This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:Subscribe on Patreon to watch the uncut interview:https://www.patreon.com/posts/20618842Our New, Better Life?https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/7061-2/Why I Am Afraid of Global Coolinghttps://charleseisenstein.net/essays/why-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling/Discussed:What inspired Charles’ thorough history and critique of civilization, The Ascent of Humanity, and how it differs from “anti-civilization” texts.The independent convergent evolutions of civilization in Mesopotamia, China, India, and several other places, pointing to the inevitability and directionality of what we call “progress.”What new stories emerge at the intersection of the timeless attractors toward a whole and healthy, thriving biodiverse world of human inter-beings, and a fragmented post-ecocidal VR fully artificial landscape?When is it useful to think of humans as part of nature and when is it useful to think of humans as distinct from nature?“Participation begins with listening. And that listening is motivated by accepting that there’s something to listen TO. That there’s something that wants to happen. What wants to happen and how can we participate in that? How can we exercise our gifts in service to this larger thing?”What cultural appropriation gets wrong in its attempts to retrieve and revive indigenous rites (“It’s not the content of the rituals; it’s the spirit of the rituals.”)Money as a ritual: “One of the reasons money comes so easily to us is that it’s a kind of ritual. The human mind…ritual is its territory.”“Law, Medicine, Money, and Technology: those are the most powerful realms of ritual that we have.”Operating on a story that believes the world to be dead leads to a world that is, in fact, dead – whether or not it actually was dead in the first place. Treating nature as a resource rather than as a community of minded cohabitants and potential collaborators is a self-fulfilling prophecy and an act of self-sabotage.Charles’ critique of the New Age technologies of manifestation as oblivious of where the intention or vision comes from in the first place, how we’re enfolded into our environments……and how paradoxically similar that critique is to the disenchanting philosophies described by people like Yuval Harari and Timothy Morton, who make the case that it’s equally the case that the world is alive, or that humans are basically just machines. Or Erik Davis’ “re-animism,” in which we return to a pre-modern sense of a sentient environment through our encounter with AI-suffused devices.How the scientific quest for control over a purely mechanical cosmos pushed us all the way around into some truly weird revelations about the indeterminate, irreproducible, and contingent workings of our mysterious universe.Why machines don’t provide a sufficient metaphor for understanding consciousness, and certainly not for reproducing it.Is trying to fit the complexity of the world into a linear narrative structure the problem at the root of all this? Is it a form of violenc