We are all verbs.  Not a one of us a noun. Not one a fixed identity.   Thank you Bucky, for articulating something so critical, so crucial,  so clearly.  The liberating power of this deep understanding is a game changer.

Somewhere a few centuries back, we developed the fragmented, Newtonian worldview that haunts us still.  With help from the new power of the zero, we accelerated our reduction of the world to facts and figures, cleaving it apart with a sword of Hubris. .  Our very perception shifted, as we fragmented ourselves, specialized ourselves, as we created a binary world of black and white, of us and them, of either/or.  Nature and spirit a distant other. There was security in this view.  A false sense of security.

Look up! The skyscrapers are falling. Rapid climate change, economic collapse,  ecological collapse, political instability and technological escalation: the only thing we can be sure about is radical indeterminacy.   In the face of this acceleration,  we  have choices to make.  We can freeze in fear, becoming paralyzed. Static. Resistant. Frozen. We can buy stuff or watch stuff or eat stuff, anything to avoid feeling. There’s too much pain out there.

Or we can rise onto our surfboards and surf the power of this wave ~ particle ~ wave of change.  This Tsunami of transformation. We can dive into the frothing waters with joy, celebration and Love, following the currents, not fighting, not resisting, yet not succumbing ~ transforming poison into pearls.

Buckminister Fuller’s gravestone reads, “call me Trimtab.” The Trimtab is the tiny rudder that trims the direction of great ships. We are not trying to shift the steel prow of the oil tanker that is industrial growth civilization, which is clearly on a collision course with limits, heading for the next spill. The next crash. The next dead end. Instead, we are becoming the collective Trimtab for spaceship Earth. We are learning to meet the raging tides of this age of extinctions with radical grace.

We are schools of fish lost at sea, seeking to change course from the bottom of the ocean up. Slowly, then suddenly, with a committed wave of our million fins, we will steer the seemingly immobile forces of top down self-destruction, back towards harmony, towards Love, towards an ever evolving universe story that is as ancient as light.

There is tremendous energy to be found in these days of quantuum leaping. We are facing record breaking weather around this trembling Earth – the hottest, the wettest, the coldest, the driest. But we are also seeing record breaking vision arising everywhere, in this season of transition. Millions of people around the world are creating a new story. We are the largest mass movement in humanities history, and we are a verb.

Welcome to the era of resilience. Of fluidity. Of flexibility.   Balanced with the strength of right relationship, of clear intention.  Free will in service to the Universe made manifest on Earth. Which is Us.

The rigid, the fixed, the unmovable- they will be moved, regardless. Most likely they will snap, crackle, crumble, unable to bend with the winds of evolution.  Unless they (who are Us) learn that we are truly verbs.  How beautiful this understanding that we are evolving.  There is so much joy in this – so much meaning.   How can we not help but be in awe of the stupendous 14 billion year journey that has brought Us to this place of consciousness, of conscience, of self aware Love? A miraculous mirror reflecting the infinite journey back to the creative life force Ourself.

I am in Love with Life.  I can’t get enough of it. I am in Love with this pearl of a world.  I am in Love with humanity. I am in Love with our wisdom – and our folly.  To those who say the planet would be better off without Us, I ask that they reconsider.  For we are integral to this planet.   We are Earth.

We are  in the midst of a great Love story, and part of that story currently involves a separation. Yes, we have lost our way, We have strayed far from our Love.  But still we carry the torch, burning away, buried in Our heart of hearts.

We are in a reckless mid-life crisis, spending all our resources on some useless, big red Ferrari, racing away  from compassion and responsibility, lost in denial, searching for something we’ve always had.  One day, may it be soon,   we’ll crash the damn thing one last time, and come back home, to our true Love, to our true Life, with a much deeper appreciation for all we have left behind.  Carrying new gifts, borne of the experience of separation.  And in that return, we will Love like never before.

Love is a verb. It is something we do, something we live, something we are.   Every dancing cell is alive with Love.  The stars are burning with Love. The Earth gives birth  to Love, night and day.  Death is part of Love. Sadness is part of Love.

The whole spectrum is Love, in action, in motion. Even our illusion of rigidity – borne of fear – is all about Love, about our vulnerability. Our human vulnerability.   We are afraid of truly living, of truly Loving, for to Love is to accept that one day, the Lover will be gone. To open the heart, is to be deeply vulnerable. But to be vulnerable is to flow, to be open, to give and receive.

Yes indeed- all is impermanent, all will be lost. And that is the ultimate source of liberation. So don’t hang on – but don’t let go.   Breathe it all in! Don’t miss out by numbing down or dumbing down or running away.  No matter what is happening, you are Loved, and you are Love.  And it will all disintegrate, dissolve, decompose, be gone in a flash.

Don’t turn from the journey! The greatest show on Earth is this very moment. This very breath. This this very heart beat. This endless Love.   Welcome home to planet Earth. May you Love the Life you Live.

~ Velcrow Ripper

A community of people walking together on a spiritual path has a great deal of strength; its members are able to protect each other, to help each other in every aspect of the practice, and to build the strength of the community. There are many things that are very difficult for us to do on our own, but when we live together as community, they become easy and natural. We do them without growing tired or making a strenuous effort. The community has a collective energy. Without this energy, the practice of individual transformation is not easy.

When we live together in community it becomes a body, and each one of us is a cell in that body. If we are not part of the community body, we will be isolated, hungry, and needy, and we will not have a suitable environment for practice. We can visualize the community body as a forest. Each member of the community is a tree standing beautifully alongside the others. Each tree has its own shape, height, and unique qualities, but all are contributing to the harmonious growth of the forest. Looking at the trees standing steadily alongside each other like that, you can sense the beauty, solidity, and power of a sacred forest.

Our community body is going forward on the path of practice and its eyes are able to direct us. The eyes of the community are able to see the strong points as well as the weak points of every member of the community. By community Eyes, we mean the insight and vision of the collective body of the community, which includes the vision and insight of all of its members from the youngest to the eldest. Although the contribution of everyone’s insight is necessary for the community insight to be clear, it is not just a simple adding up of individual insights. The collective insight has a strength, a wisdom, and a vitality of its own, which surpasses any individual insight. [...]

The energy of the community body has the capacity to protect and transform us. As a member of the community, all we have to do is to make our contribution to that energy. This is called community building. It is the most precious work a monk, nun or layperson can do. [...]

When we are stubborn, we are not open to listening to others or seeing the limitations of our own way of thinking. We think our way is the best and our ideas are best. We may become angry when our community makes a decision that does not exactly reflect what we wanted. This is the result of our stubbornness and arrogance. We are so sure of ourselves, so sure that our view is the best. This is an obstacle to overcoming our suffering and finding peace and happiness in the present moment.

I have often said that there is no place for pride in true love. True love is a process of humility, of letting go of our individual ideas and notions to embrace and become one with another person or our entire community. When we are proud we can be easily wounded. We are like the tall, dry grasses that do not bend down low in the face of the winds. Instead, they try to remain standing tall and in the process are broken to pieces. Our pride is an obstacle to developing our understanding, compassion, and boundless love. When we are humble we have nothing to fear, nothing to lose. We easily flow with the circumstances that we find ourselves in and are endlessly open to learn, to practice, and to transform ourselves.

