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.

A woman recently told me a story about her descent into chronic fatigue. She was sleeping sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and feeling more tired when she woke up than when she went to bed. She really wanted to go to a workshop and she went anyway. And when she was there, she felt much less tired. So she decided, "Maybe if I continue to follow what I really want to do at all times, I will feel less tired." This was her spiritual practice - - to only do the things that she wanted to, and to not make choices based on anything else. That is an embracing of pleasure, of joy, of good feelings.

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.

It is the cry of the separate self, ‘What about me?’ As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn’t matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.

Joint consumption doesn't create intimacy.

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

Sometimes people will have a heart attack or some devastating personal loss, and after that, their political views change completely, and their behavior changes completely. It's not because somebody persuaded them to look at the graph on CO2 and temperature, and they finally saw the evidence and were persuaded. Something else changed that allowed them to see and to hear. What is that something else? How can we cultivate that in people without them having to go through a heart attack? The interpersonal things we do change the substructure of our systems. They are political.