Summary
Charles Eisenstein explores the breakdown of modern civilization’s dominant stories and its connection to personal and collective awakening. He examines how social and ecological crises expose deeper patterns of separation, control, and misplaced certainty.
Questions This Interview Explores
- How is spiritual awakening connected to social and ecological change?
- Why do efforts to solve major problems often create new problems?
- How should we respond when we do not know what to do?
- What happens when a society’s dominant worldview begins to collapse?
Key takeaways
- Personal resistance can reflect an inner refusal to accept a failing cultural story.
- Crisis can bring forward human qualities and forms of cooperation that were previously marginal.
- Many problems are symptoms of deeper patterns rather than isolated issues with simple causes.
- Trying to control or eliminate problems often strengthens the patterns that created them.
- Admitting that we do not know can open the way to wiser and more effective responses.
- A new civilization may center on healing the biosphere rather than controlling nature.
Transcript
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.
That little introduction doesn’t really explain why I have Charles on the show. So let me say a couple of 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, and all the things that humanity confronts—are symptomatic of the consciousness of the individuals that make up the world. It’s like the color of a forest, if you flew over it, being symptomatic of the health of the individual trees in the forest. It might be gray, it might be green, depending upon the overall health of the trees.
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. He does so very eloquently and very deeply. I’ve just finished, or nearly finished, reading his book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, and he delves really clearly and deeply into a number of points that relate to what I’ve just said.
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 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 what does it really tell you?
The whole thing about introducing myself to people I don’t know—normally you say only the good things about yourself, but that’s not actually even honest. But if I tell the bad things about myself, that’s a little bit 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, but it made them cry, and we can go into things like that.
Well, 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 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—just a five-minute background. What led you to where you are now and the way you see things?
Charles: My background is not actually that unusual. I haven’t done anything especially heroic. I don’t have any really dramatic story. 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. It would be bad news if it were only the special people.
Actually, I’m not going to say I’m an ordinary person, but I’m not that unusual or that extraordinary either.
Rick: Well, the subtitle of this show is “Interviews with Ordinary Spiritually Awakening People,” and the title of the show, Buddha at the Gas Pump, implies that in this day and age, all kinds of people are waking up. It’s likely that you’ll be encountering a Buddha at the gas pump—some guy or girl or woman who is living an ordinary life, appears ordinary, but has got something really interesting going on inside.
Charles: Yeah, I think that’s a really accurate depiction of our times, whereas maybe 50 or 100 years ago, it was only profound visionaries that saw through the illusion of our civilization. Now everybody’s waking up to it.
There I was, a kid with a stable home, loving parents, and a good school, as far as that goes, and I still—maybe because of the sensitivity—felt an 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, half in and half out, doing just enough to get by.
I went to an elite university but didn’t really apply myself. 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.
Anybody who’s listening to this: if you were procrastinating or if you’re lazy, that may not be a problem. That may be your unconscious way of resisting participation in something that you don’t really want to participate in. That’s happening to a lot of people, because the overarching story of our civilization—the story that says, “Here’s where we’re going, here’s how to participate in it, and here’s how to be human”—is falling apart.
The overarching story of our civilization is falling apart.
There’s a lot of pressure to conform to it, but then there’s this inner rebellion, this soul rebellion against it. A lot of people are in that place, half in and half out, resisting unconsciously with addictions or something like that. I think that my story is really 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, the first time I took LSD, and the whole thing was going wild that summer. The Beatles came out with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Jefferson Airplane came out with Surrealistic Pillow, and the Haight-Ashbury thing was at its height.
People then were saying some of the same things you just said: the old system isn’t working, the world is falling apart, and “I’m going to 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. It didn’t change.” The world is getting worse and worse. How do you reflect on people’s expectations back then vis-à-vis what’s actually panned out?
Charles: Most of those people became lawyers and dentists.
What they learned is that they were seeing something real. They were seeing what I call The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is 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 and habits of the old story.
When they went to make their perfect little societies and their communes and all of their other visionary projects, the hidden baggage of the old story came with them. Then it came out to the surface and had to be dealt with.
It’s like LSD. You get transported to a place, and you get a glimpse of something. In that moment, you know that you’re seeing something profound, but then it’s over and you’re back to who you were. 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 try to traverse the entire territory in between.
That’s what we’ve been doing on a cultural level. After this magnificent glimpse of “hippie planet”—what the world could be—we realized that there’s a lot of stuff to work through to get up there.
Learning from Failed Attempts to Create a Better World
But we have an advantage today. 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. We can learn from their wisdom, and they’ve also created an energetic template that makes a difference.
But we have an advantage today. 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. We can learn from their wisdom, and they’ve also created an energetic template that makes a difference.
When they were telling their parents about this stuff, it was like they were aliens from another planet. There was no possible way for their parents, or for society, to even understand what they were talking about.
That’s not true today. My parents were born before the hippies—they were before the baby boomers, born during World War II or before—but they still heard about it an awful lot. These concepts are not foreign to them.
I think that we are making progress toward a collective enlightenment, but it’s not like all of a sudden it happens.
Rick: No, things never do, either individually or collectively.
Charles: You get a glimpse all of a sudden, but there’s still the stuff to work through.
When systems begin to break down
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 liked the ones with Rupert Sheldrake—was that when things are about to collapse, they become exaggerated.
On our current political situation—these were made before the recent presidential election—you predicted correctly that Trump was going to win. You saw that as an indication that things were really coming to a head because of the exaggeration of certain qualities that don’t have a place in a more enlightened world. Do you want to reflect on that a little bit?
Charles: The farcical nature of politics, for example, is not new. It’s been growing for decades now. You could still pretend until last year. You could still pretend that the system was fundamentally working, with just a little bit of self-delusion. You could say that the political system is functioning, that we have a functioning democracy, and that it’s working.
But with the election, it’s now so in your face that—even among the people who voted for him, though it’s not as if they think that normal is working either—a lot of them voted out of nihilism or fatalism.
Nobody thinks now—it’s almost impossible to think—that the American democracy we learned about in civics class in high school is functioning that way. The story is broken, and the farcical nature of it is at an extreme now.
Rick: You probably don’t consider yourself a futurist, and you probably don’t want to make specific timeline predictions. However long it takes, what do you see the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible actually looking like? Whether it takes five years, ten years, or thirty years, what do you see it actually looking like, and what sort of changes or earthquakes do you think 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 going to get a lot worse before they get better, and that it will be crisis, emergency, and sometimes suffering that brings forth the gifts that are needed to transition to the next level.
So, because of crisis, we are going to witness the emergence of human qualities and modes of interaction that have been marginal up until now, but they will come forth according to the need. On one level, things are going to get worse, but I think in my lifetime—we’re talking maybe forty years—we’re going to 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. The consensus will be that we are here on Earth to bring healing to the biosphere. 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 such a cliché, but in fact, like a lot of clichés, there’s a little truth in it. The word “ji,” which is used in the word for crisis, is also used in the word for opportunity, and it can kind of mean either one. It can be a turning point, a fulcrum kind of thing.
Rick: Yeah. I think I might have heard that point from Elizabeth Sartorius, who is a futurist and an evolutionary biologist. I guess she was saying that the caterpillar goes into a real crisis when it turns into mush, but the imaginal cells within the cocoon begin to form a butterfly, and it comes out a completely different thing.
Why we need bewilderment
One thing I heard you say in one of your talks is that if you look at the many problems besetting humanity—global warming, nuclear waste, and many other things—take any one individually, and we can’t figure out how to solve it. The fact that there are a multitude of them makes it all the more overwhelming.
Somehow, I think you used the word “bewilderment” when you brought up that point. Being cocksure of the answers—“I know how to solve this. I’m going to get jobs for everybody. You’re all going to mine coal again”—that kind of attitude doesn’t really lend itself to going deep enough to actually solve the problems. We need to enter into a phase of not being so sure of ourselves. Do you want to elaborate on that?
Charles: Sure. When you don’t know what to do—and I think right now we’re facing a time when we really don’t know what to do—the most positive step forward you can take is to stop pretending that you know what to do.
When you don’t know what to do, the most positive step forward you can take is to stop pretending that you know what to do.
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? It’s a habit that we got in school, where you’re 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.
It’s also built into the scientific worldview, which 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.
The War Mentality of Finding a Linear Culprit
Therefore, if something is happening and you don’t know why, you try to understand what the causal forces are, and then you try to counteract those forces. In its grossest form, this is war mentality. You see a problem, and this is a habit of our culture: 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 say, “Who’s pushing the car? What’s driving it? What force is making it happen?” Then you counteract that force, or you go to war against it.
You see that thinking throughout politics. Problem: crime. Reason: criminals. Solution: lock them up. Problem: terrorism. Reason: terrorists. Solution: kill the terrorists. Problem: disease. Reason: germs. Solution: kill the germs. Problem: climate change. Reason: greenhouse gases. Solution: cut greenhouse gases.
I mean, I could go on and on and on. Agriculture, medicine, weeds, insect pests—the solution is always to kill something, lock something up, suppress something, or 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, it’s really convenient to 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, then they become radicalized.
Rick: Not to mention drought due to global warming, which 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 thing. I’m writing a book now on climate change.
But this web of causes is less convenient to explore, first, 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. That’s a place that we don’t usually go.
So, 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 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.
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.
Agriculture is a perfect example of that. You get one superweed after another, caused by the application of herbicides. 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 you’re going to get if you take the thing. Then there are drugs to deal with those side effects, and probably those drugs have side effects. So, you know.
Charles: Yeah, the farce extends beyond politics.
From control to connection
People are just not really believing in the system anymore—not like they did when I was a kid or when my parents were kids, when it was taken for granted, without question, that science and technology were going to bring on a perfect society, a technological utopia. We would be the masters of nature, and it was just going to be great.
It was unquestionable that we would have conquered all disease by the impossibly futuristic year 2000. I mean, do you remember how futuristic the year 2000 was?
Rick: Oh, yeah.
Charles: It was going to be robots, bubble cities, and space colonies.
Rick: The Jetsons.
Charles: The Jetsons, yeah. That was part of our story, part of our narrative, or even our mythology. The mythology says—that’s how we learn how to be human—“Here’s who you are. Here’s how you participate in the world.”
That’s breaking down. People don’t believe in it anymore, and that’s dangerous, 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 to that.
But that’s also part of the transition process in personal life: clinging even more tightly to what hasn’t been working. That’s part of the process. If you try to surrender prematurely because some spiritual teacher said the path is surrender—“Okay, yeah, I’m going to do that now”—then it becomes the new to-do.
That premature surrender is actually a fake surrender. You end up realizing, “Actually, I was still holding on. I was trying to use ‘surrender’ in order to avoid truly surrendering,” and it doesn’t work.
