take good care of him.” Like that’s the equivalent of a lot of the environmental arguments today that are framed in terms of climate change. Look at the economic damages, for example. Look at the danger to civilization. Well, what about like if you have to give me those reasons to care about my son, there’s already a problem and I’m not gonna take very good care of him, even if I believe your reasons. He’s not gonna thrive. So that’s another shift in the mindset that I think comes. It only makes sense if you really understand Earth as a living being and a forest and a river and a mountain because then they’re lovable again.
Rick: Yeah.
Charles: And not just a bunch of resources and a bunch of stuff, you know.
Rick: Also, I mean in the case of your son, there’s a unity with your son, you know, a closeness, almost like you’re the same being with just two different, you know, two different appendages of the same underlying thing or something. It’s a little harder to see that with, you know, some forest in Brazil or some rhinoceros in Africa or something, but if you really get right down to it, and many people do in their actual experience as spiritual awakening dawns, they feel the pain of the world because they are the world, you know. There’s no place at which they end and the rhinoceros begins. It’s all one thing and they see it that way.
Charles: But another thing that what you’re bringing up, I think, is that it can’t just be abstract. Like in theory, I love …
Rick: Can’t be intellectual. It has to be experiential.
Charles: Right, and that means it has to also be local and place-based and we need to redevelop connections with the land, the place around us, nearby, that we interact with with our senses and not just through a screen. And that’s why the local food movement, for example, I think is so important because it … Like you were saying, me and my son, you know, there’s love there in part because of familiarity, you know, and I mean, I changed his diaper, I feed him. I mean, it’s like this daily give-and-take that in a standard American lifestyle people just don’t have. The land around them is little more than a spectacle. But when you start gardening, when you start even, you know, going out into the forest to gather herbs or to hunt animals, when you are getting water from a spring, when you’re on a sensory level involved and participating in nature, then the love is not abstract anymore and there’s something more than love which might be called intimacy, something related to love which is called intimacy, which is on a sense level. So I think that … and that’s hard to have when, you know, we’re living in a commodity world and having abstract relationships with distant strangers and it doesn’t get more basic than food as far as an intimate connection with the other. So I think just to maybe point out one of the bright spots here, the local food movement is reconnecting people to … and helping them fall back in love, I mean, especially if you’re gardening or something like that, but helping people to fall back in love with the actual material world and that’s really powerful for society.
Rick: That’s great. I mean, it’s almost a joke but you see these videos of people walking into light poles looking at their phones or, you know, tripping into fountains at the mall while looking at their phones and on and, you know, people sitting at the dinner table and they’re all staring at their phones, you know, people have just gotten so divorced from nature and from the real world that, you know, sounds like what you’re saying is a real good antidote to that.
Charles: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, I’m gonna read another passage from your book here. We kind of covered this next one, the ecological crisis, like all our crises is a spiritual crisis, I’m quoting you there. I don’t know if you want to elaborate on that anymore. The external institutions reflect our basic perceptions of the world, our invisible ideologies and belief systems. Shall we go on or you want to say anything more about that?
Charles: We can just go on.
Rick: Okay, good. So at one point in your book you posed five or six questions and you said, like, who am I? Why do things happen? What is the purpose of life? What is human nature? What is sacred? Who are we as a people? Where did we come from and where are we going? And you say the answers to these questions are culturally dependent yet they immerse us so completely that we have seen them as reality itself. These answers are changing today along with everything built atop them, which basically means our entire civilization. We’ve talked about that earlier, that the civilization is changing, but we didn’t really talk about it with reference to these kinds of questions. So yeah, let’s touch on that for a minute.
Charles: Well those are the questions that our mythology answers. So I have talked a bit about the mythology of the separate self, which goes along with the mythology of domination and control, because if you’re separate from nature then, and nature is just these random forces or competing other separate selves, then your well-being depends on controlling the random forces and dominating the competing others. So the story of self is related then to the story of the people, which has humanity on this triumphant course toward domination of nature. So that’s what I call the old story or the story of separation, and that answers these questions, like what is human nature? It says, well human nature is to maximize self-interest, and we see that as reality, as the truth, and then say, well you can’t have a civilization that way, so we have to protect ourselves from each other. We have to have laws and deterrence and punishments in order to rein in human nature, which is selfish, and force us to act in socially beneficial ways. Like that goes along with that story. The money system reflects, I mean I wrote a book, this is what one of my other books was about, the money system also draws from that story and the answers it gives to those questions, like what is the human role in the world? So we have a money system that propels endless growth and only works if there is endless growth. Like the money system is completely enmeshed in the domination of nature, turning more and more of nature into products, into commodities, and also making us separate from each other, forcing us into competition. So we have, because you look around and it does look like everybody is in fact maximizing self-interest. You know, you go online to buy something and you compare some prices, you know, like here’s these goggles I use to look at computer screens, and you know this website has them for $7.99 and that one’s $12.99. Well which one am I going to buy? Am I going to care? You know, maybe I’ll buy the $12.99 ones because they need to make a fair profit, and you know, they’ll be able to pay their employees better and get the more expensive ones. Like we just don’t do that, do we? That’s not normal behavior. So we look around and even look at ourselves and it’s like, yep, everybody’s trying to get the best deal, everybody’s maximizing their self-interest, and we don’t realize that that behavior isn’t core human nature, but it’s a response to circumstances. If we were in different circumstances, for example a gift society, which is what all societies were, where your social prestige and your security depends on how generous you’ve been throughout your lifetime, because if you’ve taken care of people your whole life and been generous, then they’re going to take care of you and be generous to you too, and that’s kind of a savings account. And maybe you’re not that calculating about it, but the reality that you’ve seen is that well-being comes through sharing. If you’ve seen that your whole life, then you’re not going to think human nature is this competitive rush to control.
Rick: So you say all societies were that. I presume you’re referring to some indigenous societies or something, because there are not too many obvious examples in the Western history that we study.
Charles: No, I mean everything up till society that has not been fully modernized will have a lot of gift elements remaining. I mean even in America, like the more traditional parts of the country, you know.
Rick: The Amish, people like that.
