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In his wisdom, the author doesn't claim to be right, he claims only to be pointing in the direction of an understanding that can free us from the painful experiences of separation, lack, and entity that plague us.
Of course, many of us have presaged this development as sense and meaning, story and structure, have broken down in our own lives. As you’ll see from this interview, there are some areas of disagreement but I have enjoyed finding such a bright light who seems to have come to similar conclusions as I have in my own work, from the ontology of identity to aesthetics to fundamental physics to evolutionary theory to climate change policy, forest policy, and egalitarian political movements. 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. His climate change book revisits many of the themes discussed in the first two books just mentioned, but is (obviously) focused on the climate crisis. One very concrete way this plays out is in the mania for safety that I first noticed in the wave of litigiousness in the 1980s, that accelerated after 9/11 into a national obsession, and then reached hysterical proportions in the Covid era.And we do see in extraordinary circumstances, like the COVID at 19 situation, we do see people cooperating.
The dream is that if we could only control every atom in the world, in our own bodies and brains, etc. Charles argues that the negative direction that this planet and our species is heading can be traced back to one root cause: the stories that we live by that we use to answer the questions "why am I here?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. He presents data in dozens of categories showing that the world is far better off in terms of declining violence, longer lifespans, better standard of living, access to health care, declining child death and death of mothers during birth, etc. Also, whatever can be measured may also be controlled; we have subsumed it within our own system of numbers and categories; we have domesticated it. As I mentioned earlier, the time to do is when you know what to do when we don’t know what to do and act anyway, you’re probably acting out of habit.
Yes, I am still fluent in Mandarin, although I seldom have opportunity to speak and have forgotten a lot in the 25 years since I lived there. This inspirational and thought-provoking book serves as an empowering antidote to the cynicism, frustration, paralysis, and overwhelm so many of us are feeling, replacing it with a grounding reminder of what’s true: we are all connected, and our small, personal choices bear unsuspected transformational power. And then you start looking forward to, so this is a different kind of change, and it’s not a substitute for then eventually taking action. So this is a pattern of response that can achieve certain results, like through technologies of control. You describe in your work how you’ve had a feeling of discontent and of fundamental wrongness with modern society from an early age.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.
Is it practical to suggest that performing mundane acts like laundry, yard work, or changing diapers should be viewed as sacred tasks, as ways of creating a more beautiful world, as you suggest in your work? And the only thing that you can take with you, the only thing that outlives you is what you’ve put into the world, not your money, not your status, not your possessions. I committed to this deep dive through Charles’ ideas because I sensed as I swam deeper not only a fellow traveler (I’ve also been on a long and eclectic thirty-year journey of discovery to “figure it all out”) but also a guide for better understanding of the broad and sometimes incomprehensible sweep of human and pre-human history.
Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation. The bubble you know, we had, we had a formula that was implicitly given to us of how to live life, where you get good grades in school and you are responsible and you get into a good university and you build up your resume and you launch on a professional career and you eventually get married. And here you have this view of the world that’s incredibly compelling that says we are all interconnected, that that everything, you know, in fact, I feel one of the things I wrote this morning when I woke up and I was thinking about this interview is I feel like you, Charles are one part of me saying things that are part of me says that like, there’s even that interconnectedness, that I, that I, I see this world really, really clearly. So this, this question itself might defy the whole premise that you’re leading from, but so what do we do?
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