–Thich Nhat Hanh in Joyfully Together: The Art of Building a Harmonious Community.

After we were evicted from Liberty Park, I spent the early hours of the morning struggling in the streets of Lower Manhattan with a few hundred disoriented and angry people. Cops in riot gear were turning the streets into a maze of steel barricades. We tried to unify our scraggly numbers and rally, but it became gradually clear that the police had the upper hand. Toward morning, the tension in my body gradually eased into defeat.

Among my company that night was a Chinese man patiently trying to unify the hotheaded crowds. He had been a student protester in Tiananmen Square. He said to me, “Movements do not attract activists, they create them.” So even though we seemed to be losing, we were in fact learning. We were stumbling through the dark that night, searching for a path to walk together, and that’s why this is the beginning of my occupation story, not the end.

The story of my life began at the San Francisco Zen Center. My parents, zen teachers Norman and Kathie Fischer, transitioned from lay practice in Berkeley to a monastic life at Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm in the 1970s. We lived at Zen Center until my brother and I left for college. During these years, I absorbed the rhythms, smells, and tastes of monastic California-style zen.

Interconnectedness, sangha, and non-duality formed the language and spirit of my childhood.

Coinciding with the miraculous changing of leaves, Occupy Wall Street began in New York on September 17th but was really sparked by demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Spain and Madison, Wisconsin, months before. The time for transformation was ripe. In the U.S., decades of exponential wealth disparity and war after war against brown people at home and abroad left our society fragmented and spiritually sick. It was not an optimistic time to be a young person.

In the 2000s, as I pursued an art career, I struggled, often painfully, with finding my place in a culture that appeared to revolve around cutthroat competition, celebrity and immense concentrations of wealth. I even felt that creative freedom—the impulse I was following in my art practice—had been confused with greed, privilege and fear of failure. The big picture seemed hopeless. But then, reading about the uprisings in Tahrir and Madison, I began to realize that resistance was possible. Maybe, just maybe, we could heal our world if we woke up and brought our silent struggles into the strong sunlight—if we tried.

In June, I launched an art project called “Summer of Change: a series of numismatic rituals for Wall Street” and with my collaborator, Jim Costanzo, I chanted oratory at bankers and tourists, while throwing hundreds of dollars-worth of U.S. coins on the ground. For the first performance I chanted:
Oh, Wall Street! Your Great Wall is impregnable to marauding Justice, Equality, and Change!

Later, in another of the seven performances, arriving at the Stock Exchange in a wheelchair and wearing a silver mask resembling a giant FDR dime, I pointed at passersby and shouted:
The ship of our great democracy sinks in a rising tide of greed! Working-class Americans are the first to be cast off into the sea. Some stand by and watch this crime from afar. But who will be the next victim?

By the end of the summer, when the Occupy Wall Street protests started, I was all warmed up and right in the center of it.

What was I in the center of exactly? Something new—that was clear from the start. On that September Saturday, hundreds of people came together in Zucotti Park and didn’t go home. This was no ordinary protest. Rather, we were living change in our bodies. We were mending our connection to each other, mending the tender fabric of a society torn apart by emphasis on private space and money markets. We were re-embracing the right to occupy public space and finding our power as citizens in a shared world—the basic power of the people. It was anger that had awakened many of us. But in the park, love reigned. The beginning was wonderful!
There was a daunting task ahead. Inside the park, non-capitalist time and space prevailed: lost souls were meeting like crazy, creative plans were hatching and music rang out. Going a block away you felt culture shock: everything was the same as before in the same old world. And we knew that to get this work done we had to push ourselves, like caterpillars struggling in the cocoon. We had to transform and develop wings. Every day, all day, we marched and shouted and organized, served and ate free food, held assemblies, and struggled with the police. And so we turned from “protestors” into “people acting freedom,” in search of unbroken physical and social space, free of boundaries.

Yet we can’t live in this world without playing roles, like performers on a stage. In our occupy-opera, the NYPD play the role of protectors of the status quo, standing densely in their dark uniforms, with guns, stern expressions and menacing riot gear, or rolling up with trucks full of steel barricades. I know that these men and women are exquisite buddhas, perfectly imperfect as I am, but as the tension builds, they become monuments to un-freedom, following commands that lead them to bash heads against the pavement and to put non-violent people into little cells and slam the steel door shut behind them.

Meanwhile, we who gather together chanting and marching are “protesters.” We seem to be on the other side; we seem to be a menace, even to threaten social chaos. Passersby on the street are our audience. The stage is set and the curtains drawn. We sing our arias through the human microphone. Time and space contract and expand dramatically as these forces dance together.

These tense situations are the jewel of the movement, the master classes that turn us into activists, and we work hard to create them. We have a better chance of dissolving the boundaries that separate us if we first make them visible. But violence can begin here too, so it is important to not truly believe in the roles. I have tried to remember I am not separate from the cops and other actors, even while surfing the tension of these situations.

Early on in the protest I switched sides as an experiment, wanting to explore the limits of this new social space. As an Occupy Wall Street group marched from Liberty Park to the Wall Street Stock Exchange (a daily ritual in the first few weeks), I dressed in a business suit and waited with a small group at the Exchange. When the protestors arrived we heckled them as we imagined a group of young and entitled Wall Street investment bankers might (and sometimes do). I yelled “Get a Job!” loudly in the protesters’ faces, falling deeply into my new role. It felt a little transgressive too, like a man putting on a dress; I hadn’t realized how many unknowns were at play here.

The tension rose, emotions flared. All of a sudden, one of the drummers turned around at me and shouted, “I am a veteran of Iraq, I have PTSD and can’t get a job! Fuck you!” He hit me, hard, with his drumstick, which I was not expecting. The sting on my arm told me that years of suffering, anger, hurt and aloneness were coming forth. Yes, this was theater, but it was also very real—as real as violence, as real our emotions and bodies. In retrospect, it was like the Shosan ritual in which zen practitioners expose their inner life and pain in ceremony, for the sangha to share and support. In my conflict with the Marine, we shared the sting of disempowerment. Later that day I found him and we both apologized. Now we hug every time we see each other.

A few weeks later, I found a way to protest from my core social and economic struggles as an artist. I helped to organize an action group called Occupy Museums, to bring attention to the ways that major cultural institutions disempower artists and benefit the wealthy. One day we marched to MoMA and found a large police force waiting for us. They herded us into the police pen they had prepared for us. We stepped into the cage, yelling, chanting and waving signs; the tension mounted as our outrage filled the enclosed space. The police ushered away passersby who approached us in solidarity, creating a buffer zone around the magnetic human force of our voices and bodies.

