(00:00) okay so that’s good we are ah take a deep breath okay so um charles if uh it’s unless you have any questions we’ll just read um so i’ll do a bio and all that but since we’re 15 minutes late uh we’ll just go ahead and start with your questions if that’s okay with you yeah hold on let me just just so you know jade charles says he has a till about four o’clock his time he’s in eastern time uh so he has got i have time i’ve got plenty of time i don’t have a i don’t have a hard stop oh okay
(00:38) um okay awesome um okay so was there anything on your heart that you wanted to talk about yeah charles just so you know uh we had this conversation yesterday we were like charles is is a guest of all the guests we’ve ever had who we could probably just give you the microphone and be like just talk and we’ll chime back in at the end of the two hour mark or whatever um because really what you what your work is covering is something that’s so you know yeah in alignment with this show specifically like our whole thing is is
(01:23) uh embracing the yeah being able to hold two things at the same time um including any kind of contradiction making a case for the other side yeah beautiful yeah i mean we should go into those things i didn’t see those in the questions well maybe a little bit but we should go into you know paradox and things like that okay um yeah yeah so just and i’m always happy to go into any kind of philosophical deep dive you want to get into right and my best friend uh tom shadyac he wrote a book um life’s operating manual
(01:57) um that is very much like the gift economy um and i always ask him like hey what question do you think i should ask this person and for you he just say said um ask him if he’ll marry me because he loves you so much okay well i’m already married but you know yeah yeah maybe next lifetime or something um yeah okay all right great and i just encourage you like you know you go off script if if something else comes up from what i said you know that wasn’t in your questions i’m happy to just um riff on whatever
(02:31) okay awesome yeah um so we’re so excited to have you here and we have so much that we want to come cover with you but your essay coordination um went pretty much immediately viral and for our listeners who haven’t read it can you give us an overview of that and maybe why you think it went viral yeah i mean it was a long essay i was surprised it went viral because usually nine thousand word essays don’t go viral you’re supposed to write 800 words or less for virality but what people told me is that it
(03:03) gave voice to things that they’ve been thinking and not able to put into words um gave voice to some of not only the doubts around the official narrative but also to the doubts about the doubts like you know i wasn’t coming and saying okay everything you’re being told is wrong and here’s what’s right i was more saying um everything we’re being told is suspect and i have no idea what’s right and some of these alternative narratives i don’t know if they’re right either and the facts from which we build our
(03:36) narratives even those are suspect uh so i gave voice to this uh bewilderment um and also um i wrote about some of the um trends that that the covet 19 crisis has kind of crystallized but that have are are of long standing so for example uh social distancing is actually not new uh we have been becoming more and more distant and less and less engaged in community and in physical presence embodied presence with each other for decades education moving online socializing moving online many kinds of human interaction moving online so this kind
(04:25) of crystallized a long-standing trend and we could also talk about the trend toward the tracking and surveillance of all citizens at all times uh that’s not new either even things like the destruction of small business that is a consequence of lockdown that’s not new yeah so so and i guess um what else did i talk about in there i talked about the the paradigm of control that is the default response of the authority structures of our society facing anything uh troubling the the response is to find something that you can control
(05:08) something that you can lock up keep out isolate or kill whether it is a terrorist or a criminal or an invasive species or immigrants uh or bad people or a virus or a bacteria um something that uh and and so that in a way uh the uh covet 19 has given us in a way it’s provided a relief it’s almost a sense of relief that finally here’s a crisis where there is a bad thing that we can control unlike the real pandemics of our time which are i would say primarily autoimmunity that i mean that is uh i was just talking with um
(06:00) uh dr zach bush the other day you’re gonna say that yeah and he was pointing out he’s he’s like he’s like and he was talking about the decline of health health and and environmental stressors and he’s like and we wonder why the prevalence of childhood chronic conditions has risen from 1.
(06:17) 2 percent in 1980 to 52 today and and these are autoimmune diseases um psychological disorders uh you know depression and anxiety and allergies and i think he talks about how that’s mostly from glyphosate and maybe vaccines too glyphosate pollution toxic waste like all kinds of things electromagnetic pollution uh but but and i thought you know i wish that we wondered about that he prefaced it was saying and we wonder why you know as a figure of speech and i i was like i wish we wondered more about that yeah and didn’t just take it for
(06:54) granted but anyway i think that and i i wrote about this a bit in the essay that that we have this uh latent anxiety and perception that there’s really something wrong in the world but we can’t really pin it on anything we don’t even recognize most people don’t recognize that there is an uh epidemic of autoimmunity and depression and obesity and uh allergies and um you know these chronic conditions um so so we we so covet comes along and it provides a vehicle to express our latent anxieties here’s something to be afraid of and you
(07:34) can do something about it it’s kind of like the same catharsis that a horror movie provides some people like we have all these unconscious fears and it offers something to to dress those fears in it’s like an avatar of our fears and then it provides a satisfying resolution when it the bad thing is is overcome can we and and so covet is kind of like that like it alleviates the feeling of powerlessness because here’s something that we can do about uh we the government knows what to do about it people know what to do about it like
(08:11) we have the illusion of control so anyway i said there’s all kinds of other things i said in that essay and and i think that it was popular because um it filled a bit of a vacuum um of sense-making like how do you make sense of what’s happening and it also spoke to the bewilderment as i said before yeah i think that as you’re talking about this you’re talking about the virility of your essay and the reality of a virus which i mean you know where we get that term but coven specifically becoming such a viral sensation in its
(08:47) own right you know if we want to talk about how popular it is on media um that both things your essay and covid have created this um really eloquent if you want to call it that when we’re talking about covet i’m not sure but really concise way for us as humans to be able to envision exactly what’s happening in our world and inside us and you i mean of course your words is the way that we’re used to seeing it and so we saw it in your essay of how you put together what’s happening for us in a way that we could understand and then
(09:24) you know from my own binary human mind it’s like okay then i can process that and hopefully resolve some parts or you know heal some parts of my my mind goes to wanting to fix things when it comes to the virus it’s like this is presenting us with an opportunity if we decide to look at it that way and if we can look at it that way it’s a blessing in a strange ass backwards anyway but um i think just for me it’s like hearing what you just said there speaks so much to how humans want to perceive stuff like we want it to be
(10:04) put in front of us in a way or be able to see it in a way that makes us go aha yeah because that’s the that epiphany is like what brings us to the table to consume the media to um regurgitate the media you know to be the answer if we can and all these different aspects i think of what make us human yeah i mean i think a lot of the media right now is uh keying into our desire to be good and right so it offers fuel for the outrage machine and the indignation machine that says your side is right their side is wrong aren’t they awful
(10:46) and and let’s rally the troops so it offers an identity for people living in a society that has stripped us off of a lot of our identity and left us not knowing who we are and that’s because of a very deep condition of breakdown of community and disconnection from nature and all of the other relationships that contributed to a full human self yeah so this is you know a symptom of a very very uh deep condition yeah so let’s talk about what you call inner beingness how um we can maybe strive to regain a sense of inner beingness
(11:34) and really what that is so um it gets really like kind of philosophical if that’s okay we love that all right so the modern conception of a self is one of the underpinnings of our civilization it’s part of our basic mythology and by mythology i mean the stories that tell us who we are and why we’re here and what the world is and what’s real and what’s possible and what’s important that’s a mythology and so ours says who we are is a separate individual in a world of other among other uh competing individuals
(12:17) and competing organisms and that that the world outside of ourselves is is basically this fantastically complicated machine but it is not a sentient conscious intelligent being it is merely the habitation of sentient conscious intelligent beings the pinnacle of which the only full beings are ourselves so animals have a bit less beingness and plants even less and rivers rocks mountains the sun the moon the stars the wind the clouds none at all that’s the mythology that that most of us have grown up in if we’ve been
(13:00) educated in modern society uh indigenous people of course didn’t believe anything of the sort so that that’s the story of separation i call it and it is uh it stands in contrast to what i like to call the new and ancient story of inter being which is a term coined i believe by tick not han but it’s a very naturally occurring word um i and probably many people started using it uh simply to because what we’re talking about this this successor to the separate self it’s it goes beyond interdependency or
(13:42) interconnection it’s really inter existence it’s not that i depend on you and on our relationships for my survival or i depend on the amazon where i depend on uh the pollinators or the sun but it’s that these beings are actually part of myself which means that if we cut down the amazon or destroy the honey bees or extinguish any species on earth even if we could come up with a technological substitute for it and manage and control this planet with geoengineering carbon sucking machines and you know bleaching the sky white and
