A wonderful Speaker and Man who impacted my Life when I met him in Utah at a Conference and Retreat in 2009.
http://beyondawakeningseries.com/blog/archive/
http://beyondawakeningseries.com/blog/archive/
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Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Owlsden- Posts : 459
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Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Owlsden Sat Jan 14, 2012 8:41 pm
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
Join date : 2012-06-02
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Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Tue Jun 05, 2012 5:00 pm
Chris Martenson interviews Charles Eisenstein: It's Time for A Better Narrative
youtube.com
/watch?v=-G38MigtTdU
ChrisMartenson.com
CharlesEisenstein.net
youtube.com
/watch?v=-G38MigtTdU
ChrisMartenson.com
CharlesEisenstein.net
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
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Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Thu Jun 14, 2012 7:03 pm
Charles Eisenstein: The Three Seeds
2012 JUNE 9
Once upon a time, the tribe of humanity embarked upon a long journey called Separation. It was not a blunder as some – seeing its ravages upon the planet – might think. Nor was it a fall, nor an expression of some innate evil peculiar to the human species. It was a journey with a purpose: to experience the extremes of Separation, to develop the gifts that come in response to it, and to integrate all of that in a new age of Reunion.
But we knew at the outset that there was danger in this journey: that we might become lost in Separation and never come back. We might become so alienated from nature that we would destroy the very basis of life; we might become so separated from each other that our poor egos, left naked and terrified, would become incapable of rejoining the community of all being. In other words, we foresaw the crisis we face today.
That is why, thousands of years ago, we planted three seeds that would sprout at the time that our journey of Separation reached its extreme. Three seeds, three transmissions from the past to the future, three ways of preserving and transmitting the truth of the world, the self, and how to be human.
Imagine you were alive thirty thousand years ago, and had a vision of all that was to come: symbolic language, naming and labeling the world; agriculture, the domestication of the wild, dominion over other species and the land; the Machine, the mastery of natural forces; the forgetting of how beautiful and perfect the world is; the atomization of society; a world where humans fear even to drink of the streams and rivers, where we live among strangers and don’t know the people next door, where we kill across the planet with the touch of a button, where the seas turn black and the air burns our lungs, where we are so broken that we dare not remember that it isn’t supposed to be this way. Imagine you saw it all coming. How would you help people thirty thousand years thence? How would you send information, knowledge, aid over such a vast gulf of time? You see, this actually happened. That is how we came up with the three seeds.
The first seed was the wisdom lineages: lines of transmission going back thousands of years that have preserved and protected essential knowledge. From adept to disciple, in every part of the world, various wisdom traditions have passed down teachings in secret. Wisdom keepers, Sufis, Taoist wizards, Zen masters, mystics, gurus, and many others, hiding within each religion, kept the knowledge safe until the time when the world would be ready to reclaim it. That time is now, and they have done their job well. The time of secrets is over. Released too early, the knowledge was co-opted, abused, or usually just ignored. When we still had not covered the territory of Separation, when we still aspired to widening our conquest of nature, when the story of humanity’s Ascent was not yet complete, we weren’t ready to hear about union, connectedness, interdependency, inter-being-ness. We thought the answer was more control, more technology, more logic, a better-engineered society of rational ethics, more control over matter, nature, and human nature. But now the old paradigms are failing, and human consciousness has reached a degree of receptivity that allows this seed to spread across the earth. It has been released, and it is growing inside of us en masse.
The second seed was the sacred stories: myths, legends, fairy tales, folklore, and the perennial themes that keep reappearing in various guises throughout history. They have always been with us, so that however far we have wandered into the Labyrinth of Separation, we have always had a lifeline, however tenuous and tangled, to the truth. The stories nurture that tiny spark of memory within us that knows our origin and our destination. The ancients, knowing that the truth would be co-opted and distorted if left in explicit form, encoded it into stories. When we hear or read one of these stories, even if we cannot decode the symbolism, we are affected on an unconscious level. Myths and fairy tales represent a very sophisticated psychic technology. Each generation of storytellers, without consciously intending to, transmits the covert wisdom that it learned, unconsciously, from the stories told it.
Without directly contradicting the paradigms of separation and ascent, our myths and stories have smuggled in a very different understanding of reality. Under the cover of, “It’s just a story,” they convey emotional, poetic, and spiritual truth that contradicts linear logic, reductionism, determinism, and objectivity. I am not talking here about moralistic stories. Most of those carry little truth. To transmit the second seed, we must humble ourselves to our stories, and not try to use them for our own moralistic ends. They were created by beings far wiser than our modern selves. If you tell or transmit stories, be very respectful of their original form and don’t change them unless you feel a poetic upwelling. Pay attention to which children’s literature has the feel of a true story. Most recent kids’ literature does not. You can recognize a true story by the way its images linger in your mind. It imprints itself on the psyche. You get the feeling that something else has been transmitted alongside the plot, something invisible. Usually, such stories bear rich symbolism often unknown even to their authors. A comparison of two 20th-century children’s books illustrates my point: compare a Berenstain Bears story with How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Only the latter has a psychic staying power, revealing the spirit of a true story, and it is rich with archetypal symbolism.
The third seed was the indigenous tribes, the people who at some stage opted out of the journey of separation. Imagine that at the outset of the journey, the Council of Humanity gathered and certain members volunteered to retreat to remote locations and forgo separation, which meant refusing to enter into an adversarial, controlling relationship to nature, and therefore refusing the process that leads to the development of high technology. It also meant that when they were discovered by the humans who had gone deeply into Separation, they would meet with the most atrocious suffering. That was unavoidable.
These people of the third seed have nearly completed their mission today. Their mission was simply to survive long enough to provide living examples of how to be human. Each tribe carried a different piece, sometimes many pieces, of this knowledge. Many of them show us how to see and relate to the land, animals, and plants. Others show us how to work with dreams and the unseen. Some have preserved natural ways of raising children, now spreading through such books as The Continuum Concept. Some show us how to communicate without words – tribes such as the Hazda and the Piraha communicate mostly in song. Some show us how to free ourselves from the mentality of linear time. All of them exemplify a way of being that we intuitively recognize and long for. They stir a memory in our hearts, and awaken our desire to return.
In a recent conversation, the Lakota Aloysius Weasel Bear told me that he once asked his grandfather, “Grandpa, the White Man is destroying everything, shouldn’t we try to stop him?” His grandfather replied, “No, it isn’t necessary. We will stand by. He will outsmart himself.” The grandfather recognized two things in this reply: (1) That Separation carries the seeds of its own demise, and (2) That his people’s role is to be themselves. But I don’t think that this is an attitude of callousness that leaves the White Man to his just desserts; it is an attitude of compassion and helping that understands the tremendous importance of simply being who they are. They are keeping alive something that the planet and the community of all being needs.
By the same token, our culture’s fascination with all things indigenous is not merely the latest form of cultural imperialism and exploitation. True, the final stage of cultural domination would be to turn Native ways into a brand, a marketing image. And certainly there are some in my culture who, sundered from community and from a real identity, adopt Native pseudo-identities and pride themselves on their connections to Native culture, spirituality, people, and so forth. Underneath that, however, we recognize that the surviving First Peoples have something important to teach us. We are drawn to their gift, to the seed that they have preserved until the present time. To receive this seed, it is not necessary to participate in their rituals, take an animal name, or claim a Native ancestor, but only to humbly see what they have preserved, so that memory may awaken. Until recently, such seeing was impossible for us, blinkered by our cultural superiority complex, our arrogance, our apparent success in mastering the universe. Now that converging ecological and social crises reveal the bankruptcy of our ways, we have the eyes to see the ways of others.
The seeds of Reunion are sprouting everywhere. That which was hidden for millennia is coming to light. Soon, fertilized by the detritus of our decaying civilization, the sprouts will mature, bloom, and bear fruit. Our job is first to receive them, then to spread them everywhere and to guard and foster them with every ounce of our love.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/three_seeds
2012 JUNE 9
Once upon a time, the tribe of humanity embarked upon a long journey called Separation. It was not a blunder as some – seeing its ravages upon the planet – might think. Nor was it a fall, nor an expression of some innate evil peculiar to the human species. It was a journey with a purpose: to experience the extremes of Separation, to develop the gifts that come in response to it, and to integrate all of that in a new age of Reunion.
But we knew at the outset that there was danger in this journey: that we might become lost in Separation and never come back. We might become so alienated from nature that we would destroy the very basis of life; we might become so separated from each other that our poor egos, left naked and terrified, would become incapable of rejoining the community of all being. In other words, we foresaw the crisis we face today.
That is why, thousands of years ago, we planted three seeds that would sprout at the time that our journey of Separation reached its extreme. Three seeds, three transmissions from the past to the future, three ways of preserving and transmitting the truth of the world, the self, and how to be human.
Imagine you were alive thirty thousand years ago, and had a vision of all that was to come: symbolic language, naming and labeling the world; agriculture, the domestication of the wild, dominion over other species and the land; the Machine, the mastery of natural forces; the forgetting of how beautiful and perfect the world is; the atomization of society; a world where humans fear even to drink of the streams and rivers, where we live among strangers and don’t know the people next door, where we kill across the planet with the touch of a button, where the seas turn black and the air burns our lungs, where we are so broken that we dare not remember that it isn’t supposed to be this way. Imagine you saw it all coming. How would you help people thirty thousand years thence? How would you send information, knowledge, aid over such a vast gulf of time? You see, this actually happened. That is how we came up with the three seeds.
The first seed was the wisdom lineages: lines of transmission going back thousands of years that have preserved and protected essential knowledge. From adept to disciple, in every part of the world, various wisdom traditions have passed down teachings in secret. Wisdom keepers, Sufis, Taoist wizards, Zen masters, mystics, gurus, and many others, hiding within each religion, kept the knowledge safe until the time when the world would be ready to reclaim it. That time is now, and they have done their job well. The time of secrets is over. Released too early, the knowledge was co-opted, abused, or usually just ignored. When we still had not covered the territory of Separation, when we still aspired to widening our conquest of nature, when the story of humanity’s Ascent was not yet complete, we weren’t ready to hear about union, connectedness, interdependency, inter-being-ness. We thought the answer was more control, more technology, more logic, a better-engineered society of rational ethics, more control over matter, nature, and human nature. But now the old paradigms are failing, and human consciousness has reached a degree of receptivity that allows this seed to spread across the earth. It has been released, and it is growing inside of us en masse.
The second seed was the sacred stories: myths, legends, fairy tales, folklore, and the perennial themes that keep reappearing in various guises throughout history. They have always been with us, so that however far we have wandered into the Labyrinth of Separation, we have always had a lifeline, however tenuous and tangled, to the truth. The stories nurture that tiny spark of memory within us that knows our origin and our destination. The ancients, knowing that the truth would be co-opted and distorted if left in explicit form, encoded it into stories. When we hear or read one of these stories, even if we cannot decode the symbolism, we are affected on an unconscious level. Myths and fairy tales represent a very sophisticated psychic technology. Each generation of storytellers, without consciously intending to, transmits the covert wisdom that it learned, unconsciously, from the stories told it.
Without directly contradicting the paradigms of separation and ascent, our myths and stories have smuggled in a very different understanding of reality. Under the cover of, “It’s just a story,” they convey emotional, poetic, and spiritual truth that contradicts linear logic, reductionism, determinism, and objectivity. I am not talking here about moralistic stories. Most of those carry little truth. To transmit the second seed, we must humble ourselves to our stories, and not try to use them for our own moralistic ends. They were created by beings far wiser than our modern selves. If you tell or transmit stories, be very respectful of their original form and don’t change them unless you feel a poetic upwelling. Pay attention to which children’s literature has the feel of a true story. Most recent kids’ literature does not. You can recognize a true story by the way its images linger in your mind. It imprints itself on the psyche. You get the feeling that something else has been transmitted alongside the plot, something invisible. Usually, such stories bear rich symbolism often unknown even to their authors. A comparison of two 20th-century children’s books illustrates my point: compare a Berenstain Bears story with How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Only the latter has a psychic staying power, revealing the spirit of a true story, and it is rich with archetypal symbolism.
