The Pandemic Is Over. Now What?

The President of the United States recently declared that the pandemic is over. Now what? Charles Eisenstein offers insights on where we’ve been and are headed. Charles is a bestselling author, public speaker, and social critic. He speaks of the pandemic time as an initiation, or invitation, to investigate new ways of living, both as individuals and as a society.

Today, Charles covers several topics, including the broken societal systems that, over the past few years, valued safety over connection and authority over personal empowerment. He points out how those who dared to challenge the mainstream narrative were ostracized—and how he faced such shunning and dealt with it. He points out the futility of the “blame game” many of us are involved in, looking for a scapegoat for our societal woes, and he invites us to take steps to reclaim our sovereignty & humanity.

Visit his website: charleseisenstein.org

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript, the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Charles Eisenstein.

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The Pandemic Is Over. Now What?

The president of the United States declared that the pandemic was over. Now what? This is Episode 387, and our guest is Charles Eisenstein. Charles is a bestselling author, public speaker, and social critic who gives us insights into where we have been and are headed as a society. He looks at the time of the pandemic and its subsequent restrictions as an initiation or invitation of sorts to look into new ways of living both as individuals and as a society.

We discuss his new book, The Coronation. In our conversation, Charles covers a number of topics, including the broken societal systems that, over the past few years, have valued safety over connection and authority over personal empowerment. Charles points out how those who dared to challenge the mainstream narrative were ostracized and how he himself faced such shunning and how he dealt with it.

He points out the futility of the blame game many of us have been involved in of looking for a scapegoat for our societal woes. Finally, Charles invites us to take steps to reclaim our sovereignty and humanity. Before we get into the conversation, I’m excited to introduce to you one of my friends and to tell you about the podcast that he hosts that you are going to love. It’s called the Wellness + Wisdom podcast hosted by Josh Trent.

He has been a guest on the show, speaking about the healing powers of breathwork. Wellness + Wisdom, his show, is where you will get all you need to know about the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and financial intelligence needed to live free and authentically in the 21st Century. Josh calls his approach the Five Sides of the Wellness Pentagon. Its many facets nourish us deeply.

One thing I love about the Wellness + Wisdom podcast is that each episode is artfully crafted to go an inch wide and a mile deep. Josh asks questions that no one else will ask. You get the truth about the science and the spirit of how to live with freedom and authentic well-being. Again, the podcast is called Wellness + Wisdom, hosted by Josh Trent. Take a moment to subscribe now by heading over to JoshTrent.com/podcast or search for Josh Trent on any podcast player.

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Welcome to the show, Charles.

I’m happy to be here.

I finished reading, The Coronation. I fell in love with it. Every other page, I had things underlined and notes in the margin. One reason why I was ready to receive what you had to say is that we, in the alternative food system, get the idea that we do need to opt-out of the conventional system. We get the idea that to regenerate the soil, we might need to plant our crops differently and opt-out of consumerism as it is. We need to form an alternative barter system.

We get the idea that our system is broken and something needs to change. However, with the pandemic, we might not have realized that systemically, there’s also something wrong. It revealed something wrong in our whole overall system that we would respond in such a way that would alienate us from one another and throw us all into a tailspin.

What happened during the pandemic originated in something deeper than the system. The system is certainly part of it but there’s also a consciousness and a way of being human and relating to nature each other that impelled the insanity. That’s what I’m going to call it, a collective delusion or a collective hysteria. It intensified a trend that I’ve seen building for quite a long time, which is toward a bifurcation of society where we in the Weston Price Foundation, and I say we because I have been involved with Weston Price since 2003 or even before since I started reading. I read Nourishing Traditions in 1999 or something. We’ve already opted out to greater or lesser degrees.

Some people are opting out means, “Maybe I will buy from the organic section.” Other people are opting out means, “I’m going to localize my food supply.” That sense of not being at home in mainstream society intensified. Stepping out is one response. Another response is to try to change the mainstream system but we don’t know how to do that.

In fact, a lot of the attempts to do that end up reinforcing the basic patterning underneath the system. For example, when we talk about changing the economic system, the discourse and the political system are about communism versus capitalism or socialism or freedom versus compassion for the other. There are all of these binary conversations that leave out the things that we need to be talking about.

