On Thursday, August 4, I shared episode 46 of my podcast, Post-Woke. It was mostly a conversation between me and Charles Eisenstein. Since it’s been brought to my attention that some folks don’t always listen to podcasts, I’m posting a few transcribed and slightly edited excerpts here for your reading pleasure.
Mickey Z.: I’m curious to know if, in the last two plus years of this intense pandemic programming and the intensifying move towards the Great Reset, how it has changed your worldview or validated it, or perhaps did a little bit of both.
Charles Eisenstein: Yeah, yes to all of those. I definitely went through a process that many, many people have gone through in the pandemic of questioning beliefs that I had thought were beyond question. The result for me was I ultimately even abandoned certain beliefs to kind of clear the table and went through a phase of questioning everything. And in the end, I came back to a lot of the beliefs that I started with — although there have been some things that have changed.
The main thing and this isn't just with the pandemic but it intensified through the pandemic as I saw every dystopian nightmare that I'd ever entertained coming true with great dismay, I finally stopped believing that crisis or collapse was going to save us. This has been a belief that has been growing over the last five or ten years.
In my earlier work, I thought that the way that change happens is there's a collapse and we're kind of forced through the birth canal and we have to change now. This is also a common theme in environmental discourse. We can't continue destroying the Earth because we'll do it ourselves. So, we have to change. We have to make the changes that we environmentalists always wanted to make. And I no longer believe that.
I think that crisis and collapse offer us an opportunity to make a change. They interrupt the hypnosis of normality because with the pandemic if anything was going to make us change, it would be totalitarianism staring us in the face. The blithe acceptance of so many people to that really reconfigured me. I believe much more now that we are offered a choice, which is why I call the book The Coronation, which is an initiation into sovereignty and into conscious choice where we had been unconscious.
MZ: I’m going to move into a more general topic and one that I fully associate with you, which is the “living in the gift.” I don't know if I've heard you say this or it was someone else or, for all I know, I dreamt it or all the above, but it's been said that there's no boundary between altruism and selfishness.
I feel that I learned a lot about altruism from my parents, and I was fortunate to get those lessons. And I've lived a lot of it firsthand. But I run a program here in New York City to help homeless women, and what I've learned a lot more from that is how much I've been gifted by doing the gifting. Now that I have a chance to speak to you directly, I would really appreciate you elaborating on this concept as something you see, live, and teach.
CE: What you experience with the homeless women is this fundamental unity of giving and receiving. And especially if you don't contrive that somehow your giving is going to confer benefits on you, then you receive unexpected benefits. In fact, because you don't control the return gift, you actually free the return gift to take its proper form and come to you. Whereas if say that you ran some program for homeless women — but you made absolutely sure that you were getting a lot of praise and a lot of recognition for it and that everybody was noticing and that there was always a photo op and it was going to go viral and that you were going to be recognized for this work — then you might actually receive that kind of praise. But you wouldn't receive the other gifts that would be cut off by your attempt to control how it comes back to you.
The return gift that you experience is a signature of the nature of reality that is outside the modern Western story of the world and story of the self that has us as competing separate selves in a world that does not bear its own intelligence and logic and purpose, but that it's just ruled by arbitrary forces acting on generic particles. That worldview is demolished through the kind of experience that you're talking about, which then points to a different story of what a human being is and how the world works. I use the Buddhist term for that story of interbeing, which says that we're not separate individuals, but we are, each of us, a nexus of relationship. We are the totality of our relationships. That relationship is primary, and the self is a function of that. What we do to the world, we do to ourselves. That what happens in the world happens to us.
All of these may sound like spiritual principles because we use the word spiritual to acknowledge the things that don't fit into the material consensus view of reality. But they're not spiritual in the sense of nonmaterial. They are properties of the material world, too. Entering into a gift orientation is where you understand that the reason I'm here is to give something to the world and to contribute to something bigger than myself that is beautiful to me and meaningful to me. That is actually what human nature is. When we occupy that, we begin to experience the truth of it as that's reflected back at us.
MZ: When you say something like “what you put into the world, you get back,” how do we square that with a planet on which so few humans have access to so many resources and so many humans live in a state of daily suffering and struggle? How can we make sense of that? And how can we apply the “living in the gift mentality” in a way to improve even beyond our neighborhoods and our immediate reach?
CE: A lot of the wealthy and powerful and privileged also are in a certain sense living a day-to-day struggle, subject to constant anxiety and even a constant hunger that we name as addiction and constant misery. The happiest people that I've ever interacted with are not to be found in Beverly Hills or Malibu. They are people living in less developed parts of the world. So we have a kind of phony wealth in the most affluent places. The poverty that people in positions of wealth and power visit upon the world ultimately always comes back to them in a different form, just as what we give to the world comes back to us too. But it is usually in a different form.
It's not like if you give all of your money away, you're going to get even more money back. It's not like that. But you will have an experience if it is truly a gift, sooner or later you will have an experience of having a rich life. And if you hoard and control and are stingy, no matter how much you have in your bank account, you will have the experience of poverty, of loneliness, of stress, of busyness. That's the kind of poverty, the scarcity of time, the scarcity of well-being, the scarcity of intimacy, such intense experiences of suffering that people sometimes kill themselves because of them.
MZ: You’re obviously quite well known, but surely some listeners (or readers) are encountering you for the first time. So I'm going to ask you: What gift would you be happy to learn that they received from hearing/reading this conversation today?
CE: To know that maybe people are opening up to a less dogmatic and less entrenched polarized way of looking at current events and recent events especially to not default to the uber-explanation for everything, which is that there are just some bad people out there. If that were true, the solution would be easy: just get rid of those fuckers.
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