Top Quotes: “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” — Charles Eisenstein

The Story of Separation

“Prisons in China where prisoners must spend 14 hours a day playing online video games to build up character experience points. The prison officials then sell these characters to teens in the West. Here we see, in extreme form, the disconnect between the physical and virtual worlds, the suffering and exploitation upon which our fantasies are built.

Old people in Japan whose relatives have no time to see them, so instead they receive visits from professional ‘relatives’ who pretend to be family members. Here’s a mirror to the dissolution of the bonds of community and family, to be replaced by money.”

“Herein lies a key realization of interbeing. It says, ‘I would do as you do, if I were you.’ We are one.”

“Another version of the Story of Separation is that the universe comprises a multitude of independent phenomena. In it, an environmental leader’s neglect of his family or contracting of minimum-wage janitorial services has no bearing on global climate change. Quantum mechanics, with its collapse of the self/other, object/universe, observer-observed distinction, offers us a new set of intuitions about how reality works. I won’t say that it ‘proves’ that by changing your beliefs or relationships you’ll remedy climate change. It does, however, suggest a principle of interconnectedness that implies that every action has cosmic significance. But even without sourcing that principle to quantum mechanics, we can get there simply by asking, What is the real cause of climate change? CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases, perhaps? OK, what’s the cause of those? Maybe consumerism, technological arrogance, the growth imperative built into the financial system. And what’s the cause of those? Ultimately it’s the deep ideologies that govern our world, the defining mythology of our civilization that I’ve called the Story of Separation.

Carbon dioxide emissions won’t change unless everything else that encourages them changes as well. Simply wanting to reduce CO2 isn’t enough, as the abysmal failure of the 1992 Rio climate accords show. The world solemnly declared its intention to freeze CO2 emissions; in the 20 years following, they rose by 50%. Rising CO2 is inseparable from every other facet of the Story of Separation. Therefore, any action that addresses any of those facets also addresses climate change.

Sometimes, the web of connections that ultimately implicates climate change is visible through our usual lens of causality. Those whose cause is cannabis legislation could point to the ecological benefits of plant medicine over tech-intensive, energy-intensive, chemical-intensive pharmaceuticals, to the biofuel potential of industrial hemp, or even to the way that marijuana smoking weakens some people’s drive to participate fully in the Machine. For other areas of activism, the causal link to climate change is harder to see. How about marriage equality? Ending human trafficking? Giving shelter to the homeless? In the separate self’s understanding of causality, it’s hard to see how these relate.

Let us ask, ‘What kind of human being is politically passive, votes from fear and hate, pursues endless material acquisition, and is afraid to contemplate change?’ We have all those behaviors written into our dominant worldview and, therefore, into the institutions arising from it. Cut off from nature, cut off from community, financially insecure, alienated from our own bodies, immersed in scarcity, trapped in a tiny, separate self that hungers constantly for its lost beingness, we can do no other than to perpetuate the behavior and systems that cause climate change. Our response to the problem must touch on this fundamental level that we might call spirituality.”

“What if we face not continued warming, but increasingly violent climate gyrations as the atmospheric composition changes with unprecedented rapidity at the same time the primary homeostatic control systems in the forests and oceans are degraded? Or what if some geoengineering scheme brought down CO2 levels, or promised to do so? Then fracking and drilling opponents would have no ground to stand on. That’s why, in addition to systems-level measures to address climate change (for example, a fee-and-dividend system for carbon fuels), we need to appeal directly to our love for the real, local, unique, and irreplaceable land and water. No amount of data can obscure a clear-cut. It can obscure ‘total acres of clear-cutting,’ but this clear-cut. We need to ground environmentalism on something other than data.”

“Any effort to change people’s basic perceptions of the world is political work. What kind of people take refuge in sprawling suburbs? What kind of people work at jobs that satisfy no desire but the desire for security? What kind of people stand passively by while their nation prosecutes one unjust war after another? The answer is: fearful people. Alienated people. Wounded people. That’s why spiritual work is political, if it spreads love, connection, forgiveness, acceptance, and healing.”

