Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of financial, ecological, and health crises, warning against prioritizing profit over the sustenance of life.
Charles Eisenstein's quote highlights the urgent and interconnected challenges of our times: the financial crisis, ecological crisis, and health crisis. He warns that there is a limit to how much of the earth's resources and our health can be commodified, suggesting that aggressive monetary pursuits can jeopardize the very foundations of life. This serves as a call for a reevaluation of our values and priorities, pushing for a more sustainable and health-conscious approach to our existence.
In practice
In discussions about the importance of sustainability, this quote can be used to emphasize the broader implications of environmental degradation.
When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Such is the life of the slave—one whose actions are compelled by threat to survival. Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time.
It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.Fear it or not, it is happening already.
There is a vast territory between what we're trying to leave behind, and where we want to go - and we don't have any maps for that territory.
The cynic thinks that he is being practical and that the hopeful person is not. It is actually the other way around. Cynicism is paralyzing, while the naïve person tries what the cynic says is impossible and sometimes succeeds.
The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.
Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%.
This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.
The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.
Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.
Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves.
Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake. If material poverty is to be avoided, spiritual poverty is to be abhorred. For it is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.
I can tell you that God is alive because I talked to him this morning.
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