Our answers to these questions also come from stories we tell ourselves about the nature of reality. Then there’s a theme about how we live our lives in relation to each other. I’ve encountered a deep yearning for closer or more meaningful relationships with others. People talk about getting to know their neighbours, living in communities where they know other people well, spending more time with loved ones. Often this is accompanied by a desire to give – to support friends when they are in need, to visit the vulnerable, to help out when needed. To find a place of value, contribution, connection, love.

With chapters covering separation, interbeing, despair, hope, pain, pleasure, consciousness, and many more, the book invites us to let the old Story of Separation fall away so that we can stand firmly in a Story of Interbeing. I felt it again when I gave birth to my son at home, this feeling---this knowing---that I was a part of an eternity of creation and in that one moment, that eternity came through me. It's difficult to explain, but since then, I've worked to recapture that feeling of oneness and belonging. I've studied Buddhist, Jewish, Taoist, Baha'i, Muslim, and Christian traditions, and this feeling of oneness is only heightened as I see similarities between each of these traditions. The more I see the oneness, the more I want it, and the more I seek it. A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Overview: Story of the World

Because remember, you will not be there alone. As you begin to awaken to your mission you will meet others of our tribe. You will recognize them by your common purpose, values, and intuitions, and by the similarity of the paths you have walked. As the condition of the planet Earth reaches crisis proportions, your paths will cross more and more. The time of loneliness, the time of thinking you might be crazy, will be over. The More Beautiful World offers a refreshing and confronting take on the wrongness in the world and where it truly comes from.

The facts arrive at our brains already prefiltered by the distorting lens of the stories in which we operate.” It came into my life at the perfect time when I was reconfiguring my worldview. I was (and still am) in what Eisenstein calls “the space between stories”. My notes from this book total more than 17,000 words. Any attempt to summarise it will fail to do the book justice. The science is beginning to confirm what we have intuitively known all along: we are greater than what we have been told. We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.” Sometimes I feel nostalgic for the cultural mythology of my youth, a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Super Bowl was important, in which America was bringing democracy to the world, in which the doctor could fix you, in which science was going to make life better and better, and they just put a man on the moon.Acting accordingly, our choices often seem, to those operating within the old paradigms, to be crazy: naive, impractical, irresponsible. Indeed, they seem that way to that part of ourselves—and I trust that it lives just as much in you as it does in me—that also inhabits the old story. You might recognize its voice, critical, disparaging, doubting, insinuating. It wants us to stay small, safe, protected in our little bubbles of control. My purpose here is not to urge you to fight that voice or purge it; simply recognizing it for what it is already begins to loosen its power.“ On some level, we all know better. This knowledge seldom finds clear articulation, so instead we express it indirectly through covert and overt rebellion. Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way. More and more of us cannot bear to stay in the “old normal” any longer. How could your birth be a representation of the more beautiful births our hearts know are possible? As you grow up in that world, your knowledge will be under constant assault. You will be told in a million ways that a world of destruction, violence, drudgery, anxiety, and degradation is normal. You may go through a time when you are completely alone, with no allies to affirm your knowledge of a more beautiful world. You may plunge into a depth of despair that we, in our world of light, cannot imagine. But no matter what, a spark of knowledge will never leave you. A memory of your true origin will be encoded in your DNA. That spark will lie within you, inextinguishable, until one day it is awakened.

At the time I was closely following/supporting Preemptive Love Coalition which is an NFP organisation that placed themselves in war torn situations to provide assistance and there legacy was the above words. Our systems of money, politics, energy, medicine, education, and more are no longer delivering the benefits they once did (or seemed to). Their Utopian promise, so inspiring a century ago, recedes further every year. Millions of us know this; more and more, we hardly bother to pretend otherwise. Yet we seem helpless to change, helpless even to stop participating in industrial civilization’s rush over the cliff” We are following an invisible path, learning from each other how to follow it. As we do that, and as we learn to see its subtle markings, the path becomes visible. Absent a map, and in the very early stages of a new story, we can only follow our intuition at each choice point, guided by our heart-compass, not knowing how our turnings will add up to the destination.” I remember up until my mid 20’s having this view that ultimately everything is doom and gloom. That the trajectory of life and of the planet was towards more hardship and disaster. That I should fear everything, not trust and make it all happen on my own.Another man asked, “Is it possible that our mission will fail, and that this planet, Earth, will perish?” So what can I say about the book? I can't fully agree with the book, although I don't really think the book was intended to provoke agreement. Instead of just reading the book, you, in a way, read yourself while reading it. It questions the way you perceive and make meaning of the world, and in this regard I would say it is a good book. In the following I'll leave you with some of the interesting and thought provoking bits of the book: 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. Take this book and let it seep into your very being.” How to choose? What will you believe, given how easily reason, logic, and evidence are conscripted to the service of a story? Here is an alternative: Choose the story that best embodies who you really are, who you wish to be, and who you are in fact becoming. The second concept (which seems so obvious now but wasn’t at the time) were the words ‘Love Across Enemy Lines’, ‘Love Anyway’ and ‘You can’t fight hate with hate.’

When we experience this paradigm shift and start to see the world from a new perspective it will help us feel that somehow everything is going to be alright. To appreciate, from nuanced and subtle to the more striking beauty that is all around us every day. One does not ‘read’ this book, but rather interacts with it. And take heed, it will open your heart and mind, arouse ire and derision, and change the way you think about your life. Beautifully written, heart-warming, and thought-provoking, Eisenstein will undoubtedly be noted in history as a pivotal storyteller.” Behind the fog of helplessness of the question “Will we make it?” is a gateway to our power to choose and to create. Because written on its threshold is another question, the real question: “Who am I?”

Read The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

Another form of disruption is simply to create a living example of a different way of life, of technology, of farming, of money, of medicine, of schooling … and by contrast reveal the narrowness and dysfunction of dominant institutions.” Charles Eisenstein is a cultural investigative journalist, questioning the perpetually unexamined assumptions of both conventional and counter-cultural thinking. He is a cultural storyteller, a visionary who gives us a glimpse of what the new Story of the People may look like, how we might get there, and how close we are to it.” Reading The More Beautiful World I felt understood, challenged, hopeful, and relieved. Overview: Story of the World Who are we as a people? We are a special kind of animal, the apex of evolution, possessing brains that allow the cultural as well as the genetic transfer of information. We are unique in having (in the religious view) a soul or (in the scientific view) a rational mind. In our mechanical universe we alone possess consciousness and the wherewithal to mold the world according to our design. The only limit to our ability to do so is that amount of force we can harness and the precision with which we can apply it. The more we are able to do so, the better off we are in this indifferent or hostile universe, the more comfortable and secure.