(14:24) seeding the oceans to draw down carbon and so on something in us would still have died without the amazon we would we will have become less and and therefore our healing as as individuals and as a society and as a civilization it it depends on recovering these dwindling aspects of our being these lost relationships to come back into relationship with on every level with um exiled parts of ourselves with marginalized elements of our society of our of with other cultures with the places around us uh to come back into
(15:09) community to come back into the larger ecological community relations with nature to know ourselves as relational beings that is the um that’s what healing is and that is what i would like our next mythology to be yeah one thing i said in the coronation is that that’s not a guarantee it’s not like this disease comes and delivers us from our purgatory of separation but i was like at least it’s showing us in stark detail where we’ve been going to the to the totalitarian biosecurity dystopia where you never
(15:52) appear you never again go to a festival or a wedding or have a group hug or a yoga class or carnival or any of these age-old ways of human interaction without your personal protective bubble you know like that is and this touch is another another dimension of the essay which is uh and it’s related to the story of separation because which is the program of control and the equation of progress with control because if you are separate from the world outside of you then the forces of nature and the workings of the world
(16:30) they have no intelligence no consciousness no purpose they’re just a bunch of random noise and human destiny and human progress then becomes to impose our intelligence onto a world that has none and to overcome the competing others out in the world that’s what progress is more and more control domination of the world of the other civilizing the barbarians uh conquering the beasts draining the wetlands uh all of these are different versions of the program of control that equates to progress so in that ideology
(17:13) everything we’re seeing happen as a response to covet 19 totally it makes sense you don’t have to posit a a evil conspiracy seeking for their nefarious ends a totalitarian police state it comes occurs naturally to somebody who’s imbued with this ideology that of course we’re going to make things better that’s progress we’re going to track everybody at all times contact tracing and then we’ll be able to control this infection and this is this is another thing part of that essay as i said it was really long
(17:47) that the the or was i um another part of this essay the program of control um contact tracing yeah it can come as a like a conspiracy of good intentions uh it’s it’s the it’s i call it the civilizational tilt toward control and in fact to say to to jump off that understanding see that’s an uncomfortable understanding because at least a conspiracy theory tells you what to do about it like you you you show them up you kick them out you you win a war against these bad guys and then the problem is solved
(18:35) right but if the bad guys don’t exist at all or if they exist but they are part of uh they are they are part of a system and are generated and necessitated by a system then ousting the bad guys doesn’t do anything because the system will produce new bad guys and so then we’re left with i don’t know what to do we don’t know what to do that is good that’s what we need we need to know we need to acknowledge that we don’t know what to do that we are not in control and that the program of control
(19:11) has reached its class ceiling for the last 40 or 50 years it has not made the world a better place we have not engineered our social problems crime poverty racism out of existence we have not conquered disease we have not conquered hunger we have not run the war on cancer uh in fact quite the opposite not only are we ruining the biosphere but we’re not even healthier than we were a generation ago as you know zach bush’s statistic demonstrates we’re not healthier we’re not happier rates of depression rates of suicide are
(19:51) going up and it’s not it’s not even that the one percent are doing fine it’s not working for the one percent either [Music] so this is so we this is part of why i called it the coronation uh in that it maybe can show us like here’s where we’ve been going and um here is here and showing us our helplessness and showing us maybe that our efforts to control even create more problems than they solve and that also shows us our helplessness and then saying is this the future that you really want so do you think that some people are
(20:28) wanting that future because they’re so scared of this virus they’re like they’re being pumped with fear to where they are going to want to sit in that outline circle at the park and wear a mask for the rest of their lives because that’s how much fear they’re having right now yeah yeah um that was another piece of the essay actually that i forgot about uh is tracing this to the fear of death and the elevation of risk minimization to holy status if like and i said i said okay why why are we so afraid of death that’s also
(21:03) part of the ideology of the separate self death is the ultimate catastrophe the annihilation of your consciousness forever and if you accept that um then of course you’re gonna fight a war on death and see death as the worst possible medical outcome and gear an entire system onto saving lives but even that actually we’re not actually saving lives if you are making policy and making that judgment based purely on epidemiological statistics then you might say yeah lockdown quarantine distancing masks you know they saved x number of lives
(21:49) even that’s quite debatable actually there are experts who say that this was the wrong response but if you but at least that’s there’s a debate to be had there but what do those statistics leave out on the one hand they leave out the quality of life that that that is invisible to longevity statistics like and do you live your life that way do you like avoid every possible risk never get in a car never get on an airplane never do anything at all risky i mean most people understand that if you live to merely maximize your
(22:30) chances of surviving long you’re not really living you’re not engaging life but even like purely you know in terms of deaths caused probably there are going to be way many people dying of starvation than dive then would have died of covet of course yeah there’s there’s tens of millions right now of children who are wasting you can look at the videos they’re heart mending yeah do you think that with the spike this recent spike and everyone freak like everyone’s really freaking out now do you think that that
(23:04) recent spike happened because we were doing the quarantine and the um the mass and the social distancing and that weakened the immune system or how i i this is i i was just this morning looking at um basically i spent the morning getting very confused um you know there are those out there i saw a graph of about the spike in cases in florida accompanied by a graph of the number of deaths the cases are rising and rising rapidly and the number of deaths is plummeting so why is that is it because the virus is becoming less virulent
(23:49) less deadly uh is it because it is now infecting younger people um who have been you know released from lockdown and have infected each other but they’re they’re not as susceptible to really getting sick is it because there’s a lot more testing now so a lot more cases have been reported but they’re not actually more cases it’s just an artifact of more testing and more antibodies yeah i don’t know uh but but so i’ve been re i i spent like time reading this twitter thread you know and from that we’ve had a lot of people who
(24:30) are in the medical system and they’re like yeah any patient who comes in we routinely test them now and if they test positive for covid they become a coveted patient even if they came in for cancer or heart attack or anything else they become a covid patient and they get reported in the covent statistics and we’re testing everybody now so of course there’s but we’re not actually seeing more real coveted patients with classic coveted symptoms so they so these people think you know this entire spike is an illusion
(25:03) but then i also heard from another person who’s like i work in a hospital my hospital is you know getting filled up quickly and then other people are saying no my hospital is empty so i have no idea what’s going on and it’s so hard to tell in this time of narrative warfare where where people construct narratives that fit their beliefs and selectively uh use certain facts and not others and i mean i i have no idea what’s going on yeah there’s so many uh directions that i the confusion that you’re talking about
(25:47) and you’re talking to holding you know as part of really the work you do and what you ask the world to do um we’re in this opportunity of being in being asked to hold all the unknowns because there are so many and uh you brought up that everything when it comes to this anxiety i don’t know if i’m going to word this right but or what i’m perceiving or what’s coming up for me in it is that when we get into the mode of anxiety which is the mode of fear of unknowing what the future is going to hold for us right
(26:30) if you take that all the way down to its root it it leads us down to death this fear this underlying fear of annihilation like you’re saying and a part of that that um came up for me yesterday my husband sometimes is my you know oracle as i think our spouses tend to become if we allow them to uh and he said i said something about being really in fear of not of all this unknowing and having this underlying anxiety and the way that it’s affecting my hormones and all these things that are happening for me and um
(27:09) he said something about fear being the thing that we’re always trying to banish you know we’re always trying to get rid of the fear but the reality is that you know if we’re on our hero’s journey or if we consider ourselves brave which is i think under all of it what we want to be considered when it’s in the face of fear um bravery only happens because there is fear and bravery is the thing that really if we can hold on to being brave then it’s not about banishing fear anymore it’s about being brave
(27:42) and being able to you know be resilient and recover and show up again against your fear he’s a surfer so he you know he has fear out in the water when there’s big waves or you know some there’s all kinds of fears out in the middle of the ocean but um mostly for him it’s when he’s underwater and locked down by a wave and he’s trying to keep his heart rate low so he doesn’t use up his oxygen before he can get back up to the surface and that that struggle that happens there is the brave part right the part where you’re
(28:16) sitting there and you’re he said he used to try to figure out how to get fear out of his body like i don’t want to experience fear anymore so i’m going to do all these techniques and tools to try to remove it from my body but then later realize that it’s not about removing the fear it’s about focusing on how to be consistently brave and show up again and again and i think that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about the um holding of the two concepts or the the confusion that this is all bringing