For example, you mentioned one of them, local economy versus global economy or relationship versus standardization and abstraction. When we value localism relationship connection, then a lot of the other conversations, especially when they are stuck, they can work themselves out in a different way. We don’t know how to change the system. People come up with all these plans that usually involve some form of scaling something up. Scaling up is one of the mind forms that define the system that we know now.

What are the alternatives to that? Another mind form is to identify the origin of the problem in the people administering the system, thinking that if we could get rid of those people and replace them with better ones, then the system would change. That is a habit of authoritarianism. We don’t think our society is authoritarian or maybe now we are starting to think that but it is. All of the major institutions, from school to medicine to finance, are highly centralized and power-driven. We are acclimated to seeing the world in that way. When we speak of systems change, we must go through a process of unlearning and deprogramming.

When we speak of systems change, we must go through a process of unlearning and deprogramming

That is true. If I were reading your book, I would be writing true in the margin and underlining. Let’s give another example. During the height of the pandemic, people would go before school boards, for example, and say, “My child should not be forced to wear a mask.” They are fighting the authority and thinking that if the authority concedes, that’s a victory. Why do they need to go before them in the first place? It might be a question. This is what I liked. I felt like your book was laced with questions like, “Why are we doing it this way anyway?” Is it perpetuating the system we are already finding ourselves in?

There’s an agreement that we generally have about what power is and who holds it. That leads to a disempowering way of thinking. When you see the deep corruption of every institution, then it’s hard to stay away from the idea that the people running those institutions must be incredibly evil. How could an all-pervading agenda of evil be the result of anything else but a deliberate conspiracy of diabolical villains? It’s hard to see that systems, stories, ideologies, and entire mythologies can take on a life of their own and manipulate everybody immersed in them like puppets, including the elites.

I’m not on the inside of the halls of power by any means but once in a while, I interact with somebody from that realm. For one thing, they seem like an ordinary person. Maybe they can be quite intelligent or whatever but if you took a person and plunked them down into their position, they do pretty much what anybody would do in that position. They don’t seem like criminal masterminds. We tend to give them credit for a lot more intelligence capacity to plan efficiency than they have. I’m writing an essay called There’s No One Driving the Bus.

It’s quite bewildering and disorienting to consider the possibility that there’s no one driving the bus because then we can’t solve the problem by replacing the evil elites by casting them down or by finding somebody to fix it by appealing to them, to relent. If they themselves feel like they are barely able to reactively respond to one thing after another and barely ride the wave, the more cynical and ruthless of them are trying to exploit the situation for their own human shortsighted ends. Who is there to appeal to? We have to step away from that and think about how change happens. It comes down to what’s the nature of this world.

To orient through another organ of the body besides the brain and the intellect and the analysis, which would be the heart and the gut. Here that takes us back to relationships, to these strong impulses that we have to reconnect. The brain says, “How is that going to change the system? How is that going to change reality?” Something orients us toward those things. Part of my role is to validate that.

It’s encouraging because we are stuck in almost this primal tribal brain that tells, “Us good, you bad.” Whether you think the authorities are part of some evil cabal or whether you think the people who aren’t cooperating with the plan to get us all safe and healthy are evil or disparaging them in some way, shape or form. In other words, both sides are placing the other in the spot of the enemy and therefore rallying their troops around each other. What does that lead to? More war. As opposed to that third way that you suggest, what if neither system or side has the market on good or bad? What if there’s simply another way that all of us could be drawn to create change?

I want to be careful here. I’m not saying that both sides have an equally valid position, and then the truth is somewhere in between. I am pretty firmly of the belief that, for example, masking is inhuman and virtually useless, that social distancing is utterly ineffective, and that the vaccines do far more harm than good, which is little good than a lot of harm. I’m not a fence sitter. However, what I’m talking about is how we ascribe the problem to who we describe the blame. I also will say that corrupt, psychopathic, and ruthless people are very much at home in our power structures. Those structures encourage those traits and reward those people.

Corrupt, psychopathic, and ruthless people are at home in our power structures. Those structures encourage those traits and reward those kinds of people.