In the midst of the tension, I found energy welling up within, but I let it happen, feeling it as energy not anger. I “mic checked,” invoking call-and-response from the group. “Policemen! (Policemen!) /We are watching you/harass citizens peacefully walking/on New York City sidewalks!/What’s going on here!?” Then my body, compressed in tension, started to move, to stride out from behind the barricades to the sidewalk and into the no-go zone defined by the standing line of cops. This was the corridor of greatest tension, full of the possibility of violence. But I found space, air, and life here! I began to widen my movements—now I was almost dancing—and my language opened: “I am free—I know I can be on this sidewalk!” Pointing to the policeman: “You are free! We all are free, let’s march on this sidewalk, we can be here!” Somehow, all of a sudden, we could be here! A surprise reversal of plot! So we marched out from behind the barricades onto the vast sidewalk.

Two weeks after we were evicted from Liberty (formerly Zucotti) Park, we gathered at Lincoln Center Plaza, a vast open space in New York where protest is forbidden. Lincoln Center was showing Philip Glass’s opera, “Satyagraha,” which speaks about the life of Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King—all non-violent protesters who have inspired Occupy Wall Street. Lincoln Center is partly funded by Michael Bloomberg, the very man who evicted us from Liberty Park.

Before the end of the performance, hundreds of protesters assembled on the steps of Lincoln Center, blocked off from the plaza by police barricades and heavy NYPD presence. Thus the private and public spaces, which on a normal day would be seamless, were clearly separated. When a few who dared to cross the line were arrested, there were shouts of “shame, shame, shame!” from some of the protestors. We took off our shoes—a Gandhian symbol of dignity—and stood barefoot on the cold pavement, conducting our assembly.

As “Satyagraha” ended and the elegantly dressed audience finally exited into the plaza, they came upon this strikingly theatrical scene: real life protest at the foot of the grand steps! We called out to them in unison to join us, but the sight of the NYPD barricades seemed to paralyze them.

Then all of a sudden Philip Glass, who had been at the performance that night, popped up in the Occupy Wall Street crowd—he had come to read a statement on the people’s mic. We sat down so that people could see him, and the lights from a video camera illuminated his face. He called out the last lines of the opera, a passage from the Bhagavad Gita:

Mic check!
When righteousness withers away
And evil rules the land
We come into being
Age after age
And take visible shape
And move
A man among men
For the protection of good
Thrusting back evil
And setting virtue
On her seat again.

Chanting along with Glass, whose music had been the soundtrack to my childhood, I melted into the crowd, my body vibrating to the shared voice, deeply encouraged by this ancient text. When I looked up, the opera audience had joined us. The buffer zone was gone. We were one big crowd—the 100%! The physical NYPD barricades still stood among us, but they were no longer barriers, absorbed now into our big warm body. Until late into the night we held our general assembly. The police stood offstage, now relaxed. Two separate spaces had flowed into one, protesters had become people again, and the police could then be people too.
After the first day of the occupation in Liberty Park, I went home thinking that the scraggly core protesters would be gone the next day, booted out by the NYPD. But miraculously, this was not so, and from that moment on, I learned to suspend disbelief—to not kill off this unfolding moment in my mind. I learned to trust my body, which was responding to a desire for freedom and connection. I learned to trust hundreds of strangers. When we lost the park, this was only a stage in an unfolding movement. A few weeks later, we were all standing euphorically on the steps of Lincoln Center Plaza, 100% human, pointing with our hearts toward each other, and finding freedom in this way. Who knows what happens next?!

Noah Fischer is a Brooklyn-based artist activist who grew up at Green Gulch Farm, run by the San Francisco Zen Center. He has exhibited art installations and performances in New York and internationally. Since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, Fischer has completely committed his work to this movement. He is the curator of the No-Eyes Viewing Wall at Brooklyn Zen Center.

Visit http://www.noahfischer.org.

This is an expanded version of an article that appears in the Spring 2012 issue of Inquiring Mind.

© 2012 Inquiring Mind

I spent the day last Monday at the United Nations by invitation of the Bhutanese government (along with about 600 other guests). The event was called “High Level Meeting on Well-being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm.” I thought, “It must not be very high-level if I am invited.” Nonetheless, there I was among 600 activists, economists, NGO workers, bankers, et al from around the world, listening to speeches by prime ministers and Nobel laureates. Except for the monks, I was the only man not wearing a necktie. But that wasn’t what disturbed me about the meeting.

Let me give you a bit of background. In 1972, the King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, remarked that, instead of gross national product (GNP), the nation should strive for “gross national happiness” (GNH). I believe he meant merely to point out that GNP (or GDP, as is more commonly used today) is a poor indicator of a nation’s well-being. The concept of gross national happiness had traction, though, and it wasn’t long before psychologists and economists were trying to come up with metrics to put a number on the concept. Adding impetus to this effort was a growing awareness among social critics that GDP is a very poor indicator of a people’s well-being. In the United States, real per-capita GDP has risen three-fold since the 1950s, but people are not three times happier by any measure. If anything, they are less happy.

Goods and Growth

That GDP and happiness are poorly correlated actually presents a deep challenge to economic dogma. Economics associates GDP closely with “utility” – that is, with “goodness.” After all, you won’t buy something with your hard-earned cash if it doesn’t benefit you, right? If, for example, you decided to sacrifice some of your leisure time in order to buy a new car, that must mean the car will make you happier than that extra hour of leisure every day. In a free market, two parties won’t make an exchange if it is not to their mutual benefit. Therefore, say the economists, the more exchanges being made, the more total benefit is being had. That is why, in economics, it is those things that are exchanged for money – and only those things – that are called “goods.”

The fact that economists were at the podium questioning the equivalence of happiness and GDP is a hopeful sign, a sign of a deep crack in the foundation of the economics discipline. But it is one thing to say there is more to happiness than economic growth; it is quite another to propose that economic growth is inimical to generalized happiness. None of the speakers advocated an end to growth – that would be called, in the present vocabulary, economic stagnation or recession. Instead, they invoked, again and again, “sustainable development,” a phrase I must have heard 30 times. The main message seemed to be, “Of course we will continue to have economic growth and sustainable development, but alongside it we should adopt policies that foster the well-being that GDP doesn’t measure.”

The Federal Palace Restaurant in Hong Kong offers this advice on happiness. Photo credit: Guy Kawasaki/Erno Hannink. Used under Creative Commons license.

Economic growth is sacrosanct for a reason: without it, our money system disintegrates. Because money is created as interest-bearing debt, without growth, debt tends to rise faster than the ability to service it. For a time, borrowers can be lent even more money with which to service their debts while they wait for the return of growth; but if growth doesn’t return, they will go bankrupt. As this process proceeds, debt-to-income ratios rise, wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, and a Marxian crisis of capital looms: a vicious circle of falling wages or employment, shrinking demand, falling profits, more layoffs, and so on. In times of high growth, a portion of that growth can go to enrich the owners of capital, and everyone else can get richer, too. But when growth slows, there isn’t enough wealth left for “everyone else” after the interest has been paid.