(28:46) is like how do we sit with this until it becomes clearer for us yeah so so this is i mean one of the things that’s going on definitely um is a discomfort with uncertainty uh and and people therefore rushing to what’s most familiar and most most orthodox which is what the doctor tells you or what the authorities tell you that the doctor tells you uh what the the collective of medicine tells you because actually there’s a lot of dissenting doctors right now who many of them are afraid to speak out but they
(29:19) speak out privately um you know to me and other people who are in these conversations uh but but yeah there’s like certainty comfort security um predictability you know it’s like a refuge um as for fear the way i see it like fear is um an important natural and valid emotion that has its purpose and and its purpose is to heighten our awareness in the presence of danger so that we um are not so we don’t succumb to those dangers it it it provides like a a shell of safety around us actually fear keeps us safe the thing is uh as we grow and develop
(30:11) uh as as a human soul at some point we outgrow the shell that those particular fears provided for us so like for a surfer um you know maybe when he’s a beginner he doesn’t want to really go challenge those gigantic waves or go to like a more dangerous beach or something like that uh or if say you’re you know socially awkward you know speaking from experience here like you know maybe you just don’t want to go in any public situation where there’s you know groups of people with drinks who might you know exclude
(30:52) you so so like you have a fear that that protects you that protects you from harm but at some point you grow out of those fears and the things then at that moment the fears that um have become limiting you you actually crave to face those fears you actually seek out opportunities to face those fears because we have we are life and we have uh an imperative within us to grow and to develop into our full potential into our full beingness and ultimately that means confronting every fear that we have as it becomes no longer
(31:38) uh useful no longer in service because like you your skill as a surfer grows and and that fear now is holding you back it was necessary it kept you safe you could never have survived if you hadn’t listened to that fear fear is not a bad thing so but but it is a signal of a bigger world out there and at some point in the journey uh it comes time to probe that larger world so i think on a societal level right now um we are uh ready to face or at least i would like to speak this into reality that we are uh ready to face our fears
(32:28) and to probe beyond them and to see who we can become when we’re no longer scurrying around in denial of death with us mania for hygiene and safety safety first risk minimization where it becomes confining and we’re like even if it raises the death rate by x percent which is very debatable but even if it does i’m willing to accept that in order to live a full life um and i’m not just speaking for young healthy people here like i mean i have parents who are if they get covered they’re going to die
(33:09) like this is not like me being selfish um it’s it’s about what values do we hold sacred as a society right certainly life prolongation um is a value it’s an important value like my mother has has been quite ill for a couple years and we thought she was going to die a couple years ago but she held on outlived her terminal diagnosis and she’s had beautiful precious moments during that time like we’re all grateful that that that she has those extra two years so this is a value but if it came at the price of
(33:53) never seeing her grandchildren ever again you know or dying alone uh or like staying indoors all the time would it be worth it right and you know we don’t have to theorize we can ask her you know and i have um and and so this is it’s there’s no simple answer to this it’s not safety first or freedom first or um uh embodied gatherings first or like there’s no trump card there’s no overriding value and we have to understand like this is there are competing values there are shades of gray it’s it’s it’s
(34:32) complicated um and not and not default into some um simplifying uh principle that determines what our choices should be yeah and it’s it’s like when we say well it’s whatever is right for the individual then we’re becoming separate again because it’s also what’s you know you need to consider what’s right for the whole um and you mentioned this this concept of the dying off of the amazon and it being something that you know when we look at it we go well that’s probably not going to be good and
(35:18) beneficial in many ways but then i also think about the fact that we i don’t want to call it a fact the idea that we are um we are these people who who hold a where do i want to go with this if we are nature right because we are human we are born here on the planet we are part of this and we are inter being you know we are interacting with all the things around us we are born of it i guess then that asks us to hold the fact that as we progress quote unquote progress as we change the world around us and holding the idea that we are nature
(36:17) at the same time then when we are doing the destroying of the amazon or we are doing the uh you know affecting the climate in some way we are essentially doing as as nature i mean we are doing it as nature to some degree so i feel like we become separate when we say well we need to stop what we’re doing and reassess uh you know the damage that it’s doing to some degree because it’s it’s a it’s very it again it’s confusing because it’s like well if we are nature then what we’re doing on this planet is
(36:57) just part of what our our species does um but we have a bit of consciousness so it’s also like well we do have a we have the decision to make because we’re able to perceive having a decision or having a choice rather yeah that it gets confusing doesn’t it seems to be a paradox there if like everything we do is natural then then you know how can we talk about going back to nature or respecting nature um without setting it up as an other which is actually the root of the problem to begin with yeah so for me
(37:36) it’s a question of um that the problem is not that we’re separate from nature it’s that we think we’re separate from nature if we understand that we are part of nature and and we understand what nature actually is um like that’s another aspect of it if the the modern conception of nature is not as a holy being not as an intelligent conscious world or universe cosmos but as basically a random melee of force and mass of generic particles bouncing around randomly you know so as long as we have that understanding
(38:27) our participation in nature is going to um not be in service to the unfolding and development of life the i’d like to say that the story that we hold about the world is an invitation for the world to become that story same thing as with a person the story that we hold about other people uh invites them to be that so you’re a horrible person you’re greedy everybody’s out for themselves you pretty soon you discover that that’s true and holding the people are generous this actually gets one of your other
(39:03) questions you know um then they become generous you’re a walking invitation for that and so the way that we uh hold the world uh invites the world to be that anyway um i i think that our our civilization our species as civilized humanity is simply not yet mature um we’re in still the child phase of development where the relation to the mother is one of taking receiving you could say and the mother mother earth has very generously given to us everything that we’ve needed not only to survive but also to grow a civilization
(39:51) to grow technology and science and all of the ways of creating that we have access to now then the child is supposed to go through um adolescence and transition into adulthood where your relationship to the beloved let’s call it not the mother there’s a new kind of love relationship that enters the scene at this time where you no longer are simply in the role of taking receiving but you’re also in the role of giving and of co-creating participating in an entity bigger than yourself maybe called a partnership
(40:37) that’s where it heads that’s where the first bloom of romantic love carries us into partnership so our destiny as a civilization is to enter that kind of partnership or another word for it is participation coming from the same root partner participation in the evolution and flourishing of life that’s why any species is created it’s because there’s uh an ecological need for it to to maintain or develop the ecosystem as a whole and we look at the history of life on earth for billions of years it has become more and more and more
(41:22) complex you know from the first multi-cellular organisms you know to flowering plants uh to like at every stage the the complexity and biodiversity has grown with maybe a few you know bottlenecks and hiccups but but overall uh life on earth is much more complex than it was um two billion years ago or even half a billion years ago so our we as a species were created for that reason too we’re not gaia’s mistake we are we are here for the same reason that all life is here we have a unique gift to offer life to offer evolution
(42:04) and as as we grow up we yearn to enact that sacred duty that gift that we have as individuals too like if if more and more if you do something with your life energy in the form of your career for example that is not in service to life it’s probably going to feel kind of empty and so this is to actually rejoin nature really means to accept our purpose as being here to serve life so i’m hearing it’s it’s sorry jade it’s just just to repeat back what i’m hearing out of that and to confirm that
(42:48) i get it right because i want to really understand this um it’s a way to understand it is that we are coming into a hopefully an age where we can create the synergy needed to be able to hold more so almost creating the void for a new species to be born in the instance you’re giving us or for more consciousness to be born from or to progress in some way yeah that’s what wants to happen i’m not going to say that it’s an inevitability but we have the opportunity now it’s a coming-of-age ordeal actually that we’re in
(43:35) there’s no guarantee that that you we make it through the ordeal but knowing i mean i think it’s really helpful to know to have another story of why we’re here to replace the story of ascent the story that we’re here to become the lords and possessors of nature right yeah that’s that doesn’t inspire inspire us very much does it you know onward and upward the conquest of this the conquest of that the conquest of space the conquest of the atom i mean come on isn’t there hasn’t there been enough conquest
(44:09) yeah i think you’re right i think we’re changing the desire is changing for for many of us i did dude i didn’t know if you’re gonna are you gonna move us on are you gonna stay in i think we should yeah okay we still have a good handful of questions okay um go for it i was gonna ask something that it’ll be a spin-off i’ll save to the end if we have time okay so um i wanted to go back to inner beingness and how we’re that is part of what we’re waking up to with the whole black lives matter
