Charles Eisenstein Quotes
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The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.
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Enlightenment is a group activity.
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There is a vast territory between what we're trying to leave behind, and where we want to go - and we don't have any maps for that territory.
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The regime of control tightens inexorably in our schools, many of which now have video cameras, police patrols, chain-link fences, random unannounced locker searches, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, networks of informants, undercover police posing as students, and a comprehensive system of passes so that there is a record of each student's authorized whereabouts at all times. What a perfect preparation for life in a prison or a totalitarian society!
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When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.
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Community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors for anything. You can just pay someone to do it.
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Trust your intuition and be guided by love.
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We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.
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The cynic thinks that he is being practical and that the hopeful person is not. It is actually the other way around. Cynicism is paralyzing, while the naïve person tries what the cynic says is impossible and sometimes succeeds.
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I think the term "interbeing" has cropped up in a lot of places. It's in the atmosphere, because it's just so true, and the time for that truth to be revealed to mass society is here. It's like in those French bakeries where they don't need to add yeast to the dough, because the yeast is so ambient in the air that the dough gets quickened whether or not you add yeast to it. Many people, even without doing a whole lot of study and reading, are coming to the same kinds of conclusions and perceptions about the world as I am.
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When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.
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Non-inflationary economic growth - an increase in the production of goods and services - is structurally necessary for the current money system to exist. That is what drives the relentless conversion of life into money.
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No one's ever completely broken. It's just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.
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The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.
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How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.
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I think most kids have a sense that it's not supposed to be this way. You're not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don't have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love.
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Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
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We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.
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We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.
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Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.
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One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.
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It is the cry of the separate self, ‘What about me?’ As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn’t matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.
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Joint consumption doesn't create intimacy.
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In a gift economy, the more you give, the richer you are.