Episode #14

Laura Dawn [07:47]: Alright without any further ado, here is my fascinating conversation with Charles Eisenstein. Alright, welcome Charles Eisenstein, you know, I just want to start by saying thank you so much for all the work that you do. I’ve been admiring your work for so many years now, your writing and your speaking and your capacity to communicate really complex ideas. Has played such an enormous and influential role in my life, as I aspire to cultivate my own path of thought leadership, specifically in the psychedelic space. So, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.

Charles Eisenstein [08:23]: Yeah well, I appreciate those kind words, and I’m just happy to be on anybody who isn’t a psychedelic activist. I feel like it’s my tribe because I think that these medicines are essential for that transition that we all sense. It’s possible that we want to see in our lifetimes. So yeah,

Laura Dawn [08:48]: I’m so curious to just start by asking you, you know, how have your direct experiences with psychedelics and sacred plant medicines directly shaped your thinking as a thought leader?

Charles Eisenstein [08:59]: Yeah, it’s not like I had direct visions that I’m then describing directly. It’s more than that, I guess, the most impactful psychedelic experience I’ve had, until recently, was an LSD trip when I was 22, which totally confirmed a suspicion that I didn’t even know that I had. But when I had the experience, I recognized that always been waiting for something like this to happen. And that suspicion was that reality and self and the mind and possibility are much bigger than what I’ve been told. So, like part of me when I had that experience and came down from it, I was like, yeah, I knew it. Thank you. I knew it. I knew that. It wasn’t just this narrow ghetto of reality. But then there was like this confirmation that. Without that, I don’t think that I would have had the courage to defy reality, as I know, as I’ve been told. That secret suspicion would have remained a suspicion.

Laura Dawn [10:21]: Yeah, you said until recently, do you feel like sharing recently? What happened?

Charles Eisenstein [10:29]: Yeah, I’ve had a really powerful medicine experience, just like a month or two ago. It’s kind of this underground thing. I don’t even know what the medicine is. But it was really powerful. It was it an experience of within minutes of total ego death, you know, like, Charles Eisenstein flew out the window like, like a scrap of paper out of 100 miles an hour car, gone. And in that fleeting moment, part of my mind is like, oh, but this isn’t a real this is just a chemical, you know, but then a split second after that. It was like, No, that wasn’t real, that Charles Eisenstein, that whole lifetime, that whole identity, that is what wasn’t real, this what I’m experiencing now, this is real. And it’s kind of hard to, people listening, who have done psychedelic work to understand what I’m talking about when I say that. It’s like, it’s a cliche, you can’t really put it into words.

And sometimes, I’ve noticed that the attempt even to put something into words can be a way to try to control it, to try to normalize it to try to fit it into the categories that the words represent that I came in with. And it can be not always, but it can be a way to confine the medicine to try to master the medicine rather than the other way around. I’m not saying like never tell your trip story or something like that. But I guess it’s more of like, I don’t want to try to understand it too thoroughly. I don’t want to try to explain it. I don’t want to try to fit it in a tiny box and oh, here’s what it is. Here’s what it meant. Maybe in five or 10 years, I’ll have a clear answer to that. And I’ll be able to say, yeah, here’s what it meant like I could say about that LSD journey when I was 22. That was 30 years ago, like I, I can say now, what it was in my life?

Laura Dawn [13:02]: Yeah, I have, let’s just go right off the deep end into o ego disillusion. You know, we know that psychedelic experiences can disrupt what we call our sense of self, but also, you know, what you call the defining mythology of our civilization, the story of separation. And, you know, we can go into these journeys and have these experiences of deep interconnection, and what you call interbeing, and I love that term so much. And yet afterward, we’re thrust back into the matrix of institutions that were literally designed for a different era, a different time that we don’t live in anymore. What advice do you have for people, especially leaders, who are really at the forefront of trying to contribute to paving a new path forward? But feel oftentimes, you know, we’re up against so much, and it’s easy to lose hope and to feel cynical.

Charles Eisenstein [13:55]: Yeah, yeah, I have two pieces of advice that totally contradict each other. One, so yes, like, I’m well familiar with this despair, even that, that, you know, you’ve come to see something that doesn’t even have to be through a psychedelic experience. But I’m given a glimpse, or an experience in one way or another of what the world could be, like, I could be that world, what’s possible, the true vastness of reality, of our capacities as human beings, etc. Like, you see that then you come back up to a world that lives as if that didn’t even exist. And then, because all of my reference points are in that world, and all of my conditions, my conditioning, circumstances, the expectations around me, the acceptable behavior in that society, it’s all defined by those institutions. And so, I snap back into conformity with it as well. I am not separate from my conditions. When you invoke the word interbeing, which I believe was coined by [inaudible15:11] originally.