(44:40) movement that racism is you know still very much present and that we are one and equal with all colors a lot of people are waking up to that that that hasn’t been the case for a lot um but we’re still doing the bad guy in good guy narrative when we do things like cancel culture and um you know doing the whole karen um name calling and things like that so do you think that in the midst of this black lives matter movement which we’re all for that we’re getting further from or closer to the unity and the thought of
(45:12) we are one yeah so i think that the basic energy underneath black lives matter is this like authentic uh indignation um and desire for for justice and desire for healing that basically says we cannot tolerate the way things are today we cannot tolerate the condition of of black and brown people uh on this earth um and then like so much else this this basic energy of justice gets hijacked and diverted onto formulas strategies narratives that actually undercut its effectiveness to generate change so one of those is to blame our current
(46:11) structural racism on the individual racism of uh white people uh and and you know and and so you get all this calling out you get the toppling of statues because those are white people who also were complicit in slavery or complicit in racism and you know all that you do all the diversity trainings and you interrogate your privilege and so forth but does any of that actually change the structural conditions of racism actually our current system could continue uh perpetuating it could continue perpetuating racial inequality even with
(46:53) no actual racists even if nobody has racist attitudes uh the legacy of trauma going back many generations and among the descendants of slaves the economic uh institutionalized poverty that’s not going to go away just because you get on your knees and apologize to a black person so so even worse than that the the whole um trend toward um you know apology and and tearing down statues and policing your language and so forth it makes it seem like you’re doing something about it but it actually diverts attention
(47:37) from these structural issues if we really wanted to uh improve the condition of the black and brown people of this world by far the the biggest thing that we could do would be to cancel third world debt because that is what keeps countries all over the world especially in africa south america the poorer parts of asia that’s what keeps them constantly exporting their wealth in order to maintain their debt payments to generate the foreign exchange that can be used to pay the interest on these tens of billions of dollars of debt
(48:20) that then leave the country’s population fighting for the scraps that are left over when everything’s been exported to multinational corporations and institutional investors and this gets like really like nerdy you know nuts and bolts economic stuff uh and and and so this is what immisrates and impoverishes hundreds of millions of people on earth and in slaves so we’re back in virtually slaves i mean you know your your exporting you don’t get to enjoy the fruits of your labors it goes to the masters
(48:52) the masters of finance in this case and all those people that are enslaved are living in a fight or flight state with no ability no gap to be able to have perception of change and and even like you know many of the uh consequences of this global debt system are very close to what the antebellum south um did with their slaves like breaking up families for example like families are getting broke communities cultures are getting destroyed all over the place so this is this issue is just not even on the like where are
(49:30) the people protesting in the streets saying this must stop it’s not even on the radar screen domestically as far as this goes probably the best thing the biggest thing we could do would be to end the um you know prison industrial system and um implement some kind of universal basic income or debt cancellation domestically on an individual level and this gets you know into a lot of wonky stuff but um to to change the system that generate see racism was actually invented to justify well in part invented to justify slavery
(50:11) it wasn’t the cause of slavery it was the justification for slavery because in um after the roman empire collapsed um and by the way this isn’t the only narrative but it’s it’s it’s a fairly compelling one after the roman empire collapsed in europe slavery was was forbidden there wasn’t there was surfs um uh but then the serfs were freed too and there was no slavery in europe and then and it was considered morally repugnant um and then the economic motivation for slavery arose again with the colonization of north america
(50:50) so racism was used as a justification oh it’s okay because these aren’t really people these are less than human um so so the the the economic like in and you could even extend that to say that in in a system of capitalism that requires deep inequality racism is a key enabler of that system it gives you a reason to accept unequal conditions but the goal of anti-racism uh the goal of black lives matter ultimately and this goes back to martin luther king um and his his broader political consciousness it is not to
(51:37) merely give people of color uh an equal slice of a pie whose ingredients require the impoverishment of people and places somewhere it’s not that black people now get to drive the world destroying machine too it’s not that that the tables are turned and the uh submissive ones become dominant uh and they get their turn no like how about a society where where we don’t have this kind of inequality and exploitation anymore that requires either racism or some other way to dehumanize people so in in i’m sorry i’m going on a long
(52:17) time here but no no unless we we get to these um deeper um uh these deeper things um like like dehumanization like the equation of justice with punishment like that’s another thing like do you want to uh punish those who have done these bad things or do you actually want healing do you actually want racism to end right are you a humanitarian or are you dealing with just the racist binary concept and it’s you say like we seek our medicine according to the configuration of that wound so it’s like you you see their anger
(53:06) and and you you empathize with them but the expression of inner being in this case like you’ve said before also is like i would do as you do if i were you so i feel like when i look at a black person i would do as you were doing if i were you you know like i see that side and when i look at white supremacy i don’t i don’t i don’t relate on that side and so it’s hard i feel like to have the we are one mentality with the racist point of view you know yeah see people tend to dehumanize you know white nationalists
(53:40) right and think well you know i can understand if i were born into a legacy of poverty and trauma in a ghetto uh where my only role models were drug dealers or my only valid career path was the illegal drug trade yeah i see myself becoming a criminal yeah i can understand that but i could never understand how i could become a white nationalist right with that disgusting pot belly the beer resting on top of it because i’m so privileged and entitled i would never do that and at any time same influence yeah it’s
(54:12) the same like that’s called dehumanization it says if i were you i wouldn’t be like that i’m made of better stuff right that is the basic psychic template of racism and as long as we inhabit that we will create more of the energy for racism on this earth and we don’t act see the thing is if that were true if it were true that people become white nationalists because we’re white supremacists because they’re bad that again gives us an easy solution right just like stamp out the virus yeah cut them out
(54:46) fill their mentality call them out you know uh shut them up and so forth and this isn’t a cause for them to become more conscious or anything it’s just slice it off it doesn’t change the conditions that generate right and it’s actually and i think it’s it’s actually repeating the conditions that generated them in the first place because the same hatred that they may you may be witnessing them put on to another race for instance is the same energy that you’re coming from when you say well you don’t deserve to be a part
(55:14) of this then you know cut you out or right or just imagine like you know here you are i see i feel a little hesitant to even say these things because oh charles is making excuses for you know racism or something like that um but this is actually about like what do we actually have to do just to end racism not what satisfies our craving to punish those that we identify as the perpetrators right but what actually changes these conditions imagine yourself as as you know being called a white supremacist and being told how horrible a person you are and
(55:57) like you’re like well actually you know i just helped my neighbor you know my elderly neighbor mohart lawn you know and i’m a nice person you know and i and i’m a good person i’m not a horrible person like people who are calling you horrible things they seem um ridiculous right and and and so there’s there’s no possibility then of of hearing their point of view and this is one of the things i think is necessary for our society to heal its racism is for the stories to be heard yes like you know i sometimes visit to
(56:38) understand yeah like i visit right-wing websites sometimes you know and they have like the the most um uh what what i believe is the most like distorted views of uh immigrants and why they’re coming you know and they’re they have like this they conjure these images of these gangs of criminals and so forth and like i’m like wow if you ever could just have a conversation with you know that immigrant mother risking her life to come here with her children for a totally unknown future because she’s escaping death squads in guatemala
(57:13) or something like that like if you actually could hear these stories right then you would not hold on to those beliefs so i asked how do we create conditions for all the stories to be heard because that is what rehumanizes each other if racism is basically dehumanization then the healing of racism has to come through rehumanization right this is a something we touch on a lot here on the show but um you know to your point of what we say here is everyone is doing the best they can considering their specific domestications and conditions
(57:52) if we which many people do not believe that they have a lot of resistance towards that idea but i think the the only way i’ve found so far to release the the judgment that i would hold on someone else and what they’re doing with their life is to remember that if i was in their shoes which means i had experienced all their domestications and conditioning then i would be doing exactly what they’re doing there is not another option really because that is who they are yes they have choices that present in front of themselves but
