 Hello, everyone. Today is September 7th, Wednesday, and I am here with Charles Eisenstein with great honor and excitement. And we're doing this recording in advance prior to our festival because Charles wasn't available, wasn't going to be available at the time. So thank you, Charles, for giving us this opportunity and your time. Thank you. Thank you, Felice. Really happy to be with you again. So I think we last saw each other on 2017. We were at Tamara at a course together and then, and I still remember the first moment actually I met you. I remember too. That was like, yeah, that was like in 2010 or something like that. Well, it was 2012. I was on a journey that I called audaciously Brave New World and I was tracking people and projects of that I believed carried the vision and the energy of this. What you called the new story, the new and ancient story. So it was at the time it was, I think during the economics of happiness conference, and me and my friends I figured in Manish we cornered in the hotel breakfast room, and I had invited you for an interview. We were both 10 years younger than, and I know I feel older after 10 years and changed, and hopefully in the direction of more maturity and wisdom. At the time I had interviewed you about the Brave New World and what your vision of the new story was. I just want to start us off. What might have changed in these 10 years for you. How did you change maybe in your take on the new story after we had also gone through the pandemic. And then we will connect that with grief and death. Well, the main thing that's changed in the last 10 years for me is I've gotten 10 years older. And it does actually, and, and, you know, people who I love have passed away. Almost everybody in my parents generation has passed away now. Just my father's left all my uncles and my mother passed. And it really has brought my mortality. And the fact that I'm going to die some day into into sharper relief into more reality. When you're young, it's kind of a theoretical idea, at least for me, that you're going to die someday, you know, or even that you're ever going to get old. And as I'm not actually answering your question very well here because you asked how my views about the new story or the next story have changed. But also how you yourself because it's all interconnected. Yeah. So, um, as my as the finiteness of my life has become more and more obvious. I've become less ambitious. And it's not about okay I need to build my career and it wasn't even necessarily selfish, you know, it's like, yeah, of course I need to build my career need to build my audience because I have important messages I want to share for the world. But as I get older, that becomes less and less sensible to do anything for my future. And I don't have that much of a future anymore. So, so I've become much more oriented toward empowering other people younger people. And I guess it's like my, my borders have opened a little bit. And who I am includes a wider circle of people. Yeah, and as far as how my views, my philosophy has changed. I'd say that the one big change become the biggest change is that I used to kind of assume that crisis and collapse. And that we're going to automatically transition us into the next story. Now I don't think that is true I don't think that we're going to be rescued from ourselves by political economic ecological collapse. I think that rather that these crises. When one of these crises comes to us it gives us a choice. It gives us a choice to hold on there's a train going by outside it's going to wait for it to pass. Yeah, the railroad company times these to come by when I'm actually you know, recording something. And maybe about to make a very important point so it just, yes. Right. So, So what the way I see it now is that each of these crises and like especially coven. It gave us an opportunity to choose because it showed us things that had not been conscious before. So in the, in the example of coven. It said okay here's fast forward to the future. If we continue this path of increasing technological surveillance and control over life and increasing obsession with safety. And like here's what society will look like if we continue down this path. And do you want it. Is this the future that you want. And part of it was also showing us our phobia for death. And how much of life we're willing to sacrifice in order to be safe. And in order to minimize risk. But does that mean that we automatically say, Oh, no, we don't want that. No, it's still something that we have to choose. And, and so I think that when we ask, well, what's the future going to be, is it going to be a more beautiful world, or is it going to be a, a totalitarian hell. That is not an objective question. It's like when you go to the restaurant and someone says, can you please predict what we will have. Is it going to be, you know, a pizza, or is it going to be lasagna let's let's predict what the future will be. That's silly, because you get to choose what the future is going to be, you get presented a menu. And that's, that's how I think that that collectively and even individually. That's the situation that we face right now. Right. So humanity gets to partake in its destiny, basically, we have to awaken to a choice that is before us. If we don't awaken to the choice then we're just going to blindly continue on the path that we've already been on. I mean, it's already a deep dive. But not, I wanted to ask you about the midst of modernity, like, because it's also in the collective response we have seen towards covered. A lot of it comes. Now there are many theories but a big chunk of it for me is also coming from this warfare with death, or against that. And fear of death. And, and then you also mentioned like this unconscious death wish. There is this like, which for me comes from the estrangement from one of the core and human rights of passages as sacred. The sacred aspect of being human and being part of this world. There's this estrangement and and that that that feeds the midst of modernity and also vice versa the myths. Maybe feeds that. And how does that really impoverish our experience of life. And also strengthens our sense of separation from each other and from life itself. Well it's a lot for these. So, one way that I look at modernity is that it. It's the result of kind of a war on nature. And in the myth of modernity we are winning this war. We have harnessed natural forces we have domesticated the wild. We have penetrated the mysteries. We have extended our lifespan by controlling biology with drugs with surgery. And, and we have even, you know, changed the code of life genetic engineering, we have become the masters of materiality. We can, with chemistry and physics and engineering, we have more and more control over the world. The ultimate triumph over nature would be to conquer death, which, you know, there, people actually do predict or dream about this possibility that we can, we can reverse the aging process by changing the genes. We can replace worn out body parts with mechanical parts. We can even integrate silicon computing into our minds, maybe we can even upload our consciousness into computers. And this has been the dream of, of futurists for, you know, centuries now, that someday we will have vastly extended or infinite lifespans. This ambition draws on the modern concept of a self and who we are that says that death is the ultimate calamity because what you are is this sort of meat machine that generates consciousness and that when the meat machine dies, then your consciousness is extinguished forever, like a candle flame getting blown out. That is, that's the dominant myth of our time. Now I know that religious people, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, I mean pretty much every religious person does not agree with this concept of what a self is and who you are. But even if you are religious that ideology of a material finite self, it's still pervasive. It still infiltrates our perceptions. It's built into science, which is our description of what is real. It has a very deep effect on people. So modern society then driven by the fear and by the ambition seeks to conquer death and to as the as the ultimate triumph, the ultimate conquest of biology, the ultimate act of domination. So a lot of modern society is geared around avoiding death, denying death, pretending that death doesn't exist, hiding death, so that it's not part of our daily experience. Or managing death. Now this is actually impossible, but anytime that we can pretend that it's possible, we get very, as a society, very obsessed with that. And so COVID comes along. And so here, you know, because actually this, this modern program to dominate nature and conquer death, it hasn't been working very well. Life spans increased dramatically throughout the 20th century, almost doubling in some places, but going up by at least 50%. Almost 50 years ago, this increase has slowed down and even before COVID was starting to reverse in in the United States in the UK, life expectancy was starting to fall. Now it's fallen in the last couple of years it's fallen by like one year, every year. And the conquest of disease which was promised in the middle 20th century, that hasn't happened either. We're not healthier than we were even without COVID. We are less healthy, mentally, physically, emotionally less healthy than we were a generation or two generations ago. So already we've been losing faith in the story and feeling really anxious. And then COVID comes along and and basically the narrative unconsciously it is here is something that we can control. And if we can conquer this virus, then we will have immortality. Then we will have perfect health. It's like takes all of our anxieties and all of our failures and focuses them on to one thing that if we can conquer this one thing, we will we will have victory. So it's like all of our death denial, and all of our safety obsession gets focused on one enemy that we can actually supposedly control. So I think a lot of, you know, there's many, many narratives about what happened in the time of COVID. You know, there's conspiracy narratives, you know, depopulation agenda, evil elites, totalitarian forces, all that stuff. But we still have to ask what made society so vulnerable to all of those powers, and all of that corruption. Why are we so willing to be herded by cattle into these, these insane policies, like that, that most of the public enthusiastically embraced? Why? And I think a lot of it has to do with the phobia of death. Maybe could you say more about how this, how you see this phobia of death and warfare? How does, how does that shape us individually and collectively? And you know, there's this like vicious cycle of the culture shaping us, then we shaping the culture in penetrating each other. And how do we get out of that loop, in a way? And, and then further question was, what kind of myths and do we need? The biggest tragedy with the denial and avoidance and phobia of death is kind of a paradox. It prevents us from being fully alive. You know how, I mean, I experienced this with my, you know, relatives, my mother and my uncles all dying. Like, only after they die, or when they're in the dying process, do I realize just how precious they are. If I'm not aware of how temporary this being is in my life, then I'm not aware of how precious each moment is. By the same token, if I'm not really aware, if I haven't fully accepted and integrated the fact of my own finitude, then I don't treat my life as precious either. I don't treat each moment as precious either. If I were going to live forever, then it wouldn't be a matter of such urgency to really enjoy each moment in, in this body with these relationships in this beautiful world that I'm in right now. Because, you know, it's going to last forever. So, so I might as well enjoy it later. Well, there isn't always going to be a later. And I think a lot of people experience this like when, when they have a close brush with death, and your death experience of severe illness, or like I did, you know, being at the bedside of a dying person. And, and when that experience is over, you have a renewed appreciation for life. Culturally, when we have a cultural denial of death that we that we all participate in, we have less appreciation for how precious life is, we treat life as not sacred. Our own lives is not sacred, the lives of the people we love is not sacred, and the life of the planet as not sacred. Because we don't integrate the preciousness and the fact that it will all be lost. Like this is one of, you know, Francis Weller's key insights. I know you had him on last year in the program. The key insight is everything you love, you will lose when I really understood. So, so the process of understanding that is called grief, which means that grief is necessary in order to fully appreciate life in order to fully be alive to feel all of the other emotions, such as joy, you know, such as pleasure, such as love, like you have to have the grief too. It's what makes this all real. And, yeah, you know, when our society, I mean, I don't know how it is in Turkey, but here, you almost never see a dead person. All of the billboards, all of the advertisements, all of the most of the entertainment media and all features young people. It's as if what we're being shown is a world without death. The fashion models, they're all young people, the popular actors and actresses, all young people. Yeah, it's like, it's like we're being shown eternal youth that is that that contributes to the delusion that you're going to have eternal youth also. And also another aspect of that is the narrative of security in national politics, for example, you know, national security militarism like the idea that that the suggestion that if we can only keep our borders secure if we can only control all of our enemies, then the problem is solved. What is the problem? The problem is that we're all going to die. But, but it's like this pretense that if we can only be secure and safe enough that that'll never happen. So the whole narrative of that that puts security first, that puts safety first. There's a saying in English safety first. Like what does that actually mean? Safety first really? What if the safest thing is just to stay inside your house all the time and never go out because any all kinds of bad things could happen to you if you go out. So basically safety first means don't actually live. Don't, don't take any risks to fully live and to express your gifts and to create beautiful things in the world. That requires risk, even in the sense of if you're generous, if you, if you devote your money and your time and your energy toward helping society and creating beautiful things, well, that's less money for you because you've given it away. You've used it for something else. Couldn't you invest it and keep it secure and keep yourself safe instead? Yeah. So. So the absence of death awareness and the absence of grief as a practice as a function in the community, one can track it through the really very roots of violence and separation and conflict in the world, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's really the healing of this condition. It's really just as simple as acknowledging the truth. The truth is that our time here is limited. The truth is we're all going to die. The truth is that you don't even know when that's going to happen. The truth is that every, everything that is beautiful to you will pass, that every person you love will die, that every place you love will change, that you yourself will change, that your children will grow up, or the people you love will become old, they will become sick, like all of this is true. And along with that truth comes another truth, which is that each of these beings is infinitely precious and each of these moments is infinitely precious. This is not about taking something on faith, okay? This is simply integrating what is true, undeniably true. And by taking that truth in, everything changes. Everything changes. Everything changes indeed. And you know, the roots of all those things I mentioned, essentially the root of suffering in the world. There's also already an existential angst about the fact that we are conscious of our death. Humans are, as far as I know, the only beings who are aware of their own death. So I think for that to humanity, you know, developed. I'm going to use the world technology being all aware, your criticism of it, but spiritual and social technologies to really bring sanity around it. Because it's not an easy thing to face. So, you know, we're talking about the truth of dying, existing with the knowledge, however disembodied, knowledge of that one will die someday. So this is not easy. It's a difficult act and perhaps a lifelong practice, I will say. And so humanity developed over the millennia, all these different modalities, stories, rituals, rites of passages, you know, handed down from generation to generation. And, and some, you know, indigenous people still hold on to them and practice those but most of the world's most of humanity have lost touch with those things. And, you know, Stephen Jenkins mentions the, the power, the cultural poverty, and, and, and then essentially sitting with the grief of it so once, once, you know, you become aware of this, there's a lot of grief about that. It's the fourth gate of grief with Francis's work. So what is your take on it, you know, now being, you know, middle-aged person on the way to elderhood from a very, you know, living in a privileged, well, materially speaking privileged country, what's your take on it, like, how do we, beyond grieving, because Stephen Jenkins doesn't make any pointers beyond grieving, but I feel like there are more things than to do grieving about the loss of those cultural aspects. How do you bring these things back in your daily life, if I ask you, everyday life. Well, so the, the practice of grieving or the allowance of grieving. Generates an orientation, like, and a new seeing that guides me in bringing real richness back into life, because it orients me towards what's actually important. I'm no longer in the pretense that the precious is not precious, that the moments will be eternal, that I can preserve everything that I love. I'm no longer in that pretense. So, so simply knowing that reorders my priorities. And, for example, it pushes me to make the most of the time that I have with my son, instead of mortgaging that time to a future that never actually comes. That's another realization that comes through grief is that the future never really comes. Like the future is always the future. And if we're always oriented toward the future, which might make sense if we and everybody we love our immortal, but we're not. So always oriented toward the future means you never actually live the present. That's one of the, the orienting principles that comes through grief. Another, for me, this has been especially, especially important for me that that there's a counterpart to grief that is equally important called celebration. And a society that doesn't really have room for grief also doesn't really have room for celebration. Kind of empty fake celebrations, but celebration. Just as grief is the process of integrating loss. Celebration is the process of integrating our, our victories, and our accomplishments and our successes, and the, our creations. Like, if I find that if I don't have some kind of process of celebration, then I never know in my bones. I never know that I have actually achieved something that I've actually done something beautiful that I've actually been an agent of healing or creation or, or beauty or life in some situation. So I, therefore, am unable without celebration, I'm unable to really be fully present in a moment because there's a sense well there's something I haven't done yet. Celebration says, I have done it. It was good. It's just like in the Bible, you know, God actually celebrates after he makes the world. After each stage, he says, it was good. You know, it's like, yeah, I created with this that nothing and it is good. Like that, that's the, that's like the essence of celebration. It's you take a step back you look at it is good. Let me gather people around me to also say, and reflect that yes, it is good. You know, I really want to bring this into a discussion about death and grief because it can seem so morose, you know, and so solemn. And it becomes that if you practice grief without also practicing celebration. And at some point grief and celebration merge into one a funeral can be a grieving process right and an acknowledgement that this person is gone now, but it can also be a celebration of their life. Yeah, where we look and we say it is good. This reminds me of two things one of one is the funeral I had witnessed in Tirumunamalai in India. It's a procession of like with the dead person in a car being taught and then in the back, there are like musicians and all kinds of things happening so that and then also in Sufi tradition a death of a person is also called a wedding day. So it's a wedding day that this person is then gets married to the divinity again to the infinite to God. And I think of what Francis brings grief and gratitude together so for me a celebration is also giving thanks that this thing happened that this we were able to, you know, do this thing, whatever it is, and, and we're not the only force for most of our creations right we are like you say you tap into the source, there is the source of your writing or of your books of your thinking comes from a wider field so giving thanks to those forces for giving us the chance to bring worlds. And in, you know, I lived in Taiwan in my through my 20s, and they're like funerals sometimes they would set up like a whole stage you know and they would even higher strippers. Sometimes to like make it a really festive like celebration that was just like mind boggling for me. You know, okay so this thing about about gratitude and thanks that isn't all there is to celebration. That can actually for me that's been a way of of denying myself celebration to say well you know that wasn't really me who did that. You know that was all of the people who have contributed to me and I said like, but actually though. I was, I was rejecting my own accomplishment. Like there's something. Because I did it to like I made a choice. Yeah, and that needs to be acknowledged if I am going to be able to move on to the next thing. It has to be complete. Yeah, so I've become actually this is maybe another thing that's changed for me over the last 10 years. I've become wary of like false modesty. And, you know, like, if somebody comes and thanks me for my work or something that I've done. And I like deflect the thanks. Like, well, you know, you got that from my writing because you were ready for you know it was really you were like, I'm actually in denial of something. And what I'm denying is a mini celebration, an opportunity for a mini celebration. Because we are creative agents also we have choice. We have all of these gifts we have all these inputs we have, we have a lot to be grateful for but we also are making a choice to direct these gifts to use these gifts for something. And I guess this is, you know, part of the other change in my thinking that I described earlier, we're not just automatic agents of creation. We are also creators. We are also even like spirit made flesh we are God made flesh like there's a mystic component of this, where we are choosing creation. And I don't want to get too metaphysical here but but maybe people can can resonate with what I'm saying like, like, maybe it's time to step up and say yeah, yeah I did that. Okay, you know, let's celebrate that because once you celebrate it, and you integrate it, then you don't have to unconsciously seek out celebration. That's never completed, which you might do through bragging and boasting and, and attention seeking, like, because your accomplishment has never been fully acknowledged acknowledged. And it's in that, in that, in that stage of, of trying to make people admire and respect you and, you know, it's very similar to what happens when we deny death, because one thing that happens. When we deny death and we don't and we postpone grief. We actually continually generate situations that invite us into the grief. We invite situations of loss, even beyond what will inevitably happen. And we are like walking around with this sadness, this unresolved sadness. So celebration as a almost like a precondition to be able to grieve, not maybe a precondition but it's side by side it's yeah. They're part of the same, because they're both the same thing, they're the integration of truth into your being the truth of loss, the truth of gain, you know the truth of accomplishment. Yeah. I had asked you this was a response to how you are bringing the grief and death awareness and practices maybe back into your life is there anything else you would like to add. You know, I mean just on a really practical level. Sometimes I'll just go into a little meditation. Where I like imagine myself holding Stella's hand as she's taking her last breaths, or imagine myself watching the sunrise with the knowledge that this is the last time I will ever see the sunrise, or the other night I went outside and there were the crickets, the crickets were making a lot of noise, you know, and I realized someday I will be hearing the crickets for the last time. And this. So, so every day almost I connect with the truth of death. Yeah, it's a way that I stay sane. And thank you for like these are very simple daily like moments of truth or practices. What about rituals I know you also have an interest in those and it's a passion for me to like lifelong learning journey for me and I have grown up without rituals. I have faced without ceremonies or rites of passages and even the notion of rights of passage because death and grief for me as are also thresholds into transformation and into another cycle of life like that is not the opposite of life but I feel like that is part of life's big embrace. And even death itself are rites of passages so what about that the absence of that the poverty of the absence of those in modern life. I wonder. A lot of us have no access now to the two certain lineages or receiving you know these traditional ceremonies and then, and there's a hunger around it and now there are attempts of recreating those. And there are risks involved in that, and maybe also some of those risks we need to take I would like to hear about your. Yes. Very often when we try to bring ritual, and I will also say ceremony back into our lives, they feel fake. There's like, they feel inauthentic. It's