Charles Eisenstein quotes:

Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.

The regime of control tightens inexorably in our schools, many of which now have video cameras, police patrols, chain-link fences, random unannounced locker searches, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, networks of informants, undercover police posing as students, and a comprehensive system of passes so that there is a record of each student's authorized whereabouts at all times. What a perfect preparation for life in a prison or a totalitarian society!

Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.

When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.

Even the most thorough change happens once choice at a time

Trust your intuition and be guided by love.

The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable.

No one's ever completely broken. It's just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.

The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.

We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.

The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.

The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.

One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?

We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption - anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.

Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

Are the problems of the world caused by bad people who need to be crushed? Or do people do bad things when they are in a certain situation? If it is the latter, then we can go around crushing the villains for another thousand years and nothing will change.

We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.

I think most kids have a sense that it's not supposed to be this way. You're not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don't have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love.

For a machine to run smoothly and predictably, its parts must be standard and hence replaceable, features which contribute, respectively, to modern depersonalization and anxiety.

Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%.

When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.

True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary.

We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overly large houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness; media surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In the ubiquitous world of money, we hunger for all that is intimate, personal and unique.

An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me, too.

You can't have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other.

How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.

How do we change the world? Change the story.

Each person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.

More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our cultureâ??s relationship to nature.

A revolution that leaves our conceptualization of self and world intact cannot bring other than temporary, superficial change. Only a much deeper revolution, a reconceiving of who we are, can reverse the crises of our age.

Community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors for anything. You can just pay someone to do it.

The cynic thinks that he is being practical and that the hopeful person is not. It is actually the other way around. Cynicism is paralyzing, while the naïve person tries what the cynic says is impossible and sometimes succeeds.

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.

Ultimately, work on self is inseperable from work in the world. Each mirrors the other; each is a vehicle for the other. When we change ourselves, our values and actions change as well. When we do work in the world, internal issues arise that we must face or be rendered ineffective.

What you're looking for, you won't find. But only by looking for it can it find you.

There is a vast territory between what we're trying to leave behind, and where we want to go - and we don't have any maps for that territory.

When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small scale, is therefore a political act.

In a gift economy, the more you give, the richer you are.

The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it.

Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun.

Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus.

Non-inflationary economic growth - an increase in the production of goods and services - is structurally necessary for the current money system to exist. That is what drives the relentless conversion of life into money.

Enlightenment is a group activity.

The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money.

The primary method by which governments increase their control is by creating fear.

We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.

It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.Fear it or not, it is happening already.

Real change doesn't come without crisis. Childbirth doesn't come without crisis. I think that's happening with humanity now. Our growth has generated multiple crises...and these are the contractions that are propelling us into a new world, whether we like it or not, but I think we're going to like it.

Property is, after all, a social convention, an agreement about someone's exclusive right to use a thing in specified ways. However, we seem to have forgotten this. We seem to think that property belongs to us in some essential way, that it is of us. We seem to think that our property is part of ourselves, and that by owning it we therefore make ourselves more, larger, greater.

A miracle is an invitation into a new story.