(58:26) in a sense they are creating their exact fate almost because of the conditioning that they are collectively made up of to this point and then their future will be the conditioning that they decide to bring into their life one way or another their forward and when we can understand that the forgiveness and the understanding of the other person that comes with it is extremely healing and i think it gets us back to remembering that that person is you know god in one of his myriad of disguises he is another one of us if you you know
(59:03) however you want to say that he is us or this other person is a is a mirror you know it’s showing us um a piece of us that we would be in that circumstance too uh and that means the white supremacist that means the narcissistic personality disorder abusive ex-boyfriend you know that means all the people uh the the person who’s dealing drugs on the side of the the corner or whatever it’s it’s a it’s a matter of figuring out how do we allow people to come to that understanding without bashing them over the head with
(59:40) it because that’s where we see all this resistance and i wanted to also bring up with you just to give get a little deeper into that and because you brought up the statues of these confederate generals you know being knocked down all over right now really just what your thoughts are on that because i think this is a really interesting and very philosophical conversation that is not being had it’s like who who are you siding with you know it’s like figure it out right now and and we’re all scared to be on the wrong side so
(1:00:11) what are your thoughts on that how would you argue i mean you know we can excavate this issue um so you start by toppling the confederate generals and then you start to ask well you know what about the northern generals or the the northern politicians who may not have owned slaves or traded slaves but the banking system at the time was completely implicated in the slave trade same with the textile mills i mean the entire so so in so if you were in any position of uh privilege or power in um pre-civil war america
(1:00:50) uh and many other places you were part of that system too so we shouldn’t have statues for them as well um and i think ultimately the whole idea of putting putting making a statue of a person making a hero um elevating them to this semi-divine status that is actually a problem because you only do that if you think well this person is better than others because you know here are their accomplishments isn’t that what we do when people die anyway we just focus on their intentions like oh they have the best intentions we
(1:01:25) don’t focus on any issues like like if so you know if you were if you were born into uh like say the patrician land holding class in virginia and then you know late 18th century there’s no way you were not going to have some kind of racist attitudes it was you were you were steeped in that right so it you can’t say well they were a bad person because they had those attitudes they were a person of their time so yeah this is all related to the punishment mentality that basically holds that people do bad things because
(1:02:03) they’re bad people and as you were saying people do bad things out of the circumstances that they’re in which isn’t to say that we have no choice we do reach moments of choice where there’s a crystallization of our consciousness uh but but these moments most of what we choose is unconscious and automatic the moments of true choice um are are are special moments when when something is crystallized into our attention that had not been there before anyway what goes for bad people goes for good quote people also
(1:02:44) people do brave things and heroic things also from their circumstances so it so like even you know you might admire uh somebody like thomas jefferson or someone less controversial how about john brown you know if there’s any white man who might be okay to admire in our current political climate it would be john brown you know who forfeited his life to try to free the save slaves by violence um and and and so you so you want to revere him but if you ask okay well what made john brown into john brown was it him this separate individual who somehow
(1:03:36) mustered the moral fortitude to make a better choice than other people because he’s made of better stuff or was it the convergence of his circumstances that gave birth to who he was so basically those so this is getting again like just it gets again kind of theoretical but but the whole idea of making statues and heroes of somebody it devalues all of the people doing the humble work that never get a statue made for them never gets celebrated but who are part of creating the conditions for the heroic appearing people to do what they
(1:04:18) do so someone is is courageous and and um altruistic is that because of them was that because how of how their grandmother loved them and the strong community that they were in and the mentor that took them under their wing at a certain time of their lives and the love that they received like those are the people maybe you should get more credit and that’s that’s why um you know i i i was um supposed to be awarded this prize uh i don’t remember what it was but you know it was this thing where you go and you make a speech and they give
(1:05:02) you this prize you know in the check and i was like i just felt really uncomfortable with that you know because anything that i’ve accomplished i’ve done as an instrument of even like on an intellectual level like i’m an instrument of a field of consciousness that that millions of people participate in and my good fortune that allows me to do this is because of the the the love that generations of you know mothers have given to their children and that love gets passed on um and and you know the the um
(1:05:41) my teacher in first grade gary mccaslin his name was and he was so kind to me in that bewildering alienating school building um if it weren’t for him you know maybe i would maybe my narcissistic tendencies would would you know be much more in control right now if it weren’t for him and these other beautiful humans so it’s not that like i’m you know modest um and and denying my gifts it’s that i’m just recognizing the reality that i am not a separate being and and so this is you can see how this
(1:06:21) translates to the matter of statutes the problem actually on a fundamental level isn’t that we have the wrong statues up it’s the whole mentality that puts statues up to begin with right and i see all of that and i agree with all of that i um i think still you know i empathize that as a jewish person wouldn’t want to walk past a situation of hitler with all of the history and the pain that their family has experienced i can see why a person of color wouldn’t want to walk past the statue of you know
(1:06:52) robert e lee at their school every day things like that i have it can i say it also depends on how that statue is held you know if if the statue becomes um a way to unfold stories uh and history it might be good to have a statue of robert e lee there otherwise you’re kind of erasing that history it might be good to have the statue there but instead of you know just glorifying that he was a brilliant general you know you tell the whole story yes my piece of this is my argument is that when we’re trying to
(1:07:25) erase history like um i don’t know if it was iran uh somewhere where there’s pyramids um uh not egypt somewhere where there’s some of the most ancient things that we know humans have made on this planet right they were being destroyed because of an uprising there and the world is going oh my god how are you destroying these ancient artifacts that the guys there like this is the history of of our time and the history of our time is um holds this idea of a whether it be a monarchy or something that no longer
(1:07:59) serves the people at this point and that’s why they’re having this uprising in any case we’re talking about statues of any type or monuments of any type it resemble it represents something in our history which is important to have a memory of the history but i think the thing that we dismiss when we decide to just knock it down is the ability to now consciously clarify what the history actually was if we had left out some of the because like i said when people die we just focus on their good intention and stuff like what did they
(1:08:31) do that was good that we can talk about now when we dismiss the other stuff but if we view it as a whole piece of history like this is who this person was and this was their conditionings and it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily you know a terrible person or a hero but this is what they did and this is how we got to where we are now this is the progress history is important for that reason then we get to a a place of clarity which is again what i think we’re looking for in the midst of all the confusion
(1:09:00) um so i don’t know i don’t have a i don’t think there’s a right answer to should we rip these statues out or not but i do think that there is an argument to how do we preserve ourselves i think there is an argument you know to to tearing down the statues simply because the statues are part of the maintenance of a certain narrative of history that um that minimizes or obscures a lot of the the suffering that happened um yeah of the slaves you know of people of color and and you know by elevating these figures
(1:09:34) you’re you’re um yeah you’re constructing a certain narrative um and so i can i can understand why we might want to erect different statues or just put them at ground level put them at ground level with us right but i just think that that um you know like as i was saying before um there’s such a it’s such a magnet for seeming to do something and take action that actually doesn’t really change the the uh causes of the inequality it might hinder it it might even hinder it right it kind of vents
(1:10:23) that energy makes you feel like you’re doing something virtuous but have you really changed conditions right now for the minimum wage worker in in the dunkin donuts you know so yeah i think if we did have the ability to go these were humans they were imperfect and we could collectively look at it that way then we’re doing we’re creating the paradigm shift that i think we’re talking about here today which is the inner beingness you know allowing ourselves to have come from a place that we can now see you know with hindsight
(1:10:57) was not a good idea and now we can decide to change it with some conscious effort and integrity so let’s talk about the conspiracy so conspiracy that you you bring up in your essay and i think you you touched on a little bit earlier charles that conspiracy theories tap into an unconscious orthodoxy um the war against the other so can you go into what the conspiracy myth is i think a lot of people are going to have some mixed feelings about all that yeah i mean i mentioned it a little bit before like like to take a complicated systemic
(1:11:38) structural problem and blame it on a group of evil people that is the same pattern as as any kind of reductionism you know it’s the same pattern is reducing climate change to just a matter of carbon dioxide or a disease to a matter of a virus or a bacteria not asking what is the terrain that allows this bacteria to take hold in your body to begin with when there are bacteria and viruses everywhere like why this person why now why you uh it’s the same mentality that blames poor harvests on weeds you know here’s this