Tech and Its Limits

“If it were up to tech to save us, it already would have. We have long possessed the tech to live abundantly and sustainably on this planet, but we’ve used them to other ends. We could live in an earthly paradise using perfectly uncontroversial tech: conversation, recycling, green design, solar energy, permaculture, biological wastewater treatment, bicycles, designing for reparability, durability, and reusability, and so on. These are techs that already exist and, by and large, have existed for decades or centuries. No new, miraculous techs are necessary. However, another kind of miracle is necessary to redeem the promise of these existing techs: a social or political miracle. That’s what it would take to reverse deforestation, cut greenhouse gas emissions, heal damaged watersheds, and remove all the legal, social, and economic impediments to change. It would doubtless require a different money system, and therefore a radical restructuring of economic power and privilege. It would require a wholesale shift away from militarism and all the belief systems behind it. It would require millions of people going back to the land to engage in small-scale, high-productivity, labor-intensive agriculture. Technologically feasible? Certainly. Politically realistic? Hardly.

There’s no denying that one way or another, we’re facing a task we don’t know how to accomplish. Any politically realistic proposal today pales into insignificance beside the severity of the crisis at hand. Herein lies the significance of the unorthodox and heterodox techs that I mentioned before: The worldview that eliminates such things from the realm of possibility also cuts us off from the kinds of actions that are necessary to change the world. In both cases, we face something that cannot happen without violating our Story of the World.”

Scarcity

“When we know the true cause of a problem and what to do about it, then that’s the time to act, and perhaps to act urgently. But when we haven’t penetrated to the true cause, or when we don’t know what to do, then it might be counterproductive to jump into action. The appearance of frenetic action placates the conscience, creating the illusion that one is part of the solution, but are these actions doing any good?”

“Why is global warming happening? There are the proximate causes: the burning of fossil fuels, and the assault on the forests and biodiversity that maintain climate homeostatis. And why are these happening? It’s all in the name of efficiency: labor efficiency (doing more work per unit of labor) and economic efficiency (maximizing the short-term return on capital). And efficiency is just another name for getting it done faster.

One might wish to think that there’s good hurrying (to save the planet) and bad hurrying (to use machines to get things done with less work), but maybe the underlying mindset behind both kinds of hurrying is the problem. This mindset is one of the habits of separation.

There’s a time to act, and a time to wait, to listen, to observe. Then understanding and clarity can grow. From understanding, action arises that is purposeful, firm, and powerful.”

“Even wealth offers no escape from the perception of scarcity. A 2011 Boston College study of the superwealthy surveyed attitudes toward wealth among households with a net work of $25 million or more (some much more — the average was $78 million). Amazingly, when asked whether they experienced financial security, most of the respondents said no. How much would it take to achieve financial security? They named figures, on average, 25% higher than their current assets.

If someone with $78 million in assets can experience scarcity, it obviously has much deeper roots than economic inequality. The roots are nowhere else than in our Story of the World. Scarcity starts in our very ontology, our self-conception, and our cosmology. From there, it infiltrates our social institutions, systems, and experiences of life. A culture of scarcity immerses us so completely that we mistake it for reality.”

“I drive past the strip malls and big box stores, the parking lots and auto dealerships, office buildings and subdivisions, each building a model of cost-efficiency, and I marvel, ‘After 5,000 years of architectural development, we’ve ended up with this?’ Here we see the physical expression of the ideology of science. Only the measurable is real. We’ve maximized our production of the measurable — the sq. ft., the productivity per labor unit — at the expense of everything qualitative: sacredness, intimacy, love, beauty, and play.

