#8 | From Mother Earth to Lover Earth - Charles Eisenstein
“The role of the King is to be in service to the Kingdom.”
I’m pleased today to share my conversation with visionary philosopher Charles Eisenstein. He is the author of numerous books, including the recent Climate: A New Story.
I first came across Charles’ work over 10 years ago with his book The Ascent of Humanity, where he articulates the deep story of separation that lives at the heart of modern civilization. From there, he wrote Sacred Economics, which inspired me to reach out to him and collaborate on a short that to this day remains one of my most popular films.
Since then, I’ve been privileged to call Charles a friend and ally in weaving the story of re-union - what he calls: the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
A few years ago, Charles developed his own interview series exploring the new story of masculinity. In this episode, I learn what he brought back from his journey, how he understands the role of the true king, and humanity’s coming initiation to cross the threshold from Mother to Lover Earth.
A technical note: the lower quality of my audio recording becomes better about halfway through the episode.
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IM: Welcome to the podcast, Charles.
Charles Eisenstein: Hi, Ian. Good to be speaking with you again.
IM: I just had a feeling come up with gratitude that I believe now that we're in 2020 that it was almost exactly ten years ago that I think I first reached out to interview for a…it was The Ascent of Humanity, was the book.
Actually, at the time it was a written interview that we did way back when.
Charles Eisenstein: Wow! I don't remember that, actually.
IM: Totally okay. Yeah, it was pre-Sacred Economics. It was for a magazine I was writing for, and that was actually the first time, and I remember actually reading The Ascent of Humanity that year.
I was actually on the beach in Mexico. It was a friend's wedding, and I was working through the, I think it's what, 600 pages or something? 400? And I was reading through the book, and everyone in the wedding was very much partying and margaritas, and dipping in the water. And I'm sitting there on the beach, pouring over this massive book and one of my friends was like, what are you doing? We're in Mexico! And I had such a difficult time “being there” because I was so taken by what you were speaking to in the book and how everything that was around me in that moment was so clearly an example of that which you were of deconstructing and revealing the story of. And so, yeah, I'm just profoundly remembering that moment right now.
I’m grateful for the collaborations since, which have been numerous, it feels. Along with a friendship, which I'm really grateful for it.
Charles Eisenstein: Yeah. Me too.
IM: So the podcast today is around the mythic masculine. And I'm grateful that we can talk about this and draw upon your own experiences.
And also, I think, too, to look at some of the, I don't know, the emerging stories around the masculine, particularly in a really urgent time, let's say, with what's going on in the world.
I'd love to start maybe initially with just an initial sense of how was it for you growing up and what were the stories of masculinity that were most apparent to you as an adolescent, as a young man?
Charles Eisenstein: I mean, I guess like most people, at least in this culture, I get my main ideas of masculinity from my father. And in a way from my mother too, in contrast too ‘cause the mother defines in the child's mind what isn't masculine. That was a time, I mean, I grew up in the 70s, so that was a time when the traditional kind of patriarchal masculine was really on life support. The archetypes of that masculine were still very present and running kind of on momentum.
But at the same time, this was, I don't know what wave of feminism it was. Second wave maybe. My mother was a very strong feminist, not exactly like a political feminist but she was a lawyer. Struggling to be accepted in our town where no law firm would hire her, even though she went to Yale law school, and she carried a lot of resentment toward men, toward my father, partly visited upon his person as a proxy for “the masculine” in our culture.
So it's almost like we almost take it for granted that women resent men. And can we even imagine a culture where women don't resent men? So internalizing that, boy, that really messes us up because we end up rejecting ourselves because of the mother rejecting the father. And I definitely inherited some of that pattern where I was like, yeah, I don't want to be a man. Because to be a man means to lose the acceptance of the mother, and I guess, yeah, maybe ever since then I've been, like you, I've been exploring the recovery of a self-accepting masculinity.
Because the other option is to abandon it all together, and I think a lot of the cultural rejection of masculinity/femininity to make it into simply a story, into a cultural construct and so forth is a kind of rejection that might come from the very understandable resentment of women toward men that is ambient in the culture.