The third seed was the indigenous tribes, the people who at some stage opted out of the journey of separation. Imagine that at the outset of the journey, the Council of Humanity gathered and certain members volunteered to retreat to remote locations and forgo separation, which meant refusing to enter into an adversarial, controlling relationship to nature, and therefore refusing the process that leads to the development of high technology. It also meant that when they were discovered by the humans who had gone deeply into Separation, they would meet with the most atrocious suffering. That was unavoidable.
These people of the third seed have nearly completed their mission today. Their mission was simply to survive long enough to provide living examples of how to be human. Each tribe carried a different piece, sometimes many pieces, of this knowledge. Many of them show us how to see and relate to the land, animals, and plants. Others show us how to work with dreams and the unseen. Some have preserved natural ways of raising children, now spreading through such books as The Continuum Concept. Some show us how to communicate without words – tribes such as the Hazda and the Piraha communicate mostly in song. Some show us how to free ourselves from the mentality of linear time. All of them exemplify a way of being that we intuitively recognize and long for. They stir a memory in our hearts, and awaken our desire to return.
In a recent conversation, the Lakota Aloysius Weasel Bear told me that he once asked his grandfather, “Grandpa, the White Man is destroying everything, shouldn’t we try to stop him?” His grandfather replied, “No, it isn’t necessary. We will stand by. He will outsmart himself.” The grandfather recognized two things in this reply: (1) That Separation carries the seeds of its own demise, and (2) That his people’s role is to be themselves. But I don’t think that this is an attitude of callousness that leaves the White Man to his just desserts; it is an attitude of compassion and helping that understands the tremendous importance of simply being who they are. They are keeping alive something that the planet and the community of all being needs.
By the same token, our culture’s fascination with all things indigenous is not merely the latest form of cultural imperialism and exploitation. True, the final stage of cultural domination would be to turn Native ways into a brand, a marketing image. And certainly there are some in my culture who, sundered from community and from a real identity, adopt Native pseudo-identities and pride themselves on their connections to Native culture, spirituality, people, and so forth. Underneath that, however, we recognize that the surviving First Peoples have something important to teach us. We are drawn to their gift, to the seed that they have preserved until the present time. To receive this seed, it is not necessary to participate in their rituals, take an animal name, or claim a Native ancestor, but only to humbly see what they have preserved, so that memory may awaken. Until recently, such seeing was impossible for us, blinkered by our cultural superiority complex, our arrogance, our apparent success in mastering the universe. Now that converging ecological and social crises reveal the bankruptcy of our ways, we have the eyes to see the ways of others.
The seeds of Reunion are sprouting everywhere. That which was hidden for millennia is coming to light. Soon, fertilized by the detritus of our decaying civilization, the sprouts will mature, bloom, and bear fruit. Our job is first to receive them, then to spread them everywhere and to guard and foster them with every ounce of our love.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/three_seeds
devakas- Posts : 2038
Join date : 2010-04-10
- Post n°4
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
devakas Thu Jun 14, 2012 7:35 pm
Aquaries this is very nice article! Thanks
I personally like hippy subculture Revolution, revolution of love
and flowers 
There were many revolutions, how about you?
I personally like hippy subculture Revolution, revolution of love
and flowers There were many revolutions, how about you?
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
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- Post n°5
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Thu Jun 14, 2012 8:56 pm
devakas wrote:Aquaries this is very nice article! Thanks
I personally like hippy subculture Revolution, revolution of love
There were many revolutions, how about you?
Hi Devakas,
Thank you kindly for your nice comments. I Love Charles Eisenstein's work. He is a revolutionist in my eyes. He is gifted with the confidence and power of his voice in communicating a truth that resonates within me. The Revolution that is happening is in the "Mind" and will not be advertised on the Telly vision. It's an invisible Revolution that is happening on a Mental Plane.. Higher Mind I call it, where we move beyond the pettiness of our own personal problems and extend a Heart toward receiving others. It's important however to "set agreements" as to who you will work with and allow in, for there are many out there looking to distract, destroy and de-harmonize through their own "fragmented personalities" and they could be termed as "delusional". Observe the signs given by your Dog if you have one prior to allowing a stranger into your home.. Your Dog can guide you with its psychic senses which are more finely attuned than ours. Signs we see are all around and its important we "notice" and "pay attention" - for it is the signs that could save our very own life.
Each of us have different "gifts" and walk different "paths" but we are always greeted with a warm fire and a kindrid spirit to remind us we are not alone.
devakas- Posts : 2038
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- Post n°6
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
devakas Fri Jun 15, 2012 11:11 am
you are welcome Aquaries
It is good that nobody can fake genuine love, it can not be checked by any material cause (ahaituky apratihata)!
such as ‘set agreements’ or use responsive dogs with psychic senses or look for the signs to save very own life?. Otherwise people may become victims of its own imagination and may be banned from fireplace because of 'gifts'.
Life is going on without any revolution…
Especially invisible mental plane revolution is strange and unpredictable.
If reference about dogs was taken from Swami Radhanath speech, the point was misunderstood. He hinted to the healthy society when all do their duties and responsibilities as whole organism as body in society.
nice if you listen to His speach
peace
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
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- Post n°7
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Fri Jun 15, 2012 12:14 pm
devakas wrote:
you are welcome Aquaries
It is good that nobody can fake genuine love, it can not be checked by any material cause (ahaituky apratihata)!
such as ‘set agreements’ or use responsive dogs with psychic senses or look for the signs to save very own life?. Otherwise people may become victims of its own imagination and may be banned from fireplace because of 'gifts'.
Life is going on without any revolution…
Especially invisible mental plane revolution is strange and unpredictable.
If reference about dogs was taken from Swami Radhanath speech, the point was misunderstood. He hinted to the healthy society when all do their duties and responsibilities as whole organism as body in society.
nice if you listen to His speach
Hi Devakas,
No reference was taken anywhere in regards to my last post.. It is all based upon my own "experiences".. In response to your comment "As far as faking genuine Love".. One cannot fake it.. We either "generate it" or we don't.. Wouldn't it be nice if over 7 billion of us could know that we are "Love Generators" as opposed to "Love Seekers?" That would stop the seeking wouldn't it? This would be one big Love Planet.
But I did just find this for those who haven't experienced and prefer media confirmation...
devakas- Posts : 2038
Join date : 2010-04-10
- Post n°8
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
devakas Fri Jun 15, 2012 12:19 pm
Aquaries1111 wrote:devakas wrote:
you are welcome Aquaries
It is good that nobody can fake genuine love, it can not be checked by any material cause (ahaituky apratihata)!
such as ‘set agreements’ or use responsive dogs with psychic senses or look for the signs to save very own life?. Otherwise people may become victims of its own imagination and may be banned from fireplace because of 'gifts'.
Life is going on without any revolution…
Especially invisible mental plane revolution is strange and unpredictable.
If reference about dogs was taken from Swami Radhanath speech, the point was misunderstood. He hinted to the healthy society when all do their duties and responsibilities as whole organism as body in society.
nice if you listen to His speach
Hi Devakas,
No reference was taken anywhere in regards to my last post.. It is all based upon my own "experiences".. In response to your comment "As far as faking genuine Love".. One cannot fake it.. We either "generate it" or we don't.. Wouldn't it be nice if over 7 billion of us could know that we are "Love Generators" as opposed to "Love Seekers?" That would stop the seeking wouldn't it? This would be one big Love Planet.
But I did just find this for those who haven't experienced and prefer media confirmation...
just thinking what is life span of those 'generators'.
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
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- Post n°9
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Fri Jun 15, 2012 12:29 pm
What is the life span of Earth? It depends on how well we Love.
devakas- Posts : 2038
Join date : 2010-04-10
- Post n°10
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
devakas Fri Jun 15, 2012 12:58 pm
Aquaries1111 wrote:What is the life span of Earth? It depends on how well we Love.
Life span of earth planet is 4 yugas, sattya, treta, dvapara and now Kali
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga#Durations_of_four_yugas
So there is a question of how WELL we LOVE. interesting. as I do not thing people love earth, humans or animals. I think we are blind.
see liebe Deuschland uber alles was massive love revolution expression also.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2IaFaJrmno
there are many many revolutions, one was recently Kony2012
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
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- Post n°11
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Fri Jun 15, 2012 1:59 pm
Nice point out Devakas,
I caught myself after I posted it and was inferring more toward the wholehearted vs halfhearted approach. How much more love can we generate if we all wholeheartedly enjoyed putting the trash out instead of seeing it as a boring chore in half heartedness. Everything we do and say counts toward generating Love if done with Heart.. So when I catch myself grumbling under my breath I change the station.. and when a disrespectful guest in my house threatens me.. I kick em out.. wholeheartedly..
Nice vid.
devakas- Posts : 2038
Join date : 2010-04-10
- Post n°12
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
devakas Fri Jun 15, 2012 2:30 pm
Aquaries1111 wrote:
Nice point out Devakas,
I caught myself after I posted it and was inferring more toward the wholehearted vs halfhearted approach. How much more love can we generate if we all wholeheartedly enjoyed putting the trash out instead of seeing it as a boring chore in half heartedness. Everything we do and say counts toward generating Love if done with Heart.. So when I catch myself grumbling under my breath I change the station.. and when a disrespectful guest in my house threatens me.. I kick em out.. wholeheartedly..
Nice vid.
video shows the passion of humans.
so this revolution invisible on mental plane can be partial with use of dogs to set contracts. I will stick with hippies with flowers.
please smile instead of imagining guests in your house
orthodoxymoron- Posts : 13378
Join date : 2010-09-28
Location : The Matrix
- Post n°13
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
orthodoxymoron Fri Jun 15, 2012 3:06 pm
Aquaries1111, I keep thinking of you as being a young Erica Evans!! I'm presently rewatching the second series of 'V'!! Dr. Robert H. Schuller used to speak of 'changing the channel'. Regarding Responsibility, Love, Freedom, Positive-Thinking, and Self-Esteem -- if Responsibility is focused-upon -- the other four tend to manifest in a proper and balanced manner. I support Responsible-Love, Responsible-Freedom, Positive-Reinforcement, and Positive-Response-Ability.
devakas, the Hippies were right about a lot of things -- but I think they were manipulated and played -- just like everyone else. They should've stayed away from LSD -- and they shouldn't have gone to pot. Taking a bath once in a while might've been nice too!! Once in a while I attempt to psychically-sweep my house to get rid of sinister and/or malevolent intruders -- but I have no idea what the effect has been in the nether-realms...
devakas, the Hippies were right about a lot of things -- but I think they were manipulated and played -- just like everyone else. They should've stayed away from LSD -- and they shouldn't have gone to pot. Taking a bath once in a while might've been nice too!! Once in a while I attempt to psychically-sweep my house to get rid of sinister and/or malevolent intruders -- but I have no idea what the effect has been in the nether-realms...
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
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Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Fri Jun 15, 2012 5:04 pm
Charles Eisenstein ~ Sacred Economics: Working in the Gift ~ Chapter 21
“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.” -Albert Einstein
Trusting Gratitude
The question comes up again and again: How can I share my gifts in today’s money economy and still make a living? Some people who ask this question are artists, healers, or activists who despair of finding a way to “get paid for” what they do. Others have a successful business or profession but have begun to feel that something is amiss with the way they charge for their services.
Indeed, to charge a fee for service, or even for material goods, violates the spirit of the Gift. When we shift into gift mentality, we treat our creations as gifts to other people or to the world. It is contrary to the nature of a gift to specify, in advance, a return gift, for then it is no longer giving but rather bartering, selling.
