Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 348: Charles Eisenstein

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

Charles Eisenstein, public-speaker, philosopher, and author, returns to the DTFH! This episode is brought to you by Squarespace (use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site) and Simple Contacts (use code duncan20 at checkout for $20 off your first order!)

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or technological marvel that you'd like to have in your own home, use our Amazon link, which is located at dunkitrustle.com. All right, pals, without further ado, I want to reintroduce you to Charles Eisenstein. He came on some time ago and we both agreed that we had to have another conversation and this is that conversation.

And it's conversations like this that make me feel as though I truly must be in some kind of beautiful simulator that I get to just have chats like this with brilliant people like Charles Eisenstein. Charles Eisenstein is a public speaker, a philosopher and an author. He's written some fantastic books,

most recently a book on climate change. And if you've been feeling the heebie-jeebies or the hypercreeps lately, then hopefully this episode will help melt some of that fear that might be sizzling around in the frying pan of your brain. Without further ado, everyone, please welcome to the Dunkitrustle Family Hour podcast,

Charles Eisenstein. ["Welcome to the Dunkitrustle Family Hour podcast"] ["Welcome, welcome to the Dunkitrustle Family Hour podcast"] ["Welcome, welcome to the Dunkitrustle Family Hour podcast"] It's the Dunkitrustle Family Hour podcast. Hey, thanks for doing this last second. I really appreciate it. This is so cool.

We never got to finish our last, well, we did finish it, but we wanted to do a part two. And so I'm grateful to you for your time today, Mr. Eisenstein. It's easier to do things last second because then I don't have to put it in my calendar, and then it gets in the way of other things. We've changed the time,

and it's so much easier just to do pop-ups. I agree. Have you read anything? This just makes me think of stuff I've read about the way people worked prior to the industrial revolution, how it was more organic, I guess you would say, or more spontaneous than it is now. Do you know anything about that?

A little bit, yeah. I remember reading about how the idea of being paid a wage was outrageous. It was considered tantamount to slavery where someone owns you 24 hours a day, and instead of being owned, you're rented, essentially, when you're on the clock. And then you have to subject your organic body rhythms

to industrial machine rhythms. Do you think that that industrial revolution or, you know, okay, here's two paths we can take now because I have some questions for you, and I wanted to dive us right into the deep end. But I know right now people are freaking out, I think, right now. More, you know, and I think it's,

unfortunately, people have been freaking out for a while, but I was thinking, my God, if anybody could maybe find a way for us to not be so cynical right now, you're the man. So two paths, maybe it's the same path, because what I was gonna ask you is either, one, what do you picture the apocalypse, the human apocalypse, the planetary apocalypse,

looking like? The other question was, what's your vision if you could be the architect of a global utopia? What sort of global utopia would you create? And I'll let you choose which one to answer. Yeah, those are both related. So we're recording and everything, we're... Yeah, we're rolling, yep.

Okay. Oh, wait, hang on, I've got you in Ableton, hang on. I'm recording in Ableton, but I didn't press record in Zoom. So one second, let me just, to back up, back up. Okay, there we go. Okay. But I did record all that, so it's all on Ableton.

Okay. One second. Yeah. Okay, we're rolling. Thank you. So what do I envision the human apocalypse to look like? You know, even in the word apocalypse, there's a thread of positivity

or potential. I think the word means something like a great unveiling, a revelation of that which was hidden. And I don't know about you, but like me and a lot of people I know, when we look at the possibility of a total collapse of society, whether it's economic collapse or peak oil or whatever apocalypse we're facing,

it's not just fear that we respond with. There's also this feeling of like, yeah, bring it on. A feeling of liberation from the world that we're stuck in. So apocalypse or crisis or collapse, it's not just this frightening thing to be avoided at all costs. There's a promise within it as well, a liberation from, as I said,

like a liberation from the world that we're stuck in that pretty much everybody agrees, or I don't know, maybe I'm being a little naive here, but I look around that I think but I look around and I feel that most people are not really bought into this thing with their whole hearts and that most people feel trapped or imprisoned in the world that we've collectively created,

whether they feel imprisoned by their student debt or their mortgage or their job or their relationship, their single family box or just the political order. A lot of people want out. And I wonder if because of that, because our hearts aren't in it all the way, we're participating half-heartedly and actually sowing the seeds of the breakdown

by not giving our full energy to maintaining the world as it stands, which I think is a big change from a couple of generations ago when everybody really believed in the program and the technological march to utopia and just knew that everything's getting better and better and what new wonders are on the horizon. Like those days, maybe it's just the little echo chamber

I'm in, but I mean, what do you think? Do people still believe that? Well, you know, when it brought to mind something we would do when we were in the bus going to high school is there was a curve. And we thought it was funny to jump to the side of the bus. Like we, it was just a spontaneous thing that would happen once in a while.

Like this insane idea of like, we would rather tip the bus over, I guess, than go to school. Like it would be better for the bus to roll or whatever. And I don't think we really believe the bus would tip over it. If we did, I don't think we would have done it, especially if we knew like people would get hurt.