IM: Would you speak a bit more of that as well? Because some listeners too may say, what do you mean there's an ambience? Resentments? Because in some ways I would see it's almost it's so much the water in some ways that it's hard to see. And I would love for you to speak even more about…
Charles Eisenstein: Well, I mean, why wouldn't women resent men if they’ve been patriarchally oppressed and violated and abused and held down for so many generations?
I mean, we see it in the media. I've just been watching The Handmaid’s Tale, and there's like this baseline assumption that what men are is kind of clueless and brutal and emotionally dull. And you know, this is just men. So it's partly depictions in the media, but for me it even comes down to a look on a woman's face, like a contemptuous look that just cuts to the bone. Maybe because it triggers childhood patterns. I don't know.
So I'm not a warmonger saying that these women, they're contemptuous, they're resentful, and we have to stand up for ourselves as men, because it's so understandable, like this is a holding pattern that I would like to resolve.
IM: Would you speak about, then, what brought you to launch the course that you did on “Masculinity A New Story,” I think a number of years ago, which really does seem like a real deep dive into this inquiry. And I'm curious, what was the moment you thought, okay, I have to make this into a deeper exploration for myself? And what were some of the gems that came from that journey for you?
Charles Eisenstein: [00:09:30] Yeah, that course was part of my inquiry. I did not go into it with, okay, here's the new masculine, and I'm going to teach you what it is. Instead, I conducted interviews with various men. Actually, Pat McCabe was on it too, so not only men but mostly men, who I thought had something to say. Like they had a piece of the puzzle of what does masculinity want to become?
I entered into it with an open mind, including on the table, putting on the table maybe what it wants to become is that it wants to die, and we enter a gender-neutral, non-binary universe where something as primal as yin and yang, the generative play of polar opposites, becomes obsolete. I didn't think that that's where I was going to end up, and I did not end up there.
I think that…I don't know. I tend to be rather suspicious of postmodern/academic/intellectual rejection of thousands years old philosophical and spiritual traditions because we've risen above that, and those are just patriarchal, or those are just this, those are just that. I tend to mine these traditions for teachings that could be useful today.
But anyway, I had that on the table. Maybe they're right. I was like, I don't know. So let me ask some men who are doing men's work. And I can't say that through that course I came to any clear understanding of what the new masculine is or wants to be and how much of it can be distinguished from what the new human is or wants to be.
It's not that everything that we're stepping into as men is an aspect of masculine. Gender is a way of seeing the world. It's a lens that can really distinguish some things and be helpful, and it's just not the only lens.
IM: What are you seeing today in terms of the conversation, the lens by which masculinity is being talked about or being viewed? Where are the places in which you still see a lack or an absence? What are the things you're thinking about in terms of masculinity today now?
Charles Eisenstein: Sometimes I hesitate even to venture into that territory because there is a lot of seething rage out there. If I engage the issue at all, because like so much of our culture now, it's so polarized that if I say the wrong thing, then all of a sudden, I get lumped in with the misogynistic alt-right or something like that or I get lumped in with the self-hating, wokester, liberal snowflakes. When the environment is polarized to the extent that everything you say on an issue immediately gets filtered through the lens of which side does this support, then I prefer to say nothing at all. And in those circumstances, I like to pull back to a deeper level that can encompass both sides and not be immediately identifiable as serving one side or the other.
And maybe this is one of my inner questions. How much of this is coming from conflict aversion, and how much of it is recognizing what actually serves life on earth? And how much of it is a reluctance to, in a way, embody the traditional masculine of okay, I'm going to assert my territory? I'm going to put myself out there. This assertiveness, this willingness to make enemies. This willingness to define who I am in contrast and potentially conflict with the other, to stake out some territory. That part of the masculinity that I've rejected.
And one of my questions is, What is the proper role for that kind of thing? So that would be one of the inquiries that I don't think that there's an answer to it. I think it's one of the fruitful questions that remains generative without an answer.
It's the question that's powerful. It's not that we want to come up with a principle that can resolve that question each time, but it's a good thing to think about.
IM: You made me think of my interview with Sharon Blackie not that long ago where she spoke about the archetype of the King, and how I think there's so many examples in today of what could be understood as the adolescent King or the tyrant King, the shadow King, the abuse of power. And in that sense, there's very few examples, it feels, of the right use of power. And so the impulse seems to be to reject power altogether, which I think is maybe somewhat of you're speaking with. I know I lived that as well in the past, saying, “Oh, power is inherently destructive, is inherently violent and aggressive. So I'm going to distance myself from that kind of power.” And yet, in some ways, it feels like an absence of the King at all.
