A New Story of the People: Charles Eisenstein at TEDxWhitechapel

Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Denise RQ So a few months ago, I was having a delightful conversation with Kalle Lasn. He's the founder of Adbusters magazine. No one can say that he's not an activist. His magazine, in part, inspired the 'Occupy' movement. And he spent his whole life devoted to practical, hands-on culture jamming and activism. And he told me, he said, "In the last year, I haven't really spent that much time on the magazine, because I've been taking care of my 95-year-old moth

er-in-law, and to be honest, that feels a lot more important to me, and a lot more meaningful than anything else that I've done, and anything else I could be doing right now." And I thought, could I bear to live in a world, where that choice, that action, is less important than his activism, less important than his efforts to stop climate change, or reform the prison system, or any of these other things? Can I bear to live in a world where we can't trust the leadings of our heart that tell us to

do these little things that our minds say couldn't possibly make a difference? She's going to die anyway, and no one's even going to know that he did it. Well, now someone is. But at the moment, he didn't know that; that wasn't part of his choice. All those little things, maybe you've rescued a lost puppy, or something like that, and what good is that going to do in the face of nuclear holocaust, or climate change, or any of these big things that seem to press on us so urgently. This kind of de

spair, or this kind of cynicism, it's very dispiriting, you know, and I think it afflicts pretty much every activist that I've met. At one time or another in their lives, they have the feeling, that, "What could I possibly do that will be enough? I'm just one person, and even if I make the right choices, there's hundreds of millions of other people who are mindlessly consuming. And my choices aren't going to necessarily affect them, and maybe if I have a big pulpit, maybe if I write a book and s

peak to millions, maybe then I'll have an effect, but what about the powers-that-be who control the media?" And basically, it's the same mindset, that the small things that I do couldn't possibly make a difference. Yet, we have this feeling that Stefana said, "The more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible." Our hearts know it's possible. I'm sure you've had that feeling many times here today. But our minds do not know that it's possible. Our minds cannot see how to get from here to t

here, because our understanding of causality, even, doesn't allow for a path from here to there. For this more beautiful world to actually manifest, miracles would have to happen. Which is why I've become interested in miracles which are not the intercession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of nature. Miracles are something that are impossible from an old understanding of reality, and possible from a new one. That is the transition we are going through today. We're going thr

ough a transition in our basic understanding of what's real, in our "story of the world", I call it, in our basic mythology. Rupert Sheldrake articulated some of what this mythology is. Science is very deeply ingrained in our understanding of the world, and provides an account of exactly this, of what's real. I don't think necessarily science is at the very bottom of our perception of the world, and of our perception of ourselves. Every culture has a different set of answers to these basic, basi

c questions, of, "Who are you? What is it to be a human being? What's important? Where did we come from? Where are we going? How does the world work?" Every culture answers this in a different way. And science provides some answers, but all of the ten scientific dogmas that Rupert described are part of, I call it "the myth of separation". And it says, basically, that what you are is a discrete, separate individual, among other individuals, in a universe that's separate from you as well, that run

s along mechanically, indifferent to your interests, separate from you. And every field pretty much has agreed with this characterization of what it is to exist. Physics - yeah, you're a mass, subject to impersonal forces that are deterministic. I mean obsolete physics, okay. Biology - yes, you are, basically a flesh robot, programmed by your genes to maximize reproductive self-interest. Economics - you are a rational actor, seeking to maximize financial self-interest. Psychology - you're this b

ubble of psychology, or this mind encased in flesh. Religion - you are a soul encased in flesh. All of them agreed on what it was to exist. And this story is changing today. It's quite natural, growing up in this society, to have this understanding of what it is to exist and how the world works because for one thing, our economics reflects it back at us, our experience of living in a competitive economy, a money-based economy, where we're always in competition with each other, always in the expe

rience of, "everyone's in it for themselves", and "more for you is less for me". Other cultures didn't have that experience of life. In a gift culture, more for you is more for me, because if you had more than you needed, you would pass it on to someone who needed it. And so all of these spiritual teachings that we're really attracted to today, that I would call, "the new story"; they were much more natural in this context. So our defining mythology has a scientific component, it has an economic

component, it has a religious component, and of course, all of these things are intertwined, and each supports the other, which is why it's not hard to see that scientific orthodoxy has financial interests behind it. And all of these are breaking down in various ways. Usually I talk about how the financial system is breaking down, and how that reflects the breakdown in our deeper stories. If we're separate from the universe, for example, then of course, we want to control these indifferent or h