But yes, I agree with you. I think that there's a subconscious, semi-conscious, well, for some people a very conscious attempt to knock over the bus of history right now because there seems to be a pretty universal agreement that this bus is headed towards doom and it would put in white as well, just like, fuck it, let's burn the whole thing down

and hope for freedom. It's a very, isn't that cynical though? Don't you think that's a cynical attitude? Well, it's a sign of profound alienation. And, but I'm thinking back to school now too, if the school had burned down, everyone would have been happy. Yeah. Everyone would have secretly

or not so secretly celebrated. In fact, we sang songs about that. You did? Well, I'm older than you, you know, that we used to sing songs on the school bus. You sang songs about the school burning down on the school bus, can you sing it for me? Yeah, let's see.

Joy to the world, the school has burned and all the teachers are dead. We're looking for the principal, he's hanging on the flagpole with a rope around his neck, with a rope around his neck, with a rope around his neck. I mean, it's horrible, isn't it? But that's like, that's how alienated we were from school and everything

that represented institutional authority. Wait, I'm sorry, did you go to school in Transylvania? Where did you go to school? It was a university town. I mean, this was actually considered a good school. Wow, I love it. I'm sorry to cut you off. And let me tell you, your song and our attempt

to wreck the bus, it's the same damn thing. Please continue about institutional alienation. Yeah, and like, I don't want people to think that I'm advocating violence and stuff like that. And I'm sure if kids were singing that today, like literally the cops would come in, they would get suspended, terroristic threats and stuff like that.

Absolutely. Those were more innocent days. But what I'm speaking to is like, we did not identify with the rightness of authority and the rightness of the system. Like if you had said to your friends, I like school. They would have given you a swirly, you know? They would have given you a wedgie.

I mean, it was not acceptable, socially acceptable. So I'm not sure if I quite call that cynicism. Cynicism to me is a kind of a resignation a refusal to believe that things could be different. Cynicism I think is the capitulation that eventually happens when you rebel and you rebel, you set off a stink bomb in the school, you do anything you can, you try to tip the bus, et cetera.

And nothing changes, nothing works. Those who rebel get crushed and eventually you accept that it's never gonna change and that it never could change because cynicism rejects any possibility of change because I think it's afraid that it will be crushed again. Wow. Better not to believe it all.

Yeah, right. So we shrink into this. Hold on, I've got a six-year-old here at the door. Hey, Carrie, sweetie, I'm recording something here. Yeah, he's pretending to be a monster. Cool, I've got a seven-month-old now, but he's at swimming lessons. Yeah, yeah, so cynicism, right, rejection of possibility.

Yeah, because of the fear that it will be crushed again. Yeah, I got you. So I think that for that reason, because of this repressed rebellion and repressed knowledge, like there's actually a knowledge that a more beautiful world, I'd like to say, you know, a more beautiful world is possible. That is deeply buried in a lot of people

and anytime there's the possibility of a system collapse, it's reawakened and it feels kind of good. But because there's no way to act upon that, people are left very passive, kind of hoping that they will be rescued by collapse, but not exerting their agency to either bring that collapse about or plant the seeds of what might follow the collapse.

Wow, the only people who seem to be, you know, I don't know, do you watch preppers at all? No, I mean, I'm familiar with what preppers are, is that like a show or something? It's a show and they cover these survivalists as they spend, quite often it's very wealthy old dudes who like own helicopters and shit and they end up spending millions or half a million

on some kind of insane shelter, stock it with guns. It's a very strange thing to watch, but when you watch it with, it dawns on you that these are gonna be the people should they be right in the world ends, these are going to be the fathers and mothers of whatever comes next. And quite often they're very, very paranoid

and very, very caught up in the preparation for a thing. And so I love that you're saying, plant the seeds for what comes next because no offense to the preppers who've been on preppers, but I would like there to be a little bit more diversity in whatever the future human species looks like after the ice caps melt or whatever is to come. So yeah, I think that the preppers are

not adopting the best strategy for surviving and thriving post apocalypse. Because if you were just relying on guns, then probably somebody else is gonna have more guns. I think a much more resilient strategy is to rely on community. So the best preparation would be to develop community, to be generous, to develop skills and resources

that could help other people, to be somebody that people wanna take care of. Whoa, that's so crazy. That would be an amazing version of preppers, which is it's just people trying to connect to other people in their community. And then of course though, that's the answer. The preppers that I've seen,

they're like fragmenting away from community, fragmenting away from society and burrowing down into the earth. And what you're suggesting is that this is, well, for one that seems like pathetic, but for another, yeah, I get what you're saying. But then what about the situation of okay, great, we formed a community,

we have a wonderful community of a hundred people and we don't have a lot of guns. We're still going to fall prey to whoever the next Genghis Khan is or, you know what I mean, some war war. There might be somebody in your community who, some people who do have guns, but there also might be people in your community

whose son or brother is in the military. I mean, that's who's going to have the most guns is the military units that, I don't even believe in this scenario actually. And I can play it out and describe how community actually will make you safer and more prosperous and comfortable than your bunker with your guns. But what I would rather talk about,

I'd rather expand the concept of prepper to ask the question, what are we prepping for? Like what world do we want to live in? How do we prepare ourselves for that world rather than the dystopian world of cutthroat competition and domination? Is there another world possible that we can prepare, prepare ourselves for and prepare each other for

and co-create together? Because really, I don't think that, this is one of the things I write about in, I wrote a book on climate change. I don't think that collapse, whether it's social or ecological is gonna save us from ourselves and force us into a more loving, kind, generous, compassionate way of being human.