Charles Eisenstein: Right. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the King archetype, actually. I was doing a cold plunge with a friend in this mountain stream. I have not done a lot of this. So I’m going in there, and I'm walking into this icy cold pool, and I'm kind of all clenched up, and he says, “Enter like a king.” And I just got it immediately. I relaxed. ‘Cause the King isn't going to be concerned about a little bit of discomfort. So I entered in there like royally, and my friend said my whole spine changed, my whole body changed.
And after that I began to take this up as a mantra, “like a king.” To enter a room like a king, and to explore what does that actually mean? Because, as you say, there are shadow archetypes that surround the King. On the one side, the tyrant, and on the other side, the pretender. The pretender is more insidious than tyrant.
So I understood that the true King does not actually need to be recognized as the king. It's not that he personally needs to be the king. He's discharging a function. The function is to be of service to the kingdom. It may be of service to be recognized and centred and given a voice and to rule, but it may not be. There's so many dimensions of it. In fact, I think I might even write a book about this, but this is a very initial stage of my meditation on it, my personal exploration.
Basically, it's a clarification of what I serve? Pat McCabe says this, that the masculine is supposed to be about serving, protecting life in relation to women, who are the life-bringers, life-bearers. The men are supposed to…she's almost a bit hesitant to say, ‘cause it sounds so traditional and conservative, to protect and provide.
But if we extend that to all of life and why are we…because, in a way, men are a little bit more expendable than women. Going back thousands of years, if the man dies, the baby can still be nursed. Yeah, I mean, obviously, we don't want anybody to die, but the men are a little bit more expendable. So, why are we here? And when we extend the family to include all life on earth, it's like, okay, we're here to be of service to life.
And so I look in my exploration of kingship. I look at, in various situations, what am I actually serving? Am I serving life? Or am I serving gaining approval? Am I really serving the life-bringer/life-bearer, as Pat would say? Or am I serving, getting approval from the life-bringer/life-bearer?
If I'm exploring this King archetype, am I actually serving my self importance? Am I trying to look like it came as a goal rather than possibly as a means or as a side effect? This is the kind of introspection that the King archetype is stirring up inside of me.
IM: You reminded me of the piece that you wrote a number of years ago, but it was Money and the Divine Masculine, if you recall the essay. I remember it was quite powerful. I just recently returned to it, and you painted this really powerful image of…maybe you could speak to it…of this man, I think either caught in the bonds of money or there's the shackles of the economic system, or however you described it.
And when you hear you speak of the King, I do see this element of almost like the King has been twisted to be in service to this realm of abstraction known as the money system, but I'd love for you to maybe to speak to that archetypally or mythically, if you can recall, because I feel like you're touching upon it now.
Charles Eisenstein: [00:19:41] There are certain capacities, certain gifts that we could name as masculine that are not possessed only by men, but boys and men tend to be more attracted to.
One of them is linear thinking, goal-oriented thinking, how do we get this done, rational thinking. Where rational meaning first you do this, and that makes that happen. Then you do that. Then you do that. Then you do that. It's a linear progression from here to there. Orientation toward a goal.
[Inaudible] would even say that this has an anatomical correlation, the thrusting penis, the wanting to forge into new territory, rise above, penetrate the mysteries, all that stuff.
This capacity needs to be firmly grounded in the feminine so that it doesn't become unmoored and pursue ends, ‘cause it can go anywhere. And if it's not anchored in the feminine knowledge of what is in service to life, then it will eventually become not in service to life, even if it might've started being in service to life.
There's no better example of that than the financial industry where the numbers of high finance are so abstracted from anything real in the world that it's almost impossible to see what they're doing. Like what the effects on the ground are of a hedge fund issuing a collateralized debt instrument or something like that. How is that actually affecting life on earth? It's a very, very long chain of cause and effect. It's not grounded.