Charles: Yeah, or just even like small towns in Iowa or something, people take care of each other, people know each other, you know, they’ll look out for each other.
Rick: It’s interesting that when there’s an emergency like Hurricane Sandy or a big snowstorm or something, it brings out that quality in people, you know, they get out there and they’re shoveling the neighbor’s driveway and making sure that the old lady down the street has food and things. It awakens something in people.
Charles: When the structures that enforce separation break down, then another aspect of human nature can be free to come out. And I feel like it’s bursting and wants to come out, but people are afraid to be generous and afraid to share, because we’re anxious, we’re subject to constant survival anxiety, because if I give away my money, then what about me? Because I don’t see anyone else taking care of each other. But if you have a crisis like this, like you said, a hurricane or something that makes it obvious that you see other people taking care of each other, then you feel safe to do it too. Your money isn’t going to help you then, like you’re liberated from the structures that make us separate and generate the perceived reality of separation. So yeah, those are the questions you’ve listed are answered by our mythology. And when the mythology breaks down, then you don’t have answers anymore. You’re like, gosh, I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what’s real anymore. I mean people had that after the election, when reality was kind of breaking down, people were actually disoriented, because everything that seemed so real and permanent was in shambles.
Rick: So you’re talking about a gifting society and you know people like Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders and people like that are always reminding us that in certain cultures, Western Europe, everybody gets health care. I mean Michael Moore’s movie, “Who Should We Invade Next,” he was showing how all these companies are like, you know, they give big lunch breaks and vacations when you get married and all kinds of stuff. And maybe the CEOs don’t make as much money, but they say, yeah, who cares, you know, people are happier, they live better lives, they make better employees. I wonder why, and right now in the US, you know, health care is a big debate. I wonder why somehow we’re not able to, what is it about American culture that’s preventing us from moving into a more of a gifting mentality?
Charles: I mean that’s a question with, you know, I’m sure a historian could discourse on that for hours, but maybe what I’ll say is, this is another kind of place where I think people are starting to really disbelieve in the dominant story and to feel betrayed by it, because we’re supposed to have a leisure society by now. Why do people have to work harder and suffer more anxiety, more financial stress than they did a generation ago? Why? Is it because we’re not as productive? Is it because our machines are no longer working? Is it because we’ve regressed in our technological levels? Like we have machines that can do things, I mean, you used to have to have like a whole room full of people to produce a magazine or brochure or, you know, like things that were like a spreadsheet, like you had to have people with typewriters and shit, you know. Now we have so much more productivity, yet we’re working harder than ever for less. Like why is that? I don’t think people typically ask that question that explicitly, because they take it kind of for granted that it’s going to get harder and harder, more and more competitive. Like why? Why is the world getting more and more competitive? Why should it? And the answer is, I mean, there’s historical reasons why maybe this attitude in the US is especially strong, but there’s also economic reasons that I wrote about in that other book.
Rick: “Sacred economics”.
Charles: “Sacred economics.” Yeah, that essentially we have a system that only works if there’s economic growth, and economic growth means that consumption has to continually increase exponentially, and that means that instead of working less, we are consuming more and more and more, and a lot of that consumption is not actually enhancing our material well-being, but we have to do it anyway to meet needs that should not even be met with consumption. For example, and this goes back to the food conversation, but another addiction is shopping, or another need might be to have space to live out a life, and that used to be public space. You used to have a tiny little house, and for entertainment, for companionship, just to pass the time, if you weren’t working, you would go out and you would, you know, sit on the plaza, and there was a public life, and if that gets taken away, then you need much more indoor space to compensate for it, so the private realm expands in compensation for the shrinking public realm, and our public realm has been taken away from it. This is coming, I mean, this has come up for me as a father, remembering when I was a kid and going outside, and there were other kids outside, and we would play all day.
Rick: Yeah, me too.
Charles: And you can’t do that anymore. In fact, like I’ve almost gotten arrested for letting my kids be outside, unsupervised, doing the same things that I used to do when I was a kid. It’s illegal to let your kids roam around unsupervised, and so, but even if it weren’t illegal, like it’s just not, like you send your kids outside, there was no other kids playing outside, because they’re in front of screens, or because they’re being carted off to martial arts, or to whatever other class they’re put into, and so this public, this kind of public domain, this was a kind of a gift economy. I mean, anything that’s not a service that’s provided for money is in the realm of gift. So play, recreation, leisure, these were not consumer products, but they’ve become consumer products. So to meet these basic, basic needs now, you know, you got to like pay for daycare, the basic need for a child to play with other kids, like you got to pay for something. You got to pay for martial arts class, or Little League, or whatever you pay for now. So we are, it’s not that we’ve become wealthier because we’re buying all these things that used to be free, it’s that we’ve become more dependent on money, and therefore more stressed and insecure. So that’s part of that, like yeah, that’s part of the puzzle here. I mean, you can see it goes really deep into the whole fabric of society, and that’s why I personally think that that kind of incremental, quote, progressive changes aren’t really gonna make that much difference, because the things that really need to be questioned are not even looked at by any political party, right, left, or center. I haven’t heard any candidate speaking about the decline of public space, and civic life, and you know, children going outside and there’s no other children to play with. I mean, there’s books about it, “Last Child in the Woods,” for example, but these are kind of fringy things. So that’s, yeah, part of my disengagement from politics is for these reasons, like the questions that I’m concerned about are not on the menu. Like Obamacare, you know, like no one’s talking about holistic health.
Rick: That’s a good point. I mean, with all this healthcare debate going on and Bernie Sanders saying, “Well, healthcare is a basic right,” and you know, my feeling is, yeah, well, true, but with rights come responsibilities. You know, there are so many things people do to make themselves unhealthy, and you know, people need to be educated and supported to live in such a way that they don’t get sick. That’ll bring down healthcare costs. So it’s, again, kind of going back to a more fundamental cause.