ostile external forces, and humanity's destiny becomes to become the lords and masters of nature, and to transcend nature. And it's not working too well any more. In economics, that translates into growth, the endless growth of the human realm. And we're learning that there's a limit to that. And we're learning that there's not an external universe out there, but that everything we do to this world, we're doing on some level to ourselves. Everything we do to the Eskimo curlew or the passenger pi

geon, that is a wound that we feel all the time and that we suffer from, that pain of existing in our culture that's so omnipresent, we don't even realize it, except for when we're bored, you know? That feeling of: why does it hurt just to exist? People in "primitive societies" didn't experience boredom. It's a relatively new phenomenon. So we're moving into a different story, a different story of self, a different story of the world, a different story of the people. And we've been talking about

it all day here, the self of interconnected-ness, the self of interbeing-ness. So I'd like to talk about what that actually means for us, practically speaking. One thing it means is that these tiny actions may have a significance beyond that we can understand according to our old view of cause and effect in a Newtonian universe where the only effect you have on the universe is by exerting a force on it. Well, the new sciences contradict that. Things don't change only when a force is exerted upo

n them. On the quantum level, stuff just happens randomly. Random used to mean: we don't have enough information, and we don't know why it happened but there's a deterministic reason. Not any more. It's an irreducable indeterminacy. And quantum mechanics also seems to violate this separation between self and other, between observer and observed. Physicists have dealt with that by basically relegating it to the micro realm and saying the world still works deterministically, in effect, and excludi

ng any evidence that doesn't fit into that paradigm, excluding things like morphic fields, excluding things like water memory, excluding all kinds of things that any scientist in the room would begin scoffing at, and feeling triggered by and derisive about, which speaks to the emotional attachment to these paradigms and the fact that our stories have kind of an immune system that keeps them in tact as long as possible. But they're getting harder and harder to maintain today as the world built on

top of our defining mythology falls apart; as our ecosystems fall apart; as our political system, as our educational system, health care system falls apart. Things aren't working so well any more and it's a lot harder to fully believe in our stories. So they're falling apart practically and falling apart scientifically, and kind of birthing us into a new understanding of what's real, what's possible, and who we are. And in that new story, that logic of the heart that says, "Yeah, I know that th

is is a significant act, and I know that everything I do is significant", no longer contradicts the logic of the mind, which had been the logic of separation. And what effect could you, one tiny little being have, with the puny force available to you, when the powers-that-be have so much more force at their disposal, and there's billions of other people who just don't care? That was the old story, and now, we're able to believe what we know with a little help from our friends. Because there's st

ill a lot of influences upon us that maintain the old habits, the old habits of separation. And we doubt, and that cynical voice which comes from the wound of betrayed expectations, because when we're young, we have this knowledge that the world is supposed to be much more beautiful than what has been offered to us as normal. And life is supposed to be more joyous than what has been offered to us as normal. We understand that. But that expectation gets betrayed again and again and again, and to

protect it we develop cynicism. So to reawaken our knowledge, to reawaken and to bring it into belief, we need help to counteract all of the forces that would suppress it, for example, economic forces. And for example, the logic that says, "What good could it possibly do?" And so we gather together at events like this and we surround ourselves with other people who say, "Yeah, I understand it too; I've seen a piece of it too." And we hold each other in a new story. And with that, I'll just say a

few things about what we can practically do for other people, because you may have noticed that it's not so easy to change somebody's beliefs. One of our habits of separation is to try to change them by force, to overcome them with the force of logic, or to maybe make people ashamed of the way they're living in the world, and shame is also a kind of force. Or to say, "Well, they're just these evil people out there who only understand force." "I know you, you're a corporate CEO monster, or somet

hing like that; you're not like me, you're separate from me." Raoul was talking about the fallacy of that perception, that, "If I were you, I wouldn't be doing as you're doing." And when we understand, and this is another example of our interbeingness, when we understand that, yeah, that person is essentially the same as I am, that person is a locus of attention, in a different situation, and if I were that person, I would be doing the same thing. Then from that understanding of oneness or of in

ter-being, we no longer believe that the only way to change that person is by exercising force. And if we do that, really, if we just exercise force, what are we doing? We're strengthening the morphic field of force. And what happens if we act from love, and we act from the understanding that that person is like me, that person has a gift to give to the world, and will not feel happy unless he or she is giving that gift, and I want that for you too. This is something that's eminently practical.