So these gifts of maximizing the numbers, playing this game, which is all done with computers and these hard negotiations and these legal maneuvers and all that kind of stuff. It's not that these capacities that are in operation are in and of themselves bad. It's that they're not grounded. They're not directed. They've just become dissociated from service to life.
And so instead of rejecting those gifts outright, I would like to redirect them, ‘cause they're here for a reason. Everything that human beings are capable of is here for a purpose, part of the evolution of the totality of life on earth. All of our gifts are for that reason. So it's a matter of turning those gifts toward that.
A part of that is to even accept that that's what the gifts are for. We lived in an ideology that says that the gifts are for purposes of domination or purposes of transcendence where we become separate from earth. That needs to be undone for us to even ask the right question, the right question being, What are the gifts in service of? How can I live meaningfully?
Because when our gifts…and this is true, of course, for men and women, but for me and for a lot of men I know, it's an especially acute yearning to devote our gifts toward what we care about and what we love.
So often in the economy, what we care about and what we love, there's not a lot of money to be found serving those things. And the money, the highest rewards are toward things that might actually be destructive of life.
So why are we here? This disconnect between what the gifts are actually for and what they have been perverted toward becomes very painful. One response is just to opt-out entirely. It's like, well, I don't want to cause harm, so I'm just going to retreat from life.
IM: Thank you for that. There's actually a line near the end of the essay too where you say the divine masculine wants to make love to the world, and I feel there's something really beautiful in that, the invitation which does speak to something I think we've touched on before, which is this archetypal shift from what could be understood as a relationship to Mother Earth into perhaps a maturation of the archetype into Lover Earth.
Charles Eisenstein: Yeah, I've been putting that idea out there in various forms for quite a few years. The idea basically being that humanity, at least as a mass civilization, has been acting very much like a child. The relationship between the child and the mother is one of taking, one of receiving, you could say, where the child is unstinting in his, let's say, his acceptance of the mother's gifts.
The mother wants it that way, and the father too. Like, I “don't want my children to eat less because they're worried that Dad isn't going to be able to pay for it,” or something like that. Like that's not their job. Their job is not to restrain their receiving from the parents.
And in that phase of childhood, the child grows and grows and grows. Just like humanity has grown and grown and grown exponentially for many centuries now, even thousands of years. And as we've grown, we've taken more and more or received, we could say, more and more.
Right now, it looks a lot like taking. Initially, it looked a bit more like receiving, like so much wealth right there for the taking. The metal deposits right on the surface, the oil fields that all you had to do is prick the ground, and there'd be a gusher. Now it's a lot more like…it's like the earth was like, “Here! Here’s the oil, here's the iron, here's the gold, here's the soil, here's the wealth. Here. Take it. Grow.”
Now it's not so much like that. Now it's like, the oil, you have to pound fracking fluid into the ground to force the oil out. The harm that is caused by the extractive industries is tremendous, as you know.
I think that our growth phase is coming to an end. Growth in every realm. The monetary realm, the economic realm is one realm. The amount of energy that we're using, human population. This is already happening, actually.
I was just looking today at some statistics, some demographics statistics. Death rates in the United Kingdom and the United States are rising and have been for four years. Life expectancy is starting to decline in the United States. Birth rates around the world are falling precipitously, and probably by the year 2050 or so, we will reach peak population and enter then into maybe a slow decline or maybe a steady state.
So it's very much like a child reaching adolescence and then the growth spurt. We've just finished our growth spurt, and then the growth spurt slows down. And in that time, the adolescent, say, the young man, becomes a different being. A new aspect of his being unfolds.
One of the hallmarks of this unfolding is…well, there's two that I think are most important. One is a transition from just receiving to also giving and to co-creating to full membership in the tribe. Traditional and indigenous people would often have initiation ordeals that not only confirmed a young man in the eyes of the village or the tribe that he actually is a man now, but also put him through a process in which his childhood identity had to disintegrate to face the challenge that the ordeal presented.
The child's self was insufficient to that task. From that breakdown, a new identity emerges and a new understanding of who I am and why I'm here. And that is, that I'm here in service. I am not just here for myself, and I'm not just here to receive. Because of that, the young man could be welcomed as a full member of the tribe, because to be a full member of the tribe, you have to serve the tribe.