So it is in Europe today: “Austerity” means that more and more of a nation’s income will go toward debt service, and more and more of its assets will be transferred to its creditors. And if growth doesn’t resume, this process will never end until the entire population are paupers. Around the world, whether for nations or for individuals, financial policymakers adhere to the same plan: Grow your way out of debt. The only alternative is some sort of redistribution of wealth – through debt forgiveness, for example, through inflation, or through Gesellian negative-interest economics. There is no alternative that preserves the wealth of those who have wealth.

Thus it was that, at the conference and in the World Happiness Report that accompanied it, while there were a few nods to the ecological limits of growth, there was no mention of addressing Third World debt, consumer debt, or the financial system that depends on it. This was the coal pile in the ballroom – obvious but unmentionable, for acknowledging it would mean, inescapably, a radical transformation of our entire society. The circles represented at this “high level” conference have not reached the point yet of countenancing anything as radical as ending the debt system. But they will soon. As ecosystems and cultures unravel, the party isn’t as much fun anymore even for those at the top.

Debt and the Erosion of Well-Being

Without addressing debt, I’m afraid the world won’t make much progress in happiness. You see, it is not only that GDP and GNH are not equivalent; further growth in GDP cannot even happen without eroding the basis of human well-being on Earth. What exactly happens when GDP grows? GDP is defined as the sum total of goods and services exchanged for money. So, if neighbors look after each other’s children, no service is rendered; it only becomes a service when they pay for day care instead. If a culture practices subsistence farming on communal land, no goods are being produced. The food only becomes a good when they sell it to each other; so, too, the land when they divide it into private property and rent it out. Any potential to monetize what was once free is a business opportunity, a lending opportunity. Without such opportunities, banks cannot lend new money into existence. Without new money, the old debts quickly become unpayable. And because the new money comes along with even more debt, the system always needs to grow; the realm of goods and services needs always to expand.

So here is a dilemma: The way the realm of goods and services expands is by transforming nature and social relationships – the very things that the World Happiness Report cites as essential to happiness – into products and services. In order to keep the financial system functioning, we are destroying the basis of human well-being.

Here are some of the many examples of how economic growth policies directly destroy the essentials of happiness. Economic growth turns social reciprocity and gift relationships (two components of GNH) into paid services. It converts pristine ecosystems into sources of timber or minerals. It converts silence into noise, starry skies into urban lights, kitchen gardens into supermarket purchases, mom’s cooking into fast food takeout. It replaces the village storyteller with the TV cartoon, mothering with day care, outdoor play with video games. A society that still has these former things intact, and meets its needs without much money, is called, by economists, an “undeveloped market.” The process of liquidating social and natural capital is called “development.” Clearly, our conception of sustainable development is begging for scrutiny.

It is not enough to call for education, national pride, or religious teachings to stem the tide of globalization when the money system drives that tide. When rural youth leave the farm for the slums of Cairo or Bangkok, the glamorized images of Western consumption that draw them usually have an ally in economic conditions. Possibly, it is that local produce cannot compete with imports thanks to free trade policies and perverse subsidies for mechanized agriculture and transport. And what is behind the free trade policies, the subsidies? We would like to blame greed, but, at the bottom, I find something more banal – the pressure to pay the bondholders, or to get an extra half-percent return on investment, or to reduce a fiscal deficit. Debt pressure is endemic to the system, and it pushes the commoditization and marketization of everything and everyone. Ecological protection, cultural diversity, local agriculture, and fair trade are all under assault when nations are forced to liquidate natural resources, to convert agriculture to commodity production, to open markets and eliminate protections on labor in order to keep servicing their debts to the international banking system. The effects of debt pressure reach into personal life in wealthy countries, too. We would like to enjoy more leisure (listed in the report as important for happiness), but how can we when we have student loans to pay, credit cards, mortgage debt?

At the conference, Swami Atmapriyananda recited an old teaching story about a fisherman lounging at the wharf. A businessman comes up and asks why he isn’t out there fishing. “I already caught enough today to feed my family.”
“But if you fish more, you could sell the fish and make money.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“With the money, you could buy more boats and hire other people to man them.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Well, then you could make even more money and retire.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Then you could spend your days lounging on the wharf and only fishing as much as you pleased.”
“But that’s what I’m doing right now.”

During the Q&A at the end of the conference I offered a variation to this story. The businessman tells the fisherman he could make more money. “Why would I want to do that?” Because if you don’t, you won’t be able to make your debt payments and I will seize your boat!

In summary, debt drives growth, and growth drives debt. This system erodes many of the things that are essential to human happiness – such as community, leisure, and nature – but as long as there is room for new growth, the system can keep going. Today, though, we are running out of nature to convert into goods – the planet just cannot sustain much more exploitation. We are also running out of social relationships that aren’t yet monetized. This crisis of growth has been delayed for many decades through colonialism and technology, extending the domain of money, but it is upon us now. The result is rising indebtedness and growing misery, as each extension of growth comes at higher and higher cost.

Human Nature and the Easterlin Paradox

A key paradox in the field of happiness research illuminates this situation. Known as the Easterlin Paradox, it observes that, while national happiness doesn’t rise with national income, nonetheless, within a nation, those with higher incomes are generally happier than their compatriots; moreover, wealthier nations generally rank higher in measures of happiness than poorer nations. With a few notable exceptions (Costa Rica, Thailand), the happiest countries on Earth are the Western industrialized democracies.

How to explain this paradox? One might critique the findings of the report on methodological and conceptual grounds. For example, could “happiness” signify different things in different cultures? Perhaps it has taken on associations of Western-style “success.” Or, perhaps, it only measures how people compare themselves to a socially constructed standard. The accepted explanation for the paradox is that people are, by nature, competitive and are, therefore, unhappy when they see people around them who are wealthier than they are. If that is the explanation, one can only shrug one’s shoulders. Absent totalitarian communism, people will always vary in their abilities and fortune. At best, it suggests the prescriptions of mainstream political liberalism – more equitable distribution and welfare state services to ameliorate the effects of disparities. The economists present were comfortable with this level of change which, admittedly, in the current political environment, is already beyond the pale. I would be happy if the liberals got their way, but they will not. We cannot afford it – if “afford” means, as it does today, to keep the wealth of the creditor class intact. Along with everybody else, the liberals are working against debt pressure, which conspires to erode the social safety net and intensify wealth concentration still further. There is no escaping the need for systemic monetary reform.

The dynamics of growth and debt reveal another, more disturbing explanation for the Easterlin Paradox. The reason that lower-income nations are unhappier is simply that the basis of happiness there has been strip-mined, converted to money, and exported to creditor nations. And, of course, within these creditor nations it is the same – only a very few people enjoy the benefits. Most people there are debtors, as well, and suffer from the same depletion of the natural and social capital.

Where does happiness fit in life? Photo credit: Paul Downey. Used under Creative Commons license.