Whatever the extent of their power, they don’t seem quite that intelligent to me. Whether they designed the whole thing or not, we still have to ask, “Why do we comply?” Their power does not come from Marvel comics types of superpowers. They can’t point a mind ray at you. Although there are various theories that they are doing that but no. Fundamentally, we have sovereignty and choice.

The question then is, “What are the conditions?” It’s like terrain theory in disease. The indoctrinated default is to find the pathogen. We are searching for a pathogen in public health but also in social and political change. “Who’s the pathogen?” “It’s Fauci. It’s Gates. It’s so and so.” “Now I know what to do. Let’s shoot an antibiotic at this political parasite and get rid of it.” That orientation neglects the terrain. The terrain is our consciousness collectively, and each one of us has a part of that.

How can we start to lean into that terrain theory? I love it. I’m like you, I’m not a fence sitter at all but I see that there’s a blame game thing going on that gets us nowhere. How do we open up our hearts so that we let this system crumble that hasn’t served us well and start to build a new one?

How do we open up our hearts? On a subtle level, this learned helplessness and incapacity that’s taught to us in school, you don’t know how to do anything until the teacher tells you how. This is something that we already know how. It is not taught but modeled. It’s a contagion in a way. When I am with somebody who’s very much in their heart, which is also the origin of courage because when you are connected to what you know, trust, and believe, then you have no inner conflict.

Courage is not so much about overcoming fear. It’s about drawing on a clear source to which you are connected. When I witness somebody doing that, it opens that channel in me and gives me permission to do what I already know how to do, which is to be in my heart and trust what I know from that place. Not a how-to but an expression of gratitude for those who are doing it and who are transmitting that to me.

It’s almost like words tend to fragment our understanding of an experience of a reality. Maybe that how to question is asking you to define something that is impossible to define. You will know it when you see, feel, and live it kind of thing.

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I noticed in your book that you were referencing the work of Girard. Who is that man? Why is what he wrote relevant to us?

René Girard was a philosopher, theologian, and anthropologist. He was most active in the mid to late twentieth century. The body of work that I referenced was on scapegoating or sacrificial violence, as he called it. His theory was that the original social crisis was cycles of vengeance, tit for tat retributive violence where somebody maybe insulted you, and your brother comes and gets revenge, and then my brother gets revenge on your cousins and back and forth.

WT 387 | Pandemic Is Over — Pandemic Is Over: The original social crisis was the cycle of vengeance. These cycles of violence tear society apart.

It escalates in these cycles of violence. It tears society apart and divides society because, “I saw you with that group. Are you with them or are you with us? If you are with them if you have been present, if you have been witnessed, if you are aware of that, why didn’t you do anything about it? You must be on their side.” Everybody is forced to take sides, and it rips society apart.

The way that this crisis is resolved is that things aren’t the way they used to be. Society is falling apart. Something is wrong here. Let’s find somebody to blame it on. Somebody who doesn’t quite fit in, somebody who’s violated the taboos, it must be his fault. Somebody who looks different. We all get together, and we murder that person. We expiate our bloodlust and unite in this killing. Now the problem is gone, where everybody is in harmony because of this act of unifying violence. It’s because the killing worked to solve the problem, we think, “That proves it. It was that person’s fault.”

That’s the origin of the mythology of the villain. That’s where scapegoating comes. What societies would do is eventually they preemptively found sacrificial victims to discharge social tensions before they’ve even built up too far. They have a special time of year maybe to do this, the festival. This basic pattern can be exploited by demagogues, fascists, and totalitarians. All they have to do to unify society is to point to a scapegoat for a dehumanized minority.

I referenced this during COVID because here, we had an extremely divided society intensifying throughout my lifetime. The divisions have been intensifying throughout my lifetime. I saw this process in motion. The dehumanization of COVID dissidents of the unvaccinated who were ascribed all of the qualities of the scapegoated victims. They are filthy. They are unclean. They are possessed by evil spirits.

They endanger us all. They don’t care about society. They are callous and narcissistic. All of these dehumanizing caricatures piled onto them. I’m like, “This doesn’t look good because it’s the same thing that happens in the witch hunts and the pogroms and the Holocaust.” The same pattern of powerful institutions. They take advantage of this.