(1:12:14) thing that we can uproot and the problem is solved so it’s a distraction from um [Music] the the bewildering and uncertain kinds of change that involve ourselves and our own participation much easier to blame some group not to say that there aren’t conspiracies what i’m saying is true whether or not there are actual conspiracies i’m just pointing to a tendency that might cause us to to look for them um and to uh because it is kind of a comfort zone um to to to to short circuit our marination in uncertainty
(1:13:02) by pinning it all on oh now i understand here’s what’s happening mm-hmm this this totalizing explanation for the way that the world works it short-circuits our our uh foray into the into the territory of the unknown oh i know here’s the explanation for everything not that there aren’t conspiracies you know like uh i mean some of them are are uncontroversial like the iraq weapons of mass destruction conspiracy there were no such thing and everybody knew it uh and they pretended like in the media in the government right that’s that’s
(1:13:37) well documented um iran contra blatant conspiracy not controversial at least among left people um enron uh co-intel pro the fbi’s infiltration of the civil rights movement and the environmental movement et cetera et cetera and i would you know he and i would venture into more uh controversial territory but i would say i think the kennedy assassinations both were conspiracies um and and you know then you you go a little farther into like 9 11 and stuff and and um it becomes more murky um people who who investigate those become very convinced
(1:14:20) of that um and i’m not you know in the essay i was not saying conspiracy theories are false and i was not saying that they are true i’m saying that they are vehicles of truth and the truth may not be literal they are myths and the truth of a myth does not depend on its literal factual truth it may or may not be true but you can feel the truth of a myth such as the in many cultures it is believed that the world rests on the back of a turtle can you feel that there’s a truth there like for me on a deep psychological
(1:15:08) level i’m like yeah that’s true and if somebody you know shows me a picture of the earth and look no turtle and what would the turtle stand on and like all these things that doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter so i in that essay i invested i wrote an essay called the conspiracy myth and investigated uh what truths are the conspiracy theories expressing and one of them is there is a lot we’re not being told that’s true another is there is an evil or an inhuman power in control of the world pulling the
(1:15:50) strings now i think that that inhuman power is you know something like capitalism or patriarchy or white supremacy not uh an evil cabal of plotters but still that’s a truth it’s giving an expression to a truth um and just the fact that we feel that we need to create any myth because we are in fear of being lied to by you know the government or big brother a myth is a good thing we need myths myths are are how we uh give life to to to to truths that would otherwise um be an inaccessible to us all cultures had myths like we need
(1:16:47) myths yeah it’s the imagination it’s exploration and some of our myths today are decaying and they’re no longer valid like you know the myth of like you know the founding fathers and right the glorious history of america right now that’s a myth that that that organized us and and conditioned our perceptions of the world and that myth is decaying right and part of the conspiracy phenomenon uh is for a hunger for a new a new mythology that we can use to make sense of the world or at least a reformation with clarity
(1:17:21) of what really you know what’s true now [Music] yeah i see that part like the control but then there’s also the fact that um we’ve a lot of people feel like we’ve been lied to so much it’s impossible to not be a conspiracy theorist these days you know especially when it comes to vaccinations and this virus and the tracking and things like that it’s so polarizing yeah yeah um so how can we not be conspiracy theorists right now yeah i mean in a way uh i mean i think that conspiracies can happen unconsciously
(1:17:59) whereas i wrote about this in the article too that that even if there’s no mastermind uh as an emergent phenomenon uh people collude or or conspire um like like you know the journalists kind of know what is forbidden you know what is going to advance their career what is going to receive criticism even if there’s no one giving them orders to like like to write disparagingly of a uh vaccine skeptic you know a prominent vaccine skeptic like they know that if they write uh approvingly of robert f kennedy jr they’re
(1:18:42) going to receive tremendous pressure they’re probably going to get fired you know they’re not they’re going to get de-platformed and if they write contemptuously of him then they are seen as respectable and and a serious journalist you know and and like they know that they don’t there doesn’t have to be anybody giving them orders to write this and not that um how do we ask ourselves to be a maverick in the midst of that though uh it’s um yeah it’s scary and it’s always been scary for humans to
(1:19:23) um dissent from consensus reality to events opinions that are different from those of your tribe right and and to espouse values and to violate their norms this is um generally it’s anti-social people uh psychopaths who do that most people are conformists and and seek and it’s not a bad thing they seek harmony i’m not i’m not disparaging the conformists like we we have evolved uh for social harmony that’s why we’ve been so successful uh compared to say neanderthals who were smarter than we are
(1:20:08) their brains were at least according to brain size were much bigger 30 or 40 percent bigger i think but they didn’t have these um this kind of social cohesion uh at least according to one theory that i that i find fairly uh convincing but we humans homo sapiens um we we it’s really important to us to get along and if that means um pretending to believe something that everybody else believes in order not to make waves like we tend to do it and that usually serves the village and serves the tribe it’s only in extraordinary times because
(1:20:51) usually our norms and values have co-evolved with our environment and with our conditions to serve our well-being it’s only in uh times of of drastic change and disruption that the blessing of our uh um conformity and tendency to harmony becomes a curse and it in those times it’s the shameless people and the mavericks and the dissenters and the rebels who uh are exercising a necessary function and i do think that we are in that time today yeah i think so too [Music] yeah it’s hard with the um again with the we are one
(1:21:38) mentality and healing the polarization which i i want us all to strive for we are one but so many people feel that their health and human rights is at stake and everyone’s doing one um i keep using vaccinations as an example because it’s such a a touchy topic and i i feel like it fills my timeline a lot one mom you know she’s only vaccinating her kid because she wants her kid to be healthy and one mom is not vaccinating their kid because they just want their kid to be healthy so they’re both doing what they
(1:22:07) truly believe is best um and they’re so passionate about that and they feel like the other one is affecting their own human rights because your kid’s going to get my kids sick and your kid’s going to get my kids sick from vaccination shedding you know so uh or from getting a forced vaccine because you know it goes that route yeah yeah yeah i i do think that our um in many ways our society has kind of our our narratives have become divorced from reality and are maintained only with greater and greater denial
(1:22:45) [Music] now i’m not you know by any means a a scientist or researcher in the topic of vaccines um but i do pay some attention to it because it is like the most polarizing of all topics out there like if i wanted to divide my audience in half and shed half my audience all i have to do is come up with one or another announcement about it yeah like it doesn’t matter which side i come up like yeah um and in those situations i always look for underlying truths and the agreements that both sides share without knowing it
(1:23:19) and the questions nobody’s asking with vaccines you know i mean honestly like i think that the medical establishment needs to start looking at um some of what has been excluded from their worldview you know i was just a couple weeks ago i was reading a thread uh i think it was on might be on facebook um this uh australian celebrity had come out as a vaccine skeptic and um i just you know perused the comments sections uh the comments you know the uh and many many people basically you know naming him as the antichrist and so
(1:24:17) forth but also like hundreds of stories along the lines of my kid was a precocious healthy one-year-old getting into everything making messes everywhere you know very bright and engaged and then i took him in for his whatever vaccine and he you know screamed all night you know and had a fever and the doctor said it was coincidence not related and i believed him and then i took him in for the next vaccination and this time the same thing happened but the next day he stopped making eye contact and you know he’s 18 now and oh and and and stopped
(1:24:59) talking yeah and and he’s 18 now and he still can’t talk yeah yeah and multiple friends with the same story yeah yeah like and you know you read like you know some of these sites you can read thousands and thousands of these stories you know and and uh you know this is i guess something where where i’m uh not so much just holding the paradox and and looking for the for the hidden assumptions but where i think that um the uh the blindly pro-vaccine people really should read some of these stories and and ask why am i so sure
(1:25:47) right because ultimately it comes down to which authority do you believe it comes down to belief in authority not really most most people don’t have not done the research themselves or you know i had one i mean i remember a kind of conversation that i’ve had more than once where they’re like show me one peer-reviewed study that casts doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines and i’d be like okay you know here’s a page that has you know 200 studies and they’re like you expect me to read
(1:26:17) that crap you know what journals were those in those couldn’t be because if you already know what’s true then why would you even entertain something that that conflicts with what you think is true it’s a waste of time uh so so this and i guess what you know what i want to say is is that everybody i know including myself has something like that something that we we are so sure is true but that is actually um a a part of our identity complex uh that we believe not for reasons of evidence and logic but because it’s
(1:27:03) become that belief has become part of our identity and and it’s hard to give those up yeah when they’re threatened you feel threatened because it’s your identity when there’s some some data point that comes in that doesn’t fit you ignore it where you attack it when something comes in that does fit that belief especially if you feel it you’ve experienced it if you feel it was your child that you saw experience it then it’s like you feel like they’re actually calling you a liar because they’re
