From Living the New Story

Charles Eisenstein is a speaker and writer focusing on themes of human culture and identity. He is the author of several books, most recently Sacred Economics and The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible. His background includes a degree in mathematics and philosophy from Yale, a decade in Taiwan as a translator, and stints as a college instructor, a yoga teacher, and a construction worker. He currently writes and speaks full-time. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and four children.

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About halfway through Charles Eisenstein’s presentation in Session 3 something he said leaped out at me.  What a flash! He was in the middle of giving a deeply thought out answer to a question I had been working on, and blogging about, for years! In my blog post of May 10, 2014 the question was posed as “What is the shift of consciousness needed to support the Great Turning from our industrial growth society to a sustainable civilization?”

What I heard Charles say that snapped me to attention was “That’s the shift of consciousness that we need to live into to transform this planet, to make it through this transition.” As soon as the video came I started transcribing the few minutes before and after that sentence so I could carefully study what he was offering as the answer to my question . This is the transcription.

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Whatever field you’re active in, what really excites you or inspires you, you can probably explain it in terms of the Story of Interbeing, how it draws from that story and it makes sense in that story. 

For example, maybe you are passionate about preserving biodiversity and slowing down the mass extinctions. This is something from my book. I wanted to do research on how biodiversity loss impacts climate, because I know, but intuitively, that if we destroy biodiversity and simplify the biosphere that the climate will be less resilient.

Can you imagine if you said “You know I’ve got all these different cell types in my body (I can’t remember how many cell types there are in the human body) you know, you don’t need all those, let’s simplify it down to ten, ten different cell types”.  You would not be able to maintain homeostasis that way. The same thing with this planet. If we continue to degrade the organs and tissues and cells of this planet it doesn’t matter how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, the climate will be deranged, the planet will die.

So, anyway, I looked up ‘effect of biodiversity on climate’. Page after page after page after page of Google results, not a single one. They all, even though I phrased it that way, they all gave me the opposite result, effect of climate on biodiversity. And I’m like, this is fundamentalism, in one important thing.

So if you care about the great horned owl or the Carpathian lynx or one of these endangered species, and someone asks you “Why, why is it important? What is the carbon sequestration contribution of that species? Can you please quantify that? I mean yes, you know, I’m sure, you know, we all love the furry little animal but come on, let’s get practical here, do we really need that animal?”

How can you answer that? From the assumptions of that question you cannot answer that. In the Story of Separation you cannot answer that. But from the Story of Interbeing we know that if that lynx goes extinct something in me dies as well. It would be like if someone asks me “Charles, you care about your son so much. You know actually he’s sort of a drain on your time, resources, and energy. You’d be better off without him, wouldn’t you? Show me the numbers that…”

That’s silly, that’s stupid, because I love my son, he’s not separate from me, because his happiness is mine, his health is mine, his well-being is mine. That’s the shift of consciousness that we need to live into to transform this planet, to make it through this transition. I don’t want to say that’s what we need to live into to survive. That’s the wrong motivation. It’s true! But it’s not the right motivation. It has to come from love of what we have othered. That’s the initiation that is being invited in through the climate crisis. It is the initiation of no longer seeing the planet as other. That can be very practical, oh yes we’re interdependent etc. etc. but it’s more than that. It’s also, I’ll just say it again, to see and experience the world as a being, and everything in it and on it as beings, so that we’re not alone here any more, we’re not the pinnacle of beingness, but we are in a love relationship with all that is, seeking therefore through technology to further the well-being of all, knowing that if we do that we’ll be better off too.

That’s what underlies regenerative agriculture for example. If we care for the soil we will be better off too, because we’re not really separate from the soil. If we care for the water we will be better off too. If we care for the rain forest we will be better off too. If we enter into service to these beings we will be better off too, because we’re not separate.

And that doesn’t mean we never cut down a tree or never eat a plant or animal, but it means that we do that from a place of understanding that each of these beings is a being, has a gift, has a right purpose, has a way that it is supposed to live and die, and not just treat them as a commodity.