I think it has to be a choice. And that there is a possible future where the ecosystems one by one collapse, the species go extinct and we live in air conditioned bubbles with hydroponics factories to make our food and a planet that's just one big strip mine and waste dump. Like that's the direction we've been going for a long time. Horrifying.

Yeah, like why isn't that gonna continue? And if it isn't gonna continue, how do we have to change ourselves to not choose that, to choose something else? Well, how? I mean, personally, I would love to know in the sense that whenever I, you know, whatever I watch my habitual activities

and imagine if the entire planet were engaging them, it's pretty, it's a bad situation. And I want to, I do authentically want to not use as much plastic. And, you know, I want the, not some sanctimonious virtue signaling feeling of like I'm doing good, but I like the feeling of when I start getting in harmony with a more ecologically friendly way of living,

but sure as shit, man, before long, I'm just right back where I was. You know, a locust or some termite or some rotten thing, just shitting out plastic into the world. So how, how do you do the change? So I think that it's not so much right now a matter of how much plastic are you using, but where you're putting your life energy

and what you are aligning with. So you could say, yeah, if everybody's using as much plastic as I am and driving as much as I am and living the lifestyle I am, then the planet is doomed. But you could also look at the way you're living your life. What if another way to describe your life is that any opportunity you get to move toward sustainability, care and regeneration,

you take that opportunity, that that is your orientation. If everybody has that orientation, then we're always pushing the envelope, always looking for the next step and supporting, like it's not just about personal decisions. This is kind of what we were talking about at the beginning that nobody really feels at home and fully aligned with this world and the way it's going,

but almost everybody feels trapped and compelled to go along with it. Yeah. Like if you live in most places in America, that you pretty much have to have a car. That's right. It's not that you don't care about the environment, you might care very much, but still drive a car.

So there also, there has to be an element of social, political and economic change here. And to just make it all about individual choices, kind of gives a free pass to the system that provides the context for our choices. Friends, if you wear contact lenses and you find yourself dreading that annual appointment for a new year prescription,

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Hare Krishna. Well, wouldn't a mass shift even a small shift, but among millions or hundreds of thousands of people that was like you're saying, a shift towards rejuvenation, regeneration, naturally be an existential threat to any overarching system that was implicitly destructive?

You know, it depends. I think the collective power of consumers does make a difference. I think we can't just discard that as a lever of change, but there are some areas, so like in our choice of food, for example, like the food that we eat, we can't just discard that as a lever of change,

in our choice of food, for example, like the food movement toward local and organic food, although organic is now severely compromised, but toward local food especially, that's had a huge impact. You know, people can, well, but if we're talking about cars, it's pretty hard to boycott cars.

So in that case, I'm not sure what consumer activism can really do. I think that something else is needed there. Well, I mean, not to belabor the point, I guess what I mean is because the laws and the massive changes that would have to take place, not just on a national level, an international level, do require new laws and new ways of regulating,

new regulations for fossil fuel industries and any industry that's related to climate change. Because those massive super organizations or whatever it is that are all sort of connected and that connection is between people, it seems like there would just be a natural shift in legislation, et cetera, if a large enough number of people heated your advice

and just made the decision like from now on, whenever this opportunity to move towards, I love that you said regeneration, whether it's like in my own relationships, whether it's my job, my business, whatever, I'm gonna take it, passionately take it. That to me, what does seem to be a very simple recipe for some kind of shift, not just in what people buy,

but in what people say and what people wanna watch on TV and the art people create and the music that is made. And you know what I'm saying? The philosophical movements emerging from some shift in society, you know what I'm saying? It would be more than just a consumer-based change. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that this is already happening, what you're describing is already happening.

And that attitudes that once were normal and a consciousness that once was normal is increasingly out of place because of all that you're talking about, because there is a shift of consciousness going on that stands in sharper and sharper contrast to the institutions and systems that we live in. Hence the increasing feeling of alienation

from those systems. Yeah, this is definitely happening. And people still feel, even people in positions of power still feel trapped, they feel powerless. We think that they have power, but the way that, I mean, it really comes down in large part to the global economic monetary system. If you, no matter how much you personally reject

the way that the world is going, you still gotta pay the debts, you know? You still gotta, if you're a third-world country, like you have to meet those debt payments. Otherwise, the international bond markets flee your country and you have an economic crisis. So you gotta keep the timber falling, keep the strip mine open, keep the exports going,

keep the austerity in place, keep the wages low. Otherwise, you're systemically punished, even though there's no single person necessarily that wants to punish you. So we have a, basically we're living in a legacy system that is built on an old consciousness. Wow. And yeah, but the consciousness is changing.