Humanity right now is going through a collective initiation where our identity, our collective identity…and when I say our, I'm talking about the dominant civilization or the one that looks dominant, at least. I could add disclaimer after disclaimer: looks dominant to those who consider it to be dominant, etc., etc.
Anyway, going through an initiation ordeal that's very similar. That involves a breakdown of identity, a helplessness to use the kinds of approaches to the world that have worked so well or seemed to have worked so well for so long, and now we're faced with the situation that our cherished and long-held patterns of response cannot meet.
For example, the response of totally destroy the enemy as a solution to a nation's problems has been unavailable now for 50 or 60 years. Ever since the bomb, basically. Total war became no longer an option, but we still operate kind of as if it were, or hoping that that option will somehow come back.
[00:30:00] So we haven't necessarily fully received the teachings of this initiation. This is a long process, but that's what we are in the midst of. Not to mention the ecological crisis, which is disabusing us of the idea that we can just continue to take and take and take.
So going through an initiation, that if we make it through, which there is no guarantee that we will, but if we make it through, then we arrive at the felt knowledge that, yeah, we are here in service to life.
Many of us as individuals are already, in fact, maybe almost everybody as individuals, are already tuning in to this truth. But we are all…it's not like some people get it and some don't. I mean, maybe to some extent there are people who are totally happy maximizing self-interest in the world-destroying machine. But most people, even as they participate and enact the roles of that machine, still feel alienated from it and feel forced into a life that they do not actually want to live.
IM: I read a piece recently about the recent rise of the Right in many countries around the world, and it linked it to this relationship to fear, which is perhaps not surprising, but that in a time of greater uncertainty, there’s a natural urge to seek those leaders who, at least on the surface, offer more control or more stability.
I'm struck by its relationship too to what you're saying about initiation, which is that in an initiatory time, of course, everything is uncertain. Everything..it's easy to step into fear. And I hear, though, in what you're speaking, that there's a different kind of invitation. Or maybe that's my question to you as well: How to enter into a time without resorting to or clinging to fear as the pathway, which itself has one reach to more implements of control and just doubling down and all the rest, which we do see [in] a lot of places around the world?
Charles Eisenstein: Yeah. And I see it both on the Left and the Right actually in different forms, each ready to let go of some things, each clinging to something else. And that is, to answer your question, it's the willingness to let go of control, particularly the mental form of control that looks to us as knowledge, the way that we organize and categorize the world, the concepts we use to narrate the world to ourselves. These are the biggest thing getting in the way of our emergence through this initiation, thinking that we know.
So I would like to see us embrace unknown and put on the table of the mystery, dearly held beliefs. That is what this process will do to us, by force if necessary. Better, let it be voluntary when the moment comes.
And this includes every single person listening to this, and it includes me. I'm not farther along in this process than anybody else, but the way that it is set up right now is not that some people are still clinging to obsolete beliefs that are holding us in stasis, and others, particularly those listening to this podcast, have let go of those, and we are in the new story. We are maybe 1% in the new story. The amount of unlearning that's necessary for us to embrace the reality that corresponds to the beingness that can live in the world that is coming, we're really actually at the outset of a very profound process.
IM: I'm struck by the power of story and how story has actually been in some ways a way of encoding possibility or imagination into…or archetypal processes throughout history, throughout cultures. And I know we've spoken in the past about a story, perhaps a sacred story, around this very transformation, and I would love for you to share that now, if that feels true.
Charles Eisenstein: Okay. One aspect of the initiation, the coming of age ordeal, is into an understanding of our gifts. The other is the birth of a different kind of love than the child's love for the parent. The kind of love that we could call romantic love. The kind of love that doesn't want to just take, but also wants to give.
In fact, the first thing that you want to do when you have a sweetie is that you want to give her something. Lovers like to exchange gifts. You don't want to just set that person up as a parent, although actually a lot of wounded people do just that, but a mature love, the love that is invited through eros is a love of equals, is a co-creative love, and a love of mutuality, giving and receiving.
That, to me, points to a different relationship to earth than humanity as a collective has been in. And it is a relationship where we always ask, How can we serve earth? How can we serve life on earth? How can we make this mutual? What does the soil need? What does the river need? What does the planet need?