But interbeing, what it really means is that you are a relationship, you’re not a separate being having relationships, you are the totality of the relationship. So, it’s, so this is one piece of advice is actually don’t be too hard on yourself, for not being able to hold the psychedelic state after the medicine is gone. Like, don’t beat up on yourself for, snapping back into conformity, and have some mercy on yourself. Because, boy, that is a painful thing, to have that knowledge and that state of being in this like shrinking little bubble inside of you, that just diminishes and diminishes and diminishes until you don’t even like maybe it’s not even there anymore. It’s painful, like that cut-off, and it’s better to never have known God at all than to have seen God and then be cut off from Him. So, like, that’s the one piece of advice is, yeah, it is hard.

And then the second piece of advice is to stop feeling sorry for yourself, and just do it. And ultimately, these two are our one, because of this shrinking bubble, because you can’t actually unsee it once you’ve seen it. And the experience operates on you and part in fact, even the despair, the agony of the cut off of being cast out of Paradise, once you’ve seen it, that is part of it working on you. Because you have to be shown the reality of the condition here. Ordinarily, we make it hell palatable through all kinds of distractions and delusions. And medicine can remove those. So, the initial phase or part of the integration can be an intensification of the experience of hell. Now, why do I say hell? I’m not saying that there is not a lot of beauty enjoyed and offer in this world, that we are born in.

I say hell in a sense, it’s actually a very classical sense of perdition, you know the term perdition used to be a synonym for hell and you know, pilgrim’s progress and stuff like that. Perdition literally means the state of being lost. So, the experience of being lost intensifies. The experience of disconnection becomes more tolerable when you’ve already when you experience connection. Because, because we this is actually all about disconnection. It’s built on disconnection, it’s built on separation, in so many ways, economic, infrastructural, it put it into little boxes. Metaphoric and literal boxes. So, this is the separation of how our whole civilization is built. But we’re acclimated to it. And that knowledge that there is a state of greater aliveness and greater beingness. That comes through the restoration of relationships. That knowledge is what I referred to before as a secret system. We don’t know what we are missing. And so that acclimatization process is the process of addiction and distraction and pretense, all the things that we use to cope in modern society.

And the medicine makes those inoperative. So then like we know, I was right secretly. It wasn’t supposed to be, it’s not supposed to be this way, there is something more and. But I even know that, how do I get there? Because I might feel incapable of getting back to that place. With everything that I know, I can remind myself of all those teachings, I can discipline myself to do my practices, and still, I don’t know how to get back. This is, I think, for most people, it’s an inevitable stage that happens sooner or later. It is a stage, but we are telling you that it’s just the stage that won’t help. Because in that stage the logic of it is total. It’s consuming.

Laura Dawn [20:19]: Yeah, one of the things like on a really practical level that I personally struggle with. I’m so curious how you navigate this as well, is like for people who do really want to influence real change, all of a sudden, we’re still operating within the systems. And now one of those big systems is social media and technology. And sort of like the bar it feels like higher and higher and higher in terms of, you know, having influence and in some ways, I have moments of like, yeah, maybe I could just be just as much influence gardening every day and letting it all go. And not doing the podcast and getting on clubhouse now, and all of the things that do bring a sense of inherent joy, I love communicating and speaking and writing. And then it gets to a point where like, it almost tips over and it’s like, wow, this is a lot to carry. Do you struggle with that at all especially with technology and just the amount like you put out so much content? It’s really amazing, actually. Yeah. Where do you find that balance in your own life?

Charles Eisenstein [21:25]: Oh, I don’t think I find that balance. I think I vacillate from one imbalance to another imbalance. Yeah. Very flattering of you to think that but. I’m probably the last person to ask about how to balance that. It’s not so much about, for me, it’s not just like, getting into nature, like going for hikes. I mean what do you do in nature? That only meets a very small edge of what I really want, which is to be in full relationship to the beings around me, that relationship is not the relationship when I look at them. Where we came from, hundreds or 1000s of years ago, was a very intimate relationship with the beings around us, using them for food using them for medicine, observing their life cycles of being stung by them, being scratched by them, like, having a lifetime of stories that refer to them. These are multi-dimensional relationships.