like, there's like this knowledge well this is just a ritual. And that's if it's learned but not lived through like, yeah, if it's something you've learned somewhere. And it's based in a worldview that that you didn't grow up in and you on some level don't fully believe but you would like to believe it. So I'm going to do this ritual and I'm going to like this candle here and I'm going to do that in this particular way and I'm going to call the four directions and etc etc but there's like the sense that I'm just doing a ritual. See the thing that we are craving in the craving for ritual is we're actually craving meaning. And we do have hidden rituals in our in modern society that we do not recognize as rituals. Rituals are actions that seem more real than ordinary actions. We've kind of got it backwards when we call something a ritual. Seeming well that's just symbolic it doesn't, it's not real, it's just a ritual. Right there's this. I don't know in Turkish but in English there's this. There's this association of ritual with something empty and meaningless. But that misunderstanding of ritual blinds us to the actual rituals that. Essentially hold reality together. Ritual is part of the storytelling of the world that narrates what's real and who you are. That's why genuine rituals seem more real than other actions. So an example of a genuine ritual in my society is the process of buying a house. You're transferring property from one person to another. I don't know about you but we have to have to like sign page after page after page after page of documents 50 pages 100 pages of documents. Each one you have to sign your name. In order even to be allowed to sign that you have to produce other documents. You have to go through a long process with the bank. All of this is ritual. That means the documents. Like why are you actually doing this. Well you know that it's very important. You're putting your signature on it. This is a legal document. So that is an example of a ritual. Another example of a ritual would be. I'm in a tiny ritual is to swipe a credit card. I mean, imagine that you're an anthropologist going to some other society. Before somebody is allowed is given goods. They have to take a sacred chip like a little talisman. And they have to do some magic thing in the air. And then they're given food and they're given that you'd be like, yep, that's their ritual. Well, we do exactly that. But for us, if that's for real because you're making a payment and you're using money, but really all that's happening is that symbols are being manipulated. That's ritual. So, so the authentic rituals are going to a doctor's offices involves a whole other set of rituals that we think aren't rituals because that's health. That's medicine. That's the body. That's real. That's not a ritual. Another point is that they seem more real because they are embedded in a system of meaning and a story of reality. The problem today isn't that we don't have ritual. It's that these rituals are part of a story that our consciousness has moved past. We no longer are at home in the world story that generates all of these rituals. New stories, new meanings, and new ways of enacting those meanings that correspond to who we are becoming and the world that we want to live in. The new and ancient story as I call it. And, and I mean, I'm not sure if we have time for me to go too much more into that. I go back to first principles like where do rituals come from to begin with, and where do ceremonies come from ceremony being a ritual done in the knowledge that you are in the presence of holy beings. I wrote an article on it called every act of ceremony. A few years ago, that goes into some of this. But I have a question, because what you described as some of the modern day rituals, I would call transactions so there are transactions devoid of such meaning that might alter my life. So how was it different from a transaction. Transactions are accompanied by rituals. Even in ancient societies, like the exchange of gifts is always accompanied by rituals. We still have that like a birthday present, you know, you wrap it up, you know, you have a birthday cake, I mean, yeah, gift. So transaction is like a degenerate form of gift, but even transactions are accompanied by rituals. Like the swiping of a credit card is a very, very tiny, like rudimentary ritual, but it still is a ritual. So the ritual is there in our life. But there's no acknowledgement of it like what was your proposition there. It's that the ritual is the rituals are so rituals and stories they hold together the world, they come from a world story, a mythology and they contribute to the world story in the mythology. Like ancient people believed that if that if you don't tell the creation myth every year, creation falls apart, which actually happened. You know, their world fell apart when they stopped doing their ceremonies. And this is true of us as well. So the problem today, I will say it again, it's that we that our rituals are obsolete. They're part of a story that we no longer believe in that we no longer feel at home in, and we need to discover the, the individual and collective symbolic actions that come from and contribute to a new story. And to do that, we can't import rituals from somewhere else we have to actually recreate them rediscover them from first principles. Okay. And