So, anyway, I’m just saying that the process 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 Americans not always being counted on to do the right thing after having tried every other alternative. It kind of is implicit in what you’re saying that we have to really have it demonstrated to us, 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, and 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 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 much TV or anything. In fact, I’m on a news fast right now.
But I remember occasionally seeing some pundit—I’m in the airport, and I’m watching a pundit—and they’re 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. 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 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.”
If you play it well, then, yeah, you get the status and 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’ll 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. No one even believes the mass media or thinks that the things they’re being told are important are actually important. It’s more 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 was naked.
Symptoms, root causes, and the inner life
So let’s get back to the mechanics of problems. In doing so, I think we can make it clearer why this is relevant to spirituality and to enlightenment and awakening and all that stuff. What you were saying a minute ago is that, with any problem, the conventional way of dealing with it is to attack it on its own level. You’ve got weeds—kill the weeds. You’ve 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 trace it back through its more and more fundamental causes to its source, whatever that source might be. If it could be dealt with there, then the problem might just be found to disappear.
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, the inner dimensions to things, or the personal level. The same patterns—we reiterate them personally, too. I’m making 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, 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, fat is caused by taking in more calories than you burn, so obviously I’ve got to burn more or take in less. I’ve got to control myself. I’ve got to make myself do something or make myself stop doing something.”
Then it’s like, “Okay, so the problem is that I’m overeating, I’m eating too much, and I’m going to try to control that.” Instead of seeing overeating perhaps as a symptom, ask: Why would you eat more than you need? Why would you eat more than is even giving you pleasure? It doesn’t even feel good to stuff yourself, especially ten minutes later or half an hour later. Why would you do that?
One 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—is displaced from something else. Whatever you’re taking into your being, the desire for that is a secondary need that you’re meeting.
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. When we don’t have these intimate relationships ongoing, when we go outside and just see cars going by with people we’ve never seen before in the cars, and we go to the supermarket or shop online and it’s just abstract data points or random strangers, we feel 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 or for intimacy with nature, and it can’t meet our full need to feel like we belong in the world.
Overeating as Hunger for Connection
So when someone is overeating and stuffing themselves and still feeling hungry, it’s not that they’re actually hungry for food. They’re hungry for connection or some 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 when someone is overeating and stuffing themselves and still feeling hungry, it’s not that they’re actually hungry for food. They’re hungry for connection or some 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.
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. 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.
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 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, like drugs or gambling or something like that.
I’m reminded of a verse in the Bhagavad Gita:
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.
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 calling 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. 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 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. There are obviously all kinds of spiritual practices which can give you access to that and so on. In my own case, I was taking a lot of drugs, doing all kinds of crazy things. I learned to meditate, and all that stuff just fell off. 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 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 knew people who were meditating and were still alcoholics, and ended up dying from that and so on. I had definitely bottomed out, dropped out of high school, and done all kinds of other stuff. 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—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,” it feeds into this general formula again that spirituality or enlightenment is something that you do. That buys into a key precept of what I’m calling the old story, or the story of separation, which says that who you are is this separate self in a world of others.
It could be the technological self manipulating matter. It could be the economic man maximizing self-interest. It could be the biological 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. Part of that is, “Yeah, well, what about enlightenment? What about spirituality?” Well, that is also an accomplishment of the separate self. I think that we’re kind of waking up from that and realizing that, for example, enlightenment is a group process.
Anybody who you judge as not getting it, or being unenlightened or something like that, or not awake—that person is reflecting something in you that is not awake, and your further unfoldment depends on how you interact with that person. 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 necessarily find something. It’s that you search and search and search for that being, et cetera, however it’s named. You search and search, and you can’t find it. Then, in that moment where you’ve given everything and it hasn’t worked, and you give up, it finds you.
It’s not that you can necessarily find it. You search and search, and you can’t find it. Then, when you’ve given everything and it hasn’t worked, and you give up, 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; 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 that 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 of weeks and on to the next one.” But 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. I had no trouble sticking with it.
Second, another point you kind of bring in is that there are techniques that are very hard, where it’s like, “I’m doing this, and by golly, I’m going to break through.” To me, that 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.
Another thing you bring in is the sort of point of spiritual ego, 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.” 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—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, where you’re holding your arms out for 15 minutes or whatever. I do some qigong that’s pretty physically intense.
But even then, 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 when I just couldn’t get up off the couch, when I couldn’t make myself do anything? If someone said, “Just get yourself together and make more of an effort,” that was ridiculous. The day ahead of me, the year ahead of me, just seemed so forbidding that I could not. I was not in this. I didn’t have the willpower.
Willpower—does that come from you? I think it doesn’t. I think that these things are all gifts, and when you are in a phase where you are doing diligent practices and making great efforts, that’s wonderful. The proper, accurate, truthful attitude toward that is, “Thank you. Thank you for the conditions of my life that have enabled me to do this.”
Then you 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. That gets us into morphogenetic fields, which your friend Rupert Sheldrake talks about. 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. 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. It says, yeah, we’re not a separate self in a world of others. We are the totality of relationship. We are a holographic mirror of everything and not separate.
We’re not a separate self in a world of others. We are the totality of relationship.
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—global problems—and that everyone is contributing one way or the other, one influence or another.