They ride this hysteria to power and continue to provoke it. I’m like, “I got to speak out about this.” I drew on this philosopher to do that to partly anchor my contention in a philosophical tradition. I’m not making this stuff up. People have thought deeply about this. It’s an ancient pattern. We haven’t transcended it. Here it is again.

At the time, when we were all going through so much, people thought, “Nothing like this has ever happened before.” Through others also bringing up how there were pandemics or scapegoats and other traditions, it showed us that this isn’t new and there may be a systemic problem. It’s not just that there’s a sickness going around but perhaps we are the ones that are broken and need to change.

There’s some power in illuminating unconscious patterns. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s important to see it because COVID might be, as President Joe Biden said, “The pandemic is over.” The basic patterning of looking for someone to blame, someone to dehumanize as the solution to our problems, that basic patterning is still with us.

It can turn from the unvaccinated to whatever the next target is, whoever can be successfully dehumanized. When that happens, this is such a basic instinct in humans to make sure that you are not one of the dehumanized people. That’s why when I spoke out ironically, I became a target of ostracism, censorship, and so forth. People didn’t want to associate with me because then they would be infected.

Guilty by association.

Repute, like, “You are associated with him.” For example, I was scheduled to be on various online programs and things like that. Other teachers would contact the program organizers and say, “If Eisenstein’s on that, I can’t be associated with it.” Jim Crow, if you were White but you were too friendly with Black people, you would get ostracized or worse. During the Soviet days, if you even associated with a family member of a dissident, then you would be suspected, too. You had to be careful. Even like in fourth grade, if you are seeing talking to a weird girl, then you have cooties. It’s such a primal pattern.

How did you push through that yourself? I know there was a point of indecision when you were publishing your essays, and you were like, “What’s going to happen when I take a stand?” How did you push through that fear and concern that you would be persona non grata?

It brought up fear, even ancestral fear, because I’m part Jewish. I had ancestors who narrowly escaped from actual pogroms. My grandfather, when he was three years old, a Ukrainian landlord hid him in a haystack. That’s why he didn’t get killed by a murderous mob. I have some fear of identifying myself with the heretics, the infidels, and the dissidents. That came up. I spoke out a lot early in the pandemic. I wrote some pretty direct pieces critical of various aspects of the public health response but also the deeper conditions such as death phobia and technological utopianism and the program of control and all kinds of stuff like that.

After I wrote a few of those essays, I got a lot of criticism. I went silent for a while but it wasn’t because I was intimidated. Later, I realized that it was because a lot of the questions and criticisms got in. I got to the point of, “What if I’m wrong? What if these critics are right that I have blood on my hands? That by making light of social distancing, by questioning its effectiveness, who am I to question it when doctors and scientists are nearly unanimous in promoting it? It seemed because the same mob dynamic where no one speaks out because they don’t want to be identified with the potential sacrificial victim.”

It’s because nobody speaks out, it looks like everybody was unanimous. This is a key part of mob dynamics. Mattias Desmet talks a lot about this, too. Mob formation only happens because everybody is afraid to speak out. You could have 99% of the people opposed to what the mob is doing, yet the mob still does it even if 99% of its members are opposed to it.

I was questioning deeply like, “How am I any different from the Orthodox people who also filter out the evidence that doesn’t meet their narrative and readily accept any evidence no matter how shaky and flimsy that supports it? How am I different from them? What about my own cognitive biases, my own confirmation bias, for example?” I got deeply questioning. I almost went crazy.

I started even to question my deep convictions that come from direct lived experience, such as this whole thing about science is real, for example, and that things that therefore are not accepted by scientific consensus are unreal. I’ve experienced a lot of unreal things firsthand, especially in the area of medicine. For example, science trumpeted the dangers of cholesterol for 30 years. That was wrong the whole time.

There were piles of studies that seemed to confirm it and that drew on that basic established scientific fact for decades. For a while, along with the healthy doubt of, “How do I know what I know? Why do I believe what I believe?” there was this unhealthy doubt where I began to doubt what I know. It took some months before I was able to step back into my convictions, and you could say back into my heart or a full body knowing. When I did that, the courage to speak out came naturally. What maybe looked like cowardice was from inner conflict.