And any time that we give somebody a reason or give somebody an experience that doesn't fit into the old story, it weakens that old story; it disrupts it. It could be an act of generosity; it could be an act of forgiveness. Anything that violates that understanding that we're separate, and everyone's in it for themselves. My friend Poncho, - his last name's escaping me right now - he was on a hunger strike in Berkeley and the police came, and in front of a lot of people started beating him up, t

hrew him on the concrete, you know, handcuffs behind his back, and he looked at the police officer doing that, and in a moment he saw, and this wasn't a dogma, he saw, "I know that you really don't want to be doing this." And he asked his name. And it was a Hispanic name, and he said, "I bet you like Mexican food; I know a great place." And he spoke with love and no fear at all and that didn't fit into that person's world. It disrupted his reality. And he responded by loosening the handcuffs of

all of the protesters, and they actually did end up going out to dinner. (Laughter) I would certainly not be here today if it were not for the gifts that I've received of people disrupting my story of separation. That means that every act that comes from the understanding of interconnection, of interbeing, is a spiritual act, and also a political act because the world that we see around us is built on a story. By acting from a different story, we disrupt the psychic substructure of our mythology

, and we offer an alternative. And that's why I'm actually quite sympathetic to events like this where we're in some sense speaking to the choir. The choir makes beautiful music together, and the louder we sing it, the more other people will be able to hear it. And maybe when their world is working, when their story is still working really well, they're not going to be interested. But that story isn't working very well. And it's not going to work; it's going to work less and less well unless you

believe that a finite planet can accommodate infinite growth. This story is doomed. And as it falls apart, people, on a personal level, their story's going to fall apart, and they're going to be more and more open to something new. We're right now at a time of transition, you could say "reunion", a reunion, as I said, of heart and mind, a reunion of matter and spirit. Learning that it's not that the sacredness that we feel in the world is due to some external thing called "spirit", but matter h

as all the properties that we once ascribed to spirit. Part of that reunion is, as Satish was saying, revaluing working with our hands, regaining the dignity of materiality. The loss of that dignity of materiality has been part of our campaign to transcend nature; to separate ourselves from nature, to become nature's lords and masters. There's a scientific version of that which has us become robots, androids going off into space, synthesizing food, becoming independent of nature, and then there'

s the spiritual dimension of that, which is this kind of spiritualization, this kind of dematerialization where the holy person doesn't have anything to do with the flesh, doesn't have anything to do with the world, and seeing the world as unspiritual has led us to treat it as such, to treat it as something not sacred. And we're healing from that right now. We've been looking for sacredness everywhere but where it is, and we can't sustain that any longer. So why I'm here, and why we're all here

together, is to affirm in each other a new story of the people, to remind each other of what we already know, to empower us to do those things that our separation-immersed minds still doubt, still think couldn't possibly work, because that's the only way that we can accomplish the impossible. And you look around the world according to the old understanding of cause and effect based on force. These problems are impossible to solve. But as the entertainer Sun Ra said, "We've tried everything possi

ble and none of it has worked. Now we must try the impossible." (Laughter) And one more thing, Polly said, she talked about daring to be great. And what that meant as being in service to something larger than yourself. And I would offer that as the formula for accomplishing the impossible, for stepping into the flow of synchronicity. You don't know how to get from here to there but that thing larger than yourself does, and it arranges these synchronicities, - being at the right place at the righ

t time - being in flow, I think everyone's experienced that, and usually when you experience that it's when your world has fallen apart, in you're in this state of uncertainty and then all things start to flow, and they start to work, right? And we can enter that state when we let go of the paradigm of control, and bow into service, to this thing larger than ourselves. And what is this thing? What is it that unifies all of these different things that we're committed to? Let's call it "the more b

eautiful world our heart knows is possible". And I'd like to offer you, as you leave today, and as you go about your life, in fact, right now, feel that part of you that knows that you are here in service, and ask yourself if you're ready to bow more deeply into that mission, into that service. If you do it, I predict that you will experience an unexpected opportunity to act on that intention. And it will be just at the edge of your courage, but not past it. Heroic measures are kind of part of t

he old story, part of the self-conquest, which mirrors the attempt to conquer nature, and I think we're done with that. I'd like to thank you all for being together with me in service to a more beautiful world. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)