When the elements of well-being have been stripped from a culture, when its communities, its traditions and stories, its relationship to the land, its cultural identity, its natural resources are all gone, then its people have only money left to sustain themselves. Basic human needs do not change; but when an economy is monetized, the many ways its people meet these needs collapse into one way – money. Once that has happened, of course, it is true that happiness will depend on money. So, the explanation for the Easterlin Paradox is not that we compare ourselves to our fellows and are envious of their success; it is that the success of one comes at the expense of another. One man’s wealth is another man’s debt.

From this perspective, it is clear why economic growth doesn’t increase happiness. If monetary transactions merely replace things that have been lost, they won’t increase “utility” or well-being at all. For example, if I take your land and sell it back to you, if I destroy your culture and sell you entertainment, if I destroy systems of reciprocal labor and force people to buy and sell labor, if I pollute or privatize the water so that you have to pay for potable water, if I destroy your indigenous systems of healing and learning so that you must pay for medicine and education, if I impose debt on a population so that people must pay to even exist, then no one is actually better off. Instead, we have a situation where a shrinking minority can obtain at least the measurable factors of happiness, while the majority can’t even obtain those. And this state of affairs is irremediable, as long as we are stuck in a scarcity-inducing, debt-based money system.

Measuring Happiness

It is not surprising that the economists and dignitaries couldn’t acknowledge how fundamental this crisis actually is. They are, after all, deeply invested in the present system. But even the most conservative among us sense, I think, that superficial efforts to promote happiness are doomed, that some inexorable force is working against them. Though they might respond to this helplessness with pretense or cynicism, there is hope, too. Some of the speakers were from outside government and academia, and when they enunciated principles wholly at odds with mainstream economic philosophy, the audience came alive – professors, World Bank employees, NGO workers, and grass roots activists alike. If nothing else, the conference was significant for bringing such voices into a high-level conversation on economics.

There was, at the conference, an undercurrent of radicalism that would have supported a deeper critique. It surfaced a few times: Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla mentioned the need to reconceive what development is; Dr. Vandana Shiva spoke of the horrendous effects of economic development on Indian agriculture and questioned whether happiness can really be measured; Dasho Karma Ura spoke of the “joy of slowness,” the value of silence in nature, and other things fundamentally inimical to development as we know it. “In the GNH paradigm,” said Dasho Karma Tshiteem, “time is life, not money.”

One after another, the Western professors at the podium proclaimed, “Happiness is something we can measure,” and each attendee received a 100+ page World Happiness Report ranking the happiness level of each country according to a variety of measurements. While I had questions about the methodology and unexamined assumptions behind the data, my main question was, “Why is it so important to measure happiness?”

For one thing, if happiness can be measured, and if we understand the purpose of government to be maximizing the happiness of its people, then we can continue to apply the same mindsets and methods of the technocrat to governance, merely replacing GDP with a quantified measure of GNH. This would fulfill Jeremy Bentham’s 200-year-old ambition to make a science of governance. For a long time, we have sought through economics, political “science,” and the “social sciences” generally to engineer a more perfect society. If only we could be more rational, more scientific! Running society becomes something like a math problem.

Members of the intellectual establishment will not give up this ambition easily, for their careers are dedicated to it, valorized by it. If social engineering has largely failed, perhaps that is because we aren’t doing it well enough. We need better data! If GDP is flawed, let’s replace it with a new measure. That the whole ambition to quantify everything and to base decisions on the maximizing of a number is insane does not occur to them, for it lies at the foundation of a a 400-year-old intellectual tradition going back at least to Galileo. In science, only the measurable is real.

Even more alien to the technocrat would be the notion that the progressive quantification of the world is hostile to human happiness. Today we see the encroachment of the realm of money, of the commodity, of property, into the domains of the commons and the gift. We might add to Dasho Karma Tshiteem’s observation and say that only when we measure time can the equation “time is money” take hold. Perhaps it is the immeasurable that is key to happiness. Proposals for GNH metrics seek to measure the number of one’s social relationships; but can it measure their quality? We might measure leisure time, but can we distinguish hours spent in mindless dissipation from those spent in intimate connection? The danger, in making choices by the numbers, is that we develop those things that can be measured and neglect those that cannot. That is why, on a personal level, it is foolish to make choices based on money. On a collective level, too, that is why we have so many huge but ugly buildings, copious but unnourishing calories, pervasive but impersonal entertainment. And it is why those outside the measurement systems – such as the indigenous and other species – have been sacrificed on the altar of growth.

Happiness isn’t a product that can be measured, bottled, and sold. Photo credit: Jarno. Used under Creative Commons license.

To be fair, the desire to measure happiness is well-motivated. While I didn’t hear it explicitly stated, a natural next step after establishing a GNH measure would be to monetize it, in the sense of internalizing costs that are presently externalized onto our well-being. For example, if we decide that healthy ecosystems are important to happiness, we could tax their depletion. Some of the economists present at the meeting advocate just this. Robert Costanza, for instance, is a leading figure in ecological economics who advocates the valuation of “ecosystem services.” Once so valued, we can easily manage their use through green taxes and similar measures. I sympathize with this idea of finding ways to make products and processes that involve the despoliation of the planet prohibitively expensive. We must also keep in mind, however, that the immeasurable might be even more precious. Without this awareness, we risk committing monstrous acts. What if, for instance, we assign a value to a certain rare species of turtle, and find that the revenue generated by paving over its last habitat and building strip malls exceeds that value?

I am not sure whether, ultimately, the designs of the economists can be consistent with the spiritual teachings that certain of the monks brought to the conference. It seemed that the economists were salivating to get their hands on a new arena of utility-maximization. Even if their motivation is to apply the tools of their trade for the good, those tools are based on a worldview that has unhappiness built into it. It might, in this case, be as Audre Lord said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Human Nature and Selfishness

Primary among the axioms of economics is the assumption of selfishness – that human beings seek to maximize their rational self-interest, at least in most situations. After all, if you have a choice between paying more and paying less, you pay less. Everyone tries to get the best deal. Yet some of the spiritual leaders at the meeting enunciated a very different conception of human nature. They spoke of the interconnected nature of being and, drawing applause from the audience, of the importance of altruism and loving-kindness as a basis for happiness.

The World Happiness Report, however, was more equivocal. True, it devoted a brief section to the correlation between altruism and happiness, citing studies that show that people who volunteer tend to be happier than those who do not; but it also argued that people’s own happiness diminishes when the people around them increase their income. Consider the following passage in the report:

But the more general finding is that comparator’s income reduced happiness and this has been strikingly confirmed in many laboratory experiments. One neuroscience experiment involved the task of guessing the number of dots on a screen. Good guesses were rewarded by a monetary payment. Each subject was paired with another subject, and after each of the 300 trials the subject was told the accuracy of his own guesses and the associated income he would receive, as well as the same information for his “pair.” At the same time fMRI scans measured the blood oxygenation in the subject’s relevant reward center (the ventral striatum). Blood oxygenations responded strongly to both the subject’s own income (positively) and to the pair’s income (negatively). The negative effect of the pair’s income was at least two thirds as large as the positive effect of the subject’s own income.

