They helped open my mind to different ways of conceiving and perceiving the world that local traditions of Buddhism and Taoism offered. While we won’t be seeing millions of people living in space in the next decade or two, it seems likely that by 2050 or so we probably will be. if we could only quantify and manipulate everything in the material and social world, we could engineer paradise.

He presents data in dozens of categories showing that the world is far better off in terms of declining violence, longer lifespans, better standard of living, access to health care, declining child death and death of mothers during birth, etc. As I mentioned earlier, the time to do is when you know what to do when we don’t know what to do and act anyway, you’re probably acting out of habit.

Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? So as we are experiencing this other dimension of human nature, coming out through the cracks and the structures in the future, as we, you know, go back to normal, maybe, or maybe a new normal we can ask, Hmm, maybe we don’t want to go back to normal. We need people to do such things with care and devotion, at least as much as we need people to invent new machines and build new organizations. Just as meaningful words are composed of meaningless letters, so also is the meaningful world composed of meaningless protons, neutrons, and electrons. I could not accept the way the dominant narrative of my culture handled these things: as fragmentary problems to be solved, as unfortunate facts of life to be regretted, or as unmentionable taboo subjects to be simply ignored.

I couldn’t have articulated the feeling at the time, but I just couldn’t accept my situation as good and right, sitting in rows in the classroom, forced to do things I didn’t care about, filling out worksheet after worksheet, watching the clock tick slowly toward recess. The more beautiful world I inhabit accords with Charles Eisenstein’s vision: a world where we embrace the shadow and give it name so that the healing can begin. The first step is to give attention to your yearning, to do that, and to bring into consciousness, things that may have been excluded from the table of your awareness, such as the dissatisfaction with the success arc that maybe has taken you, taking you to a certain place and then hit a glass ceiling, and you realize there’s some other level of wellbeing and happiness that I’m not getting any closer to.When we tear away the ideologies, the labels, and the rationalizations, we show ourselves the truth of what we are doing, and conscience awakens. In the book I say that even if global warming is not a problem, I still want to end fracking, oil spills, tar sands excavation, and all the other ruin that accompanies fossil fuel extraction. Then there is the realm of physical and emotional healing, using modalities that don’t fit into current medical paradigms or medical funding systems. I’ve thus found myself comfortable with being in many ways “on the fringe” but it’s not something I sought out.