So, as for the personal level, I would just like to trust that the knowledge, because you do know, everything I’m saying, you already know this, I just trust that as that knowledge awakens in you, and maybe that’s kind of what I do, I kind of wake it up a little bit, that as it awakens in you it will guide you toward living in alignment with it in whatever of the diverse situations come up in your life. The aliveness of this knowledge will point you toward opportunities to serve it. You will recognize what you had not recognized before, the more this consciousness is awakened.

Yeah. And we can trust each other with that. Trust the beingness that we become in the presence of this knowledge.

My transcription of 37:28-45:17 of the video of Session 3 of  Living the New Story.

I also transcribed his comment on the nature of the self at 35:20:

The Story of Interbeing says that who you are is a point of attention in a matrix of relationships. That you are the totality of these relationships. That anything that happens in the world is happening to you. That the qualities that make you a self are not limited to human beings, they exist in everything, and in a unique way in each being. The consciousness of a rock is not the same as the consciousness of a human being, but it is nonetheless a consciousness.

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I have only answered two of the questions for reflection so far, #2 and the first part of #5. I’ll put all the questions here so I can work on them as the course progresses.

Questions for ongoing reflection and dialogue

The following questions for reflection are designed to support you in integrating the content of the session and to enliven your learning journey and process of self-discovery between now and our next session.

1. When our collective story no longer makes sense and the new story hasn’t yet emerged, how do you navigate the space between stories?

2. How are you with uncertainty and sitting in the discomfort of the unknown, resisting the temptation to leave that space and rush to solutions? There is no instruction manual for the new story. How is it for you to resist the temptation to have it all figured out, to box the new story into a tidy set of rules, guidelines or principles which, at this point, would likely be created using old story thinking?

I guess that’s why I did 40 years of zen practice,  I learned to be very comfortable with the discomfort of the unknown. I worked with koans such as “Not knowing is most intimate” (which is now the subtitle of my web site). I appreciate zen for having the tools to crack open defensive mental structures and to rest in open awareness of otherwise disorienting groundlessness.

3. What does it feel like for you to empty, to let go? Charles says that only in the unknowing state can something truly new emerge. How is it for you to gently open to that state – to that space between stories – even if just for brief moments at first?

4. How do the stories of separation and interbeing play out in your life? What triggers moments of separation? Conversely, what engenders an embodied sense of interbeing?

5. Do you have an experience of seeing the ‘beingness’ not just in the realm of humans, but also in the myriad beings that share the planet with us – the animals, the trees, the sun, clouds, rain, rocks, the land.

Yes, but not exactly in those terms. After the closing ceremonies of a 7-day intensive meditation retreat (sesshin) at our Zen Mountain Center I was walking alone in a meadow, enjoying the smells of the dry grasses, the sounds of the birds and insects, the textures of the trail underfoot, and the translucent quality of the sunlight. The thought arose that in this moment identifying as a human being would be a severe restriction, artificially wrenching me out of the magnificent sacred complexity/simplicity of the nameless presence. It would be a betrayal of all the life forms I would be making “other”. So many layers of concept had dropped away in those seven days that there was nothing separating me from the living presence of the meadow-earth-universe and all my brother and sister beings, sentient and insentient.

What changes when you open to relating to and truly ‘encountering’ all beings, honouring that every single one has a unique consciousness?

How is it for you to enter into service to these beings – to the planet – no longer seeing them as separate?

What happens when you try to love what you’ve othered?

6. What is yours to do? Perhaps equally important, what is not yours to do? What excites and inspires you? What do you love?

7. What is the change that wants to happen and that you are ready for? As Charles says, “When you attend to the call of your service to the new story, the light of that illuminates something in your life that is ready to happen. Perhaps it is a change that you’re ready to make, or a change that is ready for you. So there is a choice to put the thing that wants to happen into a field of attention – your own and that of others – which will magnify the call and support the change that wants to happen through you.”

Continue to practise asking and attending to these questions in relation to yourself and also in communion with others. Notice what emerges and share about your experience in our Facebook Group and on the Open Zoom line calls. Be gentle with yourself. It’s a process. There’s no rush. Slow down and deeply listen to your own inner wisdom, in your own unique timing.