Episode Details

Our guest this week is Charles Eisenstein, a teacher, public speaker, gift economy advocate, and writer who focuses on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution.

About Charles

He is the author of several books including The Ascent of Humanity (2007), Sacred Economics (2011), The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013) and Climate - A New Story (2018). Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme, but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunities to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

His on-line writings have generated a vast following; he speaks frequently at conferences and other events, and gives numerous interviews on radio and podcasts. He also occasionally writes for the "Comment is Free" section of The Guardian and The Huffington Post on topics including genetic modification and the patenting of seeds and debt. He is a contributing editor at the website Reality Sandwich. In advance of appearing on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday on July 16, 2017, Eisenstein wrote "The Age of We Need Each Other." Check out his latest essay on the Coronavirus pandemic at https://bit.ly/2xfaK8A

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In this Episode We Canvas:

• How We Make Money

This has been one of the three lines of his work for over 20 years because he feels any questions that anyone asks about society and the way we are doesn’t stray very far from money. An example is the fact that how the world works kind of revolves around money. We often operate based on what we have to do and what we can afford to do. A person’s survival is highly dependent on money. He wanted to understand money better so he could understand society, the human being, and himself. He feels the divide between money and spirituality is part of the problem and that the two need to be unified with money being the crux of the unification. His experience has been that money always seems to pull him back into a person that he no longer wants to be and it brings out his worst impulses, and he wants to look at that and be who he can be, so he looks into what role money can play in a person’s evolution.

“If there’s anything harder to bring into the sacred realm, it would be money” - Charles Eisenstein

• The Gift Economy

It comes from a basic impulse that one is offering something as a gift to someone, and if it’s precious to that someone, then any amount of money that that someone charges is going to be too little, because the gift is infinitely valuable, and so putting a price on it would devalue it. Any amount the person receiving the gift charges would also be too much because that would put it behind a paywall. When the price of something is too little and too much, one can’t set the price. He applies the same with his online courses