so part of those would be around death. You know, when, like, what is the emerging understanding of what death is that is the successor to the modernist understanding. Like, that that requires that we that we build a new system of meaning, and a new reality that goes to who are we, what is the self, what happens when we die, when we begin to understand that, or when we begin to step into the next understanding of that, then the appropriate rituals will also become obvious, and they won't feel like rituals really in in the sense of empty rituals. They will feel like necessities. They will feel more real, more important than other actions. That's what we actually, if you want to rediscover ritual that's where you need to orient toward. It's what feels necessary, significant, meaningful that we have to do it right. That's another part of ritual you have to there's like an exactitude or precision. It must be done exactly this way. It's important. You know, you have to sign on the right line of the contract. You have to administer the medical test in the exactly right way and not have contamination like, like there's a precision around ritual. That shows that I care about this rituals direct attention. They focus attention. So that's what we're looking for. What is becoming important to us today to do exactly right. That's where the rituals grow from. So, one of my recent explorations, and I just found out that you're moving in that direction as well which excited me a great deal. Through art and performance were for me, which for me originate from the rituals and ceremonies in the first place. And their role in changing all string. I dare to say consciousness of people, you know, beyond reading and being educated getting training and so and so beyond all of that beyond, you know, it's a little bit of actually resurfacing the oral cultures, maybe that have been, you know, been absent in the modern life. So for you, where is the power of the art and performance and I don't know how much you can share about your new project but what pulls you in that direction and Yeah, I mean partly, you know, my my long interest in a new story has brought me to realize that the part of the story that you can articulate is just one layer of an entire being that has a consciousness that has a feel to it. It has a way of relating to other people, and to the world like all of these things are part of like this, the story is part of this larger being. And to transmit that being. There's a lot of ways to do it that are actually even more powerful than describing it. Oh, here's the principles of interbeing here are the principles of the new story. People can have a direct experience of that. And one of the ways that that this experience can be shared is through through music through art through performance through story. Like, I don't mean, yeah, I mean like actual stories, like fairy tales that kind of story. These convey a consciousness that changes people. Maybe once they have had that experience, when they've seen that performance, when they've heard that story, then their beliefs and opinions might change to conform to that, which is a much different process than trying to persuade somebody to change their beliefs, using evidence and logic. Like that doesn't work very well because the beliefs are part of something much deeper. They didn't come from evidence and logic they're not going to be changed by evidence and logic. So that's why that's one reason why I've become interested in other ways of communicating these, it's not communicating these ideas. It's transmitting the spirit that is associated with those ideas that is part of those ideas. The other thing though is simply. It's not quite an other thing, but anything that is done just for the sake of beauty to give somebody an experience of that, you know, to tell a beautiful story. I think that is also part of the new and ancient consciousness. And part of accepting the preciousness of the present moment. Like how can we make this moment amazing. How can we make it so beautiful. How do we celebrate life in this moment, rather than what is practical for the future. We actually know how exactly mechanically how the present is going to lead to the future. Sometimes you do something that seems rationally very insignificant, yet it turns out to have tremendous impact. And people who are engineering their their actions with these complicated cost benefit analyses and, you know, carbon footprint numbers and all this kind of stuff. They end up having no effect sometimes at all on the future, or even a negative effect perverse effect. Just saw an article about how Europe is sacrificing. They're trying to build old growth forests to generate energy. Carbon neutral supposedly energy from wood chipping, all of the forests. Somebody, that's part of somebody's plan to make the world a better place. It's doing the carbon math. And that leads to policies that lead to bureaucracies that lead to like this runaway machine that ends up feeding trees into the power into the wood chipper. You know, meanwhile, like the tiniest choice that you make to spend some time with your grandmother that you have no idea how this could possibly make a better world. And through some mysterious causal pathway, it has a bigger impact than anything else you did in your entire life, possibly, you know, so