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.

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.

Trust your intuition and be guided by love.

I think people become environmentalists through experiences of beauty and grief. There was that pond that you visited when you were a child, and there were frogs and turtles. You go back there and it's dead now. The forest you went to, now there are bulldozers, now it's a strip mall. These experiences of beauty followed by grief affect us more than learning that CO2 levels are now 400 parts per million.

Narratives that were taken for granted when I was a kid are still there, but they don't have the same depth and fervor anymore. Even the makers of the propaganda don't fully believe the propaganda. The surface structures are more frozen than they ever were, but the core is hollowing out, and it's becoming very fragile. People don't believe in the system anymore. But they're still going along with it because, one, they don't know what else is possible, they don't even know anything else is possible. Secondly, everybody else is doing it. So they go through the motions.

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.

You could conceive spirituality as the study of the immeasurable, of the qualitative. But that's very different from the way we typically use the word. A spiritual person, in the popular conception, is somebody who's kind of aloof from the world, introspective, meditating, communing with non-material beings. That's the spiritual realm, and we elevate it above the material realm. What's more worthy, what's more admirable? Who's the one who has done this hard work on the self, and has done a lot of "practice"? That's the spiritual person.