How much of the ugly does it take to substitute for a lack of the beautiful? How many adventure films does it to take to compensate for the atrophied expression of one’s greatness? How much porn to meet the need for intimacy? How much entertainment to substitute for missing play? It takes an infinite amount. That’s good news for economic growth, but bad news for our planet. Fortunately, our planet isn’t allowing much more of it, nor is our ravaged social fabric. We’re almost through with the age of artificial scarcity, if only we can release the holds that hold us there.

From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of time comes the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation. These are but examples — there are as many responses to each of these missing things as there are individuals.”

“Many authorities state categorically, ‘The only way to feed 7 billion people is with massive fossil fuel inputs.’ To refute this claim requires deconstructing its basic assumptions about agriculture and diet. How many of them take into account (to use one example) crops like the Mayan bread nut, which in the tropics can produce 8x the caloric yield of corn with superior nutrition and storability, can be collected in vast quantities with minimal labor, requires no pesticides, only needs to be planted once, is drought-resistant, provides fodder for goats and cows, and can be used as an overstory crop with vegetables, aquaculture, etc. underneath? This tree has been cut down all over C. America to make room for corn.”

Self-Restraint

“What is the problem with doing whatever I want, or doing whatever feels good? Why do we make a virtue of self-restraint?

If what we want is destructive to self and others, then indeed it would be awful to encourage people to just do what they want. If John Calvin was indeed right about the total depravity of man, if human progress is indeed an ascent from a state of bestial savagery, if nature is at bottom a war of each against all and human nature is to win that war by any means necessary, if human beings are ruthless maximizers of rational self-interest, then yes, we must conquer desire, conquer the flesh, and transcend pleasure, conquering inner biological nature just as we conquer the outer, becoming the Cartesian lords and possessors of ourselves as well as of the universe.

That is the old story. In the new story, no longer are we at war with nature and no longer do we seek to conquer the self. We discover that desire has been so destructive because we have been misled. The things we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from. From the normal vantage point, it certainly seems that only with discipline can we withstand the temptations that surround us: overeating, drugs, video games, mindless internet surfing, and everything else we consume. These things are undeniably destructive to our own lives and beyond; therefore, it would seem, we cannot always trust desire at all. But when we recognize that these aren’t really what we desire, our goal becomes not to suppress desire but to identify the true want or need, and to fulfill it. That’s no trivial task; it’s a profound path of self-realization.

Desire comes from unmet needs. That’s a fundamental precept of self-trust. One expression of the War against the Self that mirrors the War against Nature and the program of control is to allow the meeting of one’s needs while limiting the ‘selfish’ fulfillment of one’s desires. That’s part of the old story. It leads not only to self-rejection, but also to judgmentality. I limit the fulfillment of my desires, but they don’t. How selfish of them. They should exercise restraint, discipline. And if they don’t, they’re just plain selfish people and don’t have it in them, why, then we will have to force them to behave less selfishly through incentives and rules, rewards and punishments. We’ll have to impose a program of control.

In the new story, we look for the unmet need that drives the desire. This is a powerful transformative tool not only for personal development, but also for social change. When we address the unmet need directly, it no longer drives the desire that had been so destructive. Fail to address the need, and the boiler that drives the desire keeps building pressure. Addiction and the gratification of superficial desires are like a release valve. When we clamp down on it with willpower, the pressure builds and eventually explodes out, perhaps as a binge, or, if the old expression of desire is rendered unavailable, then as a new addictive behavior. This explains the common phenomenon of ‘addiction transfer’ among recipients of bariatric surgery. Unable to overeat, they often take up drinking, gambling, or compulsive shopping.”

“Let us be wary of any revolution that isn’t threaded with an element of play, celebration, mystery, and humor. If it’s primarily a grim struggle, then it may be no revolution at all. That’s not to say that there’s never a time for struggle, but to frame the transformative process primarily in terms of struggle reduces it to something of the old world. It devalues other parts of the process: the gestation, the latency, the coming inward, the breathing, the emptiness, the observation, the listening, the nourishing, the reflection, the playful exploration, the unknowing. Aren’t these the things we could use a little more of on this earth?”