I get Yes, it has helped me to get out to the woods. I do that sometimes. There’s part of it’s like, but why, you know. Like, for that part to be nourished. I want to be somehow taking care of the woods. I want to be interacting with the woods, not just leaving no trace, but leaving a positive trace. And this points to a Universal need in human beings, which is to serve life, to be in relation to life to serve life. And I wouldn’t say that Zoom and Podcast and social media are outside of that service. I really resonate with the train of thought you were going down. Like I get that too. Knowing that change in this world is not a function of how many followers you have, how big your audience is. That mindset is the mindset of separation, it’s the mindset of domination. I have more than you. I’m going to make a big change, but who are the really powerful people on earth? It’s the people who go out in some direction we’re talking about psychedelic leadership here.

I want to say this because leadership is a function of courage. Because you’re going in a direction, you’re the first one to go somewhere. Well, becoming a, you know, popular podcaster like there’s a map for that. You’re not a leader just by doing that, I’m not saying that if you do that, you’re not a leader. Doing that does not make you a leader. What makes you a leader is doing something from the guidance that’s not already part of the general failing belief system. And that’s the kind of thing we need. Right now. We need people to follow that impulse and be like, yeah, I’m going to spend five years learning to communicate with nature. And learning to plant by the moon. And I recently reread Foucault Walker’s classic one straw revolution. The Japanese farmer, you know, who quit a prestigious agronomy job and went back to the family farm.

And learned how to farm with this minimum of effort in this incredibly elegant way that can use fertilizers or chemicals, or even compost and just basically letting nature do the work with these minimal interventions. The deeper his understanding, the more minimal his intervention can be. And, you know, equaling the yields of like, the most industrialized high-tech farms, and he had, he was not doing it to change the world. Yet after 20, or 30 years of total obscurity people start coming, people start learning from him. He writes the book it’s a bestseller. And his influence now has rippled out the entire planet. If he had set out with the agenda of, I’m going to become famous, I’m going to become an opinion leader. How do I do that? What do I put in service to that? Well, I have like, then you’re actually not serving. You’re not going to do anything new that way. So yeah,

Laura Dawn [26:42]: I love that. I love that. That story. Thank you for sharing that. You know, I also just love the concept. You know, you speak about this. I also read Yuval Noah Harare, his work that the stories we tell create our reality. And I’m so curious about your thoughts around this extreme non-cohesiveness and cultural narrative, which of course is very different than even a few decades ago. It’s like the cultural narrative was a plate and that just got smashed to the ground. And it puts us in this interesting juxtaposition of division yet a possibility. It’s like, on one hand, like each space between the broken piece now becomes an opportunity to not just adopt the cultural narrative, but to discover what’s true for me. And yet, on the flip side, people are more divided and polarized than ever before. What’s your perspective on this?

Charles Eisenstein [27:35]: Yeah, yeah, just like reality has splintered into many, many shards. It used to be that even if people had disagreements, they at least agreed on what is a valid source of facts. And they can refer to those facts in an argument and persuade each other. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I agree that this is a fact. Maybe they didn’t know it, but that’s a valid source of information that’s valid. Like they held in common knowledge, like sources of knowledge, and we don’t have that anymore. You know, one person will cite evidence from one source. Now they’ll say, well, that’s not valid. Has that been fact-checked? You know, that’s a conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s valid. Even the New York Times is telling us we read anything disturbing. Basically, did you read this article in your times, it’s like four or five days ago, basically, saying critical thinking is leading us astray. And if you read anything, any dissenting opinion, anything disturbing.

Go to Wikipedia first and check out the source and make sure that it’s okay before you waste any time. And then they gave the example of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like, you don’t need to read them. This is what the Times article said. You don’t need to read it stuff on vaccines, for example, just go to Wikipedia, and it says he’s a conspiracy theorist, problem solved. So basically, this is a, it seems like there’s a kind of desperation in that. It’s like the dominant reality is unraveling, like, threads are peeling off of it. And they’re desperately trying to hold it together by saying don’t even look outside this reality. And some of these threats, not like every one of these threads is the truth. Like, although these conspiracy theories can’t all be true because they contradict each other. Like, but I can’t say that any one of them is patently absurd. It only seems absurd from within the core narrative, which defines it as absurd. So yeah, like how do we communicate now across these gaps?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot because I’ve noticed a narrowing, it’s like I’m standing on a shrinking iceberg. Because I’ve held countercultural positions for 20 years. But the information that I can cite, to argue for these things, is getting exiled. Charles Eisenstein o the forbidden realms. Sometimes, like, you know, in the form of videos getting taken off YouTube, like I, for example, I’ve been writing about homeopathy for a long time, not that much, but I cite homeopathy as an example of something. I’m like, Hey, you know, here’s a medicine that is based on very different mythology, of self and world. That says that the inner and the outer are connected, that any condition in the human being is mirrored by a substance in the universe. And this can be used for healing.