It's like hollowing out from the inside. But the shell is still there. And I think that where my, one place that my hope and optimism come from is that that shell becomes more and more fragile. And when there's a crack in it or a rupture in the fabric of social reality and political reality, nobody is gonna care enough to restore it,

to really try to put pieces back together again. Because we're not bought into it anymore. So I don't think it's, this is where I get a lot of hope. I don't think that the system, as we know it, is really resilient anymore to a major shock. And when that shock comes and things fall apart, many, many people are now in a place where they will say, let's create something new from the wreckage

and not try to recreate what we just, what was just destroyed because, man, we were hoping that that was gonna be destroyed. We were wanting that bust to tip over. We were wanting that school to burn down. Now we're liberated from it. We're not gonna go back anymore. We wanna go forward.

And that's where the prepping comes in, planting the seeds of the future, which people are doing already in pretty much everything that is called alternative or holistic and is still marginal. That can become the new normal. Whoa, that is so cool. I love it.

I love thinking about what that would look like. And I wanna hear your thoughts on that, but I wanna just ask you, do you think it's a little cowardly though? Like in the same way, like waiting for a global collapse to liberate you from a tyrannical, oppressive, archaic system, seems a little like cowardly and lazy.

Yeah, it's not waiting. It's not about waiting. It's about participating. Right. Preparing and participating. A lot of the things that people are doing to prepare the new world also hasten the demise of the old world.

Cool, right. Because this is most clear in the economic realm because our current system only can continue with economic growth. And anytime that you protect a forest from development, anytime you keep oil in the ground, anytime that you restore community and make people less into helpless consumers,

anytime you reconnect people with herbal medicine, for example, instead of expensive high-tech pharmaceuticals, anytime you give people their power back and make them no longer helpless consumers, you are actually hurting economic growth because here is a market that's now off limits. Here's a source of raw materials that's now off limits. Here's a source of consumption and labor

that is now off limits. So the very things that we need to do to protect and heal the world also accelerate the collapse because when there's no room for economic growth, the entire economic system fails. Wow, do you think this involves sort of on the individual level analysis of what our limitations actually are

versus what limitations have been sort of stuck in our heads by corporations who need us to be limited when it comes to certain skill sets to have a maximum profit margin? Hmm. You know, I think corporations mostly exploit and prey upon the de-skilling and the disconnection that are kind of baked into the system.

So basically an alienated oppressed traumatized addiction prone person is gonna be a ripe target for marketing, for branding, for the selling of an identity to that person for the selling of substitutes for the lost social and natural connections that that person would have. We become easy prey and the corporations are mostly exploiting

a need that has been created through long social and historical processes. You know, I think that it's really tempting to try to identify evil somewhere to find the perpetrator, the cause of the problem because then we know what to do. If we can find the bad guy, we know what to do. Superhero movies tell us what to do.

Yes. It's a lot less comfortable to not be able to identify, to locate evil in any person or group of person or institution. Yeah. Then it's like really uncomfortable. I don't know what to do now. My programming of killing or dominating

to solve a problem no longer works. This is part of the transition that we're going through. It's much, much more than just our systems. It's in our basic perceptions about the world. Holy shit. I'm just feeling that feeling. Like when you cut that off that, if you take that away from me,

the ability to create a scapegoat, at least a mental sort of projection or simulation of some villainous Monsanto executive spraying glycophate into like, I don't know, a fawn's mouth or something and some dark brown basement somewhere. I'm just doing the worst thing. And you take away that that

and you pull that away from us. Not you literally, but then me. It's just that feeling of like, you know, now that I've seen how much mothers love their children, it's very anytime I'm with anyone who's I find annoying that I might normally like, be able to at least secretly develop some mild animosity towards, I keep thinking of how much their mom loves them.

And then it just fucks up that aggressive, sort of like alienating whatever you want to call it, fragmenting instinct. But I'm addicted to that. I think lots of us are. We're addicted to it. It's a high, don't you know what I'm saying? It's kind of a rush.

Yeah, totally. And that more than anything else, that's what keeps the status quo operating because everybody's energy is devoted toward finding and destroying the enemy. And therefore their attention is diverted from actually changing the conditions that constantly generate an endless supply of enemies

for each other to fight. That's the mindset of war. This is what we defeat the enemy. Finally, the world would be a better place. Peace. It's like the difference between, you know, figuring out a way to, it's the difference between like getting rid of standing water in your yard,

if you have a mosquito problem and just constantly smacking mosquitoes, right? You need to go to the breeding ground of the actual phenomena, which what, correct me if I'm wrong here, what you're saying that breeding ground is literally the fantasy that we can find evil in the world.