Furthermore, many people, particularly artists, healers, and musicians, see their work as sacred, inspired by a divine source and bearing infinite value. To assign it a price feels like a devaluation, a sacrilege. But surely the artist deserves to be compensated for his work, right?
The idea behind the word “compensation” is that you have, by working, made a sacrifice of your time. You have spent it doing work when you could have instead spent it on something you want to do. Another context in which we use the word is lawsuits, for example when someone seeks compensation for an injury, for pain and suffering.
In an economy that deserves the adjective “sacred,” work will no longer be an injury to one’s time or life; it will no longer be a matter of pain and suffering. A sacred economy recognizes that human beings desire to work: they desire to apply their life energy toward the expression of their gifts. There is no room in this conception for “compensation.” Work is a joy, a cause for gratitude. At its best, it is beyond price.
Doesn’t it sound blasphemous to you to speak of, say, compensating Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel or Mozart for composing his Requiem? No finite amount of money is sufficient in exchange for the divine. Of the most sublime works, the only appropriate means of offering them is to give them away. Even if, at the moment, few of us have access to the genius of a Mozart, we are all capable of sacred work.
We are all capable of channeling, through our skills, something greater than ourselves. Something takes form through us, using us as the instrument for its manifestation on earth. Can you see how foreign the concept of “compensation” is to this kind of work? Can you feel the dishonor in selling a sacred creation?
No matter what the price, you have sold yourself short, and you have sold short the source from whence the gift came. I like to put it this way: “Some things are too good to sell. We can only give them away.”
Questions immediately arise in the reader. Despite the foregoing, you may have even caught yourself again thinking, “But doesn’t an artist deserve to be compensated for his work?” The intuitions of separation run so deeply! So let us rephrase it: “Doesn’t the giver of great gifts deserve to receive great gifts in return?” The answer, insofar as “deserves” means anything at all, is yes.
In a sacred economy, this will happen through the mechanism of gratitude rather than compulsion. The attitude of the seller says, “I will give you this gift-but only if you pay me for it, only if you give me what I think it is worth.” (Yet no matter what the price, the seller will always feel shortchanged.) The attitude of the giver, in contrast, says, “I will give you this gift — and I trust you to give me what you think is appropriate.”
If you give a great gift, and no gratitude results, then perhaps that is a sign that you have given it to the wrong person. The spirit of the Gift responds to needs. To generate gratitude is not the goal of giving; it is a sign, an indicator, that the gift was given well, that it met a need. That is another reason I disagree with certain spiritual teachings that say a person of true generosity will not desire to receive anything, even gratitude, in return.
Now let’s make this practical. After wrestling with this issue for some time, I realized that while it feels wrong to charge money for my work, it feels fine to accept money from people who feel grateful for having received it.
The degree of gratitude is unique to each person. I cannot know in advance how valuable this book will be to you; even you cannot know it in advance. That is why it is contrary to the spirit of the gift to pay for something unknown in advance. Lewis Hyde illustrates this point most insightfully:
It may be clearer now why I said above that a fee for service tends to cut off the force of gratitude. The point is that a conversion, in the general sense, cannot be settled upon ahead of time. We can’t predict the fruits of our labor; we can’t even know if we’ll really go through with it.
Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can’t be made until the transformation is finished.
A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and depotentiates it as an agent of change. Therapies and spiritual systems delivered through the market will therefore tend to draw the energy required for conversion from an aversion to pain rather than from an attraction to a higher state.1
Accordingly, I have taken what steps I can to conduct my work in alignment with the spirit of the gift. For example, I make as much as possible of my writing, sound recordings, and videos available online for no charge and invite readers to give a gift in return that reflects their degree of gratitude.
This gift need not go to me. If the gratitude is, for instance, toward the universe for making my work available, perhaps a more appropriate way of giving is to “pay it forward.”
I use a similar model in my public speaking. When I am asked my speaker’s fee, I say that I do not charge a fee. Usually I request that my travel expenses be covered; beyond that, I say something like, “It is up to you. Give me whatever amount, or none at all, that leaves you with a feeling of clearness, balance, and appropriateness, an amount that reflects your gratitude for my coming to be with you.”
This is not a formula, it is a spirit that adapts itself to each unique situation. If they have a standard speaker’s honorarium, I won’t necessarily insist on an exception for myself. Moreover, sometimes an up-front offer communicates to me how much they desire what I have to offer. I want to give my gifts where they are wanted, and money is one of several ways to communicate that desire.
It is important not to make “living in the gift” into a fetish, or into a standard of virtue. Don’t do it in order to be good. Do it in order to feel good. If you find yourself rejoicing (as I do) over a big fat check, that is OK! We humans are delighted to receive big gifts.
Even if you find yourself (again, as I sometimes do) feeling miserly, resentful, and grasping, simply take note of that as well. The road back to the gift is a long one, so distanced from it we have become. I see myself as one of many explorers of a new (and ancient) territory, learning from the discoveries of others and from my own mistakes.
When I lead retreats, I charge only for room and board and other out-of-pocket expenses, and invite gifts.2 It has taken some time for me to enter a state of consciousness where this model actually “works.”
If I resent those who give nothing, if I intend, through the enunciation of high-sounding principles, to coerce or manipulate people into giving beyond what genuine gratitude dictates, or if I subtly “guilt” people into giving by hinting at my hardship, sacrifice, or entitlement by virtue of poverty, then I am not living in the spirit of the gift at all. I am living instead in a subtle kind of scarcity mentality or beggary, and, as if to mirror that state, the flow of gifts dries up almost immediately. Not only do people refrain from giving, but my own wellspring of gifts dries up as well.
As long as my gift intention is authentic, I find that the inflow of gifts matches or exceeds the outflow. Sometimes the vehicle of the return gift is mysterious, indirectly traceable or not traceable at all to anything I have given, yet somehow, when it comes, it carries something of the spirit of the original offering.
Sometimes only an exiguous trail of synchronicity and symbol connects the gift I have received with the gift I have given. The rational mind says the return gift has nothing at all to do with what I gave — “I would have received that anyway” — but the heart knows otherwise.
Because the return gift comes later, as we step into gift-based livelihood we live for a time in faith. With no assurance of return, we learn whether we really mean it. The ego struggles and thrashes, trying to find an assured benefit.
If not money, maybe I can advertise my generosity to receive praise. Maybe I can secretly congratulate myself and feel superior to those who are less in the gift than I am. In my experience, each new step into the gift is scary. The letting go has to be real, or there will be no return.
Business in the Gift
Now let us apply this model to other kinds of businesses.
There are already a number of enterprises today that are implementing gift economics in creative ways. I don’t uphold my own model as the best or only way of living in the gift.
We are pioneering a new kind of economy, and it is going to take some trial and error to get it right.
I’ll offer a few examples of people doing business according to one or both of the key principles of the gift I have discussed: (1) The recipient, and not the giver, determines the “price” (the return gift); (2) The return gift is chosen after the initial gift has been received, not before.
In Berkeley, California, the Karma Clinic has been treating people with holistic medicine on a gift basis for two years. After the consultation or treatment, the client receives a “bill” that reads,
“Your consultation is a generous gift from someone that came before you. If you would like to gift-forward in that spirit, you can do so however you choose. Monetary or other gifts may be left in the gift box in the Karma Clinic office or mailed to …” In Ashland, Oregon, another gift-based clinic called the Gifting Tree has formed.
There are doubtless many more around the country, and they appear to be quite sustainable: the Victoria Attunement Center operated purely on a donation basis from 1982 to 1988 and, according to its founder Will Wilkinson, was completely self-supporting with over 300 client visits per month.
The gift model has also been applied to restaurants. The One World restaurant in Salt Lake City, in operation since 2003; the SAME (So All May Eat) Cafe in Denver, in operation since 2008; A Better World Cafe in New Jersey, which opened in 2009; the Karma Kitchen in Berkeley; and many more operate on a donation-only basis — and many of them serve organic food to boot.
Recently the idea entered the mainstream when the national restaurant chain Panera Bread opened a pay-what-you-want store in St. Louis, Missouri. The menu is exactly the same as at its other stories, but the prices are guidelines only. Patrons are asked to pay whatever feels right: the sign at the counter says, “Take what you need, leave your fair share.”
If this experiment works, the company plans to expand the model to locations around the country. I wonder if they realize that they are pioneering not just a model of civic virtue, but also a model of business for the future.
On the internet, of course, an enormous gift economy thrives. Versions of all major types of productivity software are available at no charge. For example, the office suite OpenOffice, a collaborative effort by hundreds of volunteer programmers, is available at no charge.
I am hesitant to use the phrase “for free” here, because those words imply almost a repudiation of any return gift. The OpenOffice organization does accept donations and encourages those who have downloaded the software to contribute in various ways.
Lots of bands offer their music “for free” online as well. The most notable pioneer of the gift business model for recorded music was Radiohead, which offered its 2007 In Rainbows album on a pay-what-you-will basis. Although nearly two-thirds of downloaders chose to pay nothing, hundreds of thousands did choose to pay a few dollars for it, and millions more copies were purchased on iTunes, as CDs, and through other channels.
Critics dismissed this success as an anomaly made possible by Radiohead’s iconic status, yet the basic model continues to proliferate, especially in the music industry as traditional distribution channels becomes increasingly impractical for most bands.
Astonishingly, there is even a law firm that has incorporated a pay-what-you-will element into its business. The Valorem Law Group, a trial law firm based in Chicago, has added a “value adjustment line” feature to its bills. At the bottom of the bill, above an empty “Total due” box, is a box labeled “Value adjustment.”
The client writes a positive or negative number there and adjusts the final fee accordingly. I am full of admiration for this firm, because from a legalistic point of view this feature is quite insane. Someone could “adjust” the bill by the full amount and pay nothing, and the firm would probably have no legal recourse.
Now let’s generalize these examples into a broadly applicable business model. The fundamentals are quite simple. The first guideline is to charge money only to cover your own direct costs. This includes marginal costs and apportioned fixed costs, but not sunk costs.
So, for example, if you install plumbing for someone, you would charge for materials (with zero markup), fuel to reach the site, and perhaps half a day’s worth of your current payments on capital equipment (e.g., your truck loan, business loan, etc.). You would make it clear to the recipient that your time, labor, and expertise are a gift. The bill might have the total costs, and then a blank line labeled “gift,” and then the line labeled “total” underneath it.
A variant of this model is to follow Valorem and display a normal fee that reflects the market price with a line under it labeled “value adjustment” or “gratitude adjustment.” Most people will probably just pay the market price, but you can explain that they can adjust it if they are especially satisfied or dissatisfied with the work.
Another variant is not to charge anything at all but to delineate various line items such as “cost of materials,” “apportioned cost of business expenses,” “hours of labor,” “market price for this service,” and so on.
That way the recipient can choose to pay nothing at all, not even for materials, but at least she has this information. This information, like the note in the Karma Clinic, is “the story of the gift” referenced earlier. Traditionally, gifts were often accompanied by stories that helped the receiver appreciate their value.
The gift business model is actually not as far from standard business practice as you might think. Today, a common negotiating tactic is to say, “Look, here are my costs; I can’t go any lower than that.”3 It is not such a huge shift of perspective to say, “Here are my costs. You can pay me more according to the value you believe you have received.”
Often the customer will have a pretty good idea of the market price of the goods or services you are offering and, if there is any genuine humanity at all in the business relationship, will probably pay close to that. If he or she does pay a premium above the base cost, you can interpret that as indicating the presence of gratitude.
If someone is grateful for what you have given, you will desire to give more. If someone is ungrateful, you know that the gift is not being fully received, and you will probably choose not to give to that person again.
Translated into a business relationship, what this means is that you will choose not to do business again with someone who pays you little or nothing above cost, and you will preferentially do business with someone who, using money as token, communicates her high degree of gratitude.