People might say, “What can I do about the whales?” or “What can I do about slavery?” or whatever that’s going on. Well, 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. 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, 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. 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 your meditation in a cave generates a mysterious field that makes the Doctors Without Borders worker 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 meditation, and afterward you feel really good. You go to buy something at the liquor store, and the clerk there is really nasty. 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. Maybe you respond with humor and compassion: “Rough day at the liquor store, huh?” And then he’s like, “Yeah.” Maybe he’s a little bit—then the next guy who walks in is the Doctor Without Borders worker, and he’s more friendly to him. Things can spread in very mundane ways, too, and we don’t know what the ultimate effects of our actions are going to be.
Rick: Yeah, that’s very true. We just don’t know. There have been some movies made about that sort of thing.
🎵 Earth as a living being
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 going to 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. Others we might delve into more deeply.
Well, this phrase is very popular in the collective consciousness these days, at least in 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, seems to be giving people a really good reason why they should care.
Rick: Climate change does?
Charles: Because in the past, people would say, “Well, who cares about the forests?” And now you can say, “Well, the forests mitigate—they sequester greenhouse gases,” or something. You can give a reason that seems to put some kind of hard-headed, rational legitimacy onto what were these mushy 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. It’s hard to make a climate-based argument for why it’s important to preserve rhinoceroses. 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, with all sorts of unforeseen consequences.
Charles: Right, but it’s very hard to quantify those. 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, sort of presupposes that reality has to fit into our ability to quantify. That’s very anthropocentric, you know.
Charles: Right. Very presumptuous. Some indigenous people have a very different understanding of how this planet works and how it maintains its health.
For example, one tribe in Brazil was telling a friend of mine, who’s an activist down there, that they think the reason the climate is becoming deranged is that we are taking metals from the tropics and transporting them to the Northern Hemisphere. That does something to the Earth’s energy system. But that’s invisible in terms of carbon metrics.
The idea is that gold, for example, is the sacred heart of the mountain. 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 we don’t have, that is not available to us when we’re making decisions based on carbon numbers.
Because where does it matter where the gold is or where the copper is? Maybe it takes some energy to mine it, but 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 further question is, who’s doing the measuring? How are those numbers determined? 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 even on an unconscious level. But anyway, when we understand that, to return to your question, Gaia is a living being, then of course anything that happens to any of its tissues or 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 the indigenous people you just quoted are implying, and which I think is really a critical point to our conversation, is that everything is alive. Not only is the planet a living being, but all of its bits and pieces are. My cup is alive. 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 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.
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 for caring 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 respecting the forest, taking care of the forest because we love the forest, because it’s beautiful, because it’s alive, for the same reason that I take care of my sons.
No one has to say, “Charles, you better take good care of your four-year-old because otherwise you’re going to 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.” 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, if you have to give me those reasons to care about my son, there’s already a problem, and I’m not going to take very good care of him, even if I believe your reasons. He’s not going to 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.
We need to take care of the forest because we love the forest, because it’s beautiful, because it’s alive.
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, a closeness, almost like you’re the same being with just two different appendages of the same underlying thing or something. It’s a little harder to see that with 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. 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: It can’t be intellectual. It has to be experiential.
Rebuilding Connections with Local Land and Place
Charles: Right, and that means it has to also be local and place-based. We need to redevelop connections with the land, the place around us, nearby, that we interact with through our senses and not just through a screen.
That’s why the local food movement, for example, I think is so important, because, like you were saying with me and my son, there’s love there in part because of familiarity. I mean, I changed his diaper, I feed him. 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 going out into the forest to gather herbs or to hunt animals, when you’re getting water from a spring, when you’re involved and participating in nature on a sensory level, then the love is not abstract anymore. There’s something more than love, which might be called intimacy—something related to love, called intimacy, which is on a sensory level.
I think that’s hard to have when we’re living in a commodity world and having abstract relationships with distant strangers. It doesn’t get more basic than food as far as an intimate connection with the other.
So, 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, especially if you’re gardening or something like that—with the actual material world. 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 while looking at their phones or tripping into fountains at the mall while looking at their phones. People sit at the dinner table and they’re all staring at their phones. People have just gotten so divorced from nature and from the real world that it sounds like what you’re saying is a real good antidote to that.
Charles: Yeah.
The story of separation
Rick: Okay, I’m going to 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 do 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: 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?
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 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’ve 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, 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 to the story of the people, which has humanity on this triumphant course toward domination of nature. That’s what I call the old story, or the story of separation, and that answers these questions. What is human nature? It says, well, human nature is to maximize self-interest, and we see that as reality, as the truth. Then we 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. That goes along with that story.
The money system reflects that. 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?
We have a money system that propels endless growth and only works if there is endless growth. 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.
We have this because you look around and it does look like everybody is, in fact, maximizing self-interest. You go online to buy something and compare some prices. Here’s these goggles I use to look at computer screens, and this website has them for $7.99 and that one has them for $12.99. Which one am I going to buy? Am I going to care? Maybe I’ll buy the $12.99 ones because they need to make a fair profit, and they’ll be able to pay their employees better. I’ll get the more expensive ones. 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. 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 depend 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—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 until a society that has not been fully modernized will have a lot of gift elements remaining. Even in America, the more traditional parts of the country, you know—
Rick: The Amish, people like that.
Charles: Yeah, or even small towns in Iowa or something. People take care of each other. People know each other. 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. 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. 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. You’re liberated from the structures that make us separate and generate the perceived reality of separation.
So, yeah, those 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.
Gift economy and the loss of public life
Rick: So you’re talking about a gifting society, and people like Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders are always reminding us that in certain cultures, such as Western Europe, everybody gets health care. I mean, in Michael Moore’s movie Where Should We Invade Next?, he was showing how all these companies give big lunch breaks and vacations when you get married, and all kinds of stuff. Maybe the CEOs don’t make as much money, but they say, “Yeah, who cares? People are happier, they live better lives, and they make better employees.”