We can find a culprit. And it could even be worse than that because maybe the reason that there's so many mosquitoes is because you tried to spray them with insecticide and the insecticide killed the frogs whose tadpoles ate all the mosquito larva. So the solution to the problem might have actually made the problem worse.

Wow. The reason might not just be standing water. It might be the, you know, die off of amphibians or bats or dragonflies. It could, the mosquito outbreak could just be a symptom of disharmony and disruption. So in other words, the cause might not be one thing. So that's a deeper level.

It's not just finding, you know, a bad guy and killing the bad guy. It's also reducing the complexity of the real world to a chain of linear cause and effect. What is the cause of something? And that's akin to the mindset of war to find the one thing that will solve everything. And when we, yeah, I could go on, but-

Please go on. Well, so then when we understand that the cause of anything is everything, that cause includes ourselves too. And it brings us to the question of how can we participate in the restoration of harmony and balance and homeostasis? And that begins by listening, by observing and by trying to understand all of the interconnections among these millions and billions

of relating beings in the world. Yeah, that's where my brain shuts off because it's too much. It's like that extra mental energy. If I start spreading out too far, it's an anxiety, I mean, it's an anxiety attack. It feel like, you know what I, like, God, my wife was showing me videos of these kids

whose parents got deported and they left them on the sidewalk and that either, I got mad, I was at dinner, I'm like, I don't wanna look at that. And it's such a, I mean, it was, I'm not really revelatory. I know I'm a bit of an emotional coward, but still it's like, man, just that, that, but not just that, all the other kids who are out there

sobbing because of some horrific turn of fate. And then not only that, the animals, so what I'm, is this like, this is the abyss you're asking us to connect to, is what it feels like. That's half of it. Yeah, I've been working with a kind of a mantra from the Tibetan teacher, Chagum Trangpa. He said this many decades ago, he's no longer alive

and was a very controversial figure, but he said a lot of pithy things. One of them was, if you can hold the pain of the whole world in your heart, while never lifting your gaze from the great Eastern sun, then you can make a proper cup of tea. So the proper cup of tea means correct action

and beautiful action. The pain of the world, we know what that is, right? That's the, you know, the children whose pairs have been deported, that's the forests that are being clear cut in Brazil, the gigantic rainforest logs that are on a constant stream of logging trucks. It's the, I mean, there's, you know,

I'm not gonna, I don't need to go through the list. The great Eastern sun though, that is, that's the positive side of what the dominant, narrow worldview leaves out. The dominant narrow worldview leaves out all of those horrors and hypnotizes you with electronic distractions and consumer novelties. But that dominant story of the world

also leaves out all of the mystery, the miracles, the capacity of life to heal that is so far beyond what is conventionally understood. It leaves out the stuff about like the recent disclosure of UFOs, you know? Like the military admits them now after telling us that we were fools for 50 years. Now they actually, oh yeah, actually

there are all these unexplained flying objects and we're anomalous healing, energy healing, sci phenomena, you know, like precognitive dreams, near-death experiences, psychedelic plants, medicines, you know, plant medicines, like this entire universe that has the potential to expand our understanding of what is possible. And in which our despair over the fate of the planet

has no place, where does, you know, if you're feeling hopeless about the planet ever healing, does your hopelessness take into account the most miraculous synchronicity that you ever experienced that shows you that there is some other intelligence threaded through this world? Does it take that into account? So if we wanna be realistic,

if we wanna live in reality and not a delusion, we have to accept all of these data points from the most horrific information about child trafficking rings that reach into the highest levels of government all the way to the healing of stage four cancer and the feats of Qigong masters and the synchronicities that I talked about,

like all of that has to be within our data set for us to be realistic. Do you think that when people throw out the scientific materialistic viewpoint on a lot of those phenomena you mentioned, the idea that while we remember the hits, so we're experiencing all kinds of non-synchronicities all the time and forgetting that,

but the synchronicities that we do experience, they stick out only because there's a background hum of constant sort of mundane chaos around us or when you're talking about spontaneous healing, which is documented, it opens up the door to irrationality, to people desperately buying a crystal or going to see, speaking of child sex trafficking,

John of God, you know? And so do you think that that's a wrong viewpoint because that's what I've been, that's been baked into me, even though I love this many miracles and synchronicities I've experienced, I know they're real, I've experienced them. I always have a shadow of this skeptical scientist combo Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins.

You know what I mean? Some legion of rationalists telling me, no, no, no, no, that is not real. You just wanna puff out some little balloon fantasy to abnegate the reality of your existence on a planet that is dying. Mm-hmm. Yeah, none of those experiences that you've had prove

that there's, that the world is anything more than scientific materialism says it is. I just hesitated there when I used the word scientific materialism because I think, like I'm not actually an anti-materialist. I just think that our understanding of matter is very limited right now. Our meaning, the dominant scientific understanding

of matter, but yeah, like I have the same thing. I started opening up to this when I was in my early 20s. I went to Taiwan, I had this, I sprained my ankle really severely trying to start my motorcycle. I had one of the Kickstarter things and it jammed and I had a really severe sprain. And I took a taxi cab to work, I was working in a bar. Wow.