“By giving myself absolute license to drink as much alcohol as I wanted, I ended up almost never drinking any. By giving myself absolute license to eat as much sugar as I wanted, I ended up eating far less than when I tried to restrain myself. And my unrestrained license to shop leads me mostly to the thrift store. It isn’t because I’ve disciplined myself to stop these behaviors. It’s because I’ve integrated on multiple levels the fact that they don’t actually feel very good.”

“The focus on pleasure, desire, aliveness, and joy offers a guideline for work on the social and political level as well. Amid all the doom-laden exhortations to change our ways, let us remember that we’re striving to create a more beautiful world, and not sustain, with growing sacrifice, the current one. We’re not just seeking to survive. We’re not just facing doom; we’re facing a glorious possibility. We’re offering people not a world of less, not a world of sacrifice, not a world where you’re just going to have to enjoy less and suffer more — no, we’re offering a world of more beauty, more joy, more connection, more love, more fulfillment, more exuberance, more leisure, more music, more dancing, and more celebration. The most inspiring glimpses you’ve ever had about what human life can be like — that’s what we’re offering.

If you can firmly hold the vision of that, you’ll communicate it as a subtext to your activism. People respond much better to that than tot he secret message ‘You’re going to have to sacrifice and live a poorer life. You’re too selfish. Your life is too good.’ They’ll react as if you’re attacking them, and in a sense they’ll be right. To be effective servants of a more beautiful world, we have to know that the things we will sacrifice aren’t nearly as good as the things we’ll discover. We have to believe that 5k sq. ft. homes aren’t as happiness-inducing as communities with walkable public space. We have to believe that the convenience lifestyle isn’t as happy as gardening and cooking our own food. We have to believe that living life faster isn’t living life better. We have to believe that civilization’s baubles are miserable substitutes for what a human being really needs. If these beliefs are insincere, and if we cannot see the real possibility of the world we seek to create, our words will have little power and our actions will have little motivation. That’s also why it’s so important to ‘walk the walk’ — to practice what we preach. It’s not to avoid hypocrisy (that would be part of the campaign to be good). It’s to fully inhabit and embody the new story so we can serve it joyously and effectively.”

Judgmentality

“What do I mean by judgmentality? To be judgmental is not merely to draw distinctions, to have preferences, or to make comparisons. It carries a moral judgment, an assignment of right or wrong, good or evil, to a person. This assignment can take many forms. Words like ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t,’ ‘responsible’ and its opposite, right and wrong, ethical, moral, justifiable, valid, shameful, or other synonyms for good and bad usually appear in articulations of judgment.

Judgment is separation. At bottom, judgment says that you choose differently from me because you are different from me. It says, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t have done what you did.’ ‘If I were a corporate CEO, I wouldn’t destroy the environment and lie to the public about it.’ ‘If I were that wealthy, I wouldn’t spend my money on sports cars and mansions.’ ‘If I were that fat, I wouldn’t be on my 4th trip to the buffet line.’ I’m better than that. I’m not so ignorant. I’m not so irresponsible. I’m not so lazy. At least I have an open mind. At least I consider the evidence. At least I got an education. I paid my debts. I eat responsibly. I work for it. At the very least, I make an effort. What’s wrong with these people?

This is the essence of Separation: if I were in the totality of your circumstances, I would do differently from you.

A substantial body of experimental evidence shows that this statement is false, that in fact if you were in the totality of his circumstances, you’d do exactly as he does. To align ourselves with this truth is perhaps the most powerful way to magnify our effectiveness as agents of change.”

“The essence of compassion is to put oneself in another’s shoes. It says, you and I are one; we are the same being looking out at the world through different eyes, occupying different nexus points in the universal web of relationship.”

“When we deploy theatrical flourishes such as ‘The fault lies with the fat-cat bankers who care not a whit for the suffering of the common man or the degradation of the environment,’ we also make ourselves sound ridiculous to the bankers themselves, who like most human beings do in fact care about their fellow humans and the planet. If we want to reach them, our articulation of the problem has to avoid ascribing personal evil to them, while also being uncompromising in describing the dynamics of the problem. I cannot offer a formula for how to do this. The right words and strategies arise naturally from compassion: from the understanding that the bankers or whoever do as I would do, were I in their shoes. In other words, compassionate — and effective — words arise from a deeply felt realization of our common humanity. And this is possible only to the extent to which we’ve applied the same to ourselves. Truly, to be an effective activist requires an equivalent inner activism.

When we ourselves stand in a different story from blame and hate, we become capable of dislodging others from that place too. Our peaceful hearts change the situation, disrupting the story in which hate comes naturally and offering an experience that suggests a new one.

“The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is the way they become.”

“How can you tell what your own motives are in your political activities, whether online or in the street? Well, if you feel a sense of superiority over those not so engaged, a sense of condemnation, or patronizing indulgence toward those who don’t get it (and so, you must nobly sacrifice on their behalf), then the motive of proving yourself good is almost certainly present. And that’s what you’ll achieve. You can go to your grave filled with admiration for yourself. You can have engraved on your tombstone ‘Was part of the solution, not the problem — unlike some people.’ But wouldn’t you rather change the world?

Ask yourself, if you think that the wealthy, the powerful, the Republicans, the big game hunters, the meat industry execs, the frackers, or any other subset of humanity is evil (or shameful, revolting, disgusting, etc.): Would you be willing to give up that belief if it would make you a more effective agent of change? Are you willing to take a look at how much of your belief system is a giant game of upholding a positive self-image?”

“Typically, the way one defends oneself against someone who believes one is evil is to level the same charges against the attacker. Look at the comments sections on articles. Though the surface opinions on a right-wing and left-wing site might be opposed, the underlying narrative is the same: the other side is deficient in the basic qualities of human decency. They’re ignorant, self-righteous, stupid, immoral, inexcusable, sick. It’s not only in politics — the same happens in every polarized debate.

Obviously, both sides cannot be right in the implicit thesis that their side comprises a better sort of human being. That’s why it’s so fruitful to bring together in a room opponents who’ve demonized each other and create conditions in which their mutual humanity becomes apparent (such as deep listening or temporary suspension of judgment). Israelis and Palestinians, pro-choice and antiabortion activists, environmentalists and corporate officials learn that their convenient explanation of ‘They’re just evil’ is invalid. They might retain their differences of opinion, and the larger systems that generate their conflicts of interest may remain in place; they may still be opponents, but they’ll no longer be enemies.”

“Western notions of story and plot have a kind of war built into them as part of the standard 3-act or 5-act narrative structure, in which a conflict arises and is resolved. Is any other structure possible that isn’t dull, that still qualifies as a plot? Yes. The E. Asian story structure called Kishotenketsu in Japanese isn’t based on conflict. But we in the West almost universally experience a story as something in which someone or something must be overcome. This surely colors our worldview, making ‘evil’ — the essence of that which must be overcome — seem quite natural a basis for the stories we construct to understand the world and its phenomena.

Our political discourse, our media, our scientific paradigms, even our very language predisposes us to seeing change as the result of struggle, conflict, and force. To act from a new story, and to build a society upon it, requires a wholesale transformation.”

“Years ago, Pancho was involved in a protest at Berkeley, where he was an astrophysics PhD student. He was one of a group of students publicly fasting to protest the uni’s involvement with nuclear weapons development. After 9 days, the university got tired of it and had the police come and make an example of the group of hunger strikers. Officers broke the human chain the protesters had made by interlocking their arms, and one officer lifted the slight Pancho into the air, slammed him onto the concrete, and brutally handcuffed him.

