The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
When we knew every face intimately, there was no need to generalize into “people.” Our ancestors experienced a richness of intimacy that we can hardly imagine today, living as we do among strangers. It is not only social richness that is muffled underneath our words, it is the entirety of sensual experience. Margaret Mead once observed, “For those
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There is no self except in relationship to the other. The economic man, the rational actor, the Cartesian “I am” is a delusion that cuts us off from most of what we are, leaving us lonely and small.
Charles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
Boredom, that yearning for stimulation and distraction, for something to pass the time, is simply how we experience any pause in the program of control that seeks to deny pain.
Charles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
his book Elements of Refusal establishes that the Revolution must go much deeper than that,
Charles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
We have achieved mastery of the linear domain, and attempted to expand that domain to cover the universe. Most real-world systems, however, including living organisms, are hopelessly nonlinear. From this realization will arise a new approach to engineering and to problem-solving in general that does not start by breaking the problem into pieces. Ou
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greater effort from our present state of being only serves to reinforce that state of being.
Charles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
The performance of any part of an organic nonlinear system cannot be understood or predicted in isolation from the rest, but only in relationship to the rest. Such parts are no longer freely interchangeable, and the methodologies of reductionism are impotent.
Charles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
Primitive survival is a matter of intimacy and not control.
Charles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
All the causes of boredom are permutations of the interior wound of separation.
Charles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
Under the delusion of the discrete and separate self, we see our relationships as extrinsic to who we are on the deepest level; we see relationships as associations of discrete individuals. But in fact, our relationships—with other people and all life—define who we are, and by impoverishing these relationships we diminish ourselves. We are our rela
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