What are we to make of this? One might conclude that, just as economists tell us, human beings are indeed motivated by self-interest, and that this self-interest generally corresponds to money. Moreover, happiness measures also correlate fairly strongly with income. But, we might also ask, in what situation is it normal to envy the success of another person or to gloat over their failure? It is normal in a competitive situation, and our money system immerses us in perpetual competition. Because money is created through lending at interest, there is always more debt than there is money. We are always in competition for never-enough of it. The more monetized a society in which we live, the more this condition colors our perceptions, so that, quite naturally, we accept it as human nature.

Perhaps selfishness is not human nature; perhaps it is an artifact of our system. Someone recently told me a story about an anthropologist who put a basketful of sweet fruit near a try and told some children that whoever got there first would win the fruits. The children all joined hands and ran there together. When the anthropologist asked them why, they responded, “How can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?” Perhaps this, and not the above social psychology experiment, exemplifies human nature. Or, perhaps, human nature is not an immutable absolute, but arises through the the interplay of biology and culture.

In a gift-based culture, it is obvious that each person’s well-being depends on the well-being of others. In a usury-based culture, it is not so obvious. Your misfortune is my good fortune, because that’s one less competitor for never-enough money. When one is in debt, it is hard to experience the “joy of slowness” that Dasho Karma Ura spoke of. For many people I know, debt is a powerful source of stress. Marriages fall apart because of it, health breaks down. Recently, an elderly man in Greece even killed himself to escape his debts. There is academic research demonstrating a correlation between debt and psychological distress.1

Barriers to Interbeing

Why wasn’t debt and the money system mentioned in the conference? It is all well and good to voice lofty intentions to uphold the things that the debt system is destroying, but if that system isn’t addressed as well, those intentions will never be kept. I am not surprised that it wasn’t mentioned, because the money system lies at the heart of today’s world order. To advocate creating money in a different way than through interest-bearing debt is heresy. Economists, in particular, are wedded to this system, so I was not surprised that they didn’t highlight its incompatibility with so many of their criteria for happiness. The best they could do was to say, “High income does make people happy, but other things do, too. Therefore, we must pay attention to these other things even as we strive for continued economic growth.”

One might easily say that the economists have hijacked the Gross National Happiness movement, neutering its implicit radical critique of economic growth. They seem to have turned it away from the deeper questions, not only regarding the money system, but also the worldview upon which it rests – the reductionistic philosophy of measurement, number, and control, and the vision of a world of separate, competing selves. Yet even they resonate with teachings that run counter to that worldview. Perhaps they are doing the best they can, within the limits of their operating paradigms, to bring about a more beautiful world.

Unfortunately, these operating paradigms doom such efforts to failure. It is not just the money system that is at stake here. Underlying our debt-based system is a certain view of human nature, human identity, and our relationship to nature that is, like the money system, in crisis. A system that engenders competition makes sense in a world of discrete, separate selves, striving first and foremost to survive and reproduce in a world of Other. But that sense-of-self is becoming obsolete; many of the religious speakers talked of the interconnected nature of being, of interbeingness, of the larger We. Even the economists acknowledged the importance of connections and community for happiness. But when we have a money system that fosters endemic disconnection, any efforts to promote happiness will be fighting an uphill battle. We saw what happened when the sincere intentions of Rio ran up against financial reality, and its hopefully promises came to nought. Let’s not repeat that mistake. It is time to confront the fact that our spiritual values, which are evolving toward oneness or interconnection, are at odds with our institutions, which embody separation. Our economic institutions are chief among them, and cannot be excluded from the happiness conversation.

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1 See for example S. Brown et al. / Journal of Economic Psychology 26 (2005) 642–663. The researchers disaggregated debt from income and assets. Savings have a positive correlation with reported life satisfaction, but not as strong as the negative correlation between debt and life satisfaction.

New York Subway

There has been a great deal of talk in the Occupy movement around the fear of co-optation. The latest round of debate has been around the 99% Spring movement. Adbusters has sounded the alarm with the cry “#DefendOccupy.” The basic premise of the current debate is whether MoveOn.org is a bogeyman that is stealing the ideas of Occupy for its own ends, which some claim are as a “front group” for the democratic party.

In reality, the 99% Spring movement is a coalition of 60 different grass roots groups, one of which was Move On, none of whom are claiming leadership. The impetus, which aims at training 100,000 people in direct action techniques, certainly draws inspiration from Occupy, and explicitly uses the 99% terminology that Occupy popularized.

For me fear mongering on the part of Adbusters and others is simply that – fear. Division. Separation. And harkens back to very old fashioned elitist energy that I have encountered in movements throughout my experience as an activist.

It makes me a little sad. We need to grow the spirit of Occupy, not divide it into ideological factions. It’s a meme, and to try to “protect it” is hypocritical – one of the ideas behind Occupy is the spirit of open source.

No one owns Occupy. So everyone owns it. You can’t have it both ways – either it is an organization, which needs to copyright itself, or it is true to it’s principle. Open, shared, available to all. Or at least, the 99%. Which we at Occupy Love expand to the 100%.

Hell, Glen Beck just started selling Occupy Love t-shirts on his web store. That is a kind of co-optation that strikes close to the bone here, but did we freak out? No, we laughed about it. If the right wing wants to Occupy Love, then let them.

Likely their version of love will be the kind of distorted, fun house mirror worldview that Beck parrots, but at the very least, they are spreading the word Occupy and the word Love into shadowy corners where we wouldn’t have expected to see it.

Co-optation happens, with extreme rapidity, in this media drenched metaverse we dwell in. The cool hunters are out there, looking for ways to cash in on whatever is the next thing. We aren’t working that way – we aren’t concerned with ownership. We want to change the world, as effectively as possible. And that change is going to happen in a trillion ways, not in one manner. Including by reaching the people who won’t ever respond to the source itself.

Occupy is a beautiful phenomenon, a radical meme and a natural arising. It isn’t dependent on a single container, it isn’t a geographical location – it’s a self organizing meme garden of ideas. It is not an ideology – it’s an understanding. No one can, or should own these ideas. They need to grow and proliferate and evolve however they will, freely, without limits, without fear.

What is the basis of this set of ideas? The one thing that connects all the dots, the great dot connector itself, is love. Fierce Love is wild and free, and bigger than any attempts at co-optation. It can, and should, flow freely, everywhere, even in the nether-worlds of Glen Beck’s weirdness. Perhaps that tiny spark, even in his perverse attempt at co-optation, will light some real awareness in a closed mind that one day might lead to an open heart.

As for the “co-optation” of Occupy by the many friends and allies of Occupy that make up the 99% Spring? I say bring it on, let it grow.

A counter hashtag to Adbusters cry to #DefendOccupy has been launched – #GrowOccupy. Let it grow, let it flower. Adbusters – let go of your urge to control and direct this garden into your own vision of a “pure” movement. Let it be a mongrel of many shapes and flowers, let it be old left and new left and center left and rightside upside down and inside out. Who cares? Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow.

As Grandmother Flor deMayo recently said to me, we are no longer at the 11th hour. We are at 11.45 Time is short, time is precious, we need all hands on deck, the beautiful ship of mother earth is going down.