(1:27:33) threatening your own experience right yeah yep um i would even say they’re threatening your own existence to i mean at least ego existence where you literally have to experience a death of that identity like charles is talking about in order to let go of it at all you know or in order to reform it at all yeah how does um you talk about this a lot and so does uh tom shady x book uh life’s operating manual but how does our money system create scarcity yeah i mean i wrote a whole book on that [Music] i won’t go too deep into it but just
(1:28:12) basically it’s because of the way that it’s created [Music] as interest bearing debt lent into existence by banks and financial institutions investors buying bonds for example and because it’s all created as interest bearing debt it means that there’s always more debt in existence than there is money because every creation of money as a loan comes with a debt that’s even bigger so that puts us into competition uh endemically uh to to for for not enough money like systemically everybody’s competing to pay back these
(1:28:57) debts but there’s not enough money to pay them back right so somebody’s going to have to go bankrupt and we’re all competing to not to be that person and and this this radiates out into the economy as um uh you know all kinds of competitiveness and scarcity but that’s that’s the the core of it yeah and i love your um for people who do want to um go a bit deeper in that your uh it’s a youtube video um sacred economics um that was that explains it um i guess in a concise way too it’s about 12 minutes
(1:29:37) long [Music] how do you think that the legalization of psychedelics will change our economy and our culture i i think that it is disruptive um the old uh you know drug warriors when they said that it would end you know legal lsd will end society as we know it they were kind of right actually but i think that’s a good thing because it really opens they open on well one thing they do is they open people up to the existence of a much bigger reality than we’ve been told exists this is part of the conspiracy thing too
(1:30:21) like yeah the reality that has been told to us is so much smaller than what is really out there and and psychedelics as well as contact with indigenous cultures and other cultures um that that that’s what it tells us it shows us that your secret suspicion that reality and possibility are bigger than you’ve told that’s true yeah you were right um and and and then it it provides it it puts us in a dilemma um at least that’s how it was for me you know how do i reconcile the world that i’m living in with what i
(1:31:02) actually know is out there do i just ignore it and be a dutiful little citizen and and continue acting as if this narrow consensus reality is all that there is and ignore the vastness of mind and universe that i was shown and if i don’t just exclude it then how do i integrate that so i think that that as we gain more access to psychedelics this question comes up more and more and it loosens people’s it loosens the hold of the story of separation on people you know the institutions are still there the economic compulsion to
(1:31:44) participate in the world destroying machine is still there but you’re not bought into it anymore and if it crumbles if it’s if it’s challenged uh if it crumbles you’re not going to try to put it back together again you’d be like thank god it it collapsed and if it’s challenged you’re not going to try to defend it very hard or at least part of you want part of you will because i’m afraid of things falling apart the party is like yeah bring it on because as i have seen through psychedelics i know that
(1:32:17) this isn’t the right way to live right yeah did we cover um i just kind of want to define gift economy for the listeners and you’ve put some words to that here but just to go over what that might look like if we were in a situation where we could um have that type of complete renewal of our economy what would a gift economy look like oh yeah that’s another big question um you know it’s not it’s not it doesn’t mean you know giving presents uh or uh not even it’s not doesn’t even necessarily mean the end of money
(1:33:08) but it’s um it’s modeled after the way that communities used to work where people understand the needs and the gifts of those around them and meet those needs uh without necessarily keeping track without maintaining an account but there’s kind of like a inexact social account that is kept where the community recognizes who’s been generous and who’s been stingy and takes care of those and is generous to those who are the most generous so it requires um transparency and an ethic of non-accumulation and it requires having some way to
(1:34:00) connect gifts and needs and to offer the social validation for for these contributions so in sacred economics i wrote about how can we change money so that it supports that ethic and and also um i do practice in my work as well i think you had a question about that as well yeah our magic mob asked um how you got to a place where you were able to provide your work and speaking engagements for free um it’s something that tom shadyack does it as well and talks about yeah i wouldn’t say that i do it for free
(1:34:37) um i would say that i do it by gift so people are free says i don’t want any money right gift says you’re welcome to pay whatever amount feels good including zero so so i don’t compel a return gift but you know a lot of people donate through my website um or like online courses they’ll they’ll pay a voluntary fee which is anything they want whatever whatever feels good and right to them so it could be zero you know and and it could be you know what you would normally pay for an online course whatever that is
(1:35:13) or something in between or something bigger i don’t know but that that’s the the idea it comes from not wanting to uh put this material behind a paywall i mean the whole reason i’m doing it is so that people will read it or listen to it yeah so it’s like to do that and then say but you can’t unless you give me money yeah that’s contrary to my intention so right um so yeah you know i and and if i speak at a conference and stuff like and they’re paying the speakers then i’m not going to say don’t pay me
(1:35:46) because i understand that as a token of of gratitude and of honor and i want the the information that i serve to be honored as well yeah reciprocity yeah so so it’s not like i’m you know above it all and you know don’t like or don’t need money um but it’s really trying to implement a gift ethos uh a gift model even in my in the way that i um you know put my offerings into the world right yeah yeah that’s it’s a beautiful thing to remind ourselves i think to think of how we can do that with our work but it does
(1:36:29) also make me i don’t know i have this this feeling of does it only come it feels like maybe in this culture that i was raised in feels like well you have to be privileged in order to to get to that you know in order to be at a place where you feel like you can gift things because we’re in a culture that says actually actually yeah actually uh poor people give a lot more that’s true than wealthy people and i don’t think you ever really become poor by giving yeah in like in like you know impoverished
(1:37:02) communities people are sharing a lot more and taking care of each other a lot more and and [Music] even statistically as a as a percentage of income the wealthier people are the less they give yeah and then people use that as an excuse to not give because they’re they’re trying to get to be like those people but uh memphis is one of the poorest cities in america and they’re the most um charitable yeah so and in other countries if you go to like other cultures where people are literally dirt poor as in they don’t
(1:37:38) have a floor in their house it’s dirt and they have almost nothing they are so generous i know and it makes me sad because when people hear that though they think it almost makes them i feel like it might encourage stinginess and less giving because they don’t want to end up poor they want to end up wealthy you know the more money people have usually the more attached they become to that money [Music] and there’s the conversation about when people get so attached to giving that they literally will give their last dollar
(1:38:09) and then that’s it for them you know i mean yeah the question then is are you giving because you’re actually wanting to give or is it because you want to um know yourself as good right actually a kind of vanity yeah i made an online course called called living in the gift that really goes deep into this oh i like that psychology yeah i am you know a lot of people are out of work right now i’ve been out of work for three months but i still give um on the first of every month it’s just a direct deposit to
(1:38:40) um a place in memphis it’s a hundred dollars every first and it’s a rock climbing gem that doesn’t charge admission so kids can come in and get mentored um and i get different react like i don’t go around telling people that but the few close people in my life that do know have different reactions some find it very irresponsible and some find it very admirable um and if i were to ask myself why i do it it’s because i’ve been given to in times that it’s the only reason why i survived
(1:39:07) and these people even though i’m out of work right now they need in my opinion they need it more than i do they have less than i do still even with me being out of work and maybe maybe also on some level you know you’ll be okay maybe you’re not actually being it doesn’t mean i don’t have financial anxiety right now but i do on a soul level i know i’m i’ve always been okay yeah yeah that’s true um i i need to to uh end soon because um i have another one in half an hour and i need
(1:39:33) to rest in between yeah no problem um you want to move to the staples yeah so there’s a few short questions i like to ask everyone who comes on the show so first off if you could hug your younger self right now what would you say if i could hug my younger self that’s interesting i would say you don’t have to earn the right to exist [Music] i need to hear that how old were you when you were hugging yourself out of curiosity seven [Music] if you could have the whole world read one book which would it be
(1:40:25) i wouldn’t recommend the same book to the whole world yeah books are can be a kind of medicine and yeah specific to the illness [Music] so whatever calls to you then i wouldn’t say that either but now sometimes i recommend books to people yeah yeah what do you recommend we need to know we depends on the person you know it usually comes up it’s like it’s like it’s like oh you know yeah this conversation brings it about yeah do you have one that changed your life i like a pivotal time where you’re
(1:41:08) like this book was broke something open for me i mean a few uh people’s history of the united states teenager that changed my life cutting through spiritual materialism by challenging trungpa that changed my life when i was 22. order out of chaos as a science book the unsettling of america by wendell berry um gulag archipelago 1984.