And by the time I got there, my ankle was like double its normal size and all red. And the bartender's like, oh, we gotta get you a doctor. And I was like, thank God. But the doctor he took me to was a traditional Chinese doctor. He was like, it wasn't this modern clinic. This was in the 1980s, it was this concrete room where there was no separate waiting room,

like you sat around in chairs while the doctor saw the previous patient and he was smoking a cigarette in fact. And I was like, what am I getting into? But I was in so much pain that I could hardly, I couldn't protest basically. And then when it was my turn, he's like, okay, this is gonna hurt.

And he just dug into that swollen ankle with his thumbs. And like for like 10 minutes, like pulling on my toes, you know, like doing all kinds of weird stuff. And this was an injury as severe as I'd had in college running cross country when I sprained my ankle. Like I was on crutches for weeks. Wow. And so he did that.

And then he put this paste on it and wrapped it up. And the next morning it was totally better. Wait, you mean like as in, as though better, I could, I could run. And so my mind, as you were saying, my mind tried to fit that into the scientific story that I was familiar with. Like, well, maybe it wasn't so bad.

Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe it would have gotten better anyway. But none of those explanations like made sense to me. They felt like a vain attempt to preserve a worldview and not the most clear, obvious, resonant explanation of what had happened. But if I was trying to convince Richard Dawkins, you know, he'd be like, oh yeah, you know, you were in a foreign country

and you were panicked and it wasn't really that bad. Right. Okay. So then add to that experience 20 more that whether they were involving Chinese medicine or Qigong or Taoist priests, like every single one of those on its own, I could explain away,

but to explain them all away would have been just an ideology. It would have been to exercise an ideology that nothing could penetrate because I can explain away anything. So, you know, some of the, so like sometimes, I don't know if you've had the experience of, like, yeah, there are these synchronicities that you can kind of explain to yourself,

well, you know, like we have mutual friends in common. So it's not actually that surprising that they would show up at this spot at this time. And, you know, but then sometimes there are things that are just so ridiculously unlikely that yeah, like you could still use the file drawer effect to say, well, you know, we only hear the stories about the amazing things,

but some of them are just so mind blowing that you're like something is going on here. Yeah. And sometimes people don't share those because it's not that those are more shared, it's that they don't share them because people will think I'm crazy. Like, I've had, sometimes I convene circles

where people share their synchronicity stories, where they're miracle stories. And again and again, I hear I've never told this to anybody, but I'm gonna tell you now. Well, you know, I was up in San Francisco, went up to, oh God, I can't remember what it's called. It's a little enclave of scientists up there who are studying these sort of controversial,

at least in scientific communities phenomena. And they were telling me that if you, as a scientist came out publicly with, as someone who really believed this shit or maybe tried to propose a study to examine it, you just get universally rejected. And if you get rejected, you lose funding. And if you lose funding, you're done.

So there is almost like a underground of scientists that have in some way or another rubbed up against what you're talking about. And they just either keep it to themselves or they sort of go off in groups like what you're talking about to try to explore it in a way that isn't going to cause them to be banished from whatever that particular economy

or I guess career path is. But what is this, are you talking about God? Are you talking about faith? Are you talking about the presence of a sentience that shows itself in these miraculous ways? Is it, what is it you're talking about? Well, the way I conceive it is that that intelligence is not limited to human beings.

And that it is present in all things and in the world. And that there is an inconceivable mystery going on here. I don't know if you want to call that God. An intelligence that pervades all things. Yeah. That brings, that pervades the events of our lives. And we look back and we realize that everything is perfect. That's that maybe you could call it God.

Well, I mean, this is that everything is perfect. You know, this is what, this is one of the controversial stories of Neem Krolibaba talking to Ramdas and saying just that. You know, when will you realize everything's perfect? And how Ramdas says that is the really wonderful thing to say in certain occasions, but in other occasions, depending, I mean, if someone, you know,

you would never want to say that to someone who's like going through some tragedy, you sound callous. And boy, if you're looking for a spiritual bypass, slippery slope way to avoid any kind of actual you know, activity that will change the phenomenon of the world. That's a good one right there. Well, it's already perfect.

I don't really need to do anything. Right. So, so part of the perfection is the very real experience that things are horribly wrong. Whoa. That's part of the perfection that inspires us and compels us to take the actions that bring healing about. If it weren't for that, then it wouldn't be perfect.

So the imperfection is part of the perfection and perfect is, you know, again, a loaded term. Sure. Really what I'm saying is that there is an emerging order. There's a direction to the evolution of this cosmos. And this is something that I didn't come to initially through some kind of spiritual revelation. I came to it through chaos theory

and nonlinear dynamics, cybernetics, where I, again, in my early 20s, I became aware of the phenomenon of order out of chaos that any sufficiently complex system, it doesn't just dissolve into entropy, but it, if it's nonlinear and has a constant flux of energy and information through it, it evolves toward greater and greater complexity.