This is not the time for infighting. This is the time for stepping up, with all we can offer, with everyone we can engage, to create the broadest, most inclusive movement of movements in the planets history, one that in fact has room for everyone.

We are the 100%. You can’t evict love.

- Velcrow Ripper

Fort McMurray, Alberta / Photo: Kris Krug

The Occupy Movement has been characterized by, and criticized for, its lack of focused objectives. Originally gathering around issues of economic inequality and debt, it soon ballooned to include every progressive issue under the sun, and then some. Yet amid the cacophony of proposals and messages, we could always detect a hint of a unifying theme. We sensed that all of these issues are somehow connected; we sensed that we were protesting something. What was that thing? What is it now? What is it about current actions to, say, stop the excavation of Alberta’s tar sands that makes them Occupy actions? What does ecosystem destruction and climate change have to do with financial inequality?

Just as we suspect, both arise from the same source. Inequality and environmental degradation are written into the rules of our financial system on a level so deep they are nearly invisible. To see how, let us start by asking, Why is it that there is money to be made by excavating the tar sands, but not by protecting the wilderness and the indigenous way of life there? After all, money is a mere social agreement, created by human beings. It is a story – a system of interpretations of symbols that defines value. How have we come to assign value to those activities that are destroying Earth?

The answer has to do with how money is created: as interest-bearing debt. At any moment, because of interest, the amount of money in existence is always less than the amount of debt. The only way to avoid defaults, unemployment and concentration of wealth is for new money to be constantly created through further lending. Lending can only happen and loans can only be repaid when there are profitable investment opportunities: the creation of new goods and services. That is, it can only happen in the presence of economic growth. When the economy stops growing, debt rises faster than income, defaults rise, employment falls, and the concentration of wealth intensifies.

To prevent this, politicians across the political spectrum seek economic growth. Ideally, if the economy grows fast enough, the owners of wealth can keep getting richer by lending money at interest – and the borrowers can get richer too, by increasing their revenues faster than the rate of interest. That plan worked pretty well in the 1950s and 1960s, but today it is becoming increasingly apparent that the planet cannot accommodate much more economic growth. As the growth rate has slowed, economic inequality has increased. For a time the developed world “imported growth” by stripping natural resources and social capital from nations that still had a lot of it. Today, though, these sources of growth are running out as well. We are left with the dregs of the barrel: for example, the Alberta tar sands.

The debt crisis and the environmental crisis are thus two sides of the same coin. In the absence of growth, indebtedness rises quickly, and political pressure to squeeze a bit more growth out of nature – to find something, anything, from nature to convert into product – increases. If we build the Keystone pipeline and drill in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge and cut down what’s left of the rain forests and use up whatever capacity of the atmosphere remains to absorb our wastes, we might be able to force a few more years of growth out of this planet, and temporarily arrest the rise of indebtedness. But unless we can maintain exponential growth forever on a finite planet, the debt pyramid is doomed, and we maintain it only at a worsening cost.

Imagine that you are a debtor and can no longer make your payments. Your creditors, themselves trapped in the logic of money, are ratcheting up the pressure. Surely you could take a second job. Surely you could stop taking vacations, sell your house, eat less, pledge your children’s future as collateral. Surely there must be something in your life that, at whatever cost to yourself, you can convert into money, to keep the payments flowing a little while longer. Such is the dynamic driving austerity and the pillage of the natural commons.

In other words, the system is irremediably broken. Even vast redistribution of wealth, say through higher taxes on large incomes, doesn’t change the underlying dynamic compelling endless growth. And I think many in the movement intuitively recognize the futility of mere tweaks to the system. That intuition, perhaps, explains Occupy’s reluctance to make demands. Any demand that could be framed within the current political discourse (which takes the desirability of growth as a given) is already too small. What we really want is beyond our ability to articulate. But whatever it is, surely a deep change to the money system, with its fool’s choice of debt slavery or ecocidal growth, must be part of it.

Another way to look at it is that the same debt that is driving millions into destitution (and which drove many Occupiers to the streets) is also driving corporations and their stockholders to liquidate every bit of nature they can. The corporations also have debts to service, bond payments to make. So too do the governments that are selling off our commonwealth. All of us are in the grips of the same world-devouring machine that chews up beauty and spits out money.

To be sure, the money machine rests on an even deeper foundation. The story that is money is tied to deeper stories, even more invisible: the defining myths of our civilization. These too are in crisis. That is why, at bottom, Occupy is a revolution in our human being-ness. That is why, in Occupy, the long-sundered worlds of the spiritual practitioner and the social activist are reuniting. And that is why we are able to recognize so many seemingly unconnected issues as arising from a common source. Not all have to do with money and debt, but these lie close to the heart of it.

In the case of fossil fuels, habitat destruction, pollution, resource extraction and climate change, the linkage is clear. These are not separate from the original issues that brought people to the encampments. It is the same issue: the insane conversion of the world into product and profit that serves no one – not 99% of us, and ultimately not the 1% either. “We protest not at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness.” No one wants a system where, to avoid debt peonage or poverty, we aspire to be among the “winners”: those who enslave the rest toward the destruction of all. The money system as we know it prescribes this desolate choice. That system is crumbling. Let us make sure that when it falls apart, there is still some natural, social, cultural and spiritual wealth remaining from which to build a more beautiful world.

Originally published on Occupy.com

Photo: Ian MacKenzie

A review of Sacred Economics Author Charles Eisenstein with Integral New York

In deeply contemplating the ever increasing, ever more complicated and intertwining crises facing the world today, one can find a common thread: the financial system and the human species’ relationship to money. No matter what the problem, if one looks deeply to the root cause, it’s nearly always money. “What does a money system look like that no longer destroys, but instead heals nature, culture, and the human spirit?” asks Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics.

This was a rare chance to spend quality time in dialog with the emerging philosopher, writer, teacher and (I would say, he wouldn’t) economist. His book is fast becoming a guiding force in the Occupy Movement, or as it’s more widely known, The Global Awakening. Of the many speakers and gurus highlighting problems and offering solutions today, Eisenstein stands out for his ability to pull it all together and articulate root cause and realistic actionable steps toward rejuvenation. He is in a class all his own.

Charles (and I hope you don’t mind us all remaining on a first-name basis) speaks to the spiritual in a way that shows he has arrived there from deep trial and emerged with intuitive understanding of ageless wisdom. He speaks to our institutions and systems with scholarly depth, worthy of a Yale graduate, which he is. He weaves this insight and knowledge together offering an approach to solving the seemingly unsolvable inviting the listener to a new level of consciousness wherein things don’t seem so bad.

I felt good as soon as I arrived. The room was filling up and Charles was already there. In his tee-shirt and not-so-pressed khakis, he was leaning back in a chair at the front of the room, calm and monk-like, taking it all in. Gilles Herrada was the host for the evening and gave a fantastic introduction, which included a pronunciation of “Charles Eisenstein” in an elegant, liquid-French accent that made Charles smile from ear-to-ear. (My wife and I tried to imitate it the whole way home with little success….Shawls…Shaaawls Eye-shin-shteen. What fun! My Midwestern accent feels so inferior.)