Charles: Right, but then how do you educate them? Like, once you say, “Okay, we’re gonna educate them,” then the educational-industrial complex grabs hold of it, and it turns it into some belittling lesson plan about the four food groups or something like that, that actually ends up encoding the financial interests of the food and pharmaceutical industries and not real health, because real health is not a profit center. Real health is going to reduce the demand for goods and services. You’re not gonna have to pay experts to keep you healthy anymore, and it’s gonna be a much more distributed, and this is what I see for the future, you know, a much more distributive health healthcare system where not all, but maybe 80% of medical functions have kind of gone back to the people, gone back to the massage therapists and the herbalists and the people who, you know, are working with their hands that don’t require expensive technological devices, that don’t require expensive pharmaceutical medicines. Like these, I mean, I’m sure that you know about these things and have run into people who have had miraculous experiences or who can … I mean, my wife, you know, she practices, she’s a doctor of oriental medicine. I mean, I’ve seen her heal people of conditions that are medically considered incurable, like pretty routinely, and like that is not even on the radar screen. So yeah, anyway, now you’ve got me on my soapbox.
Rick: No, that’s good, and not even relying on massage therapists and herbalists. I mean, one can live one’s own life in such a way as to be much less dependent upon any kind of professional, you know, just eating right, exercising properly, doing things like that, you tend not to get sick. But anyway, you said that you don’t see incremental change, you did the quote rabbit ears, as actually being effective. So that implies that there’s got to be some kind of more radical shift somehow or something. I mean, how do we get from here to there if incremental change and political solutions and so on are not going to do it, if the agricultural industry or other powerful moneyed interests are going to clamp down every time someone tries to introduce an innovation? And you mentioned in your book, you said, “If even the most powerful of our system, the presidents and the CEOs, feel at the mercy of forces greater than themselves, constrained by their roles and job descriptions, so much more powerless are we.” And that brings me to a point that I’ve often and always felt for many decades, which is that the more fundamental you go, the more leverage you have. The molecular is more powerful than the mechanical, the atomic is more powerful than the molecular, and by the same token, more fundamental levels of awareness, if one can learn to function from there, have greater leverage, they’re more powerful. That’s why, personally, I see kind of a spiritual awakening as being the ultimate fulcrum, the ultimate sort of control switch board from which change can take place, and it’ll ripple up.
Charles: Yeah, so that quote that you read, the point I was making there is that if we are going to rely on operating the levers of power in order to change the world, it’s not going to work, because even people who we think have access to the levers of power, they don’t feel themselves as actually being able to have much freedom to make any changes. We saw this, you know, in Greece with Syriza coming into power, and they were helpless to do anything but what the previous governments had been doing. I have collected stories about this. I’ve had, you know, encounters with parliamentarians and people who, and you know, finance people who are like, you know, they have a certain leeway, but they can’t deviate too far from their job description. Yeah. So then the question comes up, okay, that theory of how to change the world operating the levers of power, that is actually based on the old story, the story of separation, that says that change happens when you exert a force on a mass, and that if you want to be a big change maker, you’ve got to have a lot of force, you’ve got to have a lot of money, you’ve got to have a lot of guns, you’ve got to have a big platform. So if you want to be an influential blogger, Rick, you’re gonna have to expand your audience, you know, and that’s going to come at the expense of someone else’s audience, and you’ve got to kind of tailor your thing and sell out to what the most people are going to hear, right, and if you do that, I’m not saying you’re doing that, but if you did do that, then your message would become uninfluential because it would, in order to expand your audience, you’d have to become more and more and more anodyne, more and more bland, more and more common denominator. So that formula is wrong, that’s what I’m saying. Change doesn’t actually happen the way that we’ve been taught that it happens, and so what I’m connecting with what you were saying, when we say, okay, well, how does big change, if the people operating levers of power are puppets of forces beyond themselves, then how does change actually happen? Well, these forces ultimately arise from the mythology that contains us all, that contains our civilization, that contains our money system. So if you want to change that, then you got to change the mythology, you got to change the story, and changing the story then comes all the way down to the personal level of who am I, because that story includes the story of self as well as the story of the world, the story of the people, and that’s what you might call a spiritual dimension, the story of self, and so it’s related to the story of the people, it reflects it, but that’s the level that the deep changes come from. And I’m not saying like you shouldn’t engage the system and shouldn’t try to, you know, protect people from ending Obamacare, from the immigration authorities or whatever, I’m not saying that, but I’m saying that as we do that we have to simultaneously be aware of the deeper levels and integrate all of these responses.
Rick: Good, and getting down to the question of who am I is not just an intellectual matter, it’s an experiential matter. I mean, self realization is not just sort of a new understanding of who or what I am, it’s more of a, you know, it’s a deep conscious realization that ultimately and ideally is abiding, you know, your experience shifts in such a way that you have a completely different orientation to who and what you are and you live from there. I just want to throw that in.
Charles: And it’s funny, well that means that like I’m not saying that you should go around telling people, you know, you are not a separate individual, you are the totality of your relationships, you are a holographic mirror of everything, I’m not saying that, but you can change the story by giving them an experience of that, which could be an experience of kindness, of generosity, of humor, of whatever is called forth by compassion. Taking the candy away from the baby, maybe not. But you so it’s to, and like you’re saying, when you’re coming from that place then even if you’re using words, the words will carry a vibration that communicates on a level deeper than semantics. That’s what I strive to do. I’m not like trying to be like some smart guy who finally got the answer, you know, got it right and here’s the answer teacher, you know, here’s my assignment now, change the world for me. Like that’s not going to happen. But when we are in service and filled with and inhabited by the story of interbeing and the felt states that are part of it, then we transmit that.
Rick: That’s the word I was looking for. Yeah, we transmit that. Yeah, you just mentioned myth and archetype and coincidentally or synchronistically a question just came in from Chris in Montana who asks, Joseph Campbell said that the new myth cannot be known and will not be consciously created, but will arise from the mythic depths. How do you see the collective moment in terms of archetypes and where in the mythic journey of death/rebirth do you believe us to be?
Charles: I agree with that quote, like myths are not something that we make up, you know, they’re something that have an existence beyond ourselves. It’s not just that mountains and rivers and planets are alive, but stories are alive too, myths are alive, they’re these enormous beings and a new mythology is being born. I’m not creating it at all, I’m just kind of reporting on it.