At this point, most of us would probably fall into the story and the habits of separation. We might respond with hatred, sarcasm, judgment. Lacking the physical force to overcome the police, we might try to publicly humiliate them instead. If it were me, I imagine, my lifelong indignation of the injustices of this world would be projected onto the person of this police officer. Finally, someone to blame and to hate. The worse his persecution of me, the more gratified I would feel, the more a martyr, innocent, blameless. It feels kind of good, doesn’t it, to have someone inhuman to hate without qualification. One feels absolved. And by personifying evil, the problems of the world appear much simpler — just get rid of those awful people.

Pancho responded differently. He looked the officer in the eye and said, ‘Brother, I forgive you. I’m not doing this for me, I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for your children and the children of your children.’ The officer was momentarily befuddled. Then Pancho asked his first name and said, ‘Brother, let me guess, you must like Mexican food.’ [Awkward pause] ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I know this place in SF that has the best carnitas and fajitas and quesadillas, and I tell you what, when I get done with this and you get done with this, I’d like to break my fast with you. What do you say?’

Amazingly, the officer accepted the invite. How could he not? He loosened Pancho’s handcuffs and those of the other protesters. The power of Pancho’s action came because he was standing in a different story, and standing there so firmly that he held the space of that story for other people such as the policeman to step into as well.”

“The best victory, says Sun Tzu, is the one in which the losers don’t realize they’ve lost. In the old story, we overcome evil and leave our enemies in the dust, wailing and gnashing their teeth. No more. Everyone is coming along for this ride. In the new story, we understand that everyone left behind impoverishes the destination. We see each human being as the possessor of a unique lens upon the world. We wonder, ‘What truth has this man been able to see from his perspective, that’s invisible from mine?’ We know that there must be something; that indeed, each of us occupies a different place in the matrix of all being precisely in order to contribute a unique experience to our evolving totality.”

“Many activists today are consumed with stopping this and stopping that; rarely do they frame their vision in terms of what they want to create or what larger thing they serve. One symptom of this deficiency is the goal of ‘sustainability.’ What, exactly, do we want to sustain? Is the purpose of life merely to survive? Are the creative powers unique to humanity without a purpose in the unfolding order of nature? We need to be able to see a vision of what’s possible that we can commit to.”

“To see how deeply ingrained the habit of separation called ‘conquering evil’ is, look at how consistently we frame any attempt to enact social or political change as a ‘fight,’ a ‘struggle,’ or a ‘campaign.’ All military metaphors. We speak of ‘mobilizing our allies’ to exert political ‘pressure’ in order to ‘force’ our opponents to ‘surrender.’”

“First, the pattern of ‘fighting evil’ comes from the same mentality as our competitive, dominator system; second, because in demonizing those we perceive as other, we drive them toward the very behaviors that justify our demonization; third, because we’re unlikely to win at the power elite’s own game; fourth, because even if we do win, we’ll have become better at being them than they are; fifth, because if we enlist allies based on the motivation of triumphing over those greedy folks, they’ll abandon us once we’ve achieved that goal, even if the deeper systems remain unchanged. This is what happens nearly every time a dictator is toppled. Thinking they’ve won, the people go home; someone else steps into the power vacuum, and soon everything more or less goes back to the way it was.”

A New Vision

“Another form of disruption is simply to create a living example of a different way of life, of tech, of farming, of money, of medicine, of schooling…and by contrast reveal the narrowness and dysfunction of dominant institutions.”

“U of M researchers found that people who’d been given a self-affirmation were better able to consider info that contradicted their beliefs than those who hadn’t. Presumably it made them feel less threatened and therefore more open.

The most direct way to disrupt the Story of Separation at its foundation is to give someone an experience of nonseparation. An act of generosity, forgiveness, attention, truth, or unconditional acceptance offers a counterexample to the worldview of separation, violating such tenets as ‘Everyone is out for themselves,’ and affirming the innate desire to give, create, love, and play.”