Knowing that as we serve that need, it's not like we're going to sacrifice ourselves, but that a co-creative resonance gets set up where the more that we enrich and beautify life and the world, the more we ourselves grow in our wealth and the beauty of our lives.
This kind of growth is different from the growth in quantity. We have associated progress with the growth of quantity, the growth of GDP, the growth of BTUs of energy consumed, the growth of data, terabytes and exabytes and petabytes. That's what growth has been.
What I'm pointing to is a growth of immeasurable qualities that don't make us bigger and bigger. When someone becomes an adult when they're 18 years old or something, it's not like they stopped developing, but they do not grow bigger and bigger anymore. They've reached their full size, and development happens along a different axis.
It's hard to speak about this because the kinds of things that we will pursue from this co-creative partner attitude, the attitude of Lover Earth, seem today to be either they're totally invisible or they have been relegated into the realm of the arts or architecture or something like that.
But we can also source back to ancient cultures, some of them still persisting today, where everything was done with a consciousness of, Is it going to make the world more beautiful?
When the ancient Mesoamericans dug up gold (the Inca, for example), they dug up gold out of the ground. The purpose wasn't to accumulate gold. The purpose was to make something really beautiful of it and then put it back. Because it was understood that this is part of the forging of a relationship between humans and the nonhuman. It enriches us to do that, enriches us in ways that are not on the radar screen of our current understanding of wealth.
I'll just say, it's easier to see the opposite of that. It's easier to see right now the ways that we are depleted from the quest for quantity, which has made the world homogenous and ugly. It takes a bite out of our souls.
The opposite, when we turn and devote ourselves to the complexification of life, to serving life's evolution, because the nature of the universe is to become more and more alive. We are here to serve that. We are part of the universal process of coming to life. Earth over the last 4 billion years has become more and more alive. Each step of evolution, from anaerobic bacteria to aerobic bacteria, to multi-celled organisms, to flowering plants, etc., etc. Each step has made the world more alive in total, and we are a significant watershed species that is meant to make it even more alive when we step into our true purpose, after this initiatory process is complete. That's why we're here.
[00:39:40] This coming more alive, this service to the world coming more alive, more complex, more beautiful, corresponds to an inner evolution whereby we become more alive. Contrast to how we become more dead as we mortgage our life purpose toward the program of increase that dominates the world still today.
So if you can see whatever extent that we've been deadened and depressed and alienated by the current system, to the same degree we will be enlivened and enriched. We will become more. We will become more alive as we turn toward this co-creative relationship with earth.
IM: What's the invitation for men, then, specifically? Because I like what you said too around this call to aliveness and how that tunes us to the aliveness of the earth. What has served your capacity to tune into that recognition of aliveness, for you to step into your gifts?
Charles Eisenstein: I don't think I am at a point right now where I'm ready to extract principles from the experiences and stories that I've come across. I'm still very much in the inquiry, and some of what I said, maybe most of what I said, is not more or less true through a gender lens.
But it's, again, it's the right question to ask: What is mine to do as a man, as well as what is mine to do as a human being? What of my being is contingent on my maleness, and what is just part of being human or even just part of being alive? Just part of existing?
I don't think that we really know, because we're so conditioned by what masculinity has been. It's true that masculinity takes very different forms in different cultures, but that doesn't mean that there isn't such a thing as masculinity.
One way to understand the radically different forms that have taken is to say, well, it's culturally created. It's constructed. So of course it's different for different cultures.
Another way to look at it, though, is that a culture is like a transponder, a receiver for the archetype of the masculine that then takes a specific form. That energy gets channelled into a specific form, in a specific culture. So what masculinity is evolves as humanity evolves.
And then the question is, What is it evolving into now? In the past, even if we go back to matriarchal cultures, to the extent that they existed in the past, the most salient differences between men and women were on a gross physical level. I mean, here I'm going to get in trouble with the PC police if I say that men are stronger than women, or that women can give birth and men can't, or something like that. These are all dangerous things to say, but I'm not going to weigh in on that. All I'm going to say is that today a lot of the gross physical differences don't, in the age of machines, it doesn't really matter that much.
That I'm much stronger than Stella. Doesn't matter that much that she can't do a pushup. How often do you actually need to do that? Yeah, we moved some furniture today, and it was helpful that I have some strength, but if we're going to hinge our masculinity on those differences, it's not that important.