So fine, as long as it’s theoretical, I can still say that, but if I’d say we should devote even 1% of the research money going towards vaccines to homeopathic treatments for COVID. If I say that, I put it on YouTube, that that can get taken down. It probably will get taken down because it is quite thick. You know, it’s Yeah, so I guess I don’t have the answer to your question. I don’t really know what to do about it. I thought, but it’s occurred to me, maybe I write fiction, you know, maybe I instead of shouting louder, at those who are in a different reality, like if I do that their experiences of me shouting. You see this online, you’re hysterical? Their experiences of me shouting. So, maybe it’s, you know, yeah. Maybe we don’t try to convince, sometimes maybe, maybe there are other ways of being and other ways of communicating. I could say more about that. But I think I’ll pause and see what you want to add.

Laura Dawn [32:06]: Yeah. It’s just interesting. You know, on my last solo episode, I also do really solos for this podcast, I released one called truth triggers and getting right with yourself. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that as we’re in the midst of so much chaos, and upheaval, and this great tide of change is happening, that we’re also witnessing an explosion of interest in psychedelics and plant medicines that offer us really, it’s like, they’re reaching out a hand and saying, hey, maybe instead of focusing outward, let’s go inward. And let’s look at where we’re out of alignment in our own life, get right with ourselves, as a primary pathway towards influencing change around us. But it is interesting to just riff on this around. Yeah, this time of finding what’s true for ourselves. And instead of shouting at other people, where there’s just so much division, finding what’s true for each of us, and then owning that from a place of integrity and kindness, and with the intention of looking for common ground to stand on. So, it’s like holding the juxtaposition of the division towards unity, in a sense.

Charles Eisenstein [33:19]: Yeah, well, I’ve been around the block on that, you know, but I say something like that, and I don’t like I’m not actually advocating, withdrawing from collective life, withdrawing from political social community engagement. I do think that any effective activism in the world has to correspond to a kind of inner activism, because of the way the world is projected into the way we are, and vice versa. Inner and outer exchange happen in tandem. When I say anything like that, you know, then in this current political climate, I, you know, I’m accused of being you know, a white privilege male who, yes, you have the luxury to do inner work, but a lot of people don’t have that luxury. And in fact, you are by just focusing on inner work and not being a vocal, anti-racist, anti-this anti that you are actually enabling all of that to happen because silence is violence.

So, get off your ass and stop resting in your privilege that goes that narrative that I think is a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. Because It’s not an escape from the action, like, the more that we heal the, to the story of separation, and the experience of separation within ourselves, the more compassionate we become, the more able in the world we become to affect change. And a lot of people like, you know, it’s not like they go into spirituality. To avoid engaging the world, a lot of people come to spirituality or come to psychedelics, after they’ve burned out, they tried really hard, using the tools available to them, using what they’re received tools and their received worldview, they tried really hard to stop the violence, they’ve tried really hard to change the world. And it didn’t work. You know, they worked for peace in Palestine for 20 years, they worked. I mean, so many stories, where they’ve tried and try and try and get burned out.

And they realized that there is a higher level of effectiveness that also might be less invisible and less celebrated. And less like it doesn’t, you don’t get the affirmation of other activists necessarily for doing this kind of work. But it is a 500-year timescale that we can sense it’s more powerful. Because this, you know, the machine that we live in has tremendous momentum. I’ve taken some solace recently in understanding, like, this is just kind of play itself out, I can’t stop it, I tried to stop it. I was writing about the dangers of, you know, biomedical security. A long time ago, and when this whole COVID thing happened. I was like, I knew this was going to happen. I tried to stop it. This obsession with safety, you know, this sacrifice of all other values, for the sake of minimizing risk, like so much that I’ve been dreading, it’s happening, you know, and that’s some antiquated tailspin of despair.

But realizing that, yeah, this has to play itself out. And a lot of the work that we’re doing, it’s planting a seed. In the future, maybe it’s operating on a very long-time scale. And even if it is not on a long timescale, like maybe the things that we’re doing, we don’t know it, but in 10 years, the world would be totally transformed. But we can’t see that from a linear mind. We can’t predict how that’s going to happen. When we can make a scenario. Usually, there’s an element of magical thinking, as an element of, and then everybody’s Consciousness Changes, there’s a shift in content there is like, how do I make that happen? I cannot make that happen. That is, that phrase, that’s a key pivot.