This is as it should be. Some people need our gifts more than others. If you have bread, you want to give it to the hungry person. Displays of gratitude help to orient us toward the best expression of our gifts. So, just as today, a business will tend to do business with those who pay the most money (although nonmonetary expressions of gratitude may also come into play).
This is different from tending to do business with those who offer the best price. The difference is key. In keeping with the spirit of the gift, the price is not offered ahead of time. The gift is offered first, and only after it is received is a return gift made.
I cannot help but notice a parallel between this approach and various game-theoretic studies of altruism and iterated prisoner’s dilemma problems. Look up “tit-for-tat” in Wikipedia for some background on this topic.
Essentially, in many situations where there are repeated interactions among discrete entities with varying payoffs for cooperation and betrayal, the optimal strategy is to cooperate first and retaliate only against someone who didn’t cooperate last time.
Analogous reasoning leads me to think that the business model I have outlined can actually be more financially successful over time than the standard model.4
Because gift mentality is so alien to us today, doing business in the gift sometimes requires a bit of education. I’ve found that if I advertise an event as “by donation,” people sometimes treat it as a throwaway, thinking, “It must not be very valuable or very important if he isn’t charging for it.”
They’ll come late or not at all, or they’ll come with low expectations. Paying a fee is a kind of ritual that sends a message to the unconscious that “this is something valuable” or “I am doing this for real.”
I and many others are still experimenting to find better ways to invoke the benefits of payment while staying true to the spirit of the gift. We are at the beginning of a new era, so it is going to take some practice and experimentation.
Obviously, at the time of this writing most corporations and business owners are not ready to step into a gift-based business model. That’s OK — you can give them a little push! Simply implement it unilaterally by “stealing” their products, for example by illegally downloading or copying digital content like songs, movies, software, and so on.
Then, if you feel grateful to the creators of it, send them some money. I would be quite happy if you did the same with this book. It will be hard to do it illegally, though, since I don’t claim standard copyrights (I bet you didn’t read the copyright page carefully, but it isn’t the usual verbiage), and the content is available online without charge.
Nonetheless, if you do manage to “steal” this book, I will be pleased to receive an amount from you that reflects your gratitude — as opposed to the amount that I or the publisher presumes reflects its value to you.
Each person’s experience of reading it is unique: for some it may be a waste of time, for others it might be life-changing. Isn’t it absurd to receive an identical return gift from everyone?
The Sacred Professions
The gift model comes especially naturally for professions in which the value delivered is something intangible. Musicians, artists, prostitutes, healers, counselors, and teachers all offer gifts that are debased when we assign them a price.
When what we offer is sacred to us, then the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift.5 No price can be high enough to reflect the sacredness of the infinite. By asking for a specific speaker’s fee, I make less of my gift.
If you are a member of one of the above professions, you might consider experimenting with a gift model of business — but remember, if you apply that model as a more clever means to “get paid,” it won’t work. People can detect a phony gift, a gift that isn’t a gift but carries an agenda of gain.
In all of the above professions, the intangible rides the vehicle of something tangible, and it is the former, unquantifiable, that naturally wants to abide in the realm of the gift. This is actually true of every profession.
Always, something is present that is beyond quantification, beyond commodity, and thus beyond price. Every profession is therefore potentially sacred. Consider the example of farming. What makes food-something tangible-a vehicle for the sacred?
It is grown by someone who cares deeply about its nourishing and aesthetic qualities. It is grown in a way that enriches the ecosystem, soil, water, and life in general. Its production and processing contribute to a healthy society.
In other words, sacred food is ensconced in a web of natural and social relationships. It is grown with a love for people and earth that is not an abstract love but a love for this land and these people.
We cannot love anonymously, which is perhaps why I’ve always gotten a somewhat cold feeling from anonymous charity that doesn’t create connection. Somebody grew sacred food for me!
When we see our work as sacred, we seek to do it well for its own sake rather than “good enough” for something external such as the market, the building code, or a grade. A builder who does sacred work will employ materials and methods that might be hidden in the walls, beyond anyone’s notice, for centuries.
He derives no rational benefit from this, just the satisfaction of doing it right. So also the business owner who pays an above-market living wage or the manufacturer who far exceeds environmental standards. They have no rational expectation of benefit, yet somehow they do benefit, sometimes in ways that are completely unexpected.
Unexpected returns accord perfectly with the nature of the Gift: as Lewis Hyde puts it, a gift “disappears around the corner,” “into the mystery,” and we don’t know how it will travel back to us.
Another way to see the unexpected fruits that arise from the mystery is that when we live in the spirit of the gift, magic happens. Gift mentality is a kind of faith, a kind of surrender-and that is a prerequisite for miracles to arise. From the Gift, we become capable of the impossible.
I met a man in Oregon who owns a property management company specializing in low-income elder care facilities. “This,” he says, “is an impossible business.” Subject to the multiple, conflicting stressors of medical institutions, insurance companies, government regulation, the poverty of the residents, and general financial turmoil, his industry was in a state of crisis.
The week I visited him, two of his largest competitors called begging him to take over their money-losing facilities. Yet somehow, this man has built a profitable, growing business, an empowering workplace, and human living environments that are a model for the industry. How does he do it?
“Every day,” he says, “I walk into the office to face a stack of impossible problems. I cannot imagine any way to solve them. So I do the only thing I can do: I bow into service. And then, like magic, solutions fall into my lap.”
The one who bows into service is an artist. To see work as sacred is to bow into service to it, and thus become its instrument. More specifically and somewhat paradoxically, we become the instrument of that which we create.
Whether it is a material, human, or social creation, we put ourselves into the humble service of something preexisting yet unmanifest. Thus it is that the artist is in awe of his or her own creation. I get that feeling when I read aloud from The Ascent of Humanity: “I could not have written this.”
That book is its own entity, born through me but no more my creation than parents create a baby, or a farmer a spinach plant. They transmit the impulse of life, they provide a place for it to grow, but they do not and need not understand the details of cell differentiation.
I too nourished my growing book with every resource available to me, and birthed it with terrific hardship from its womb in my mind into physical form, and I am intimately familiar with its every nuance, yet I have an abiding sense that it existed already, that it is beyond my contrivance.
Can a parent legitimately take credit for the accomplishments of his or her child? No. That is a form of theft. Nor will I take credit for the beauty of my creations. I am at their service.
I have drawn this out to show that the same logic that the Christian fathers, Thomas Paine, and Henry George applied to land applies as well to the fruits of human labor.
They exist beyond ourselves — we are stewards at their service, just as we are properly stewards of the land and not its owners. As they are given to us, so we give them onward. That is why we are drawn to do business in the spirit of the Gift. It feels good and right because it aligns us with the truth.
It opens us to a flow of wealth beyond the limits of our design. Such is the origin of any great idea or invention: “It came to me.” How then can we presume to own it? We can only give it away, and thereby keep the channel open through which we will continue to receive sacred gifts, in diverse forms, from other people and all that is.
As an incentive to make the switch to a gift model of business, observe that for many of the sacred professions, the old model isn’t working anymore.
Here in the small city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is not exactly the most progressive place on earth, there are nonetheless literally hundreds of holistic, complementary, and alternative practitioners advertising in the local Holistic Health Networker. Hundreds.
And probably at least half of them, upon entering their herbal studies program or yoga therapy program or naturopathy program, or their hypnotherapy, angelic healing, crystal healing, polarity therapy, Reiki, cranial-sacral therapy, holistic nutrition, massage therapy, or other program, had in mind a future career in an office or holistic health center seeing “clients” for “sessions” at $85 or $120 each.
It is impossible that more than a handful will realize that dream. Yet the schools and training programs keep churning out new practitioners. Sooner or later, most of them will have to abandon the clients-and-sessions model and turn toward offering their skills as a gift.6
What is happening in these professions is starting to happen more generally. We might ascribe it to overcapacity, debt overhang, the “falling marginal return on investment,” or some other economic factor, but the fact is that the old profit model is in crisis. Like the holistic practitioners I described, collectively we will soon have no choice but to adopt a different model en masse.
In the old economy, people pursued jobs and careers for the purpose of making a living. From the viewpoint of survival, nothing is too sacred to sell, to charge money for.
If you are working for the sake of survival, such as in a lead mine in China, then it probably won’t feel wrong to negotiate and demand the best price possible for your labor. Another way to look at it is that the survival of oneself and loved ones is itself a sacred endeavor.
I want to inject a note of gentleness and realism into this discussion. Please do not think I am advocating some saintly standard of altruism or self-sacrifice. You do not gain heavenly rewards for accepting a salary cut.
If your main concern right now is survival or security, “work” to you will probably not be an avenue for the expression of your gifts. Your job will feel like just that, a “job”-something you do primarily for the money and would quit or radically change if you had no financial pressure.
And even though you may feel some sense of being ripped off, of living the life someone is paying you to live but not your own life, the life of a slave compelled to work or to die, that doesn’t mean you “should” overcome your fears and quit that job and trust you’ll be OK.
Living in the gift is not another thing you are supposed to do in order to be a good person. Fear is not the new enemy in our continuing war against the self, the successor to the old hobgoblins of sin and ego.
Sacred economics is part of a broader revolution in human beingness: internally, it is the end of the war against the self; externally, it is the end of the war against nature. It is the economic dimension of a new age, the Age of Reunion.
So, if you find yourself slaving away at a job, working for the money, doing it “good enough” rather than “as beautifully as I am able,” I urge you to transition out of that job when and only when you are ready. Perhaps for now you will see your job as a gift to yourself, giving you a sense of security for as..
http://soundofheart.org/galacticfreepress/content/charles-eisenstein-sacred-economics-working-gift-chapter-21
www.ascentofhumanity.com
“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.” -Albert Einstein
Trusting Gratitude
The question comes up again and again: How can I share my gifts in today’s money economy and still make a living? Some people who ask this question are artists, healers, or activists who despair of finding a way to “get paid for” what they do. Others have a successful business or profession but have begun to feel that something is amiss with the way they charge for their services.
Indeed, to charge a fee for service, or even for material goods, violates the spirit of the Gift. When we shift into gift mentality, we treat our creations as gifts to other people or to the world. It is contrary to the nature of a gift to specify, in advance, a return gift, for then it is no longer giving but rather bartering, selling.
Furthermore, many people, particularly artists, healers, and musicians, see their work as sacred, inspired by a divine source and bearing infinite value. To assign it a price feels like a devaluation, a sacrilege. But surely the artist deserves to be compensated for his work, right?
The idea behind the word “compensation” is that you have, by working, made a sacrifice of your time. You have spent it doing work when you could have instead spent it on something you want to do. Another context in which we use the word is lawsuits, for example when someone seeks compensation for an injury, for pain and suffering.
In an economy that deserves the adjective “sacred,” work will no longer be an injury to one’s time or life; it will no longer be a matter of pain and suffering. A sacred economy recognizes that human beings desire to work: they desire to apply their life energy toward the expression of their gifts. There is no room in this conception for “compensation.” Work is a joy, a cause for gratitude. At its best, it is beyond price.
Doesn’t it sound blasphemous to you to speak of, say, compensating Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel or Mozart for composing his Requiem? No finite amount of money is sufficient in exchange for the divine. Of the most sublime works, the only appropriate means of offering them is to give them away. Even if, at the moment, few of us have access to the genius of a Mozart, we are all capable of sacred work.
We are all capable of channeling, through our skills, something greater than ourselves. Something takes form through us, using us as the instrument for its manifestation on earth. Can you see how foreign the concept of “compensation” is to this kind of work? Can you feel the dishonor in selling a sacred creation?
No matter what the price, you have sold yourself short, and you have sold short the source from whence the gift came. I like to put it this way: “Some things are too good to sell. We can only give them away.”
Questions immediately arise in the reader. Despite the foregoing, you may have even caught yourself again thinking, “But doesn’t an artist deserve to be compensated for his work?” The intuitions of separation run so deeply! So let us rephrase it: “Doesn’t the giver of great gifts deserve to receive great gifts in return?” The answer, insofar as “deserves” means anything at all, is yes.