Rick: What’s creating it? What is creating it?
Charles: I don’t know what’s creating it, I don’t know where these things come from. Okay. The universal mind or I don’t know, something. I mean maybe they just come into being, maybe they have been here as seeds and now they are sprouting because the seeds go back indigenous people, you know, lived in a mythology of interbeing. Anyway, so as far as like the journey through archetypes, you could say that that we’re going through a death process or a birth process into a larger world, into a different world. The world that had, it’s more of a birth process, I don’t know, I mean I don’t remember either one of these, but in many ways it’s like a birth process where the womb that had contained us and allowed us to grow is becoming confining and pressing in and there’s no more room for growth, like literally no more room for growth and that reaching of limits is generating crises. This is especially true economically, like our system only works if there’s growth. If there’s no growth we have financial crisis endlessly, worsening. And so yeah, reaching limits of growth which triggers a birth crisis, triggers being propelled very intensely into a world that you cannot really imagine from the other side, but you can catch little glimpses of it maybe, or you have an intimation of it, you see a light at the end of the tunnel when the cervix opens. So there’s some sense that there is a world that we’re being moved into. So that’s one way that the kind of archetype of birth and death fits onto our collective experience and many people’s personal experience too, that the world falls apart, they can’t grow anymore in their career or their relationship and that reaching limits of growth triggers a process, right? That happens on a personal level too. And the other metaphor or archetype I like to draw on to describe what’s happening to us is neither birth nor death, really, but a transition into adulthood, likening our current moment to a coming-of-age ordeal. In traditional societies they might take you and put you in isolation, feed you psychedelic plants, subject you to physical pain, subject you to some kind of physical hardship, thirst, hunger, isolation, etc. etc. And basically the purpose of all this was to shatter your identity, to shatter the child’s identity and open the space for you to step into the adult identity and after the process, which could last months even and involve many ordeals, you would go back to the tribe universally recognized as an adult and not having this thing in our culture where you’re in your 20s, your grown-up and you’re not really sure if you’re, you know, that wouldn’t happen. So I believe that civilization, our collective being, is going through a crisis a lot like that where our identity, who we thought we were, is being shattered by this ordeal and we are becoming therefore open to taking on a larger identity. And in adulthood then, to become an adult and part of being an adult is to use our gifts toward their true purpose, whereas a child is just kind of playing around, you know, that’s what we’ve been doing with technology. We’ve been messing around, making a lot of messes, but I cannot say that humanity has used technology for its true purpose and I’m sure that there is a true purpose because I believe that nature is intelligent and purposive and that no species has a gift that is just a mistake, but it has a purpose, you know, and so if we are transitioning into adulthood and being welcomed into the tribe as a full member of the tribe of all life on earth, part of that has to be to turn our gift of hand and mind to its true purpose, which I think I might have said this before, which initially is probably going to be to deal the damage that’s been done and after that who knows, but that, so there’s a lot of ways that our current moment fits into more of a coming-of-age initiation than a birth or a death and another part of it is that that seems really true is that in a coming-of-age ordeal you’re not sure if you’re going to make it and in fact in certain moments it seems impossible because the resources that you knew you had are not enough. It seems like you’re faced with an impossible task. This is actually reflected in fairy tales too. Some of the fairy tales are maps of initiatory processes, so you’re faced with an impossible task, but in that moment of despair and giving up and surrender, capacities that you didn’t know that you had become available to you. In fairy tales they often take the form of magical assistance and or some kind of aid from the outside that comes through some kind of process of testing, testing of sincerity. So I don’t know if I want to like right now try to map all of those things specifically to the collective human experience, but there’s definitely something there that it looks like we’re not going to make it. I mean if you look at some of the climate prognosticators, they can make like … what’s his name? Ian McPherson?
Rick: Yeah.
Charles: What’s his name? Guy McPherson.
Rick: Guy, right.
Charles: Yeah, Guy McPherson. Like he makes a pretty strong argument that
Rick: We’re screwed.
Charles: We’re facing near-term extinction. Yeah. And if you don’t believe it, you’re just in denial. You know, you’re just not looking at the scientific evidence. So you can make it a good case that the situation is hopeless. We’re not going to make it through this ordeal. A well-designed ordeal is designed that way. It’s supposed to look impossible at a certain moment in order to make you give up what you thought you knew. That’s what opens the space for, practically speaking, it’s what opens the space for the things that we label as alternative and holistic today and push into the margins.
Rick: Yeah.
Charles: You know, I mean the things, they’re not unknown. They’re unknown to the kind of collective consensus intelligence about what’s real. They’re not on the political agenda. But they’re there. Like the cure for any disease is there. The way to grow enormous amounts of food with zero ecological impact, in fact, positive ecological impact, it’s there. To have energy that doesn’t pollute, I mean all that stuff, it’s there, but it is not in collective reality yet. And so that means that existing collective reality has to be shattered for the new reality to come in. So yeah, those are the similarities I see between a coming-of-age process.
Rick: I’ve often felt that the … you okay? I’ve often felt that how traumatic the shattering would be could be moderated somewhat, and that the spiritual teachers who’ve been running around the world trying to wake people up and raise collective consciousness, a lot of them have actually explicitly said that this is coming and there’s no way of escaping it, but they’re trying to minimize the trauma, they’re trying to smooth the transition as much as possible by raising people’s awareness. It’s like if you kind of get the lesson, you don’t have to be slapped around as much as if you’re totally obstinate and refusing to get it. Here’s a passage from your book that I think is worth reading right now, “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. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void, it comes from inaction.” And that reminds me of an old phrase that Maharishi always used to say, which is, “Rest is the basis of activity.” He used to use the example of shooting an arrow. If you want to shoot an arrow, you don’t just sort of put it on the bow and drop it, you pull it back on the bow and then just let it go effortlessly and it has the momentum to fly forward. So if you had to drive 500 miles tomorrow, you wouldn’t stay up all night watching movies and playing video games, you’d want to get a good night sleep because rest will prepare you for that. You wouldn’t want to stay up all night studying the roadmap and working on your car and you want to rest. So sometimes doing the opposite of what we need to do is the best way to prepare for doing it.