So what are the more subtle levels that unfold as the grosser levels become unimportant? That is a question.
One answer is that there aren't any subtle differences. That's a possibility. But I think that the masculinity archetype that takes a certain form in the gross physical differences takes another form as you go down into the more subtle levels of mind, energy, and spirit. But we haven't even lived in a society in which those are even visible to a large extent. So this is maybe the discovery we're in right now. So I can't say, here's what masculinity is, aside from these physiognomic differences. I haven't refined it or distilled it to that extent yet.
It’s a question that I've been carrying for a long time. And that's what motivated, to some extent, the online course I’ve made about masculinity. And I think it's important to be non-dogmatic about it when so much of the dogma, the politicized dogma, is actually the expression of these unhealed wounds that I spoke about as far as the female resentment, that women's resentment of men, and so forth. These unresolved wounds take expression as ideologies.
And then those who espouse the ideology think that it's just that this is obvious, and anybody who doesn't get it must be intellectually inferior. But really, ideologies are the surface level of something that goes a lot deeper.
If you're a serious about the inquiry, then be wary of ideologies that give you a pat, tidy answer to this question of, Is there a masculinity? What is it? Any of these easy answers are probably coming from unconscious programs and wounds.
IM: You wrote a piece number of years ago, I think it was called Rituals for Lover Earth. I would love to know or for you to speak a bit too about, again not an answer that says, okay, do X, Y, Z, and then you're gonna be on track with Lover Earth. But it feels like you're almost touching upon a kind of relational instinct or a ritual cosmology with which to enact this emerging archetype between humanity and the earth.
Charles Eisenstein: Yeah. All of that is based on understanding earth as a being, whether you hold it as Lover Earth or Mother Earth. If it's a being and you know that it is always listening to you and watching you and feeling the effects of everything you do, then it elevates to a much greater importance the acts that might otherwise seem trivial.
Like, what does it matter if you chop down a tree in your yard? It's just, whatever, 560 pounds of stored carbon that will be released over whatever number of decades. And therefore, if I offset that with something else, then it won't have an effect.
There's this mindset that reduces earth to a collection of substances that are themselves lifeless and unconscious. To hold earth as simply an illusion of life that's actually just chemistry, that's actually just a nonliving process, then from that mindset, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you can predict and prevent any negative consequences that come to you.
Even if you're saying, well, it's unethical to cut down trees or to make pollution, even though it's just a drop in the bucket, because if everybody else did that, then by Kantian logic, then it's unethical. I have to do what is consistent with everybody doing it to make the world better.
But part of the mind is like, yeah, but everyone isn't doing it. it's just me. What does it matter? That changes when we come into a personal relationship with earth as a being. Because then every act, whether it's recycling something or composting or planting a tree or anything like that, or building something and really taking care that it doesn't violate the life around it, that it becomes part of the life around it and part of the landscape. All of that, it takes on a new significance because it is a communication with a being. And the communication that it offers is: I respect you, or even I love you.
If we conceive of the things that we put onto the earth and into the earth as gifts, then we are communicating love. And in so doing, we are exercising a courtship because Lover Earth, we can't take it for granted. Mother, yeah. We can take mom for granted. Mom's going to be there. Mom's going to nurse us. Mom's going to take care of us no matter what.
But lover, not so much. We have to woo the lover. We have to go through a courtship. We have to demonstrate that we are worthy of her love. So every act that we do that is in service to healing life and beauty is an act of courtship that declares our readiness to enter into this sacred marriage contract from which both of us will benefit so much.
IM: Thank you. I have just this image of an awakening to a sensuality with earth. It feels so beyond the current system's capacity to relate to earth that I wonder if you might just, maybe this could be a closing image, if you could offer how you hold this possibility within your imagination or within your being of what it could be like if we were truly to awaken to this almost collective sensuality with Lover Earth.
Charles Eisenstein: [00:50:17] Like a lot of the knowledge that we most desperately need right now, given what I said about our ideologies and our intellectual constructs, a lot of this knowledge can really only come through our senses, that comes to us underneath or even despite our understanding that we think that we have about the world.