In a sacred economy, this will happen through the mechanism of gratitude rather than compulsion. The attitude of the seller says, “I will give you this gift-but only if you pay me for it, only if you give me what I think it is worth.” (Yet no matter what the price, the seller will always feel shortchanged.) The attitude of the giver, in contrast, says, “I will give you this gift — and I trust you to give me what you think is appropriate.”
If you give a great gift, and no gratitude results, then perhaps that is a sign that you have given it to the wrong person. The spirit of the Gift responds to needs. To generate gratitude is not the goal of giving; it is a sign, an indicator, that the gift was given well, that it met a need. That is another reason I disagree with certain spiritual teachings that say a person of true generosity will not desire to receive anything, even gratitude, in return.
Now let’s make this practical. After wrestling with this issue for some time, I realized that while it feels wrong to charge money for my work, it feels fine to accept money from people who feel grateful for having received it.
The degree of gratitude is unique to each person. I cannot know in advance how valuable this book will be to you; even you cannot know it in advance. That is why it is contrary to the spirit of the gift to pay for something unknown in advance. Lewis Hyde illustrates this point most insightfully:
It may be clearer now why I said above that a fee for service tends to cut off the force of gratitude. The point is that a conversion, in the general sense, cannot be settled upon ahead of time. We can’t predict the fruits of our labor; we can’t even know if we’ll really go through with it.
Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can’t be made until the transformation is finished.
A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and depotentiates it as an agent of change. Therapies and spiritual systems delivered through the market will therefore tend to draw the energy required for conversion from an aversion to pain rather than from an attraction to a higher state.1
Accordingly, I have taken what steps I can to conduct my work in alignment with the spirit of the gift. For example, I make as much as possible of my writing, sound recordings, and videos available online for no charge and invite readers to give a gift in return that reflects their degree of gratitude.
This gift need not go to me. If the gratitude is, for instance, toward the universe for making my work available, perhaps a more appropriate way of giving is to “pay it forward.”
I use a similar model in my public speaking. When I am asked my speaker’s fee, I say that I do not charge a fee. Usually I request that my travel expenses be covered; beyond that, I say something like, “It is up to you. Give me whatever amount, or none at all, that leaves you with a feeling of clearness, balance, and appropriateness, an amount that reflects your gratitude for my coming to be with you.”
This is not a formula, it is a spirit that adapts itself to each unique situation. If they have a standard speaker’s honorarium, I won’t necessarily insist on an exception for myself. Moreover, sometimes an up-front offer communicates to me how much they desire what I have to offer. I want to give my gifts where they are wanted, and money is one of several ways to communicate that desire.
It is important not to make “living in the gift” into a fetish, or into a standard of virtue. Don’t do it in order to be good. Do it in order to feel good. If you find yourself rejoicing (as I do) over a big fat check, that is OK! We humans are delighted to receive big gifts.
Even if you find yourself (again, as I sometimes do) feeling miserly, resentful, and grasping, simply take note of that as well. The road back to the gift is a long one, so distanced from it we have become. I see myself as one of many explorers of a new (and ancient) territory, learning from the discoveries of others and from my own mistakes.
When I lead retreats, I charge only for room and board and other out-of-pocket expenses, and invite gifts.2 It has taken some time for me to enter a state of consciousness where this model actually “works.”
If I resent those who give nothing, if I intend, through the enunciation of high-sounding principles, to coerce or manipulate people into giving beyond what genuine gratitude dictates, or if I subtly “guilt” people into giving by hinting at my hardship, sacrifice, or entitlement by virtue of poverty, then I am not living in the spirit of the gift at all. I am living instead in a subtle kind of scarcity mentality or beggary, and, as if to mirror that state, the flow of gifts dries up almost immediately. Not only do people refrain from giving, but my own wellspring of gifts dries up as well.
As long as my gift intention is authentic, I find that the inflow of gifts matches or exceeds the outflow. Sometimes the vehicle of the return gift is mysterious, indirectly traceable or not traceable at all to anything I have given, yet somehow, when it comes, it carries something of the spirit of the original offering.
Sometimes only an exiguous trail of synchronicity and symbol connects the gift I have received with the gift I have given. The rational mind says the return gift has nothing at all to do with what I gave — “I would have received that anyway” — but the heart knows otherwise.
Because the return gift comes later, as we step into gift-based livelihood we live for a time in faith. With no assurance of return, we learn whether we really mean it. The ego struggles and thrashes, trying to find an assured benefit.
If not money, maybe I can advertise my generosity to receive praise. Maybe I can secretly congratulate myself and feel superior to those who are less in the gift than I am. In my experience, each new step into the gift is scary. The letting go has to be real, or there will be no return.
Business in the Gift
Now let us apply this model to other kinds of businesses.
There are already a number of enterprises today that are implementing gift economics in creative ways. I don’t uphold my own model as the best or only way of living in the gift.
We are pioneering a new kind of economy, and it is going to take some trial and error to get it right.
I’ll offer a few examples of people doing business according to one or both of the key principles of the gift I have discussed: (1) The recipient, and not the giver, determines the “price” (the return gift); (2) The return gift is chosen after the initial gift has been received, not before.
In Berkeley, California, the Karma Clinic has been treating people with holistic medicine on a gift basis for two years. After the consultation or treatment, the client receives a “bill” that reads,
“Your consultation is a generous gift from someone that came before you. If you would like to gift-forward in that spirit, you can do so however you choose. Monetary or other gifts may be left in the gift box in the Karma Clinic office or mailed to …” In Ashland, Oregon, another gift-based clinic called the Gifting Tree has formed.
There are doubtless many more around the country, and they appear to be quite sustainable: the Victoria Attunement Center operated purely on a donation basis from 1982 to 1988 and, according to its founder Will Wilkinson, was completely self-supporting with over 300 client visits per month.
The gift model has also been applied to restaurants. The One World restaurant in Salt Lake City, in operation since 2003; the SAME (So All May Eat) Cafe in Denver, in operation since 2008; A Better World Cafe in New Jersey, which opened in 2009; the Karma Kitchen in Berkeley; and many more operate on a donation-only basis — and many of them serve organic food to boot.
Recently the idea entered the mainstream when the national restaurant chain Panera Bread opened a pay-what-you-want store in St. Louis, Missouri. The menu is exactly the same as at its other stories, but the prices are guidelines only. Patrons are asked to pay whatever feels right: the sign at the counter says, “Take what you need, leave your fair share.”
If this experiment works, the company plans to expand the model to locations around the country. I wonder if they realize that they are pioneering not just a model of civic virtue, but also a model of business for the future.
On the internet, of course, an enormous gift economy thrives. Versions of all major types of productivity software are available at no charge. For example, the office suite OpenOffice, a collaborative effort by hundreds of volunteer programmers, is available at no charge.
I am hesitant to use the phrase “for free” here, because those words imply almost a repudiation of any return gift. The OpenOffice organization does accept donations and encourages those who have downloaded the software to contribute in various ways.
Lots of bands offer their music “for free” online as well. The most notable pioneer of the gift business model for recorded music was Radiohead, which offered its 2007 In Rainbows album on a pay-what-you-will basis. Although nearly two-thirds of downloaders chose to pay nothing, hundreds of thousands did choose to pay a few dollars for it, and millions more copies were purchased on iTunes, as CDs, and through other channels.
Critics dismissed this success as an anomaly made possible by Radiohead’s iconic status, yet the basic model continues to proliferate, especially in the music industry as traditional distribution channels becomes increasingly impractical for most bands.
Astonishingly, there is even a law firm that has incorporated a pay-what-you-will element into its business. The Valorem Law Group, a trial law firm based in Chicago, has added a “value adjustment line” feature to its bills. At the bottom of the bill, above an empty “Total due” box, is a box labeled “Value adjustment.”
The client writes a positive or negative number there and adjusts the final fee accordingly. I am full of admiration for this firm, because from a legalistic point of view this feature is quite insane. Someone could “adjust” the bill by the full amount and pay nothing, and the firm would probably have no legal recourse.
Now let’s generalize these examples into a broadly applicable business model. The fundamentals are quite simple. The first guideline is to charge money only to cover your own direct costs. This includes marginal costs and apportioned fixed costs, but not sunk costs.
So, for example, if you install plumbing for someone, you would charge for materials (with zero markup), fuel to reach the site, and perhaps half a day’s worth of your current payments on capital equipment (e.g., your truck loan, business loan, etc.). You would make it clear to the recipient that your time, labor, and expertise are a gift. The bill might have the total costs, and then a blank line labeled “gift,” and then the line labeled “total” underneath it.
A variant of this model is to follow Valorem and display a normal fee that reflects the market price with a line under it labeled “value adjustment” or “gratitude adjustment.” Most people will probably just pay the market price, but you can explain that they can adjust it if they are especially satisfied or dissatisfied with the work.
Another variant is not to charge anything at all but to delineate various line items such as “cost of materials,” “apportioned cost of business expenses,” “hours of labor,” “market price for this service,” and so on.
That way the recipient can choose to pay nothing at all, not even for materials, but at least she has this information. This information, like the note in the Karma Clinic, is “the story of the gift” referenced earlier. Traditionally, gifts were often accompanied by stories that helped the receiver appreciate their value.
The gift business model is actually not as far from standard business practice as you might think. Today, a common negotiating tactic is to say, “Look, here are my costs; I can’t go any lower than that.”3 It is not such a huge shift of perspective to say, “Here are my costs. You can pay me more according to the value you believe you have received.”
Often the customer will have a pretty good idea of the market price of the goods or services you are offering and, if there is any genuine humanity at all in the business relationship, will probably pay close to that. If he or she does pay a premium above the base cost, you can interpret that as indicating the presence of gratitude.
If someone is grateful for what you have given, you will desire to give more. If someone is ungrateful, you know that the gift is not being fully received, and you will probably choose not to give to that person again.
Translated into a business relationship, what this means is that you will choose not to do business again with someone who pays you little or nothing above cost, and you will preferentially do business with someone who, using money as token, communicates her high degree of gratitude.
This is as it should be. Some people need our gifts more than others. If you have bread, you want to give it to the hungry person. Displays of gratitude help to orient us toward the best expression of our gifts. So, just as today, a business will tend to do business with those who pay the most money (although nonmonetary expressions of gratitude may also come into play).
This is different from tending to do business with those who offer the best price. The difference is key. In keeping with the spirit of the gift, the price is not offered ahead of time. The gift is offered first, and only after it is received is a return gift made.
I cannot help but notice a parallel between this approach and various game-theoretic studies of altruism and iterated prisoner’s dilemma problems. Look up “tit-for-tat” in Wikipedia for some background on this topic.
Essentially, in many situations where there are repeated interactions among discrete entities with varying payoffs for cooperation and betrayal, the optimal strategy is to cooperate first and retaliate only against someone who didn’t cooperate last time.
Analogous reasoning leads me to think that the business model I have outlined can actually be more financially successful over time than the standard model.4
Because gift mentality is so alien to us today, doing business in the gift sometimes requires a bit of education. I’ve found that if I advertise an event as “by donation,” people sometimes treat it as a throwaway, thinking, “It must not be very valuable or very important if he isn’t charging for it.”
They’ll come late or not at all, or they’ll come with low expectations. Paying a fee is a kind of ritual that sends a message to the unconscious that “this is something valuable” or “I am doing this for real.”
I and many others are still experimenting to find better ways to invoke the benefits of payment while staying true to the spirit of the gift. We are at the beginning of a new era, so it is going to take some practice and experimentation.
Obviously, at the time of this writing most corporations and business owners are not ready to step into a gift-based business model. That’s OK — you can give them a little push! Simply implement it unilaterally by “stealing” their products, for example by illegally downloading or copying digital content like songs, movies, software, and so on.
