The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism Book 2)

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A tribeswoman asked, “How do you know this will work? Are you sure our shaman’s powers are great enough to send us on such a journey?” In between the old and the new there is an empty space. It is a time when the lessons and learnings of the old story are integrated. Only when that work has been done is the old story really complete. Then, there is nothing, the pregnant emptiness from which all being arises. Returning to essence, we regain the ability to act from essence. Returning to the space between stories, we can choose from freedom and not from habit.” As we walk, the destination bobs in and out of view. Ascending a hill—there it is! Somehow my wanderings have taken me closer. Descending into a vale, feeling lost, searching for the right direction, I come to doubt that the destination I saw really exists. At those moments I meet another traveler. “Yes,” he says, “I have seen it too.” We share what we have learned about how to walk the invisible path. As more of us enter this territory, these meetings happen more frequently, and together we find our way toward the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Like the crisis, the transition we face goes all the way to the bottom. Internally, it is nothing less than a transformation in the experience of being alive. Externally, it is nothing less than a transformation of humanity’s role on planet Earth.

Loving across enemy lines (within our own inner world or with others) is the most courageous and powerful medicine. Eisenstein’s theory is this new story holds the answers and solutions to the most significant challenges of our time. It is an interesting and also kind of strange experience to be reading this book while also reading Yuval Harari's Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow. Then there’s a theme about how we live our lives in relation to each other. I’ve encountered a deep yearning for closer or more meaningful relationships with others. People talk about getting to know their neighbours, living in communities where they know other people well, spending more time with loved ones. Often this is accompanied by a desire to give – to support friends when they are in need, to visit the vulnerable, to help out when needed. To find a place of value, contribution, connection, love.Paradoxically, the path to achieve the impossible consists of many practical steps, each of them possible.” It is no small thing. Our shaman will put you into a deep, deep trance, so complete that you will forget who you are. You will live a human life, and in the beginning you will completely forget your origins. You will forget even our language and your own true name. You will be separated from the wonder and beauty of our world, and from the love that bathes us all. You will miss it deeply, yet you will be unable to name what you are missing. You will remember the love and beauty that we know to be normal only as a longing in your heart. Your memory will take the form of an intuitive knowledge, as you plunge into the painfully marred Earth, that a more beautiful world is possible. The book doesn’t provide a roadmap for arriving at a more beautiful world (it’s not a “self-help” book). Instead, it offers new ways of looking at the world so that its inherent beauty becomes clear. The fundamental precept of the new story is that we are inseparate from the universe, and our being partakes in the being of everyone and everything else.” Over the past couple of years I have run workshops to explore this topic, sometimes calling them “ The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible” after the book by Charles Eisenstein. In these workshops we imagine the world after capitalism, the world that more accurately reflects the deepest yearning of the human soul.

What is the purpose of life? There is no purpose, only cause. The universe is at bottom blind and dead. Thought is but an electrochemical impulse; love but a hormonal cascade that rewires our brains. The only purpose of life (other than what we manufacture ourselves) is simply to live, to survive and reproduce, to maximize rational self-interest. Since we are fundamentally separate from each other, my self-interest is very likely at the expense of your self-interest. Everything that is not-self is at best indifferent to our well-being, at worst hostile. Life made sense. If you worked hard you could get good grades, get into a good college, go to grad school or follow some other professional path, and you would be happy. With a few unfortunate exceptions, you would be successful if you obeyed the rules of our society: if you followed the latest medical advice, kept informed by reading the New York Times, got a good education, obeyed the law, made prudent investments, and stayed away from Bad Things like drugs. Sure there were problems, but the scientists and experts were working hard to fix them. Soon a new medical advance, a new law, a new educational technique, would propel the onward improvement of life. My childhood perceptions were part of a narrative I call the Story of the People, in which humanity was destined to create a perfect world through science, reason, and technology: to conquer nature, transcend our animal origins, and engineer a rational society. It came into my life at the perfect time when I was reconfiguring my worldview. I was (and still am) in what Eisenstein calls “the space between stories”. Once upon a time a great tribe of people lived in a world far away from ours. Whether far away in space, or in time, or even outside of time, we do not know. They lived in a state of enchantment and joy that few of us today dare to believe could exist, except in those exceptional peak experiences when we glimpse the true potential of life and mind. The most direct way to disrupt the Story of Separation at its foundation is to give someone an experience of nonseparation. An act of generosity, forgiveness, attention, truth, or unconditional acceptance offers a counterexample to the worldview of separation.”Whether invisible or not, acts of great faith, acts that come from a stance deep in the territory of reunion, send powerful ripples out through the fabric of causality. One way or another, perhaps via pathways we are unaware of, they surface in the visible world.”