so that's why there's like, when you do something from love kindness generosity, and the sharing of your gifts in a beautiful way. And there's a release. That's a kind of a gift you're making a gift to the world, and letting go of the future. Because we're just going to do this really beautifully right now. We're going to make this the important thing right now. So, yeah, yeah. It's death and grief. I wanted to say the beauty way makes. And the certain languages we use like through poetry or music makes it more accessible to come a little bit closer to those really hard places to those very wounded and sore places. Which for me the soreness around death and grief is not their nature per se but it's the estrangement from them it's the accomplishment of them, you know, that we have been robbed. You know, from our cultural like practices and relating to them so that that was robbed. So the soreness comes from there and then to recover that gap. And I find that certain forms really help us. Yeah. And I did read. Yeah. And everything that we've communicated in this whole hour. It could be that a single note of a vile man could communicate all of it. But you maybe have had those moments. It doesn't, for me, ever happen when I'm listening to recorded music. But if there's a violinist who is sensing me and using that note as a communication. And he can't even explain why is it this note at this time. At the right moment that can totally change somebody's life. And as we seek to revolutionize this world. We have to include the power of that. Otherwise there is no hope. We have to access powers that are far greater than the ones that we can rationally understand. I love the way you finished your. Well the last piece I read neither hero nor journey. At the end you say, I quote, the story of humanity is bigger than our understanding and outcome is available bigger than our design and intelligence exists in the world beyond what we impose upon. I just say, yeah. The reclaiming of grief. It's one aspect of bringing back all of the lost truths and returning the exiles. The parts of ourselves that we didn't feel the things that we don't pay attention to coming back to hold us. And the opportunity to do that is always, always present, you know, even right now. So everybody watching or listening. You know, maybe you feel something moving and you right now, something alive in you a feeling. And we can just give a little nod to that feeling. We can just give that as precious and know this moment is precious and trust that by doing that a change happens. Integrating reintegrating reclaiming a lost truth or bringing in a new truth or fully feeling what there is to feel that adds a new thing to who you are. You know, it changes you. And sometimes that change works on an invisible level. And like you don't have to try so hard to change. You can trust a process of change. I mean, that's the whole point of, of grief ceremonies of public occasions where, where you can really feel that, like, you can't say well I'm doing this so I feel better later. It's like no this is what is to be felt right now yet a week later a month later a year later, you'll be in a much better place that if you had not done that. Because it's the power of the truth. That's what we have to trust the power of the truth made visible to us made feelable to us. And maybe there's. Yeah, so what I'm saying is that maybe there's a little piece of that right now that we can feel stirring and operating inside us. Thank you. Great to finish on that note. Because I personally know that I can get overwhelmed with the amount of loss, you know, culturally speaking around the subjects of grief and death. And then there's the mind rushing. What am I, what am I to do what am I to do and then there is this. Maybe I'll also add. When we, when we, you know, value grief and commit to including that doesn't mean that you're going to be in grief all the time. Like there is an intelligence to this where it'll come up at a certain moment, and you'll feel it, and you'll weep. And then it'll be gone. And you're like, but you know my mother died two days ago I should be in terrible grief right now but no grief has its own logic. And, and it will not destroy your entire life because it's just so much of it, you know the grief for law, lost cultures and lost people and lost ecosystems and lost species and so much of it. No, grief is not your. It's not your harsh task master. It's not your, your overlord that's going to dominate your whole life. It is a benign. It's a very helpful, friendly being that when you trust it, it will come at the right time in the right measure. It's when you are estranged from it and push it back that it's always knocking on the door. But when you let it in, it'll have its way with you. And it's a wise being and, and it will visit you at the right moment. I call that we don't live on the altar of grief but grief lives on our altar in our hearts from time to time, we have visitations with one another. And it is a, yeah, does a wise being that we apprentice to. Yeah. So, thank you so much Charles for being with us and sharing all these. Well, the expressions of your beauty way, which are in many different forms, blessing us, I feel so. Yeah, we're honored to have you at our festival. Thank you for this. Really good to reconnect with you this little bit. Yeah.