May I stop you there? I'm so glad you're bringing this up because the other day I landed on chaos theory and was reading it, trying to understand it. And I was fascinated with the description of chaos and as being a thing within which, like what you're saying, these patterns emerge, but also something along the lines of,

what's the word for it? Spontaneous organization. And I thought, that is the most, that's the craziest shit I've ever heard. And please correct me, I'm guessing I'm wrong here. When I was at the University of Bro Science, we didn't study chaos theory at that time. We were studying whether or not beer before liquor

makes you sicker. But I'm trying to, is this the same thing as saying, if you were to have a bunch of glass or if you were to, at some point, if it were swirling about in some energetic vortex and maybe you could control time and speed up time by a certain amount, infinities, that the window would like spontaneously

or the glass would go back into being a window or a bottle or- No, I'm not talking about that. I know what you're talking about. Like this is all this physics and philosophy about the arrow of time and entropy and stuff. Yes. But like glass shattering is not a non-linear system

with feedback. That's one of the things that can be quite well described linearly. I'm talking about, well, for example, life. I'm talking about, yeah, I'm talking about complexity. I'm talking about ecology. It's to go back to the mosquitoes and the tadpoles and the bats.

You change one thing and everything changes. You have non-linear effects. You might think that if you kill the frogs, the mosquitoes will be better off. You'll have more mosquitoes and you might for a while. But eventually you might end up disturbing the ecosystem so much that there's no longer any prey

for the mosquitoes to feed on and the mosquito population collapses even to below what it was before. I mean, this happens in the oceans where with industrial whaling, the whales eat krill. So you'd think that there'd be more krill if you kill the whales.

Yay, no more whales eating us. But actually what happens is that because the whales aren't transporting nutrients and stirring up deeper water and bringing nutrients up from the depths, the plankton numbers drop because the plankton need that nutrition. And the krill that eat the plankton

or who are a couple steps up the food chain from the plankton, their numbers decline too. So actually there's 25% of the krill that there used to be before industrial whaling. Wow. That's an example of non-linearity. Gotcha. Right, so a more and more complex system evolves over time.

It starts out with just maybe a few symbiotic organisms and like this planet has become more and more complex over time. Not less and less complex as entropy takes over. It's making me think of when people put sand on those acoustic plates and then play tones underneath the sand and the sand forms amazing patterns

based on specific tonalities. You're sort of seeing the life. Is chaos the sand in this case and the intelligence that we discussed earlier? Is that like the tone? And that we're sort of seeing the footprints of some miraculous sentience in the case? I think it's even more mysterious than that.

Like this is again, our conditioned minds want to find if there's order and design in an organization, we want to find some external entity that is imprinting that onto matter. Yes. Rather than opening to the mind-boggling idea that matter itself has order built into it,

that it is itself intelligent, that there's nothing inducing that organization to happen. But it is simply a property of reality. It's simply a property of any system that has certain parameters built into it that organization happens without an external organizer. That the world is alive. Really what we're saying is that the world is alive.

But not just the world, right? I mean, you're saying the whole universe is alive. The whole universe, yeah. And so a person, if you ever scan yourself or ask yourself, wait, what is my intelligence? Or what is my sentience? Or what is my consciousness? Which is its own rabbit hole,

different podcasts altogether. But when you do experience that thing, that sort of self recognizing aspect of beingness, is that thing you're experiencing the thing that is inside all things? Is that the self organizing, the manifestation of the self organizing principle in the human psyche as awareness of self?

I'm not even sure where to begin with that. I don't think that the essence is awareness of self. I think that what we call awareness of self is an emergent properties. It is like a landmark in a new stage of complexity. And then it becomes the takeoff point for even further advances in complexity, which is happening now on a global level.

As a collective mind emerges. Is there a limit to complexity? No. There's no limit. The grand project you might say that we're participating in is that of the universe becoming more and more alive. Wow. Wow.

So it's like a precursor God state. Like, are we in some embryonic God growing chamber? Is it a fetal God that we're in? Are we in the, and if that's the case, and where I always get, which I've thought about this in maybe some different ways. But this is where I get nervous, because I think, yeah, this is where McKenna talked about this.

The melting down of the caterpillar and the cocoon and the emerging butterfly. And then within that is this damn easy way to then say, okay, the ice caps are melting. Well, that's just a previous appendage on the organism that was the previous phase of the life that is planet Earth. Well, yeah. I mean, talking about the ice caps and the global ecology,

really we're facing a choice of whether we want collectively to participate in the increase of life in the world coming more alive, or do we want to continue on the path of dominating the rest of life and reducing the livingness of this planet? That's what industrial civilization has been doing. We've been making the world less alive. Vast swaths of the American Midwest now have dead soil.