Then, if you feel grateful to the creators of it, send them some money. I would be quite happy if you did the same with this book. It will be hard to do it illegally, though, since I don’t claim standard copyrights (I bet you didn’t read the copyright page carefully, but it isn’t the usual verbiage), and the content is available online without charge.
Nonetheless, if you do manage to “steal” this book, I will be pleased to receive an amount from you that reflects your gratitude — as opposed to the amount that I or the publisher presumes reflects its value to you.
Each person’s experience of reading it is unique: for some it may be a waste of time, for others it might be life-changing. Isn’t it absurd to receive an identical return gift from everyone?
The Sacred Professions
The gift model comes especially naturally for professions in which the value delivered is something intangible. Musicians, artists, prostitutes, healers, counselors, and teachers all offer gifts that are debased when we assign them a price.
When what we offer is sacred to us, then the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift.5 No price can be high enough to reflect the sacredness of the infinite. By asking for a specific speaker’s fee, I make less of my gift.
If you are a member of one of the above professions, you might consider experimenting with a gift model of business — but remember, if you apply that model as a more clever means to “get paid,” it won’t work. People can detect a phony gift, a gift that isn’t a gift but carries an agenda of gain.
In all of the above professions, the intangible rides the vehicle of something tangible, and it is the former, unquantifiable, that naturally wants to abide in the realm of the gift. This is actually true of every profession.
Always, something is present that is beyond quantification, beyond commodity, and thus beyond price. Every profession is therefore potentially sacred. Consider the example of farming. What makes food-something tangible-a vehicle for the sacred?
It is grown by someone who cares deeply about its nourishing and aesthetic qualities. It is grown in a way that enriches the ecosystem, soil, water, and life in general. Its production and processing contribute to a healthy society.
In other words, sacred food is ensconced in a web of natural and social relationships. It is grown with a love for people and earth that is not an abstract love but a love for this land and these people.
We cannot love anonymously, which is perhaps why I’ve always gotten a somewhat cold feeling from anonymous charity that doesn’t create connection. Somebody grew sacred food for me!
When we see our work as sacred, we seek to do it well for its own sake rather than “good enough” for something external such as the market, the building code, or a grade. A builder who does sacred work will employ materials and methods that might be hidden in the walls, beyond anyone’s notice, for centuries.
He derives no rational benefit from this, just the satisfaction of doing it right. So also the business owner who pays an above-market living wage or the manufacturer who far exceeds environmental standards. They have no rational expectation of benefit, yet somehow they do benefit, sometimes in ways that are completely unexpected.
Unexpected returns accord perfectly with the nature of the Gift: as Lewis Hyde puts it, a gift “disappears around the corner,” “into the mystery,” and we don’t know how it will travel back to us.
Another way to see the unexpected fruits that arise from the mystery is that when we live in the spirit of the gift, magic happens. Gift mentality is a kind of faith, a kind of surrender-and that is a prerequisite for miracles to arise. From the Gift, we become capable of the impossible.
I met a man in Oregon who owns a property management company specializing in low-income elder care facilities. “This,” he says, “is an impossible business.” Subject to the multiple, conflicting stressors of medical institutions, insurance companies, government regulation, the poverty of the residents, and general financial turmoil, his industry was in a state of crisis.
The week I visited him, two of his largest competitors called begging him to take over their money-losing facilities. Yet somehow, this man has built a profitable, growing business, an empowering workplace, and human living environments that are a model for the industry. How does he do it?
“Every day,” he says, “I walk into the office to face a stack of impossible problems. I cannot imagine any way to solve them. So I do the only thing I can do: I bow into service. And then, like magic, solutions fall into my lap.”
The one who bows into service is an artist. To see work as sacred is to bow into service to it, and thus become its instrument. More specifically and somewhat paradoxically, we become the instrument of that which we create.
Whether it is a material, human, or social creation, we put ourselves into the humble service of something preexisting yet unmanifest. Thus it is that the artist is in awe of his or her own creation. I get that feeling when I read aloud from The Ascent of Humanity: “I could not have written this.”
That book is its own entity, born through me but no more my creation than parents create a baby, or a farmer a spinach plant. They transmit the impulse of life, they provide a place for it to grow, but they do not and need not understand the details of cell differentiation.
I too nourished my growing book with every resource available to me, and birthed it with terrific hardship from its womb in my mind into physical form, and I am intimately familiar with its every nuance, yet I have an abiding sense that it existed already, that it is beyond my contrivance.
Can a parent legitimately take credit for the accomplishments of his or her child? No. That is a form of theft. Nor will I take credit for the beauty of my creations. I am at their service.
I have drawn this out to show that the same logic that the Christian fathers, Thomas Paine, and Henry George applied to land applies as well to the fruits of human labor.
They exist beyond ourselves — we are stewards at their service, just as we are properly stewards of the land and not its owners. As they are given to us, so we give them onward. That is why we are drawn to do business in the spirit of the Gift. It feels good and right because it aligns us with the truth.
It opens us to a flow of wealth beyond the limits of our design. Such is the origin of any great idea or invention: “It came to me.” How then can we presume to own it? We can only give it away, and thereby keep the channel open through which we will continue to receive sacred gifts, in diverse forms, from other people and all that is.
As an incentive to make the switch to a gift model of business, observe that for many of the sacred professions, the old model isn’t working anymore.
Here in the small city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is not exactly the most progressive place on earth, there are nonetheless literally hundreds of holistic, complementary, and alternative practitioners advertising in the local Holistic Health Networker. Hundreds.
And probably at least half of them, upon entering their herbal studies program or yoga therapy program or naturopathy program, or their hypnotherapy, angelic healing, crystal healing, polarity therapy, Reiki, cranial-sacral therapy, holistic nutrition, massage therapy, or other program, had in mind a future career in an office or holistic health center seeing “clients” for “sessions” at $85 or $120 each.
It is impossible that more than a handful will realize that dream. Yet the schools and training programs keep churning out new practitioners. Sooner or later, most of them will have to abandon the clients-and-sessions model and turn toward offering their skills as a gift.6
What is happening in these professions is starting to happen more generally. We might ascribe it to overcapacity, debt overhang, the “falling marginal return on investment,” or some other economic factor, but the fact is that the old profit model is in crisis. Like the holistic practitioners I described, collectively we will soon have no choice but to adopt a different model en masse.
In the old economy, people pursued jobs and careers for the purpose of making a living. From the viewpoint of survival, nothing is too sacred to sell, to charge money for.
If you are working for the sake of survival, such as in a lead mine in China, then it probably won’t feel wrong to negotiate and demand the best price possible for your labor. Another way to look at it is that the survival of oneself and loved ones is itself a sacred endeavor.
I want to inject a note of gentleness and realism into this discussion. Please do not think I am advocating some saintly standard of altruism or self-sacrifice. You do not gain heavenly rewards for accepting a salary cut.
If your main concern right now is survival or security, “work” to you will probably not be an avenue for the expression of your gifts. Your job will feel like just that, a “job”-something you do primarily for the money and would quit or radically change if you had no financial pressure.
And even though you may feel some sense of being ripped off, of living the life someone is paying you to live but not your own life, the life of a slave compelled to work or to die, that doesn’t mean you “should” overcome your fears and quit that job and trust you’ll be OK.
Living in the gift is not another thing you are supposed to do in order to be a good person. Fear is not the new enemy in our continuing war against the self, the successor to the old hobgoblins of sin and ego.
Sacred economics is part of a broader revolution in human beingness: internally, it is the end of the war against the self; externally, it is the end of the war against nature. It is the economic dimension of a new age, the Age of Reunion.
So, if you find yourself slaving away at a job, working for the money, doing it “good enough” rather than “as beautifully as I am able,” I urge you to transition out of that job when and only when you are ready. Perhaps for now you will see your job as a gift to yourself, giving you a sense of security for as..
http://soundofheart.org/galacticfreepress/content/charles-eisenstein-sacred-economics-working-gift-chapter-21
www.ascentofhumanity.com
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Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Sat Jun 16, 2012 12:05 am
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Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Sun Jun 17, 2012 8:02 am
devakas wrote:Aquaries1111 wrote:
please smile instead of imagining guests in your house
A true 3D experience this was Devakas.. and yes I did throw someone out of my house for threatening me. I am wondering why you spend so much of your time projecting on others that everything is just our fantastical imagination.. anyhow, on a new note.. it's a new day and the Sun is shining.. again.
Thinking of you.
I'm on Episode 26 of the Mahabharat
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- Post n°17
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Sat Jun 23, 2012 1:15 pm
Contributor Interview - Charles Eisenstein
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Sacred Economics talk in Portland with Charles Eisenstein on March 7, 2012
Aquaries1111 Wed Jul 04, 2012 4:49 pm
Sacred Economics talk in Portland with Charles Eisenstein on March 7, 2012
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Naivete and the Light in their Eyes
I dropped off my son at camp yesterday, a beautiful nature-oriented camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When we got there a familiar feeling welled up inside me, the feeling of Return. I might articulate it as, “This is how human beings are supposed to live.”
I’m not talking about it as an economic or social model — what gave me that feeling of homecoming was something more subtle. It was the easy smiles on peoples’ faces, the default friendliness, and the light in their eyes. I noticed my son come alive as we stepped into the camp and saw the same light kindle in his eyes as well. Here, it seemed, the default state of the human being is two or three notches happier than what we consider normal.
Needless to say, this elevated state of ease and joy doesn’t depend on luxury or consumption. The lifestyle there is simple, the cabins austere. Electronics and cell phones are prohibited. The food is organic and prepared from scratch. There are few modern conveniences and no imported entertainment. In short, there are few of the “goods and services” by which economics measures our standard of living.
One cannot help but think, “The whole world could live like this. Everybody is supposed to have this light in their eyes.” Can you not feel that truth inside you? Having seen it (and I am sure many of you have), can there be any doubt that our dead, dispirited, zombified world is an aberration, a departure from our native state?
I do feel that truth, and yet I still doubt. A cynical voice inside me says that the camp is the exception, an artificial bubble subsidized from the outside and insulated from the drudgery and degradation of the “real world.” The cynic says, it is like getting drunk. All seems rosy, until one returns, as one must, to the problems that await.
That inner cynic is articulating a wound. I have noticed that when I catch a glimpse of a more beautiful world, a feeling of pain quickly follows the initial upliftment. Maybe it is because the contrast between what is and what could be is painful to see. The cynical voices saying, “It is a bubble,” “It can’t be that good,” “Those people aren’t really that happy here,” “You are imagining the light in their eyes,” “It’s just an escape from a doomed world,” and so on are giving form to a wound. That wound is none other than the wound of Separation: from nature, from community, from intimacy, from our bodies, from play, joy, dance, laughter, all the things that have been squeezed out of modern life. We clothe that wound, invisible to us, with our cynical stories, and deride our own tender naivete, that accepts the heart-knowledge of our native radiance.
One of the criticisms I often encounter of my writing is that I am naive. People who haven’t read deeply into my work ascribe my optimistic view of humanity’s future to an ignorance of the magnitude of the present crisis. Maybe I just don’t understand how bad things are. When they learn that I believe the situation is even worse than they think it is, they say I am naive to think people will ever really change, that the power elite will ever change, or that human nature is anything but greedy and selfish. They want me to be more practical, more realistic.
Oddly enough, naivete is both more practical, and more realistic, than cynicism. It is more practical because it is more motivating. The possibility I glimpsed at my son’s camp, and that I have glimpsed again and again in special moments in life, impels me to create a better world. I think, “A world without this light in the eyes is intolerable.” If change is hopeless, or if human life can be no better, then why bother? If the best possible outcome of all my efforts is a marginal slowdown in our miserable spiral towards extinction, then why bother? I might as well protect me and mine, maximizing my own self-interest just as I cynically believe everyone else will do. Apprehending the projection of his own psychology, the cynic rarely takes action. Thankfully — thanks to my naivete and to my comrades who nourish it — I believe the world can and should be more beautiful, and endeavor to make it so.