Charles: I think you’re right. I think these spiritual teachers, wisdom holders, visionary people have seen early on that our society is unsustainable, that the direction we’re going in cannot continue forever, and have been preparing us. And that would be the same in a traditional society that has initiations too, like you’re going to have your father, your uncles preparing you to meet the challenges. I also think that sometimes people do not make it through the initiations. That’s what makes them real. You go forth and I was hearing about one where the women like grab onto their sons and try to physically prevent them from going. Part of it is kind of a dramatic performance because they know that the son has to like pull away in order to become a man. But partly it’s also genuine because they know that not all the sons are going to come back. So we are truly, you know, I don’t want to say, oh you know, don’t worry about it because it’s just this process, we’re going to come through. Like coming through it successfully depends on fully engaging that experience and reaching that point of desperation and “I’ll do anything to get through this,” reaching that point of like really having to fall back on your resources and what you really know. On a collective level, I mean I could also relate this to another archetype which is the archetype of hitting bottom in addiction. Hitting bottom means different things for different people. For some people it might mean just like a mild encounter with the dark. It could be that, you know, their wife walks out and is gone for three days with the kids and that’s the wake-up call. For another person it might be that hitting bottom doesn’t happen until they’re on their deathbed and they’re still smoking cigarettes through their tracheotomy hole, you know. So the question, if you are using that particular narrative that sobriety or the new life doesn’t come until you’ve hit bottom, then the question becomes how do you raise bottom.
Rick: Good point.
Charles: I think that yeah, so for like what distinguishes the alcoholic who quits more easily with the one who doesn’t quit until he’s on his deathbed, maybe it’s the amount of love he received in his life. I don’t know, but I think that the things that what I’m sure about actually, what I know irrationally, but I know it, is that all of the invisible actions that people have done in humble circumstances throughout history, humble invisible actions of compassion, kindness, generosity, and love are raising bottom. They are necessary and important and maybe more powerful than anything that the great leaders have done with their power, or the smart guys have done with their platforms, for example, speaking of you and myself. So that is, and this is something anybody, all of us can do all of the time, when we are in a state of gratitude and therefore able and desiring to pass on what we’ve received. We’re all the time raising this kind of psychic, this collective psychic field that makes the difference between, do we turn around when there’s still some natural beauty left on this planet or do we turn around when we’ve paved over the whole thing and we’re gnashing and wailing, wailing and gnashing our teeth with despair and grief for what we’ve destroyed and it’s too late. Like is that when we turn around? Like we got to raise bottom and protect the wealth that remains, including the inner wealth that we draw on, the spiritual wealth that, like this relates to like where does the desire for meditation come from, where does the desire to do spiritual work come from? I think it comes from, I think it’s something that we’ve received and sometimes even like a tiny moment of… I’ll tell a little story to illustrate it from my dear friend, it’s my, actually I’m not going to say names because he’s my ex-wife’s husband and he works in the belly of the beast, he’s like a custodian, repairs things, does janitorial stuff whatever at a juvenile detention facility where, you know, it’s a stop on the school to prison pipeline basically and these kids are, they haven’t received 1% of the things that a child needs and they’re locked up in these places and they’re mad and they smash stuff all the time and his job is to fix the things that they smash or buy new ones but he likes to fix things because he’s like real like working-class aspect but a very highly developed like hidden yogi, you might call him a hidden yogi and he was telling me one time about this door that was, you know, ripped off its hinges and stuff and he was repairing the door and he said, “I polished the hinges and I cleaned the door” and so he made the door. He treated that door as if it were the door to the King’s chamber and put it back on these teenagers room, you know, and I thought, you know, like who knows, I mean he can’t give them 1% of what they need but that tiny moment of being treated with respect like you deserve a really nice door, I’m gonna make it nice for you, you know, that moment of respect who knows 10, 20, 30 years later how that is gonna affect that young man’s life, who knows if that might be the tipping point in a certain moment when he was gonna pound on somebody but that little experience he had of respect maybe made him do something different.
Rick: You mentioned in your book some guy who was in Liberia and he was like a fighter and he was torturing and murdering lots of people and all kinds of stuff. The war ended and he was out of a job because they didn’t need torturers at the moment and so he was going over to some other country to join that war and his car broke down or something and some other people’s car happened to break down near his, got stuck in the mud or something. Why am I telling a story? You can tell it better, go ahead and finish the story.
Charles: Yeah and yeah he runs into the everyday Gandhi’s peace workers and he decides to become a peace worker because, so this is
Rick: a little act of kindness.
Charles: They didn’t act in a way that fit his story – his story about the world and his story about himself. He thought they were, when they realized who he was, he thought they were gonna start beating him up or kill him, you know, because he was General Bethelson, bad dude, but instead they hugged him and they said that they loved him and he was like, ah, maybe everything I thought about the world is wrong, you know, like that moment penetrated. So this is what I call disrupting the story or offering like what my, I don’t know, what do you call it, ex-husband-in-law, ex-wife’s husband, this guy, like he and he just, this is how he is every single day at that place. He is giving data points to people that don’t fit into their story and anytime you receive, like I’ve had moments like this in my life, you know, like one impactful one was I was like trying to show off to somebody, you know, and make myself look like really amazing and he saw right through me and kind of called me on it, but in a way that was so gentle and with so much love that I realized at that moment that maybe I was lovable underneath all of the pretense just because I’m a being, you know, and like that was a data point that didn’t fit. When you have any experience, could be a religious experience, an awakening experience, or seeing a UFO or whatever, when you have an experience or just receiving generosity, kindness, when you have an experience that doesn’t fit into the story, then it kind of says to you, maybe unconsciously, it says, “Oh, you know, maybe you don’t know who you are and what the world is.” So that raises bottom. It says that this isn’t all that there is. It makes that transition easier. So all of these lightworkers, and it could be spiritual teachers, but it could be like really humble people. I mean I think that the great souls are doing the humble things for which they get no thanks, no reward, no recognition, no one, you know, calling them guru and looking up to them, but doing stuff as janitors, you know, and washerwomen and people like that, holding the fabric of reality in a place where we can make this transition. All of those actions are their story disruptors. They say, “This transition can happen. There’s more to it than just this.” They make that transition possible for the rest of us.