Living soil is as complicated or more complicated than brain tissue. With all the mycelial networks and the bacteria and the worms and the insects. I mean, it's like, it's a living being, incredibly complicated living being. And it's been reduced to dirt over millions of acres. And that's just one example of,

we can talk about species extinction and so forth. So right now, we are facing a choice, or at least I want us to face the choice. I want to make an unconscious choice conscious. This is what a lot of my work is right now. Do we want to serve a living planet or a dead planet? It's not about human survival. It's not about can we survive or sustainability.

It's about what world do we want to sustain? What world do we want to create? Do we want to add our gifts to the coming alive of the world and of the universe? Or do we want to fight that and engage in endless war against life? That's the big picture as I see it. Wow.

One last question for you. With the sort of, when we experience the miracle, or whether our ankle gets healed, we have some direct contact with maybe an awakened being or telepathy or whatever it may be. What, and also similarly, when we make contact with our own potential,

some people could be incredible writers or musicians or actors or painters or architects or healers. And they run into that potential and then turn their back on it and run in the other direction. It reminds me of the same thing. Why is there internal blocks in us that seem to make it a terrifying decision

to commit to being part of the outflow of life and the breath of whatever it may be that is producing all this beautiful life within the complexity? There's a lot of obstacles that are posed by our culture and by the ideology of separation, the ideology of a dead material universe and also the trauma that people have experienced

growing up in this society. I'm not talking just about overt, child abuse kind of trauma, but also the trauma that we referenced at the beginning of being bust off to school, where you're not allowed outside, where you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom, we have to sit there doing worksheets

where you get graded on your performance, where you're age segregated. And there you are, a little kid sitting there and on some level thinking, this can't be right, but all of the authorities that you are biologically programmed to trust and to look to to explain the world, they're all saying that this is proper

and this is like, that's a kind of a trauma. Yeah, just having that experience. So all of these traumas and the environment, the social, physical, economic environment, I mean, the economic environment is part of it. You know, if you really stand in your call to serve the coming alive of the world, the healing of life, the regeneration of life,

the expansion of life, maybe you're not gonna find a job. I mean, that's not what's rewarded. What's rewarded in the current situation and I'm exaggerating here somewhat. I mean, there's certainly exceptions to this, but generally speaking, what's rewarded is your participation in the world destroying machine. So the fear is quite rational.

It does take some courage to align with a different principle rather than survival and self-interest. To serve life is to align with the principle of the gift, to understand that I am here to serve life, to serve this unfolding intelligence in the universe on this planet, to stand in that is a departure from what we've been programmed to be. So yeah, and then the question arises,

where does the courage come from to make this choice? And I would just say that it's one place that it comes from is from community, to have people around you who can see the truth inside of you, that no matter how cynical you've become, no matter how traumatized, there is still a living spark inside of you that wants to burst into a passionate flame

in service to the life and beauty of this planet. However that manifests, it doesn't have to be about forests and soil, it could be about human life, social healing, personal healing, relational healing. I mean, anything that is in service to life is a possible expression of your reason for being here. Wow.

It's so beautiful and you're so good at saying it in a very simple, easily digestible way. I really do appreciate your time and now my mind is filled with all kinds of ideas that I think we might have to do a part three of this, Mr. Eisenstein, because if you're into it, only because every time we do it, I don't know, this is a really beautiful place,

I think, to leave things sitting in people's minds because what you did is you just produced this wonderful question, which is how can I, what would be the first thing I did if I were to walk down that path? Like right now, what would be the first thing I did? And every single thing I could think of, there is an element of courage involved in it.

I'm not talking about throwing something in a recycling bin, I'm saying like, reaching out to your neighbors and weird, crazy. Yeah, maybe that's it. And I would say that the first step is different for everybody, but we could just leave off for now with simply affirming that that is inside of you, that it is an unquenchable spark that you are here

every single person is born with a desire to be in service to the aliveness of the world. Man, thank you so much for your time, Charles. I know that you have a class happening right now, is that what it is on your website? You're offering a course? Oh yeah, actually we touched on some of the themes in this talk here.

It's called Metaphysics and Mystery. And they just go to what CharlesEisenstein.com and sign up? Dot, I think it's dot org. Dot org. Not really dot org, yeah. The links. It's on there. The links will be at dunkatresl.com.

Is there anything else you'd like to announce or tell people about? Not really, I mean, I think if people feel some resonance with this, they might go look up my books and stuff like that, but they'll probably do that anyway without me announcing it. We'd rather just trust people to act as they see fit.

Beautiful, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Hare Krishna. Yep, thanks Duncan. Thanks for listening everybody. Much thanks to CharlesEisenstein for appearing on the DTFH. If you want to find him, all the links will be at dunkatresl.com.

Big thank you to Simple Contacts and Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. And much thanks to you for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe. And most importantly, don't forget to become part of the regenerative, complexifying, harmonious outflow of life. That is who we are.

Thanks again, Charles. You blew my mind today. I'll see you guys next time. Until then, Hare Krishna. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions,

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