(1:41:42) that’s a few yeah she’s writing them now uh if you could whisper one phrase to everyone on the planet what would it be you are not alone [Music] before we let you go where can people find you online uh my website charles eisenstein.org awesome yeah you’ve got all your amazing essays yeah well thank you so much thank you thank you i love your your essays um even though people i’m sure are reading them looking for answers what i love is that you encourage them to ask more questions so thank you for that yeah yeah i really
(1:42:23) think that what we need most in our time is not more answers we need to ask different questions better questions yeah yeah we don’t even know what questions to ask yeah yeah i agree um really quick you you i know you’ve um experienced with psychedelics have you ever um uh found out what your spirit animal was you know like i’ve had different you know different you know experiences where someone you know puts me in a trance or whatever does a shamanic journey or something i don’t do a whole lot of that
(1:42:54) stuff actually i feel like it doesn’t work somehow for me yeah you’re already hooking it up i had one experience where my spirit animal is a mouse oh what did you see jade reads spirit animals so she probably saw one on you a mouse is so that’s so interesting i know they have um a lot of interesting spiritual meanings but i saw you as a gekko so that’s cool yeah like you hope it’s gonna be a bear it’s like something impressive you know that is like this mouse this little quivery and then it get goes really small too
(1:43:34) it represents rebirth and life cycles the circling of energy they also symbolize there’s always hope for rebuilding our own lives they symbolize energy and magic of the nature and the life in the purest form and then you know they’re known for um they’re able to change you know yeah that so adaptability and then they shed their skin so just constant rebirth and yeah when i was in taiwan i i you know i spent my 20s in taiwan and was i went to this taoist meditation center that was on a really powerful earth
(1:44:07) energy spot yeah like i didn’t even necessarily believe in that kind of stuff but it was undeniable yeah that spot and and they had all these mediums um there who whose abilities were like vastly magnified by being there and all these interesting practices and stuff it’s a long story but they said that my they had this concept i’m not sure if it’s exactly the same as a spirit animal but they called it your um uh original spirit uh and mine was a uh a um parrot oh okay yeah ah that’s interesting too i know
(1:44:46) it’s different spirit animals they’re just in they have a message for you in this like time of your life so it could be for 10 years it could be for a few years but yeah so it’s all a little different but that’s so cool so you experienced that yeah yeah that’d be a whole story but have a nice little break before your next one oh yeah thanks okay talk to you soon bye bye bye all right um let’s do wow that was definitely our deepest dive i feel like you think so i think that’s the deepest
(1:45:24) philosophical conversation that this show is seen i think it was on par i think eric gotzi too gutsy is psychological i mean he’s in phil he’s in psychological yeah he’s a little bit more psyche yeah yeah well i definitely i definitely am so glad that we got him on because i know that i’m going to continue to read his work and um you know it just it’s a it’s a cool feeling when you’re reading someone’s work and you’re like i’ve i’ve gotten to talk to him about this so i know you guys really i enjoy
(1:45:58) this podcast for how giving us those opportunities um it’s gonna keep me i mean his whole thing is questioned so i feel like my head is spinning now with questions which how do you get out of a conversation that’s all questions think about i know [Laughter] yes what’s your magic trick my magic trick actually comes from the seven habits of highly effective people yeah but it’s really uh somehow tied into this conversation because we we broached the topic of death a couple times in here um and getting you know getting people
(1:46:36) generally and my you know myself included to be more comfortable with thinking about our own death and think about death in general because it could be such a powerful tool if we were better at that and you know we had that that episode with um the death doula arthur who is so incredibly articulate yeah i love her yeah i want to do a part two with her i know i just love her like i just want to sit with her in person and just be good friends and buddies go out and visit her in joshua tree anyway okay so my magic trick is to
(1:47:09) imagine your own funeral three years from now that’s three years is just to give you a little gap in case and maybe you have a lot of stuff you want to change when this when this uh you do this practice uh so to imagine your your funeral from three years from now and to imagine the whole setting this is you know in your mind’s eye really kind of go into a meditation with this and and think about the setting from the flowers to the casket with you laying in it um all the people who would attend seeing all their faces there in the audience
(1:47:41) and then to imagine that four people would be standing up and speaking so to figure out what four people would stand up and speak for you there and choosing one close family member one close friend someone from your work or someone you work with and someone from your church or community organization where you’ve been involved in service so that’s four people once you have those four speakers in mind then think deeply about what you would like each of these people to say about you and your life maybe it’s about
(1:48:17) what kind of wife or husband you’ve been what kind of mother or father you would like their words to reflect about you and what kind of son or daughter or cousin what kind of friend were you what kind of working associate you’ve been or were so just to really think on what character you would like them to have seen in you and what contributions what achievements you’d like them to remember and look carefully at the people in attendance at your funeral think about what difference you would have wanted to made
(1:48:52) to have made in their lives so i was doing this little exercise last night and it really gave me some perspective and insight into where i’m not showing up and the way that i’d like to change in some of the areas in my life so i thought it would be useful for our listeners to give it a go yeah a few thoughts occurred to me too just listening to it so that is a really useful practice and one of my favorite questions that you ask is always um uh think from your deathbed head deathbed yeah yeah um [Music] so uh my magic trick is very short and
(1:49:28) simple but it has to do a lot with what we talked about on this episode and it’s just um having the mentality of like if i were you i would do as you do we are one and um mercedes i feel like was um really articulate on that um this is just a a one sentence summary for you to use maybe when um someone is cutting you off or when you’re struggling with not judging you know the homeless person begging or um even with the white supremacist or you know the pro protester that may have knocked something over you know
(1:50:04) yeah anything anyone um even with your partner who’s driving you off the wall today or something just uh to put your hand on your heart and in your mind to look at them and in your mind say i see your essence so it’s like you’re choosing to recognize them as god in drag you’re choosing to see the god in them you’re choosing to see their essence so just consciously taking a step back putting your hand on your heart which is like asking yourself to be in your heart and uh not in your mind and to just say
(1:50:39) i see your essence yeah and i love that it actually makes me think of this is something so simple that probably if you’re listening to the show you already know the definition of namaste but when when they’re hands together and says the word namaste it means the divine in me bows to the divine and you it’s right yeah it’s very similar um tammy who we’ve had on the show in the past my um my shaman she was the one that taught me that and it’s yeah it is the same thing as namaste it’s um i think
(1:51:10) i think just when when you’re triggered by someone or when you’re struggling with them to say something that maybe isn’t something you hear you hear at the end of yoga class you know something you you reserve for just that time i think it it can be useful but yeah okay wait i don’t want to close it yet because i have something that that’s so weird because i wrote it down in the beginning our conversation with charles today it didn’t come back up but he mentioned han and um i don’t know interviewing this
(1:51:42) yeah i don’t remember oh yeah inner beingness was was his he pulled that from from that great uh guru and what came up for me was something that i i use all the time and it’s whenever you’re in a situation where someone is struggling or you’re struggling or you’re having a combativeness with someone it can be almost any situation in relationship with another person where you are feeling like you don’t have the right words to say and even if you did now isn’t the time because that’s not necessarily what’s
(1:52:14) needed by that person they may just need to be heard they may just need to spin out their anger whatever this actually comes through tara brock who wrote the book radical acceptance it really changed my life quite a bit but it it originates with titnit ha i believe and he says to say whether in your mind or to the other person or to yourself if you need it darling i care about your suffering because it’s not i’m gonna fix your suffering i’m going to you know this is not about trying to be the fixer in any
(1:52:47) way it’s just about caring because that’s what we want from others we have to do the work ourselves but we want to care yeah i see you’re suffering that’s a really good one yeah what you’re talking about when you’re some someone you know pulls in front of you and cuts you off or whatever or your husband or your boyfriend or whatever your loved one is being an yeah darling i care about your suffering or i care about your serving that’s really good i see your essence all right magic mobbers thank you so much for tuning in
(1:53:18) and taking this journey with us if this episode held some magic for you please share it with your friends and family this would mean so much to us and don’t forget to join us on our instagram page at the magic hour and let us know what your favorite episodes have been so far we appreciate all of your feedback and want to know what’s lighting you up yes we do and we release a new episode every monday so you can catch us again next week or go listen to some of our past episodes in our podcast library now
(1:53:42) we’ll meet you there until then be a lie all right let’s do the intro yeah i forgot we didn’t do that okay greetings boys and babes it’s the magic hour a place where we navigate through life’s peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of world-class guests from all walks of life we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our highest potential i’m your host mercedes terrell along with my partner in shine jade bryce hey you guys
(1:54:27) i am so super excited for today’s guest i actually didn’t even want to come up with questions for him i just wanted to say welcome to the show you can just talk for the next hour or so yeah me too when i read his essays i felt like he was i text you i think i said is this guy in my brain yeah but the difference is he’s brave enough to actually write books about it maybe it’s disciplined enough to write about it and publish stuff in a million different directions without giving a damn people will
(1:54:56) be able to hold it all fully embracing the gray yeah sometimes driving after myself yeah and i feel a sense of relief when reading his work it’s interesting you know to read something looking for answers and to walk away from it remembering it’s actually the questions that are more important so let’s get them on yes our guest today is a public speaker teacher thought leader and author he graduated from yale in 1989 with a degree in mathematics and philosophy he describes his late 20s through his mid-30s as a long period of intensifying
(1:55:26) crisis which we couldn’t relate to more his work covers a wide range of topics including the history and themes of human civilization money consciousness cultural evolution spirituality and the ecology movement the key themes he explores include anti-consumerism interdependence and how myth and narrative influence culture he believes that global culture is immersed in a destruct destructive story of separation and one of the main goals of his work is to present an alternative story of interbeam much of his work draws on ideas from
(1:56:00) eastern philosophy and the spiritual teachings of various indigenous peoples an advocate of the gift economy he makes much of his work available for free helping us all get closer to our center where the truth of we are one resides and to be more comfortable living in the gray our guest today is truly a light please help me welcome charles eisenstein to the show i think that’s good i’ll just clean up the hiccup yeah um stopping