Naivete is more realistic than cynicism simply because it reflects the truth — a more beautiful world IS possible. I cannot prove that this is true. Truth isn’t something we can prove. It is something we feel. We shy away from feeling it, sometimes, because it is so painful. Its light exposes our wounds. It hurts for me to see the radiance in those children’s eyes, contrasting so starkly with the social environment my own children inhabit most of the time, and illuminating the cracks and callouses in my own psyche, the long years wandering in a grey world. To receive the truth of what is possible, and to live from it as a creator, we must be willing to feel the pain of what has been lost. For me, it has been alarming and painful to realize how much of my life was spent half-awake, living as a zombie among zombies as the years slipped by.
To create significant change, one must be a least a little bit naive. It was naive in 1935 to imagine, as Gandhi did, that the British would leave India without a fight. It was naive for Diane Wilson to think she could stop a petrochemical plant on the Gulf of Mexico. It would have been naive to suppose in 1985 that the Berlin Wall would fall and Apartheid end without civil war in a few years. Today the challenges we face, social and ecological, dwarf even these. Pretty much anything worth doing today is impractical, at least from the logic of the cynic. So let us no longer shield ourselves behind cynicism, and let us no longer clothe our hurting in the vocabulary of despair. Please, let us help each other to believe in the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
http://charleseisenstein.net/category/news/
I dropped off my son at camp yesterday, a beautiful nature-oriented camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When we got there a familiar feeling welled up inside me, the feeling of Return. I might articulate it as, “This is how human beings are supposed to live.”
I’m not talking about it as an economic or social model — what gave me that feeling of homecoming was something more subtle. It was the easy smiles on peoples’ faces, the default friendliness, and the light in their eyes. I noticed my son come alive as we stepped into the camp and saw the same light kindle in his eyes as well. Here, it seemed, the default state of the human being is two or three notches happier than what we consider normal.
Needless to say, this elevated state of ease and joy doesn’t depend on luxury or consumption. The lifestyle there is simple, the cabins austere. Electronics and cell phones are prohibited. The food is organic and prepared from scratch. There are few modern conveniences and no imported entertainment. In short, there are few of the “goods and services” by which economics measures our standard of living.
One cannot help but think, “The whole world could live like this. Everybody is supposed to have this light in their eyes.” Can you not feel that truth inside you? Having seen it (and I am sure many of you have), can there be any doubt that our dead, dispirited, zombified world is an aberration, a departure from our native state?
I do feel that truth, and yet I still doubt. A cynical voice inside me says that the camp is the exception, an artificial bubble subsidized from the outside and insulated from the drudgery and degradation of the “real world.” The cynic says, it is like getting drunk. All seems rosy, until one returns, as one must, to the problems that await.
That inner cynic is articulating a wound. I have noticed that when I catch a glimpse of a more beautiful world, a feeling of pain quickly follows the initial upliftment. Maybe it is because the contrast between what is and what could be is painful to see. The cynical voices saying, “It is a bubble,” “It can’t be that good,” “Those people aren’t really that happy here,” “You are imagining the light in their eyes,” “It’s just an escape from a doomed world,” and so on are giving form to a wound. That wound is none other than the wound of Separation: from nature, from community, from intimacy, from our bodies, from play, joy, dance, laughter, all the things that have been squeezed out of modern life. We clothe that wound, invisible to us, with our cynical stories, and deride our own tender naivete, that accepts the heart-knowledge of our native radiance.
One of the criticisms I often encounter of my writing is that I am naive. People who haven’t read deeply into my work ascribe my optimistic view of humanity’s future to an ignorance of the magnitude of the present crisis. Maybe I just don’t understand how bad things are. When they learn that I believe the situation is even worse than they think it is, they say I am naive to think people will ever really change, that the power elite will ever change, or that human nature is anything but greedy and selfish. They want me to be more practical, more realistic.
Oddly enough, naivete is both more practical, and more realistic, than cynicism. It is more practical because it is more motivating. The possibility I glimpsed at my son’s camp, and that I have glimpsed again and again in special moments in life, impels me to create a better world. I think, “A world without this light in the eyes is intolerable.” If change is hopeless, or if human life can be no better, then why bother? If the best possible outcome of all my efforts is a marginal slowdown in our miserable spiral towards extinction, then why bother? I might as well protect me and mine, maximizing my own self-interest just as I cynically believe everyone else will do. Apprehending the projection of his own psychology, the cynic rarely takes action. Thankfully — thanks to my naivete and to my comrades who nourish it — I believe the world can and should be more beautiful, and endeavor to make it so.
Naivete is more realistic than cynicism simply because it reflects the truth — a more beautiful world IS possible. I cannot prove that this is true. Truth isn’t something we can prove. It is something we feel. We shy away from feeling it, sometimes, because it is so painful. Its light exposes our wounds. It hurts for me to see the radiance in those children’s eyes, contrasting so starkly with the social environment my own children inhabit most of the time, and illuminating the cracks and callouses in my own psyche, the long years wandering in a grey world. To receive the truth of what is possible, and to live from it as a creator, we must be willing to feel the pain of what has been lost. For me, it has been alarming and painful to realize how much of my life was spent half-awake, living as a zombie among zombies as the years slipped by.
To create significant change, one must be a least a little bit naive. It was naive in 1935 to imagine, as Gandhi did, that the British would leave India without a fight. It was naive for Diane Wilson to think she could stop a petrochemical plant on the Gulf of Mexico. It would have been naive to suppose in 1985 that the Berlin Wall would fall and Apartheid end without civil war in a few years. Today the challenges we face, social and ecological, dwarf even these. Pretty much anything worth doing today is impractical, at least from the logic of the cynic. So let us no longer shield ourselves behind cynicism, and let us no longer clothe our hurting in the vocabulary of despair. Please, let us help each other to believe in the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
http://charleseisenstein.net/category/news/
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- Post n°20
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Fri Jul 27, 2012 9:21 am
This is a conversation between International Economist, James Quilligan and Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics recorded at Immediacy Studio in Media, PA on June 27, 2012.
A powerful video
A powerful video
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- Post n°21
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Sun Aug 26, 2012 5:54 am
I recently attended a ceremony at the Tamera village in Portugal in which the officiant invoked “the healing of money.” Immediately a vivid image popped into my head of a man, vast and muscular, bound to the earth with stakes and tethers, straining with every atom of his strength to free himself and rise up. Finally, in a desperate, colossal effort, he bursts free and, standing tall, lets out a triumphant roar before striding purposefully off.
I knew immediately that the man represented the divine masculine and his bonds were made of money.
What is the purpose of men? In some primitive societies they were not of much use at all. In many places women were the center of life, collecting most of the food, looking after young children, and doing the small amount of work necessary to subsist. Subsistence was so easy in many places that, as the anthropologist Marshal Sahlins put it, “half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves.” Describing the Hadza, he notes one enthnographer’s estimate that adults spend two hours a day on subsistence, the women collecting plant foods “at a leisurely pace and without prolonged labour,” and the men devoting most of their time to gambling. True, the men made an important contribution to the food supply by hunting, but only a small minority of the Hadza did any hunting at all. The rest, it would seem, were completely superfluous as far as the material needs of the tribe are concerned.
In other societies, instead of gambling, the men would devote most of their time to secret societies, ritual activities, interactions with the spirit world, and so on. Theirs was the realm of the abstract; for the most part, the women and children could get along fine without them. Of course, that might change in times of warfare, but that too we might see as another men’s game that bears little benefit to the material welfare of the tribes involved.
Thus it was that the great anthropologist Margaret Mead would sometimes, half-jokingly, order the men attending her lectures to leave the auditorium. “Get out – you are all useless,” she would say.
So with some small exaggeration, we might say that human life was divided between the women’s world, which was central to material well-being and survival, and the men’s world, which was largely inconsequential. What has happened in the millenia since hunter-gatherer days?
Today, as in the past, men are still attracted to the realm of abstraction, of non-materiality, of magic and ritual, of gambling. For example, boys spend a lot more time playing video games than girls do, and men tend more than women to fields like mathematics, accounting, and computer science. Whether or not the reason is purely “cultural,” the professions toward which men gravitate help illuminate the masculine principle in our time.
One arena where all four of these male pursuits (abstraction, non-materiality, magic/ritual, and gambling) come together is money. This is most apparent at the nerve center of the money system, the hedge funds and Wall Street banks, where the “quants” – almost exclusively men – use computers to manipulate data, highly abstract representations of representations of representations, to make or lose vast fortunes. Their numbers – stock market indices, LIBOR, the CDS spread – seem disconnected from anything material, and their manipulations are conducted according to highly arcane rules inaccessible to any but the initiated.
But unlike the Hadza’s games of chance or the secret societies of the native Americans, the games of the financial elites have profound consequences for the rest of society. For these numbers are not actually disconnected from material and social life; rather, they rule it. The men’s world has invaded the women’s world and usurped its domain. Increasingly for the past several centuries, no function of life can be carried out without money. This abstract game of tallies and chits has taken over everything else.
Outside the extreme case of Wall Street, the same money chase prevails, subjecting men and women alike to the pursuit of numbers. The integration of women into the workforce was considered a great victory of the feminist movement, but today some who call themselves feminist still, or post-feminist, would say that it was the last and greatest insult to the feminine. What kind of victory for women is it, to be permitted to join the mad chase for money at the cost of nature, culture, community, family, leisure, beauty, and health? What victory is it to have won the right to be equal partners in the pillage of the planet, which itself is the consequence of a kind of distorted hypermasculinity run amok?
If not enslaved to the pursuit of numbers that is destroying the very basis of civilization, what is the true, sacred expression of the masculine principle? What, we might ask again, is the purpose of men? What does the divine man of my vision do after he has broken the chains of money that bind him? Remember, in my vision I saw him stride off with a purpose.
Whether you are a man or a woman, I’m sure you can feel that sense of purpose or mission inside of you, whether it is in full passionate expression or deep latency. It is the divine masculine. No longer is it content with frivolities, as it may have been in the ong hunter-gatherer childhood of our species. No longer, in this hour of extremity, can it be bound to a machine that turns its energies toward domination and brutality. What kind of relationship does it want to the divine feminine – nature, materiality, family, hearth, land, community, water, and flesh?
Here is a hint: In Portugal I received a tour of Tamera’s permaculture farm centered around a “water retention landscape” – a veritable oasis in that drought-stricken land. My guide described how the engineer chose where to site the ponds: “He waited until he could see where they wanted to be.” Rather than imposing an abstract design onto the landscape, he put the gift of design and the machines to carry it out in the service of that which wanted to be born. Here, an expression of the masculine – digging big holes in the ground – was an act of cocreative service with the feminine, and something beautiful was born.
The divine masculine wants to make love to the world. It wants to carry and protect what is beautiful. It wants to explore new territories and play beyond the edge of old boundaries. It wants to put its gifts in service with, not domination of, the divine feminine.
Nature and science, substance and form, matter and spirit, the heart and the mind… each of these relationships mirrors, in our civilization, the relationship that has subsisted between the feminine and the masculine. Science dominated nature; spirit was elevated above matter; the mind trumped the heart; substance was the mere substrate of form. Now these relationships are changing: science in service to nature, form arising from substance; spirit immanent in matter; the mind uniting with the heart.
As with any species, none of our human gifts is superfluous, not even those heretofore used to dominate and despoil. We will still play our number games, we will still play with principles, logic, and abstractions; we will still count and measure things; we will still use money. No longer, though, we will be lost in the map, disconnected from the material world the symbols are supposed to represent. No longer will we seek to force reality to conform to our maps. And no longer will money rule the world.