Some time ago, someone left us a review on Apple Podcast, and they were like, “Take this podcast with a grain of salt. Think critically about everything.” It was a negative review besides that. I was like, “I agree with you. It’s great to question.” Even that time you went through, some mystics call it a dark night of the soul where you are trying to figure out which way is up. “Who am I? What’s my purpose here? How am I connected to a bigger picture and God?” It’s beautiful that you went through that, however hard, because out of the other side, you came through stronger. I invite people reading to question their assumptions, biases, and all the things you did because that’s the only way we are going to arrive at the truth. It all begins with awareness.

Every single person reading this probably has a deeply held and treasured item of the belief that is false that you are invested in that’s become part of your identity.

“Now you are messing with our business,” as they say in the city. You are messing with us. It’s true. You are getting deep here.

What would it take for you to let go of that? There’s an interesting post by Steve Kirsch. He has an informant inside the CDC. He’s giving him the down low. The informant tells him that pretty much everybody in the CDC genuinely believes in the safety, efficacy, and necessity of the vaccines and that they are serving the public and doing good in the world. Steve was flabbergasted because it sure seems like any decent, rational person couldn’t possibly think that. How could they? They are not these twisted wires. They look around. We are educated.

They believe in their own goodness. They believe in the integrity of the system that feeds them information. They believe in an ideology, a mythology, I would even call it, better and better health through science and the mythology of progress and all that stuff. Their belief in the efficacy of the vaccine and the safety of the vaccine is part of an entire worldview that’s deeply wrapped into their identity because this worldview confers them status and economic security. This happens in the dissident community as well. There are certain beliefs that become part of our identity. All of us can’t be right. There are those of us who emphasize mass formation, mob morality, ideology, systems, and emergent phenomena.

People’s belief in the vaccine’s efficacy and safety is part of an entire worldview deeply wrapped into their identity because this worldview confers their status and economic security.

There are those who are much more on the plandemic, everything that’s happened is orchestrated. Both sides seem pretty darn sure. We can’t both be right. In a way, we can but that gets more metaphysical. There are different lenses that illuminate different aspects of reality. I’m not here to say one of them is objectively true and the others are not but because each side holds themselves to have the objective truth, they are in contradiction to each other. Like what Steve Kirsch went through, and to his credit, took this in. He’s militant. I respect him for taking that in.

If we do not create the template of humility, of not being too attached to our beliefs which doesn’t mean rejecting our direct experiences but means being clear, what is coming from direct experience? What is body knowledge? What feels good because it conforms with the rest of our beliefs and that, fits our identity, and makes us look good and noble? What is coming from the body? What is an elaboration of the mind? If we don’t model that, how can we rationally expect the people who are fully subscribed to the orthodoxy ever to change their views if we don’t do it ourselves? If we are not in humility, we are making a statement about what a human being is.

A friend of mine has a little phrase, something like, “Belief is the enemy of knowing.” In other words, if we hold to certain beliefs, whatever side we are on, whatever our paradigm is, if we clinging to it because our identity is linked to it, then we may not even realize reality. We may not see what is true even for ourselves because we are adhering to one thing. It’s another way of putting it.

It’s fascinating. We could go on all day, but I have only so much time on this episode. I want to invite the reader, and I’m thankful for your charge to have that humility posture so that we can examine ourselves in the light of reality and in the light of all the things that shape our perspective on things. I heard this podcast where they were talking about, tell me what you think of this, Charles, that our way of seeing things is a little bit like an aperture on a camera. If it is wide open with a lot of light, we are going to see the good, the bad, and the ugly of reality.

That can be hard. Our experience and our tendency are to shut down. If something doesn’t fit our confirmation bias, we shut down and close up. The challenge or the work we all must do is to keep our aperture as open as possible to learn and face reality and then learn to be like the sunflower that faces the light and isn’t threatened or withered by it.

We tend to fix things into categories and explanations. There’s nothing wrong with doing that but when you become wedded to a certain set of categories, explanations, and concepts, the lens gets glued to your eyeballs, then you are unable to see anything outside of that. You see this happening with various kinds of fundamentalism. For example, I don’t know what to call it but woke fundamentalism, where you see everything in terms of whatever race, gender, and intersectionality.

It’s not that these are useless. You can understand a lot about society through that lens or the lens of Marxism. You can understand a lot through the theories of Karl Marx. When you try to see everything through that lens, then you can no longer see the things that are not visible through the lens of race, gender or Marxism.

Not only that, things that don’t conform to that set of meanings, you will maneuver them into that. It becomes a distorting lens, not only a filtering lens and an organizing lens. When you have a society of people who are fundamentalist and ideologically committed, then how can they even talk to each other? They don’t even have a shared basis of fact to reference from which to have a conversation. We are seeing this. It’s like entering into a separate reality. It could be the CNN, public radio, NPR reality, it could be one of the conspiracy realities. You enter into these, and it takes on a life of its own.

One of the conspiracy realities seems like you’re entering a whole universe that is fully self-consistent, and it changes who you are. It’s not just a body of intellectual information. It’s also a state of being.

It seems like you are entering a whole universe that is fully self-consistent. It changes who you are. It’s not just a body of intellectual information. It’s also a state of being. That’s how I’ve learned to navigate it like, “Which of these sets of beliefs are part of a way of being that is me and that I want to become? How does it feel to be scrolling through the conspiracy websites, getting one confirmation after another of how doomed we are, how powerful they are, and how outrageous it is? Here’s another one and another one.” There’s an untruth in it, which is about power and who has it and how the world works.

That untruth, on a soul level, on a psychological level, how true in carpentry is used as a verb? You true the board. “Does this true me to my higher self, to who I am?” If it doesn’t, then it’s not about the evidence. People can arrange evidence to fit whatever ridiculous belief that they want to. We saw this in the pandemic. How superstitious can you get thinking that standing on these marks in the supermarket is going to protect you from an evil spirit possessing you from jumping from one person to another?

Wearing ceremonial headgear and performing a ritual hand washing with a potion that comes out of this little shrine that they set up in the airports and the supermarkets. That is utter insanity but people waving the banner of reason and science went through these ridiculous rituals for months. We are no better than any anyone else in our capacity to arrange the evidence to fit the beliefs that correspond to who we are being now.

I know what you mean because I have these red, blue-blocking glasses. If something is written in red when I’m wearing those, I can’t see it. It is totally filtering out things according to that particular spectrum. We must be careful not to be so rigid that we miss what’s most life-giving. A friend of mine describes all of the information that comes at us, something as a bog. If it’s dragging you down, your heart might be telling you, “It’s time to leave this aside and experience for myself how I want to live,” and make choices that are life giving and not pulling you down because any side can be guilty of putting manacles around us and limiting our own understanding of our own sovereignty.

I’m thinking there are situations where the lens that I have been offering people, mass formation, mob morality, scapegoating, and hysteria isn’t the most useful. Sometimes the lens of the abuser victim is more useful. Sometimes the solution is to destroy the person abusing you or to leave the person abusing you. Sometimes that lens of a good guy, bad guy, can reveal things. It does have something to reveal in our times. By itself, it’s too close to the dominant worldview of modern civilization, which is basically progress through conquest, the conquest of nature, the conquest of the other, and too close to the paradigms of us versus them of competition, of survival of the fittest.

I recognize the value. Sometimes, the importance and validity of that way of seeing things, there is competition in nature but it’s not the only thing. There is such a thing as a pathogen and a contagious disease. When we try to look for one in every situation, we end up seeing ones that aren’t there and ignoring all of the other things that create disease and ill health.

They have been looking for the virus, the gene or whatever that causes cancer for decades now. They are never going to find it because there’s nothing to find. It’s not a useful lens in that situation. Part of reclaiming our sovereignty is not to outsource our knowing to any of these fundamentalist paradigms of here’s what is. We have to come back to our hearts.

Part of reclaiming our sovereignty is not to outsource our knowledge to any of these fundamentalist paradigms here; we must come back to our hearts.

A great challenge. For the reader who may be like, “I’m lost with all these different ideas of the systems and the primal way of thinking,” and trying to understand how to lead with the heart or find that heart space and avoiding rigidity, is there a way you could put into simple terms what you are trying to call people to?

I’m aware that during some of what I have been saying, I became somewhat impassioned. I carry a certain amount of anger after this whole affair of the pandemic and impatience.

Dare I say while you are thinking, those are normal reactions. Part of our humanity is the whole breadth of emotion and response. The next question is, now, what with where we have been and where we are headed, and where we are as individuals?

The pandemic was many things. It wasn’t just one thing. In The Coronation, I look at it through different lenses. One of those lenses is the lens of an initiation where we see where society has been headed because none of the pandemic measures was anything new. We were already going in that direction of separation, distancing, and control. Another initiatory aspect was that it halted normality and allowed us to take a step back. A lot of us went through an inner process of realizing what is important. You don’t realize it’s hard to know what’s important and precious until it’s taken away from you like when a loved one dies, then you understand how precious they were.

A lot was taken away from us in the pandemic. That is an opportunity to take in how precious, sacred, and important all of those things are, even something as simple as hugging and dancing together, singing together humanity, and sociality. Even if you were working online and had plenty of money and could get everything you needed delivered to your door, there was something missing.

Please don’t forget that. To take what has been shown to us as precious as our orienting compass in building a parallel society and changing the system like that. We come back again and again to the humanity, the relationship, the intimacy, the authenticity, these connections, to the community, to ecology. If we hold that as precious, then we are not going to be bamboozled easily by any of these elaborate theories about how the world works and what the solution is. Let’s stay in sanity, what we know directly as precious.

Thank you so much for reminding us of the preciousness of human life and of connection and love, the things that are difficult to measure in a lab or study under a microscope. I appreciate that. I want to pose the question I’ve posed to you before because this is not the first time you’ve joined us. I always ask this question at the end. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, whether it’s mental, emotional or physical, what would you recommend that they do, Charles?

Do at least one thing every day that you do for the sake of how beautiful it is to do it, to do something a little bit better than it needs to be done for any practical reason but to do it in a state of devotion. That practice, I won’t explain why it’s powerful. On some level, we already know because it establishes a principle of devotion in all things. It opens or widens the channel of our true relationship to the world and our true reason for having been born here, which is to contribute to the life and beauty of creation. How could it be anything otherwise?

Any gesture of that spirit affirms our reason for being here. Our health depends on expressing our reason for being here. Otherwise, the soul is like, “Why should I stay here? For example, the gift of life, health, all of my gifts, if I’m not using these gifts towards something that I’m here to do, then I don’t need to be here. I won’t be fully alive.” Fully alive means that you are fully giving and fully receiving. That’s why acts of devotion toward life, love, and beauty make us healthier because the soul is like, “I want to be here. I need to be fully here. I need to be healthy. I need to be whole. I need to be strong.”

There’s that sense of flow. Thank you so much for sharing your heart, these profound thoughts, and simply for being here. Thanks, Charles.

Thanks, Hilda.

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Our guest was Charles Eisenstein. Visit his website, CharlesEisenstein.org, for more resources and information on his new book, The Coronation. You can find me at HolisticHilda.com. Now for a letter to the editor from a journal. “Thank you for all you do. I found out about this fantastic organization in 2009. I have been embodying the principles you share since then. I’m about to have my first child at the age of 40. I couldn’t be more thrilled about how amazing this pregnancy has been so far. I have had zero negative pregnancy symptoms. I’m looking forward to the birth and raising my child with the proper nutritional principles. Much love to everyone.”

This is a letter from Renat in Florida. We are happy to hear this, Renat. On page 91, we published a picture of your baby. There was a gap between when you wrote the letter and when we received it and published it. Check it out. Go to our latest Journal. Remember that all members get a Wise Traditions Journal. Thank you so much for reading, my friends. Stay well. Hasta pronto.

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About Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eisenstein is a renowned public speaker, bestselling author, and social critic. He offers a way forward through a series of unforgettable essays in his new book “The Coronation.”
Charles is a countercultural philosopher and the author of several books including “Sacred Economics” and “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.” He graduated from Yale University with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy before spending the next decade in Taiwan where he worked as a Chinese-English translator.