Rick: Here’s a great little passage from your book that relates to this. You say, “Complexity theory teaches us that in the chaotic zone between two attractors, tiny perturbations can have huge unpredictable effects. We’re in such a place today. Our civilization is approaching a phase transition. Who can predict the effects of our actions?”
Charles: Yeah, yeah, and if we condition our actions on whether they’re going to have like a big picture effect or not, like for one thing we’re never going to know and we’re not going to do the things that might actually have an effect on our understanding. It’s like I get a little bit sometimes impatient, like a lot of smart guys, usually guys actually, smart guys come to me and they’ve got it figured out. They’ve found the point of mass and here’s where you should put your attention and here’s what’s going to scale up and here’s going to go viral, you know, here’s the leverage point. Like having you had people like come to you and say here’s the leverage point. That’s a mechanical metaphor and it kind of devalues the things that couldn’t possibly have a leverage point. The mother telling her child a story when he’s sick and in the hospital and he’s dying and she’s there with him 24/7 and then he dies. Rationally speaking, that’s not a leverage point. That kid’s not even ever going to grow up and pass on that love, right? But you know that that woman is doing something important. You know it. No force in the universe can tell you that that was a waste of time, even if the kid was going to die anyway.
Rick: Yeah, you told some story about somebody taking care of his something, instead of doing some supposedly important thing. What was that story?
Charles: Yeah, he was like a magazine publisher, you know, and he spent lots of his time taking care of this woman who was his divorced ex-wife’s mother. He had no legal or any obligation, but he loved her and he took care of her and did really humble stuff. I don’t remember the details. I might have been changing her bedpan for all I know, but you know he could have been starting a new campaign or doing some big thing where he could show by the numbers that he was having a big effect. Again, we know on some level that you can’t live life like that, you know, by what you can calculate. That’s no way. In fact, that way of living is what’s gotten us into this problem in the first place. Making choices based on the rationally calculable impact. That’s what you how you make financial decisions. You assess the risks and the outcomes and you weigh them and you measure them and you do the projections and that’s the policy I’ll choose. That’s not how to make choices.
Rick: You know there’s a portion in your book I think where you were talking about, I forget what terminology you used, but how things can really just kind of go your way in ways that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen or calculated. You know what I’m saying? We used to call it in the TM movement, we used to call it “supportive nature,” like maybe simple as needing to find a parking place and there it is or something, but it can happen in much bigger and more complex ways that the various things come together for you that you know you couldn’t have orchestrated. It’s too complex, too coincidental and so on, but things just come together and save the day or enable you to succeed in something you’re trying to do. I think there’s a deeper mechanics to that which again brings us back to the underlying or innate intelligence of nature and that is, you know, that ultimately we are one with that intelligence, it’s our intelligence. The intelligence that grows a butterfly or causes the earth to circle around the sun according to certain laws of gravity is the same intelligence that is at our root and the more deeply we are established consciously in and as that intelligence, the more it cooperates. In fact there’s a verse from the Rig Veda, it says, how does it go? ṛco akṣare parame vyoman yasmin devā adhi viśve niṣeduḥ . It’s that the transcendent field is the source or home of all the laws of nature which orchestrate and govern the material universe. He who does not know that field, what can those laws do for him? But he who does know it, it goes on to say, you know, the laws support him, they work on his behalf. So I think this is key to our whole discussion in a way because as we were discussing earlier, the problems besetting the world are too complex, too dire for us to figure out rationally at the same level at which we’ve been operating and at the level of which we created those problems, but if we can resort somehow and align ourselves and receive the support of nature’s intelligence, then it could sort it out more efficiently and successfully than we could ever imagine.
Charles: Right, if having a livable future depends on us figuring out how to do it,
Rick: we’re screwed,
Charles: There’s no way. Yeah, yeah, like any plan that I could come up with, you can easily shoot it down and tell me why it won’t work. So that means that to have a livable future or more beautiful world, we have to reach it according to a path by a path that we cannot see in advance. We cannot plan out a chain of cause and effect that will work, that will be convincing, and that means that we have to rely on things like, well, we will be at the right place at the right time. That’s this kind of thing you described about being held by this larger intelligence that breaks out into our awareness as synchronicity, that you know, these chance encounters that seem to have meaning and relevance and sometimes even are life-saving and that especially happen in transition points in life, maybe when you move to a new city or when something breaks down. It’s, they happen precisely when we release control and release, imposing this linear cause and effect or just, you know, we cease trying to impose our structure and our understanding even, like here’s how the world works, here’s why things happen. When we let go of that, then there’s room for this larger intelligence to poke through, and that’s what we need to listen to, and I mean that’s the only way that we’re going to accomplish the impossible. It’s the only way.
Rick: I think letting go is a big part of it, but at the same time you have to somehow become aligned with that deeper intelligence. You can’t just sort of say, “All right, whatever, I’ll just sort of drift along here,” because you know, you still have to make decisions and take actions and things that you have to do in life, but at the same time if you can somehow attune yourself or connect yourself or realize your essential identity as that deeper intelligence that governs everything, then it will, you know, support you.
