The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible Quotes

“Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“The more beautiful world my heart knows is possible is a world with a lot more pleasure: a lot more touch, a lot more lovemaking, a lot more hugging, a lot more deep gazing into each other’s eyes, a lot more fresh-ground tortillas and just-harvested tomatoes still warm from the sun, a lot more singing, a lot more dancing, a lot more timelessness, a lot more beauty in the built environment, a lot more pristine views, a lot more water fresh from the spring. Have you ever tasted real water, springing from the earth after a twenty-year journey through the mountain? None of these pleasures is very far away. None requires any new inventions, nor the subservience of the many to the few. Yet our society is destitute of them all. Our wealth, so-called, is a veil for our poverty, a substitute for what is missing. Because it cannot meet most of our true needs, it is an addictive substitute. No amount can ever be enough. Many of us already see through the superficial substitute pleasures we are offered. They are boring to us, or even revolting. We needn’t sacrifice pleasure to reject them. We need only sacrifice the habit, deeply ingrained, of choosing a lesser pleasure over a greater. Where does this habit come from? It is an essential strand of the world of separation, because most of the tasks that we must do to keep the world-devouring machine operating do not feel very good at all. To keep doing them, we must be trained to deny pleasure.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“You can’t just do whatever you feel like.” “You can’t just do anything you want.” “You have to learn self-restraint.” “You’re only interested in gratifying your desires.” “You don’t care about anything but your own pleasure.” Can you hear the judgmentality in these admonitions? Can you see how they reproduce the mentality of domination that runs our civilization? Goodness comes through conquest. Health comes through conquering bacteria. Agriculture is improved by eliminating pests. Society is made safe by winning the war on crime. On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the “fight” against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet. Wouldn’t you like to be part of a different kind of revolution?”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“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.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“The things we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“These include the need to express one’s gifts and do meaningful work, the need to love and be loved, the need to be truly seen and heard, and to see and hear other people, the need for connection to nature, the need to play, explore, and have adventures, the need for emotional intimacy, the need to serve something larger than oneself, and the need sometimes to do absolutely nothing and just be.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“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.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.

Fear it or not, it is happening already.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“Nonetheless, I (like many others) felt a wrongness in the world, a wrongness that seeped through the cracks of my privileged, insulated childhood. I never fully accepted what I had been offered as normal. Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don’t have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn’t a global 911 to call.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“Before they are able to enter a new story, most people—and probably most societies as well—must first navigate the passage out of the old. In between the old and the new there is an empty space. It is a time when the lessons and learnings of the old story are integrated. Only when that work has been done is the old story really complete. Then, there is nothing, the pregnant emptiness from which all being arises. Returning to essence, we regain the ability to act from essence. Returning to the space between stories, we can choose from freedom and not from habit.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void; it comes from inaction. When we see it, we realize it was right in front of us all along. It is never far away; yet at the same time it is in a different universe—a different Story of the World.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“To conduct a revolution of love, we must reconnect with the reality of our system and its victims. When we tear away the ideologies, the labels, and the rationalizations, we show ourselves the truth of what we are doing, and conscience awakens. Bearing witness, then, is not a mere tactic; it is indispensable in a revolution of love. If love is the expansion of self to include another, then whatever reveals our connections has the potential to foster love. You cannot love what you do not know.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“The power of attention is much greater than the force of self-restraint.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“I am saying that there is a time to do, and a time not to do, and that when we are slave to the habit of doing we are unable to distinguish between them.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“I would like to propose that the reason our actions have been so manifestly unsuccessful in steering the world away from its present collision course is that we have not, generally speaking, been basing them on any true understanding.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“If we want to reach them, our articulation of the problem has to avoid ascribing personal evil to them, while also being uncompromising in describing the dynamics of the problem. I cannot offer a formula for how to do this. The right words and strategies arise naturally from compassion: from the understanding that the bankers or whoever do as I would do, were I in their shoes. In other words, compassionate—and effective—words arise from a deeply felt realization of our common humanity. And this is possible only to the extent to which we have applied the same to ourselves. Truly, to be an effective activist requires an equivalent inner activism.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“What is power, after all? Every one of the power elite’s overwhelming advantages—military forces, surveillance systems, crowd control technology, control over the media, and nearly all the money in the world—depends on having people obeying orders and executing an assigned role. This obedience is a matter of shared ideologies, institutional culture, and the legitimacy of the systems in which we play roles. Legitimacy is a matter of collective perception, and we have the power to change people’s perceptions.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“Utopia is a collective shift of perception away. Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“We have to appeal to what moves us: the love of our beautiful planet.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible