Charles Eisenstein (born 1967) is an American writer and teacher, and one of the most inspiring visionaries of the transition to a sustainable civilization; he describes himself as a non-growth activist. He graduated from Yale University in 1989 (mathematics and philosophy) and then went to Taiwan to study Chinese; he worked there for ten years as a translator and for twenty years he studied Eastern spiritual traditions. He currently lives with his family in the town of Camphill near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Goddard College. Eisenstein focuses on the problem of the transformation of human consciousness and civilization, on the question of the transformation of the economy and money, or rather on the articulation of a "new story". His texts, published in the online magazine Reality Sandwich appealed to a large number of readers. David Korten called Charles Eisenstein a "one of the great minds of our time". Charles Eisenstein is the author of the books: The Ascent of Humanity / The Age of Reunion, and the convergence of crises that is birthing the transition (2007) and Sacred Economics / Money, Gift and Community in the Age of Transition (2011), in which he explores avant-garde concepts of the new economy and books The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013), in which he articulates the emergence of a “new story of coexistence” from many sides. This author’s text is an excerpt from Chapter VII of his book The Ascent of Humanity; translated by Jiří Zemánek. The author's article "Why Rio + 20 Failed" was also published in Czech in The Referendum Diary (July 2012). See also: www.charleseisenstein.net, www.ascentofhumanity.com, www.sacred-economics.com.
If we reverse the conceptual objectification of the world that has led us to the all-consuming system of money and possession, it will bring us back to an economic system that preceded today's compulsion to constantly receive and possess something. I call this system the gift society. As Lewis Hyde has shown, its basic principle is that the gift must be given or it will cause stagnation or even become a curse. However, the gift mentality transcends the human realm and determines our different relationship to nature and to the world in general.
It is no coincidence that many rituals that permeate Stone Age culture were conceived in terms of a gift – a gift to the earth, to the water, to the fish, to the trees. When the indigenous North American herbalists set out to gather herbs, they always took with them a little tobacco or grain as an offering, a ceremonial gift to the plants and the earth from which they had received something. In our Western society, too, ritual is usually accompanied by the giving of gifts – think of Christmas. We instinctively recognize the giving of gifts as a sacred occasion from which ritual grows irresistibly.
The coming fusion of science and religion, so deeply related to the sacred purpose of the human species, can also be understood in terms of the spirit of gift. For if science is the pursuit of fulfilling our role within a greater whole, then we cannot understand this fulfillment except in accordance with the question: “What do we ourselves have to give to the world?” Ecology itself represents a network of gift, in which every organism and every species contributes far more to the environment than the limited Darwinian calculus of “adaptability” would be willing to admit. If we no longer view nature as an object, but as participants in it as ecological beings, then we must engage in this gift-giving network. No species in nature is superfluous, and no faculty in it is useless. Surely the unique human faculty that turns us to the world through struggle also has a purpose.
I am not surprised if some readers are impatient and want to know more about our human purpose. I have written about the role and function that humanity has – no less than any other species – in the preservation of the planetary ecosystem and its evolution. However, I have not clarified what this function might consist of. What I am offering is not so much a program as a different way of thinking. We will create and discover our true role through play. It is not necessary to know at the outset what that role is; what is important is the mentality, the relationship that comes from being in the consciousness of the gift. It is like going to buy a gift and having no idea what you are going to buy, but you know that you will find “just the right thing” and that you will know it when you see it.
The rise of humanity loses its connotations of control and separation when we begin to think in terms of, “What is our unique gift to the world?” This question is slowly beginning to shape the future of science and technology. How can we engage in unfolding the beauty of the universe? As the illusion of separation is healed, we begin to define our collective purpose in terms of beauty. Just as individuals will approach work in the spirit of art, so too will we measure our new technology not by whether it saves labor, reduces costs, or generates profit, but by whether it contributes to a more beautiful world. And this approach will not be driven by an attempt to appease our consciences for the sake of profit, but will be permeated by the fundamental motivation of science.
Okay, that sounds like a nice future, but what can we do right now? When we live in a society based on taking and owning, is it possible to live in a spirit of giving, which is a spirit of abundance, which essentially means dissolving the boundaries within the circle of giving?
Let us remember that separation is an illusion. We can choose to live in this illusion or reject it, but the fundamental reality that life and the universe are inherently providential, that is, giving, cannot be changed. Life itself—our human life—is a gift. Our lives, our talents, our abilities, and our very privilege of being human are all given to us, and like all gifts, they cannot be hoarded. None of this can be, like the capital of classical economics, dedicated to the endless growth of me and what is mine, but must be passed on lest it stagnate and decline. In the ancient gift-giving circles that defined an identity larger than the skin-encased ego, each individual knew that his or her gifts would one day be reciprocated in some way. This circle—truly a web of giving—cares for its own members just as the ecological web of nature sustains all species within itself. In other words, every gift eventually finds its way back to the giver in some altered form. “Our generosity may leave us empty at first, but our emptiness is then gently drawn into the whole until the thing in motion returns to fill us again.”
Who, then, is the Giver of our own personal gifts of life, health, talent, and happiness? And how can we reciprocate? What good are our gifts if they are not for survival and reproduction, if they are not for the destructive growth of our deluded selves? The Christian answer to this question is to “praise God”; unfortunately, these days, praising God is often interpreted as singing songs about Jesus. No. To praise God is to worship and participate in the most beautiful manifestation of God. God is ultimately recognized as the Creator, so to praise God is to worship and participate in this Creation. Our gifts are creative gifts. The gifts of mind and hands that make us human, including the gift of life itself, allow us to participate uniquely in the ongoing process of creation. Unfortunately, for a long time, up until today, we have had to use these gifts for the opposite purpose—to fight creation, to impose on the world a uniformity and linearity that is not its own. This struggle, which has exacted an ever-increasing toll in language, number, and time since its prehistoric beginnings, is almost over. The resources that made it possible are practically exhausted. Soon we will simply accept nature's gifts rather than try to possess them, we will pass them on rather than try to hoard them.
Whether you think of this Giver as God or as the Universe (and what difference does it make in a fully spiritualized universe?), our lives are a gift, and the way to give that gift is to live it as beautifully as we can. It doesn’t matter that modern society seems to be disconnected from this gift-giving network. This separation is an illusion. Despite the seeming rational benefit of owning and accumulating things, in reality, when we prioritize beauty over ugliness, we find that our gifts increase, not diminish.
The hunter-gatherer’s belief that the forest is always providential is still available to us: “Let us feast on what we have today. Tomorrow we will eat what tomorrow brings.” But many of our other assumptions and beliefs must be in harmony with this. To believe that the world is fundamentally providential, to accept it as a network of giving gifts and to enter into this network, is to open the boundaries of the self. It is to see through the illusion of oneself as a disjointed separate self. It is also to trust rather than to control. To receive fully always means to relinquish control; otherwise it is not receiving but merely manipulating the giver, that is, taking. In the spirit of the gift lies the destruction of every manifestation of the system of separation. When the monetary transaction is replaced by the transaction through the gift, the circle of the self atrophies until it finally becomes the solitary mercenary domain of John Calvin and Adam Smith. Living in the gift reverses this process, releasing the bonds of the disjointed and separate self and all that goes with it. Living in the gift means letting go of the urge to control, giving up the program to describe (evaluate) and calculate the world, renouncing the search for reductionist certainty, including the urge to transform the world into money and possessions.
Because separation is an illusion, we can “live in the present” here and now no less easily than our ancestors did in the Stone Age. The only obstacle to doing so is our beliefs. The impression that we “cannot afford” to live this way, that it is dangerous, is no more or less true than it has always been. The hunter-gatherer was undoubtedly sometimes unnecessarily hungry the next day because he did not manage or store his food and because he took more of it from the world. I am not saying that the world is safe. However, the idea that we make the world safer by owning and accumulating things is also an illusion. We are no safer, nor richer, than we were ten thousand years ago. As then, so today, an attitude of trust is still needed.