Charles: I think that one way that I look at that is to say that the new story or the more beautiful world or hearts and nose possible or whatever that is for you, it could just be like some project, maybe an eco-village or an organization or something that you’re creating in your life, could be something very modest, but whatever it is, if you balance a service to that thing, then it knows how to do what you don’t know how to do. All it requires is your service and your readiness and your willingness. So it’s not that like you sit down and just don’t do anything, right, or don’t intend anything or don’t orient, but it’s yeah, you orient towards something and you say, “Whatever it takes,” like I’m at your service, whatever it takes, and then when you do that, you’ll be given opportunities that will test your sincerity even. Say, “Okay, here’s the thing you should do,” and sometimes it might be really easy to help you take that first step, but then sometimes it might be something that’s almost beyond your courage to do, but you’re like, “I know that this is the thing,” and you take that step and that opens up new possibilities that you hadn’t imagined before. So I do think that there is like an intentionality, but it’s an intentionality of service that doesn’t depend on knowing how to do it. But like I run into people all the time who are like committed, so committed to something that seems like a pipe dream, but it’s not. Like there’s also such thing as a pipe dream that if you’re honest with yourself, it doesn’t even feel real to you, but then there’s the thing that if you’re honest with yourself, it does feel real, you just have no idea how it’s gonna possibly happen, but you know. That’s the thing that exercises power, and for me, I call it the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible. My heart knows, not my mind. My mind is like, “No way,” but I know that I’m seeing something real. I have no idea like how we’re gonna get there. I don’t have a blueprint. I don’t have a map, but what we have maybe is a compass, and as long as we stay, and we can deviate from it even, and look away, and that’s maybe the practice is to keep looking back again and again, just like TM, you know, where you just keep going back even in a very gentle way, go back again and again and again, turn your eyes once again toward this thing that’s beckoning so beautifully. That’s maybe all you have to do.
Rick: For some reason during this conversation, I’ve kept thinking of the Lord of the Rings, you know, and what an impossible task Frodo had, you know, getting that ring to the Mount Doom or whatever and throwing it in the fire, but how just because he had that innocence, he was just a little hobbit, and because he had committed himself to the task, all sorts of unexpected means of support kept presenting themselves, and even the very last thing, it was like he couldn’t do it because the closer he got to the fire, the more powerful the ring was, but then Gollum bit his finger off and dove in there with the ring. So I don’t know, it’s just a cool metaphor for a lot of the stuff we’re talking about.
Charles: It is. Yeah.
Rick: Here’s a question that came in for you from Mark Peters in Santa Clara. Mark always sends a question in. How have your insights impacted the daily choices you make with regard to shopping, eating, care for the body, interacting with neighbors, consuming news, etc.?
Charles: Well, one thing that I work with, I mentioned it a little bit before, but it’s this idea of, gosh, I mean this is such a big question. I guess I’ve become a lot less controlling, and like one thing I’ve decided, so like I can say all this stuff, but I noticed pretty recently that when I was making decisions on like what events to speak at, you know, where to travel and so forth, because I get a lot of, I get more invitations than I could possibly say yes to, and so I had like this kind of calculus about, you know, okay, so where is it going to be the biggest audience, you know, and the most impact, and so on and so forth, are these going to be influential people, like using those same metrics that I’m saying are not the way to navigate the world, not the way to make decisions. So I’ve decided I’m just going to be even more unreasonable, and I’ve been, you know, this has been something that’s been, you know, I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I’m like, no, I’m just going to say yes to the things that just feel like a really strong open invitation and a unreasonable feeling of yes, even if I can’t justify it on any other grounds. It could be like some little student group, you know, that has reached out and without even expecting a positive answer, but we really want you to come and speak at our group, you know, I’m like, okay, I’ll do that, even if it means not going to some like really prestigious conference or something like that. I’ve been guided to follow that a lot more. So that’s one way that it’s having an impact. So going with your heart more, going with your intuition more. Just, yeah, trusting how things feel, even when that conflicts with mental calculations about what would be the most impactful. And like so that means like not trying to, I’m like, I’m not even trying to expand my audience, you know what I mean? Like I’m not, like it doesn’t feel good to do marketing, so I’m not going to do that. Like just like I’m not going to have a Facebook logo on my website, I’m redoing my website, like, you know, because it doesn’t look good to have that thing up there, you know? It’s like, oh, a corporate logo right on the front, you know, is that what it’s all about? Yeah, if someone wants to share it, they’ll find a way, you know? And just kind of following the example of these humble people who, I mean, if you want to talk about awakening at the gas pump, you know, the Buddha at the gas pump, I mean, these are my teachers who just live such beautiful lives and give so much love and are never recognized beyond a very small circle.
Rick: I have two more points. One is, and they’re both quotes from your book, one is, we’ve kind of touched on this but I just want to touch on it again as we wrap up, “When civilization as a whole enters the space between stories, then it will be ready to receive these visions, these technologies and social forms of interbeing.” So it seems like you’ve touched on this and I just want to touch on it one more time, that we are kind of entering the space between stories. The old story isn’t working, the new story seems to be emerging. I don’t know whether we’re at the midpoint or if we’re, it seems like the old story still has a pretty firm grip and the new story is just a faint, you know, glow on the horizon, but I feel like the sun is rising and, you know, and the transition is going to happen. So just riff on that just a little bit as part of our conclusion.
Charles: I feel, I’m not going to riff on it much, I’m just going to say that we’re still in the old story.
Rick: Yeah.
Charles: But we are in that, in the late, late stages of it where we’re just clinging on to it and everyone knows that it’s, the game is up soon.
Rick: I would say that, I’d say that if everyone knows it, with some people it’s very subliminal, you know, some people can articulate it, other people it’s just sort of a gut feeling like, you know, why isn’t my life working, you know, why is the world going to hell in a hand basket, and that kind of thing. Like feeling of impending doom, something big is coming.
Rick: Right, right.
Charles: Yeah, in the financial industry it’s like widespread, everyone thinks that the system’s not going to last much longer.
Rick: Are you saying that in the financial system there, even though the stock market is above 20,000 that people are saying we’re going to have a total collapse of the economy, is that what you’re alluding to?
Charles: The insiders, yeah, and they’re still buying because they think everyone else is still going to buy a little longer. Yeah. And there’s always a greater fool.
Rick: There was that movie that came out recently about the guys that foresaw the collapse of the real estate market and bet on that, and everybody thought they were crazy, but they saw it coming.
Rick: All right, well, pardon me for persisting in this, but what would you do? I mean, if knowing what you know, feeling what you feel, would you like, you know, turn whatever money you have into some kind of concrete goods that you’ll have in hand when the economy collapses? I mean, if the money is going to become worthless or something, what would you do?