It can come through our bare feet on the ground. When you go out there, you know something, maybe you can't put it into words. Maybe you shouldn't put it into words. Maybe you should just let it operate on you without trying to tame it with concepts and categories and principles and abstractions and here's what it means.
Why do we always want to articulate what something means? Not that there's not a role for that, but do we always have to do that? It's like a more subtle form of the domestication of the world that has also reached its pinnacle and needs to stop growing. That's also part of the initiation I was talking about. Peak domestication. And maybe it shrinks a little bit.
Maybe the form of domestication becomes no longer master-servant, but a partnership, which actually there are those who say that there is a covenant between humans and certain beings—cows, for example, corn, honeybees—in which each serves the other, and that this covenant is being violated. And as it becomes violated, these beings will depart. They cannot stay here if we're not holding up our part of the drama that we've agreed to create together. So we get colony collapse disorder, we get mad cow disease, etc.
So yes, there is knowledge that is only available that way, and that knowledge then feeds into our creativity and allows us to access creative capacities that are beyond the force-based prowess of the separate self, that can only happen in co-creation.
And I guess I would include in this kind of thing, I don't know…I stayed with some people a month ago. The woman had on her counter this spoon that was bent. A heavy spoon. She gave it to me. I could not unbend it. She was like, “Yeah, I watched a video about spoon bending, and I was like, I'll try that.” And so she took this spoon and she just, every once in a while, would take it in her hands and twirl it and twirl it and twirl it. And then one day, she was doing that, and she was just like, it's ready to bend. And womp! She said, like a piece of spaghetti, the thing just bent.
You cannot do that kind of thing with force. You have to have a relationship. You have to even ask, Is it ready to bend? You have to get permission. You have to get cooperation. This is just a little tiny example of what's available when we enter into cooperation with the world. It's no longer all up to us, and we have access to happenings that we can't make happen.
So then, does that mean that we no longer have any will to project onto the world? No. It means that we put our will in service to that which wants to happen and we become aware of what wants to happen through the senses, through the listening, through the feeling.
Someone told me that their grandfather was a Sufi architect and how did they build a mosque? They would go to the site, and they would spend months doing nothing but tuning into what wanted to be there.
The technologies that become available to us when we do that are just mind-blowing, and they're so subtle that they seem irrelevant from the perspective of imposing on the world, which is the old masculine.
The new masculine, as I was saying with the example of the financial manipulator, the new masculine starts by listening. Starts by accessing the feminine-embodied connection to the world. Either the man with his internal feminine or through relationship to those who have a more fully expressed feminine, namely women. But there's a lot of men now who have a highly cultivated feminine too. Anyway, that needs to be accessed. That's part of the listening, part of the feeling into that allows us to accomplish what force and domination alone cannot accomplish.
Someone told me that in the old days in Japan, if they wanted to build a temple, they would find four trees that grew in the precise orientation that the temple posts would be, and then they would harvest those four trees ceremonially and move them. Those would be the posts of the temple because they understood that a temple built in that way was way more powerful.
That is a kind of a technology that is so far off the radar screen of what is familiar today that we would hardly even call it a technology, but imagine if we spent the next thousand years developing that kind of technology. What world would we live in? A very, very beautiful world.
And I think that is what we are here to serve and as a man, can't you feel that here's something of the sacred masculine. Okay? It's the feeling, I will do anything it takes for this world to be born. I am here to guard this birthing. I will put my life on the line for it. I am here. I am a full service to this birth.
If there's something that feels like a upwelling of a next masculinity in me, it's that. That impulse, that feeling that I'm describing, if anything, is part of a new masculinity. That's it.
IM: I had tears come to my eyes.
Charles Eisenstein: Yeah. Like you resonate with it, don’t you?. Like we recognize that. We recognize it. That's what the King does. That's the true King. He puts the kingdom before himself and would happily lay down his life for the kingdom. Yeah.
IM: Full circle. Beautiful.
Charles Eisenstein: Full circle.
IM: Thank you, Charles.
Charles Eisenstein: My pleasure.
IM: It makes me think back to the very first video collab we did, which was The Revolution is Love and how I feel it struck a resonance that I feel is right through everything that we've talked about here today as well.
Charles Eisenstein: Yeah. Yeah, me too.