“The Dalai Lama was once asked, ‘What’s the most important quality in a spiritual teacher?’ His answer: ‘Cheerfulness.’ That cheerfulness is a kind of invite that says, ‘It feels good to be here. Wouldn’t you like to come too?’

The general principle of disrupting the story expands the scope of activism well beyond its traditional conception, validating the kinds of action that aren’t based on force or confrontation. One example would be silent witness: Amish people packing courthouses to bear peaceful witness to the administration of justice, or Occupy protesters silently watching as the chancellor who ordered the pepper-spraying walks from her office. I don’t know about you, but I find it easier to do the right thing when I know someone is watching.”

“He asked everyone in the audience to reach into their purses and wallets and grab some money. ‘If you don’t have any large bills, borrow one up from a neighbor.’ Then he told them, ‘OK, now, crumble up the money in your hand. I’m going to ask you to do something on the count of three, without thinking. When I get to 3, take the money and throw it up in the air with a scream. Just do it! Now! 1, 2, 3.

The whole room did as they were told, and once they screamed they couldn’t stop screaming. When things finally settled down, he told them, ‘All right, now I’m going to give you a choice. You can either go pick up your money, showing that money controls you, or you can leave it on the floor, because you’re the master of money.’ For the rest of the day the seminar was magical. The air in the room seemed to vibrate.

At the end of the afternoon, it was time to leave the auditorium. ‘What are we going to do with the money?’ asked the participants. ‘If we’re truly not enslaved to money, then we’re going to leave it on here on floor,’ said Chris. ‘It’s a gift to the janitorial staff.’ One man, scowling, picked up his money and stalked out. The rest left it there. Chris stayed for a while in the empty room, thousands of dollars littering the floor. Soon the cleaners arrived, five of them. They stopped dead in their tracks, jaws open, staring the floor. What to do?

Of course, they went to ask the guy in the suit. ‘Senor,’ they said, ‘what’s this?’ They didn’t speak much English and Chris didn’t speak any Spanish. he tried to explain that it was for them, to little avail. It was as if they couldn’t hear him. For that to be true was an impossibility in their world.

Before long, they’d called in their supervisor, and Chris explained to him that the money was for the janitors. When the supervisor finally understood that this was for real, he was overcome with emotion and started to weep. ‘This is more than than they’ve ever made in a month,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you guys have been doing in here, but you’re welcome back to our hotel anytime!’

The magic continued for the remaining 2 days of the seminar. Chris told the participants about the janitors, and the spirit of generosity was infectious. People were paying for people behind them at the cafe when they went to lunch. He continued to disregard his script for the seminar and speak from a kind of intuitive flow.”

“The power of that act of generosity was far beyond the mere economic impact on the working-class janitors. Its power lay in its violation of the laws of reality as the janitors, their supervisor, and the seminar participants had known them. The impossible happened that day. Experiences like that tell us, ‘The world doesn’t work the way you thought it did. The realm of the possible is greater than you believed it was.’”

“To the extent that we ourselves are living in the realization of interbeing, we too are able to become miracle-workers. That doesn’t mean that what we do seems miraculous to ourselves — it fits in with our expanded understanding of the nature of life and causality. For example:

• When one is aligned with the purpose of service, acts that seem exceptionally courageous to others are a matter of course.
• When one experiences the world as abundant, then acts of generosity are natural, since there’s no doubt about continued supply.
• When one sees other people as reflections of oneself, forgiveness becomes second nature, as one realizes ‘But for the grace of the universe, so go I.’
• When one appreciates the order, beauty, mystery, and connectedness of the universe, a deep joy and cheerfulness arises that nothing can shake.
• When one sees time as abundant and life as infinite, one develops superhuman patience.
• When one lets go of the limits of reductionism, objectivity, and determinism, techs become possible that the science of separation can’t countenance
• When one lets go of the story of the discrete and separate self, amazing intuitive and perceptual capabilities emerge from lifelong latency.”