Charles: The best strategy is to invest in generosity, because that’s the only thing that can persist through a really severe crisis. Depends how deep the crisis is. If it’s just, you know, like it was in 2008, you know, then there’s certain investments that might make sense, you know, but if it gets really bad, then even the convention that we call property is no longer reliable. You could invest in gold bars, but if society breaks down enough, men with guns will come and take your gold. They’ll take your physical goods. They’ll take whatever you’ve invested in, your stores of gasoline and food. I mean, there’s no security, but if you’ve been really generous to a community, and if you have skills that will enable you to continue benefiting those around you, then that’s a kind of a savings account that that fires cannot burn and thieves cannot steal.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a story. I’m sorry, go ahead.
Charles: No, I’m done.
Rick: Yeah, there was a story in the news last night about how there’s this big boom in the industry of building underground bunkers, and you know, the guy is saying, “I used to get, you know, like a few orders a month. Now I’m getting six a week of building these great big fancy underground bunkers for people.” So, there’s something in the mentality of certain people that they’re going to kind of hole up underground until it all blows over.
Charles: It’s a much better security to have to prepare with things that will enable you to take care of people around you, because then they’ll take care of you, too.
Rick: Yeah, good point.
Charles: Even if you’re a total misanthrope, that’s the best strategy. Ideally, that strategy should be animated by a genuine desire to take care of people around you. And like, what’s going to happen? There you are in your bunker, and like a haggard woman with like a three-year-old who’s like starving comes by. Who are you in that moment? Are you going to let them in? Are you going to share your food with them? Or are you going to shoot them, like from your bunker? Like that’s the question that those people, the prepper, should be asking. Who am I for real? When push comes to shove, who am I? And how then, and once you realize that, you know, I probably would let that woman in, I probably would feed that child, then the whole mentality about prepping changes. And it’s like, how can I prepare to exercise my compassion? How can I prepare to exercise my desire to be of service, to express my love to the people that I love, to take care of my community? Like how can I prepare for that? That’s a completely … then you start to get into … I mean that changes everything.
Rick: I don’t know if too many people who are buying the bunkers are thinking that way, but that’s a nice thought.
Charles: But it’d be nice to ask them that question and put … like if you have a conversation with them, like put them in that situation, you know, touch what … because there’s a whole culture around this, you know, that’s all about maximizing your self-interest, your security. Yeah, but they’re human beings too, and they have another human nature that needs to be spoken to, because probably it’s not going to come to people in their bunkers, you know, it’s going to unfold in some other way. And I think it’s really good to invoke the best in people, and to see people, to hold them in a story in which they are beautiful, in which they are generous, because sometimes when you hold a story for somebody strongly enough, they step into that story. It’s an invitation to them, or it might even at the least awaken that in them. You know, you’re saying, I know you, you would love to take care of people. If you could, you would want to take care of that three-year-old girl, you’d want to feed her. I know who you really are, and if you can hold that for somebody, it can be really powerful, especially when it’s more than just words.
Rick: The final point I want to bring up is another quote from your book. It was a quote from Chan Buddhism. It’s that the ordinary person avoids consequences, the Bodhisattva avoids causes. I wanted to bring up that last because I think that theme came up again and again in our talk, that you know, if you wait until things bubble up to a symptomatic level and try to deal with them on that level, it’s kind of hopeless. If you can nip things in the bud, get down to the root cause and prevent that from arising. It’s like, I’ve used the analogy before, if this is obviously not literally possible, but if you wanted to change the course of a river, if you try to do that down at the mouth of the river, like let’s say the Ganges down in Calcutta, you can’t do it, the river’s already run its course. If you try to do it halfway upstream someplace, in a Hardwar or something, you might be able to change part of the river, but it’s still kind of hard, the river has force and it’s already run half its course. But if you could get up to Gangotri where it starts out and shift its direction, then with very little effort you could send the river off in a different direction. Again, it’s not really possible and we wouldn’t want to send the Ganges off in a different direction, but the closer you can get to the cause of things, the source of things, and avoid that or change it there, the more easily, you know, you do more with less effort, basically.
Charles: I mean, I don’t think I can phrase it better than you did. The causes, you know, the symptoms are a gateway to the cause. They’re a trail that we can follow back to the cause. So it’s not to ignore the symptoms. Sometimes I think it’s only by futilely fighting the symptoms that we discover that we can even discover the deeper cause. It’s a journey that’s set out for us by something very wise and at some point we start to see the patterns and we become better able to recognize symptoms as for what they are and become more familiar with what the causes are. I don’t really have anything.
Rick: That’s good. That’s a good kind of concluding statement in a way. You know, maybe if we’re shifting stories as a culture, the story we’re shifting to is to learn to function from the root, from a much more causal or fundamental level, both in our individual lives and as a culture, rather than sort of, you know, battling the consequences. It has that phrase from Jesus, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” It’s like we keep blundering along doing things and then being surprised at the consequences. But if we were aware of the sort of deeper dimension of it all, there’s another phrase, quotes are coming to mind, from Patanjali Yoga Sutras, “Avert the danger which has not yet come.”
Charles: Yeah, same idea. Yeah.
Rick: Great. Well, thank you very much, Charles. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you. You’re going to be at the SANS conference this year?
Charles: Yeah, I am. Great. I’ll probably run into you out there. SANS conference, for those listening, is the Science and Nonduality Conference every October out in San Jose, a little plug for them. So I’ll be putting up a page on batgap.com about this interview, and as always I’ll be linking to Charles’s websites and his books and so on, and so you can follow those links to get in touch with him and, you know, see what he’s up to and what seminars he might be teaching or whatever, right? And you say you’re working on a book on global warming. I’ll be interested in climate change. I’ll be interested in reading that when it comes out. Yeah.
Charles: All right. Thank you, Rick.
Rick: A couple moments before you disconnect. Hang on. I just want to make another concluding point in general, which is that, you know, this is an ongoing series of interviews. If it’s new to you, go to batgap.com, look under the ‘At a Glimpse’ menu and you’ll see everything summarized there, so I won’t have to elaborate it. And the next interview, as I mentioned, will be with a fellow named John Yates, who goes by the name of Culadasa, a really interesting looking fellow. So I hope to see you then. Thanks for listening or watching.