I wonder why. Right now in the U.S., health care is a big debate. I wonder why somehow we’re not able to move into more of a gifting mentality. What is it about American culture that’s preventing us from doing that?
Charles: I mean, that’s a question with—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 and 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? We have machines that can do things. You used to have to have a whole room full of people to produce a magazine or brochure, or things like a spreadsheet. You had to have people with typewriters and stuff.
Now we have so much more productivity, yet we’re working harder than ever for less. Why is that? I don’t think people typically ask that question that explicitly, because they take it for granted that it’s going to get harder and harder, more and more competitive. Why? Why is the world getting more and more competitive? Why should it?
The answer is, I mean, there are historical reasons why this attitude in the U.S. is especially strong, but there are also economic reasons that I wrote about in that other book.
Rick:Sacred Economics.
Charles:Sacred Economics. Yeah, essentially, we have a system that only works if there’s economic growth, and economic growth means that consumption has to continually increase exponentially. 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—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 sit on the plaza. There was a public life.
If that gets taken away, then you need much more indoor space to compensate for it. The private realm expands in compensation for the shrinking public realm, and our public realm has been taken away from us.
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, 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.
But even if it weren’t illegal, it’s just not the same. You send your kids outside, and there are no other kids playing outside because they’re in front of screens, or because they’re being carted off to martial arts or whatever other class they’re put into. This public domain was a kind of gift economy. Anything that’s not a service that’s provided for money is in the realm of gift.
Play, recreation, and leisure were not consumer products, but they’ve become consumer products. To meet these basic needs now, you’ve got to pay for daycare. For the basic need for a child to play with other kids, you’ve got to pay for something. You’ve got to pay for a martial arts class, Little League, or whatever you pay for now.
So 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, yeah, that’s part of the puzzle here.
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 change isn’t really going to make that much difference. 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 children going outside when there are no other children to play with. I mean, there are books about it, Last Child in the Woods, for example, but these are kind of fringy things.
So that’s part of my disengagement from politics. The questions that I’m concerned about are not on the menu. With Obamacare, no one’s talking about holistic health.
Rick: That’s a good point. With all this health care debate going on and Bernie Sanders saying, “Well, health care is a basic right,” my feeling is, yeah, that’s true, but with rights come responsibilities. There are so many things people do to make themselves unhealthy, and people need to be educated and supported to live in such a way that they don’t get sick. That will bring down health care costs. So it’s, again, kind of going back to a more fundamental cause.
Charles: Right, but then how do you educate them? Once you say, “Okay, we’re going to educate them,” then the educational-industrial complex grabs hold of it and turns it into some belittling lesson plan about the four food groups or something like that. It 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 going to have to pay experts to keep you healthy anymore, and it’s going to be a much more distributed—and this is what I see for the future—a much more distributive health care system, where not all, but maybe 80 percent of medical functions have gone back to the people. They’ve gone back to the massage therapists, the herbalists, and the people who are working with their hands, who don’t require expensive technological devices or expensive pharmaceutical medicines.
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 practices; she’s a doctor of Oriental medicine. I’ve seen her heal people of conditions that are medically considered incurable, pretty routinely, and 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, one can live one’s own life in such a way as to be much less dependent on any kind of professional. Just eating right, exercising properly, and doing things like that—you tend not to get sick.
Changing the story, not just the system
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. How do we get from here to there if incremental change and political solutions aren’t 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, how do we move forward?
You mentioned in your book, “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.”
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. 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 a spiritual awakening as being the ultimate fulcrum, the ultimate sort of control switchboard from which change can take place, and it will ripple up.
Charles: Yeah, so the point I was making with that quote that you read 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 don’t feel that they actually have much freedom to make any changes. We saw this 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 encounters with parliamentarians and finance people who have a certain amount of leeway, but they can’t deviate too far from their job description.
Changing the World Beyond the Levers of Power
So then the question comes up: Okay, that theory of how to change the world by operating the levers of power is actually based on the old story, the story of separation, which 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, a lot of guns, and a big platform.
So if you want to be an influential blogger, Rick, you’re going to have to expand your audience, and that’s going to come at the expense of someone else’s audience. You’ve got to tailor your thing and sell out to what the most people are going to hear, right? 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, in order to expand your audience, you’d have to become more and more and more anodyne, more and more bland, more and more the 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. What I’m connecting with what you were saying is this: If the people operating the levers of power are puppets of forces beyond themselves, then how does big change actually happen?
Well, these forces ultimately arise from the mythology that contains us all, that contains our civilization, and that contains our money system. So if you want to change that, then you’ve got to change the mythology. Changing the story 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 and the story of the people.
That’s what you might call a spiritual dimension, the story of self. It’s related to the story of the people; it reflects it, but that’s the level that the deep changes come from.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t engage the system or try to protect people from ending Obamacare, or 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. Getting down to the question of “Who am I?” is not just an intellectual matter; it’s an experiential matter. Self-realization is not just a new understanding of who or what I am. It’s more of a deep, conscious realization that ultimately and ideally is abiding. 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 wanted to throw that in.
Charles: And it’s funny. That means that I’m not saying you should go around telling people, “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, generosity, humor, or whatever is called forth by compassion. Taking the candy away from the baby, maybe not.