“Only the measurable is real,” taught Galileo, setting the stage for a world in which numbers became realer than the things they counted. What was true in science was even more so in economics: what mattered was the numbers in the form of cold, hard cash. Thus it is that we celebrate the rise of a number – GDP – even when it comes at the cost of real well-being and even survival.
I saw the divine masculine freeing himself from bondage to money and all the rest of what Riane Eisler called the dominator paradigm. You may have tasted this freedom yourself, any time you decided to follow your passion despite the money, or to put your money in service to your passion, rather than the other way around. Money and the rest of the symbolic world is meant to be a creative instrument, a means and not an end. As a means it opens up new territory and expands the horizon of the possible. As an end, it enslaves.
The liberation from the bonds of money isn’t just a psychological shift; it must also have a social manifestation. Our usurious debt-based system of necessity turns more and more of our creative energies toward servicing debt, because in an interest-based system, the debts must grow and grow, carrying all of life, human and biological, with them into the realm of money. That system is crumbling. We strain and pull against it. What would you do, if not compelled by money? Where will you devote your precious creative energy? What will you do when, with a collective roar, we all break free?
http://charleseisenstein.net/category/news/
I knew immediately that the man represented the divine masculine and his bonds were made of money.
What is the purpose of men? In some primitive societies they were not of much use at all. In many places women were the center of life, collecting most of the food, looking after young children, and doing the small amount of work necessary to subsist. Subsistence was so easy in many places that, as the anthropologist Marshal Sahlins put it, “half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves.” Describing the Hadza, he notes one enthnographer’s estimate that adults spend two hours a day on subsistence, the women collecting plant foods “at a leisurely pace and without prolonged labour,” and the men devoting most of their time to gambling. True, the men made an important contribution to the food supply by hunting, but only a small minority of the Hadza did any hunting at all. The rest, it would seem, were completely superfluous as far as the material needs of the tribe are concerned.
In other societies, instead of gambling, the men would devote most of their time to secret societies, ritual activities, interactions with the spirit world, and so on. Theirs was the realm of the abstract; for the most part, the women and children could get along fine without them. Of course, that might change in times of warfare, but that too we might see as another men’s game that bears little benefit to the material welfare of the tribes involved.
Thus it was that the great anthropologist Margaret Mead would sometimes, half-jokingly, order the men attending her lectures to leave the auditorium. “Get out – you are all useless,” she would say.
So with some small exaggeration, we might say that human life was divided between the women’s world, which was central to material well-being and survival, and the men’s world, which was largely inconsequential. What has happened in the millenia since hunter-gatherer days?
Today, as in the past, men are still attracted to the realm of abstraction, of non-materiality, of magic and ritual, of gambling. For example, boys spend a lot more time playing video games than girls do, and men tend more than women to fields like mathematics, accounting, and computer science. Whether or not the reason is purely “cultural,” the professions toward which men gravitate help illuminate the masculine principle in our time.
One arena where all four of these male pursuits (abstraction, non-materiality, magic/ritual, and gambling) come together is money. This is most apparent at the nerve center of the money system, the hedge funds and Wall Street banks, where the “quants” – almost exclusively men – use computers to manipulate data, highly abstract representations of representations of representations, to make or lose vast fortunes. Their numbers – stock market indices, LIBOR, the CDS spread – seem disconnected from anything material, and their manipulations are conducted according to highly arcane rules inaccessible to any but the initiated.
But unlike the Hadza’s games of chance or the secret societies of the native Americans, the games of the financial elites have profound consequences for the rest of society. For these numbers are not actually disconnected from material and social life; rather, they rule it. The men’s world has invaded the women’s world and usurped its domain. Increasingly for the past several centuries, no function of life can be carried out without money. This abstract game of tallies and chits has taken over everything else.
Outside the extreme case of Wall Street, the same money chase prevails, subjecting men and women alike to the pursuit of numbers. The integration of women into the workforce was considered a great victory of the feminist movement, but today some who call themselves feminist still, or post-feminist, would say that it was the last and greatest insult to the feminine. What kind of victory for women is it, to be permitted to join the mad chase for money at the cost of nature, culture, community, family, leisure, beauty, and health? What victory is it to have won the right to be equal partners in the pillage of the planet, which itself is the consequence of a kind of distorted hypermasculinity run amok?
If not enslaved to the pursuit of numbers that is destroying the very basis of civilization, what is the true, sacred expression of the masculine principle? What, we might ask again, is the purpose of men? What does the divine man of my vision do after he has broken the chains of money that bind him? Remember, in my vision I saw him stride off with a purpose.
Whether you are a man or a woman, I’m sure you can feel that sense of purpose or mission inside of you, whether it is in full passionate expression or deep latency. It is the divine masculine. No longer is it content with frivolities, as it may have been in the ong hunter-gatherer childhood of our species. No longer, in this hour of extremity, can it be bound to a machine that turns its energies toward domination and brutality. What kind of relationship does it want to the divine feminine – nature, materiality, family, hearth, land, community, water, and flesh?
Here is a hint: In Portugal I received a tour of Tamera’s permaculture farm centered around a “water retention landscape” – a veritable oasis in that drought-stricken land. My guide described how the engineer chose where to site the ponds: “He waited until he could see where they wanted to be.” Rather than imposing an abstract design onto the landscape, he put the gift of design and the machines to carry it out in the service of that which wanted to be born. Here, an expression of the masculine – digging big holes in the ground – was an act of cocreative service with the feminine, and something beautiful was born.
The divine masculine wants to make love to the world. It wants to carry and protect what is beautiful. It wants to explore new territories and play beyond the edge of old boundaries. It wants to put its gifts in service with, not domination of, the divine feminine.
Nature and science, substance and form, matter and spirit, the heart and the mind… each of these relationships mirrors, in our civilization, the relationship that has subsisted between the feminine and the masculine. Science dominated nature; spirit was elevated above matter; the mind trumped the heart; substance was the mere substrate of form. Now these relationships are changing: science in service to nature, form arising from substance; spirit immanent in matter; the mind uniting with the heart.
As with any species, none of our human gifts is superfluous, not even those heretofore used to dominate and despoil. We will still play our number games, we will still play with principles, logic, and abstractions; we will still count and measure things; we will still use money. No longer, though, we will be lost in the map, disconnected from the material world the symbols are supposed to represent. No longer will we seek to force reality to conform to our maps. And no longer will money rule the world.
“Only the measurable is real,” taught Galileo, setting the stage for a world in which numbers became realer than the things they counted. What was true in science was even more so in economics: what mattered was the numbers in the form of cold, hard cash. Thus it is that we celebrate the rise of a number – GDP – even when it comes at the cost of real well-being and even survival.
I saw the divine masculine freeing himself from bondage to money and all the rest of what Riane Eisler called the dominator paradigm. You may have tasted this freedom yourself, any time you decided to follow your passion despite the money, or to put your money in service to your passion, rather than the other way around. Money and the rest of the symbolic world is meant to be a creative instrument, a means and not an end. As a means it opens up new territory and expands the horizon of the possible. As an end, it enslaves.
The liberation from the bonds of money isn’t just a psychological shift; it must also have a social manifestation. Our usurious debt-based system of necessity turns more and more of our creative energies toward servicing debt, because in an interest-based system, the debts must grow and grow, carrying all of life, human and biological, with them into the realm of money. That system is crumbling. We strain and pull against it. What would you do, if not compelled by money? Where will you devote your precious creative energy? What will you do when, with a collective roar, we all break free?
http://charleseisenstein.net/category/news/
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
Join date : 2012-06-02
Age : 55
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- Post n°22
Re: Charles Eistenstein - January 8, 2012: “The Revolution is Love”
Aquaries1111 Mon Sep 17, 2012 6:34 am
We Are You wrote:http://www.alternet.org/visions/totally-different-way-think-about-economics-visionary-charles-eisenstein?akid=9403.145212.BNiytB&rd=1&src=newsletter711367&t=12
A Totally Different Way to Think About Economics — with Visionary Charles Eisenstein
What would the world look like if money embodied our values?
September 13, 2012 |
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What would the world look like if money embodied our values, if the best business decision was the best decision for society, and if wealth was defined by how much we give, not how much we have?
This summer, I decided to escape [my hometown of] London for a week .... for a different kind of short vacation. At Schumacher College in south Devon, the author and teacher Charles Eisenstein was travelling to the UK from the United States to run a course on ‘ecology, scarcity and the gift economy', before embarking on a tour around Europe. I'd only heard about Charles and his work when the Occupy Wall Street protests took off in late 2011, and I was captivated by his unique take on all that is wrong with our world as well as his fresh and engaging speaking style, as captured in a short film by Ian Mackenzie . After coming across his latest book, Sacred Economics , I jumped at the opportunity to spend some time in his company and learn more about his views on how "to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe".
The basic proposition of Charles' work was introduced to the course participants during a Sunday evening lecture on the first day of arrival. Charles suggested that everyone carries a secret knowledge in their hearts that tells them the society we live in is meant to be more beautiful than this, and yet we're constantly pulled back to a way of being that is somehow alien to us. Whatever world problem or crisis we look at, from fracking and atmospheric pollution to the destruction of the rainforests or the breakdown of community, someone somewhere is making money from it. It seems as if money has become opposite to our ideals, said Charles, and is often turned into a force for evil. So what would money look like if it embodied our values, if the best business decision was the best decision for society, and if wealth was defined by how much we give, not how much we have?
During the next morning of the course, we began to explore these broad ideas through a number of experiential exercises. This began with an exploration of ‘the gift' and what that means for us personally in our day-to-day lives and our work. As Charles began the session by explaining, this hearkens back to indigenous cultures in which an understanding of the gift was fundamental to how societies functioned - a concept that is widely explored in the fascinating book The Gift by Lewis Hyde (one of four books recommended for participants to read before the course began).* Today, we generally no longer see society as premised on the gift, but have rather constructed complex market economies that hinder us from expressing our gifts on a social, economic or individual basis - the implications of which is profoundly contemplated in Charles' writings. The need to re-learn the gift is central to the changes that are now needed to heal our broken world, as his latest book explains in compelling detail; from an analysis of how modern civilisation has tragically lost our understanding of the gift, to the collective actions necessary to create a gift-based economy and realise "the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible".
Learning to give of our gifts
But it was on the more personal level, in terms of our individual gifts and the changes we need to undergo in order to ‘live in the gift', that we mainly explored throughout the course. For example, the first exercise involved describing our gifts to an exercise partner in order to understand, as Charles said, how we are all here "to fulfil the unique role we have within the social ecosystem". Every person has a gift to bear which is necessary for the whole to function, like an ecology of sorts, we were told. Such knowledge can be very strong in teenagers - that we are here for a reason, even though our schooling system mostly prepares us to make a living, to take and to compete, all based on standardisation and conformity instead of preparing us to give of our gifts. The aim of this first exercise was to listen and create a space for each other to realise what our gifts are, and how we may be in a transition in life in which new gifts are coming to us.
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
Join date : 2012-06-02
Age : 55
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- Post n°23
the divine masculine and the exploration of a new masculinity
Aquaries1111 Sat Sep 22, 2012 7:27 pm
Charles speaks with Joanna about the divine masculine and the exploration of a new masculinity; the space between stories; changing the perception of scarcity; the intimacy and simplicity of transitioning; the dance of language and context; the new meaning of money; “the technologies of reunion”…
http://www.futureprimitive.org/2012/09/the-space-in-between/
http://www.futureprimitive.org/2012/09/the-space-in-between/
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
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- Post n°24
Charles Eisenstein Sacred Economics London July 2012
Aquaries1111 Sat Oct 27, 2012 3:55 am
So beautiful Charles.
Aquaries1111- Posts : 1394
Join date : 2012-06-02
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- Post n°25
TEDxNewHaven - Charles Eisenstein - The Gift of Happiness
Aquaries1111 Tue Dec 11, 2012 6:21 pm
TEDxNewHaven - Charles Eisenstein - The Gift of Happiness
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