To think that our impact on the world is the things that we make happen. And one thing that psychedelics can open us to, is the presence of a larger intelligence, which then brings up a different kind of leadership, a different kind of change agency, which is no longer imposing our will on the world, for which you have to have a plan. But instead, it’s participating in a process of change, that starts not with the plan, but it starts with listening. Starts raw, it really starts with first reconnecting to this intelligence, and then learning to listen to it, and be guided by it. So, it’s totally opposite the industrial or Newtonian mindset of making something happen. If you need to make something happen, then first you have to become powerful. And then you just like doing it, what everybody else has been doing.

I’ve got to get a lot of money first. Because if I don’t have a lot of money, I’m not going to go to scale it up, I’m not going to be able to do a big thing. So, then all of a sudden, you’re competing for a lot of money with other people who also think, who are telling themselves that it’s all for a good cause. This is what George Orwell described in 1984. The goal of the party he said was the greater good. And to do that they needed power. So, power becomes the end. Starts as a means and it becomes the end. More power. So, we’re just back in the same playground, as everybody else. When we buy into making change happen. Now, it’s not that our 3D capacities are never used, but they’re not useless. But we have to understand that the scope of this problem, the scope of the illness on earth is beyond anything that we can address through our plans and our force.

Laura Dawn [40:20]: Do you think that psychedelics and sacred plant medicines are like at the sort of forefront of quote-unquote, our best bet for helping us through this time?

Charles Eisenstein [40:33]: Yes. Yeah, you know, there’s one of the mythologies that explores the New World Order mythology, you know, where there’s a ball of Illuminati, maybe reptilian aliens, you know, satanic forces, etc., they have the world in their grip. And then there’s in somebody mythologies, there’s also the guardians, or the benign angelic extraterrestrials and these other forces. Now this whole setup this whole mythology of good versus evil, I think it’s ultimately part of the problem. However, I can enter that mythology, but then I think, Okay. How, okay, so they’re these guardians, let’s say that they’re these guardians, that are here to help humanity, transition, past this initiation, here to help us become, to reach our potential and to become full citizens of the galaxy. Okay.

How do they actually intervene? It’s not that they. It’s not that they contend with the negative violent forces, at their own game, it’s not that they’re going to swoop in with superior force, to those and, you know, come in and arrest all the Illuminati and the, you know, human trafficking, elites and all this kind of stuff. The way that they intervene is that they? Well, one way that they intervene is that they send us medicines, that have just an enormous impact. I mean, our, like the 60s, as we know it, the 60s, that happened because of honesty, that entire cultural transformation, that never would have happened if it weren’t for psychedelics. So, if you look at the history of LSD, I mean, like, you know, it was discovered pretty much by random,

Laura Dawn [42:39]: But then one could make a case that, you know, look what happened, subsequently, the forces that be we had the war on drugs, you know, we had mass propaganda, a lot of the hippies went on to become brokers. It’s like, and so, some people call this the third wave of the psychedelic Renaissance, like, is this different?

Charles Eisenstein [43:01]: Yeah, one medicine wasn’t enough. I mean, you know, we’re talking about healing a 1000s of years old process, like healing. It’s a process of separation that’s reaching one extreme and a further extreme and a further extreme in our time. But it goes back to the mindsets, the institutions, the perceptions, the beliefs. Like these inhabit us. On an unfathomably deep level? One medicine, they can show us something, but they don’t, automatically in a split second, undo all of that, like you come down from that trip, and you are yourself again, almost. Like, you know, you’re still you know, in your family, you still have your same friends, you still have the same job. Like it doesn’t magically change any of that.

The Guardians don’t work that way. They don’t magically change things. But they see the process of change. So yeah. Yeah, you know, a lot of the tech tyrants of our time, you know, they took LSD and so forth, but still, it opened a door that then makes the next door available, the next door available, and is going also this doesn’t fit necessarily into linear time. This intervention could have been initiated 1000s of years ago for seeing exactly what’s happening today, as is the case with a lot of the traditional plant medicines. You know, I lost guy he Boga Simon, right? These were suddenly invented in the 1930s or 1940s and 1950s. But they were not in reality, not in the dominant reality. They might as well not exist. And they only came in when the physic conditions were ready for them. So, this is still happening, the physic conditions have been evolving. And the earlier medicines like LSD. They prepared a collective field or some of the medicines that have been coming in more recently. The one that I was talking about earlier, I think is going to be one of the big ones. Now there are various questions about supply a