So, like you’re saying, when you’re coming from that place, 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 trying to be some smart guy who finally got the answer, got it right, and says, “Here’s the answer, teacher. Here’s my assignment. Now change the world for me.” That’s not going to happen. But when we are in service, 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.
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 and rebirth do you believe us to be?”
Charles: I agree with that quote. Myths are not something that we make up; they’re something that have an existence beyond ourselves. It’s not just that mountains, 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 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. The universal mind, or I don’t know, something. Maybe they just come into being. Maybe they have been here as seeds, and now they’re sprouting, because the seeds go back to indigenous people who lived in a mythology of interbeing.
Anyway, as far as the journey through archetypes, you could say that we’re going through a death process or a birth process into a larger world, into a different world.
The world that had contained us and allowed us to grow is becoming confining and pressing in, and there’s no more room for growth—literally, no more room for growth. That reaching of limits is generating crises.
This is especially true economically. Our system only works if there’s growth. If there’s no growth, we have financial crises endlessly worsening. So, reaching the limits of growth triggers a birth crisis, triggering our 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 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.
That’s one way that the archetype of birth and death fits onto our collective experience, and many people’s personal experience too. The world falls apart; they can’t grow anymore in their career or their relationship, and that reaching of limits of growth triggers a process. That happens on a personal level too.
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. I liken 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, or subject you to some kind of physical hardship—thirst, hunger, isolation, and so on. 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.
After the process, which could last months and involve many ordeals, you would go back to the tribe universally recognized as an adult. You wouldn’t have this thing in our culture where you’re in your twenties, you’re grown-up, and you’re not really sure if you’re an adult. 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 therefore becoming open to taking on a larger identity.
In adulthood, part of becoming an adult is using our gifts toward their true purpose, whereas a child is just kind of playing around. That’s what we’ve been doing with technology. We’ve been messing around and making a lot of messes, but I cannot say that humanity has used technology for its true purpose.
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. It has a purpose. 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 turning our gift of hand and mind to its true purpose.
I think I might have said this before, but initially that purpose is probably going to be dealing with the damage that’s been done. After that, who knows? There are a lot of ways that our current moment fits more into a coming-of-age initiation than a birth or a death.
Another part of it that seems really true is that, in a coming-of-age ordeal, you’re not sure if you’re going to make it. 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 reflected in fairy tales too. Some of the fairy tales are maps of initiatory processes. You’re faced with an impossible task, but in that moment of despair, giving up, and surrender, capacities that you didn’t know you had become available to you.
In fairy tales, they often take the form of magical assistance or some kind of aid from the outside that comes through a process of testing, a testing of sincerity. I don’t know if I want to try to map all of those things specifically to the collective human experience right now, but there’s definitely something there.
It looks like we’re not going to make it. If you look at some of the climate prognosticators, they can make a strong argument. What’s his name? Ian McPherson?
Rick: Yeah.
Charles: Guy McPherson.
Rick: Guy, right.
Charles: Yeah, Guy McPherson. He makes a pretty strong argument that we’re facing near-term extinction.
Rick: We’re screwed.
Charles: Yeah. And if you don’t believe it, you’re just in denial. You’re not looking at the scientific evidence. So you can make a good case that the situation is hopeless, that 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, the things that we label as alternative and holistic today and push into the margins.
Rick: Yeah.
Charles: The things aren’t 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.
The cure for any disease is there. The way to grow enormous amounts of food with zero ecological impact—in fact, with positive ecological impact—is there. To have energy that doesn’t pollute, all that stuff is there, but it is not in collective reality yet.
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.
Small acts and raising the collective bottom
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.
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’s 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; you’d 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, and 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. That would be the same in a traditional society that has initiations, too. You’re going to have your father and 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 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 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—I don’t want to say, “Oh, don’t worry about it because it’s just this process; we’re going to come through.” Coming through it successfully depends on fully engaging that experience and reaching that point of desperation: “I’ll do anything to get through this.” It depends on reaching that point of really having to fall back on your resources and what you really know.
On a collective level, 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 a mild encounter with the dark. It could be that 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. So the question, if you are using that particular narrative—that sobriety or the new life doesn’t come until you’ve hit bottom—is, how do you raise bottom?
Rick: Good point.
Charles: I think that, for what distinguishes the alcoholic who quits more easily from 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 thing I’m sure about—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.
All of the invisible actions of compassion, kindness, generosity, and love are raising bottom.
That is something anybody—all of us—can do all 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, 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?
Is that when we turn around? We’ve got to raise bottom and protect the wealth that remains, including the inner wealth that we draw on, the spiritual wealth. This relates to where the desire for meditation comes from and where the desire to do spiritual work comes from. I think it comes from something that we’ve received.
Sometimes even a tiny moment of … I’ll tell a little story to illustrate it. It’s from my dear friend. Actually, I’m not going to say names because he’s my ex-wife’s husband. He works in the belly of the beast. He’s a custodian who repairs things and does janitorial stuff at a juvenile detention facility, where it’s basically a stop on the school-to-prison pipeline.
These kids haven’t received one percent of the things that a child needs, and they’re locked up in these places. They’re mad, and they smash stuff all the time. His job is to fix the things that they smash or buy new ones, but he likes to fix things because he’s got a real working-class aspect, but also a very highly developed, hidden yogi quality. You might call him a hidden yogi.
He was telling me one time about this door that was ripped off its hinges and how he was repairing the door. He said, “I polished the hinges and I cleaned the door.” 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.
