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%.
Charles EisensteinWe have to create conditions where people feel safe to feel and to care. That goes against a lot of our programming about how to make something change in the world. Sometimes you can pressure people into changing, you can force them, but the powers-that-be have more force than we do. I don't think we're going to win in a contest of force. I think we need to induce a change of heart. The narrative of "us versus them" is ultimately part of the problem. Traditional activism, which is about overcoming the latest bad guy, isn't deep enough. It just brings us another version of the same.
Charles EisensteinUltimately, 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.
Charles EisensteinEach person you interact with, is an entire universe unto themselves, a Divine Being, unspeakabley precious.
Charles EisensteinSometimes 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.
Charles Eisenstein