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

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When I read Charles Eisenstein I felt as if I had just put on an extraordinarily clear, lucid, morally honest set of glasses. I see my outer and inner worlds in penetrating detail. He isn’t just describing a possible world. He is helping us find our way to it.”

That is the self of interbeing. Divested of “situation,” your attention is my attention is everyone’s attention. We are the same being looking out at the world through different eyes. And these “eyes,” these vantage points, are each unique. As the comedian Swami Beyondananda puts it, “You are a totally unique being—just like everybody else!” 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. If any of the excerpts below resonate with you, I highly recommend reading the book for yourself. This short video serves as an unofficial trailer for the bookWho are you? You are a separate individual among other separate individuals in a universe that is separate from you as well.” 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. I hope you enjoyed this piece sharing what built some of the foundation for how I show up to the world. How could your sacred union be a representation of the more beautiful sacred unions our hearts know is possible? The unions we envision for the future. This is a book summary of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein.

Who are you? It is not an objective question, which story and which self is the real you. It isn’t only that no accumulation of evidence will answer it; it is that there is no objective fact of the matter. There is, however, what is true. Can you sense that the truth of who you are is changing? Do you know that less and less are you the self of Separation? What, therefore, is sacred? Since the blind, ruthless pursuit of self-interest is antisocial, it is important to overcome our biological programming and pursue “higher things.” A holy person doesn’t succumb to the desires of the flesh. He or she takes the path of self-denial, of discipline, ascending into the realm of spirit or, in the secular version of this quest, into the realm of reason and the mind, principles and ethics. For the religious, to be sacred is to be otherworldly; the soul is separate from the body, and God lives high above the earth. Despite their superficial opposition, science and religion have agreed: the sacred is not of this world. The world as we know it is built on a story. To be a change agent is, first, to disrupt the existing Story of the World, and second, to tell a new Story of the World so that those entering the space between stories have a place to go.” The new Story of the People, then, is a Story of Interbeing, of reunion. In its personal expression, it proclaims our deep interdependency on other beings, not only for the sake of surviving but also even to exist. It knows that my being is more for your being.”

The Old Story (Separation)

The title alone shifted something in me. It sparked a deep remembering in my soul. That yes…. there is a more beautiful world that my mind can’t imagine… but that my heart knows to be true. Ultimately, unless one has stepped at least partway into the Story of Interbeing, it will not only be impossible to change isolated derivative beliefs, it will also be impossible to create anything but the image of Separation in the world.” A tribesman asked, “Is there a danger we will become lost in that world, and never wake up from the shamanic trance? Is there a danger that the despair, the cynicism, the pain of separation will be so great that it will extinguish the spark of hope, the spark of our true selves and origin, and that we will be separated from our beloved ones forever?” If I remember correctly I first heard of Charles Eisenstein when stumbling upon an quite extensive article he wrote about the COVID-19 pandemic. In it I found his perspective very refreshing and somehow different (but not in a conspiracy theory way 😄). So I looked up some of his books and found that this one attracted me most, judging only by the title. Admittedly, it sounds a bit utopic, but hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing, right?

The second concept (which seems so obvious now but wasn’t at the time) were the words ‘Love Across Enemy Lines’, ‘Love Anyway’ and ‘You can’t fight hate with hate.’One day the elders of the tribe called a meeting. They gathered around, and one of them spoke very solemnly. “My friends,” she said, “there is a world that needs our help. It is called Earth, and its fate hangs in the balance. Its humans have reached a critical point in their collective birthing, the same point our own planet was at one million years ago, and they will be stillborn without our help. Who would like to volunteer for a mission to this time and place, and render service to humanity?” 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. Side note - of course LOVE can look like many different things, it doesn’t mean rolling over / being submissive.) We are following an invisible path, learning from each other how to follow it. As we do that, and as we learn to see its subtle markings, the path becomes visible. Absent a map, and in the very early stages of a new story, we can only follow our intuition at each choice point, guided by our heart-compass, not knowing how our turnings will add up to the destination.” Please don’t think that you “have to write a book about it” for your experiences to have a large effect. The book may come, the peacebuilding project documentary might come, but usually there must first be a latency, a time of doing something for its own sake, a time of inward focus on the goal and not the “meta” goal.”