I thought, who knows? He can’t give them one percent of what they need, but that tiny moment of being treated with respect—“You deserve a really nice door; I’m going to make it nice for you”—that moment of respect, who knows, 10, 20, or 30 years later, how that is going to affect that young man’s life?
Who knows if that might be the tipping point in a certain moment when he was going to 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. He was 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. He was going over to some other country to join that war, and his car broke down or something. Some other people’s car happened to break down near his and got stuck in the mud or something.
Why am I telling the story? You can tell it better. Go ahead and finish the story.
Charles: Yeah, he runs into the everyday Gandhis, peace workers, and he decides to become a peace worker because—
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, when they realized who he was, that they were going to start beating him up or kill him, because he was General Bethelson, a bad dude. But instead, they hugged him and said that they loved him. He was like, “Ah, maybe everything I thought about the world is wrong.” That moment penetrated.
This is what I call disrupting the story, or offering—what do you call it?—my ex-husband-in-law, my ex-wife’s husband, this guy. He just does this every single day at that place. He is giving data points to people that don’t fit into their story.
Anytime you receive—I’ve had moments like this in my life, too. One impactful moment was when I was trying to show off to somebody and make myself look really amazing. He saw right through me and 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.
That was a data point that didn’t fit. When you have any experience—it could be a religious experience, an awakening experience, seeing a UFO, or whatever—when you have an experience that doesn’t fit into the story, then it kind of says to you, maybe unconsciously, “Oh, maybe you don’t know who you are and what the world is.”
That raises bottom. It says that this isn’t all there is. It makes that transition easier. So all of these lightworkers—and it could be spiritual teachers, but it could also be really humble people—I think that the great souls are doing the humble things for which they get no thanks, no reward, no recognition, and no one calling them guru and looking up to them.
They’re doing stuff as janitors, washerwomen, and people like that, holding the fabric of reality in a place where we can make this transition. All of those actions are 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, and if we condition our actions on whether they’re going to have a big-picture effect or not, 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 impatient sometimes. A lot of smart guys—usually guys, actually—come to me and they’ve got it figured out. They’ve found the point of mass: “Here’s where you should put your attention. Here’s what’s going to scale up. Here’s what’s going to go viral. Here’s the leverage point.”
Have you had people 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 isn’t 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 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, 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 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, 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 how you make financial decisions. You assess the risks and the outcomes, and you weigh them and measure them and do the projections, and that’s the policy I’ll choose. That’s not how to make choices.
Trusting a larger intelligence
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.” It might be as 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, where the various things come together for you that 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. 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. 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.
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, 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 at which we created those problems. But if we can resort somehow and align ourselves with, 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. 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 a more beautiful world, we have to reach it 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: these chance encounters that seem to have meaning and relevance, and sometimes even are life-saving, and that especially happen at transition points in life, maybe when you move to a new city or when something breaks down.
They happen precisely when we release control and release imposing this linear cause and effect, or just 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. 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 still have to make decisions and take actions and do things that you have to do in life. But at the same time, if you can somehow attune yourself or connect yourself to, or realize your essential identity as, that deeper intelligence that governs everything, then it will 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 my heart knows is possible, or whatever that is for you—it could just be some project, maybe an ecovillage or an organization or something that you’re creating in your life—could be something very modest. But whatever it is, if you pledge 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 you sit down and just don’t do anything, or don’t intend anything or orient yourself. You orient towards something and you say, “Whatever it takes. I’m at your service. Whatever it takes.” When you do that, you’ll be given opportunities that will test your sincerity, even. It might say, “Okay, here’s the thing you should do.” 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 an intentionality, but it’s an intentionality of service that doesn’t depend on knowing how to do it. I run into people all the time who are so committed to something that seems like a pipe dream, but it’s not. There’s also such a thing as a pipe dream that, if you’re honest with yourself, doesn’t even feel real to you. But then there’s the thing that, if you’re honest with yourself, does feel real; you just have no idea how it’s going to possibly happen.
So I do think that there is an intentionality, but it’s an intentionality of service that doesn’t depend on knowing how to do it. I run into people all the time who are so committed to something that seems like a pipe dream, but it’s not. There’s also such a thing as a pipe dream that, if you’re honest with yourself, doesn’t even feel real to you. But then there’s the thing that, if you’re honest with yourself, does feel real; you just have no idea how it’s going to possibly happen.
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 how we’re going to get there. I don’t have a blueprint. I don’t have a map. But what we have, maybe, is a compass.
As long as we stay—and we can deviate from it, even, and look away—that’s maybe the practice: to keep looking back again and again, just like TM, 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, and what an impossible task Frodo had, getting that ring to Mount Doom or whatever and throwing it in the fire. But 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.
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.
Living from intuition and service
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, and so forth?
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.
One thing I’ve decided—I can say all this stuff, but I noticed pretty recently that when I was making decisions about what events to speak at, where to travel, and so forth, because I get more invitations than I could possibly say yes to, I had this kind of calculus about, “Okay, where is it going to be the biggest audience and the most impact?” And so on and so forth. Are these going to be influential people? I was 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. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I’m like, no, I’m just going to say yes to the things that feel like a really strong, open invitation and an unreasonable feeling of yes, even if I can’t justify it on any other grounds.
It could be some little student group that has reached out without even expecting a positive answer: “We really want you to come and speak at our group.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ll do that,” even if it means not going to some 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: going with your heart more, going with your intuition more, and trusting how things feel, even when that conflicts with mental calculations about what would be the most impactful.