The entire evening lasted just short of 2 1/2 hours and it was equal parts Charles speaking to the room and a Q & A.

Charles is on a book tour for Sacred Economics, but the talk, I think, encompassed all of his work and was not specific to the new book. If there is an over-arching context to his theme, it is this: we modern humans are living in a transitional time and, if there is a main theme, perhaps it is interdependence, inclusiveness and community.

To offer a tight, condensed synopsis of the talk would be futile, as I find his writing and way of speaking reach me in much the same way as a Bob Dylan lyric – it’s poetic. It’s dense, yet very approachable. A few words can open up new worlds of thought. The whole of what Charles offers tells a story, yet each line seems to stand on its own. So I’ll ponder here some of the quotes which jump out of my notebook (if you would like to listen to the entire talk you can do so here).

Charles began by saying, “Enlightenment is a group project in this day and age.” He went on to explain the old model from Descartes where a thinker goes into a room alone, comes up with a brilliant solution, emerges, tries to convince people of its merit and when a critical mass of people are on-board, the change begins to happen. This is a process that may never have really worked. Especially now, community is needed. Deep listening and compassion are paramount. In our flattened, inter-webbed society, a new model is being born and new communities are arising.

“There are two great myths: the story of the self and the story of the people”, says Charles. The story of the self flows from religion, which generally sees individuals as separate souls enclosed in flesh. We can see this story beginning to change in a connected world of instant communication. Humans increasingly understand themselves as integrated into the ecosphere, rather than (as in the old paradigm) as living on the earth and as a separate entity from it. Our money system is a manifestation of this delusion of the separate self. It puts all humanity in an artificial state of competition. It destroys gift. (Charles spoke quite a bit about gift economies, and how they encourage the coming together of love and exchange of goods, thus fostering relationships in which we need each other. In an economy based on money, this is not the case. Money abstracts it so one provider is as good as the next.)

As Charles points out about our system, “It is mathematically impossible for everyone to have abundance.” Our system of money creates debt and interest on that debt, which ensures we are always indebted. There is an “endemic scarcity” built into it. The money system we are locked into perpetually compels us to go into the world to create new wealth by taking away something that was once free and selling it back. To do this we exchange gift for commerce.

There is much to ponder when Charles posits that all money is generated from the extraction of natural resources or the conversion of formerly free human interactions to paid services. One easily understands this system is destroying our psychological and spiritual relationships as well as our natural environment. Grand psychological agreements are in place between us humans. We create powerful institutions and systems that bind our better angels. A more beautiful world is possible, and each of us has a unique gift to give toward the rebirth of that world, but the great “institutions of our time militate against that knowing.” Their demands seem unstoppable.

When contemplating the future of this money/growth based paradigm it is easy to imagine all human interactions will one day be commodified and all natural resources will be extracted and sold. But this can’t happen and that is not what is happening. The tyranny of this psychological agreement has reached its apex. The growth rate of our population and the burden of our “debt” have reached a tipping point wherein our ability to find new wealth can’t keep pace with the growing demands of servicing the debt. We are all participating in the “growth of money realm” and we’re positioned at the tipping point. Our planet is finite, and we can only extract natural resources for profit for a finite amount of time. As the cost to extract resources rises faster than the value of the resources extracted, we can already see the shift.

And therein lies a seed of a new story of the people. The story is changing from seeing ourselves as having dominion over the cosmos, our science capable of rising above the constraints of nature, our very “being” objectified and seen as separate from nature, to one of interdependence, integration and consensus.

Charles did not offer many details for new paradigms and systems at this talk, but there are many solutions offered in great detail in his book. One suggestion he did address at length was the idea of negative debt, or negative interest rates. Today interest rates are very low and Charles suggests that if it could be left alone perhaps rates would naturally head where they seem to want to go: below zero. But there are too many legal and systemic barriers preventing this from happening, so it stays above the zero line. However, if we lived in a world of negative interest, where it would make more sense to give money away rather than to keep it, what wonderful changes could happen quickly. For example, imagine if a large holding of money would “decay” or diminish by some percentage over time of holding it. Suddenly it would “pay” to do the things in this world our hearts are calling us to do.

“So why can’t we change course? We know the problems, we even know the solutions. We have known them for 30 years, yet we do not seem to be able to change course.” Money is a story, Charles concludes, and the story of the people is changing and the story of money has not yet changed. “Humanity is in the process of falling in love with Earth.” We are moving through our adolescence and reaching adulthood.

“We are all being born into a larger identity, a full member of the tribe of life on earth.” We are being called to community and cooperation, to a new paradigm that is no longer “more for you is less for me, but more for you is more for me too.” However, the growth machine is doing all it can to stay alive; it’s desperate. But there is a window now to speed the transition into this new era. “So anything we can remove from the growth machine will hasten its demise.” Creating communities wherein we offer each other our true gifts is the beginning of healing ourselves and our world.

Charles has great appeal in his ability to communicate these ideals without being new age-y or “that spiritual guy.” That is what makes him so unique. He can speak to the precepts of Eastern philosophy like an accomplished Dharma teacher or speak to the ravages of the monetary system like Chris Hedges, but his style is all his own. It draws the audience in and moves with such an economy of language that the room all night murmured with “Hmmm… Yes. Right-on.” He tends to say things we are all thinking in a way we would like to have said them.

The evening ended with a Q & A that wonderfully meandered its way into being a conversation. The room felt alive with possibility. What a glorious diversity of people there are at Integral New York. They are young, older, hip, suburban, tall, medium, left, lefter, we seemed to have come from all over. But I would say the common trait was open-heartedness. An uncommon vulnerability mixed with a fierce intellect. Standing in the doorway on my way out I stopped to breathe for a moment and take in the room. I was filled with a feeling of, ‘These are my people. I like these people. We can do this. We got this.”

The book Sacred Economics is available on North Atlantic Books Evolver Editions. The new short film Sacred Economics by Ian MacKenzie, of which I am a co-producer (full disclosure), can be seen here along with Charles’ web site.

The new short is the full length version of the YouTube hit “The Revolution is Love”

- Gregg Hill, co-producer Occupy Love

This post was originally published in The Integral Leadership Review

After watching the film, head immediately over to listen to a livestream Q&A with myself and Charles.

About the film: Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme – but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

After first reading Charles Eisenstein’s book in the summer of 2011, which speaks eloquently about the return of the “gift economy”, I felt compelled to gift back. The best way I knew how was to use my filmmaking skills to share Charles’ work, and spread it to communities around the globe.

His vision of “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible” is the salve that so many of us need at this time, in the age of great transition. My hope is this film catalyzes those who work with passion and dedication to live this world right now.

Thanks to Velcrow Ripper and Gregg Hill for their help co-producing the short. Enjoy!

- Ian MacKenzie, Director