The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.

When you understand that everything happening in the world mirrors something that's happening in yourself, then you can work on the self by working on the external manifestation of that thing in the world. And in fact, there may be no other way. You can sit in meditation for a long time and be blind to huge wounds in yourself, and it's only when you're engaging with the world that the wounds become visible, externalized.

The force of love, the force of reunion is unstoppable.

We have to believe in a more beautiful world in order to serve it.

You can't have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other.

Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus.

You could ask: Why are people attracted to narratives that justify the terrible things that we're doing to the planet? Why are people attracted to narratives of control and fear and hunting down the terrorists, and this uncaring attitude toward nature? These come from what I call the perceptions of separation and the experience of separation, the experience of alienation, the experience of scarcity and anxiety and competition, and a world in which everybody is out for themselves and nobody cares.