That means not trying to expand my audience. I’m not trying to do marketing. It doesn’t feel good to do marketing, so I’m not going to do that. I’m not even going to have a Facebook logo on my website. I’m redoing my website because it doesn’t look good to have that thing up there. It’s like, “Oh, a corporate logo right on the front. Is that what it’s all about?” If someone wants to share it, they’ll find a way.
It’s just kind of following the example of these humble people who, if you want to talk about awakening at the gas pump—the Buddha at the gas pump—I mean, these are my teachers. They just live such beautiful lives and give so much love, and are never recognized beyond a very small circle.
Preparing through generosity
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 glow on the horizon—but I feel like the sun is rising, and the transition is going to happen. So just riff on that 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 the late, late stages of it, where we’re just clinging on to it, and everyone knows that the game is up soon.
Rick: I would say that if everyone knows it, with some people it’s very subliminal. Some people can articulate it; other people, it’s just sort of a gut feeling, like, “Why isn’t my life working? Why is the world going to hell in a handbasket?” That kind of thing. A feeling of impending doom, that something big is coming.
Right, right.
Charles: Yeah. In the financial industry, it’s widespread. Everyone thinks that the system’s not going to last much longer.
Rick: Are you saying that in the financial system, even though the stock market is above 20,000, 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 who foresaw the collapse of the real estate market and bet on that. Everybody thought they were crazy, but they saw it coming.
All right, well, pardon me for persisting in this, but what would you do? I mean, knowing what you know and feeling what you feel, would you turn whatever money you have into some kind of concrete goods that you’ll have in hand when the economy collapses? 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.
The best strategy is to invest in generosity, because that’s the only thing that can persist through a really severe crisis.
It depends how deep the crisis is. If it’s just like it was in 2008, then there are certain investments that might make sense. 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 savings account that fires cannot burn and thieves cannot steal.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a story—
Charles: I’m sorry, go ahead.
Rick: No, I’m done.
Yeah, there was a story in the news last night about how there’s this big boom in the industry of building underground bunkers. The guy was saying, “I used to get a few orders a month. Now I’m getting six a week” to build these great big, fancy underground bunkers for people.
So there’s something in the mentality of certain people that they’re going to hole up underground until it all blows over.
Charles: It’s much better security 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.
What’s going to happen? There you are in your bunker, and a haggard woman with a three-year-old who’s 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 from your bunker?
That’s the question that those people, the preppers, should be asking: Who am I, for real? When push comes to shove, who am I?
And once you realize that, I probably would let that woman in; I probably would feed that child—then the whole mentality about prepping changes. It becomes, “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? How can I prepare for that?”
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 would be nice to ask them that question and put them in that situation. If you have a conversation with them, put them in that situation and touch what’s there.
There’s a whole culture around this that’s all about maximizing your self-interest and your security. But they’re human beings, too, and they have another human nature that needs to be spoken to, because it’s probably not going to come to people in their bunkers. It’s going to unfold in some other way.
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. Sometimes, when you hold a story for somebody strongly enough, they step into that story. It’s an invitation to them, or it might at least awaken that in them.
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.” If you can hold that for somebody, it can be really powerful, especially when it’s more than just words.
Addressing causes rather than consequences
Rick: The final point I want to bring up is another quote from your book. It was a quote from Chan Buddhism: “The ordinary person avoids consequences; the Bodhisattva avoids causes.”
I wanted to bring that up last because I think that theme came up again and again in our talk. 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, then you can address them more effectively.
I’ve used the analogy before: If this were literally possible and you wanted to change the course of a river, if you tried to do that down at the mouth of the river—let’s say the Ganges down in Calcutta—you couldn’t do it. The river has already run its course.
If you tried to do it halfway upstream someplace, in Haridwar or something, you might be able to change part of the river, but it would still be 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 can do more with less effort, basically.
Charles: I don’t think I can phrase it better than you did. The causes—the symptoms are a gateway to the cause. They’re a trail that we can follow back to the cause.
So it’s not about ignoring the symptoms. Sometimes I think it’s only by futilely fighting the symptoms that we discover the deeper cause. It’s a journey that’s set out for us by something very wise.
At some point, we start to see the patterns. We become better able to recognize symptoms for what they are and become more familiar with what the causes are. I don’t really have anything else.
Rick: That’s a good kind of concluding statement, in a way. Maybe if we’re shifting stories as a culture, the story we’re shifting to is learning to function from the root, from a much more causal or fundamental level, both in our individual lives and as a culture, rather than battling the consequences.
It has that phrase from Jesus: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” We keep blundering along, doing things, and then being surprised at the consequences.
But if we were aware of the deeper dimension of it all—there’s another phrase, quotes are coming to mind, from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: “Avert the danger which has not yet come.”
Charles: Yeah, same idea.
Rick: Great. Well, thank you very much, Charles. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you. You’re going to be at the SAND conference this year?
Charles: Yeah, I am.
Rick: Great. I’ll probably run into you out there. SAND, for those listening, is the Science and Nonduality Conference, held every October out in San Jose—a little plug for them.
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. You can follow those links to get in touch with him and 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 mean climate change. I’ll be interested in reading that when it comes out.
Charles: All right. Thank you, Rick.
Rick: A couple of moments before you disconnect. Hang on. I just want to make another concluding point in general.
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 on it.
The next interview, as I mentioned, will be with a fellow named John Yates, who goes by the name Culadasa—a really interesting-looking fellow. So I hope to see you then.
Thanks for listening or watching.
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