 Welcome to a new and ancient story, a show dedicated to the transformation of self and society. We're moving from the story of separation to a new story of interbeing. We explore it all, technology, spirituality, agriculture, healing, economics, politics, ecology, relationships, education, because the changes that are gathering today will leave no aspect of our world untouched. For deeper engagement with these ideas, join our community at newandancientstory.net. So here I am, Charles Eisenstein again, today joined by Julio Alaya, who is a legend in the coaching world. We're both at a conference here and here of course everybody knows what coaching is. Some people might not even have any idea or only a vague idea about what coaching is, but I don't even know if we'll talk about that. Boy, I don't even have a good intro. I mean, you can, I'm not going to do the bio, the biography thing, you can look them up online, but Julio is someone I really feel deeply speaks my language and someone who reminds me that I'm not crazy. Today, I'm just going to jump in with an invitation. You spoke a lot about gratitude today. How did you learn about gratitude? I cannot call a specific moment or issue, but my sense is that I learned it from my students because one of the things that has happened and it did happen today again is that they came to me to say, I'm so grateful, I'm so grateful, I'm so grateful. So in some moment it was impossible not to listen to the word and what does it mean? And of course I entered into it and it was a huge, huge beautiful surprise because we have learned to live with the gift of life in the following way. Well, I deserve that. I deserve this. I deserve that. I work hard for it, so I deserve it. But the question that came to me when I thought of that is, the third what? Do I deserve the children I have? Or I should say simply, wow, wow, how grateful I am for their existence. Do I deserve my wife? Or I should simply say, I'm so grateful for her to be there. Do I deserve my students? So in some moment, it pretends of deserve and disappear. Which is kind of the opposite of a lot of kind of new age teaching, which says that you're supposed to affirm your deservingness. But what about accepting it, even if you don't deserve it? Did I work really hard to deserve my health and be able to breathe and having the sun shine? Like, is that trying to take credit for the sun? It would be a little pretentious, wouldn't it? It would. Yeah. For me, there's some easiness. For example, when people are grateful and come to me to say thank you, I truly appreciate that. And at the same time, I believe that the gratitude goes to something a lot bigger, of course, than myself. So I take it. I hold it. I'm honored by it. And at the same time, I think it goes to a higher place for which my job is to simply listen and articulate. So I just had a thought here. You talk about a lot of the same things I do about changing our deep mythology. So I was just thinking about gratitude and in the kind of standard scientific worldview, there is actually no cause for gratitude because the forces of nature and the events of life are fundamentally random. Therefore, anything good in this world has to come through our efforts. Either that or you're just lucky. So I guess you could be gratitude for random luck. You can be grateful for random luck, but that's not the same as being grateful for a gift. So in essence, we live in a worldview that excludes the possibility of gratitude. Well, actually, imagine I am grateful for the air I breathe, for the water I drink. I walk into a room in my home and I turn on the faucet and water comes. It's just a miracle. And I take it absolutely for granted. If, wow, I said, you know what? This precious phenomenon, this precious water is just there. How can I not be grateful? Well, I can say, I worked hard to deserve it, but come on. You didn't invent chemistry. But there's something gratitude that your question provoked me to think, which is when we say thank you, we say, who am I thanking for? Like, do I need a God to thank? I don't know if we need a God in the traditional and religious sense of God, but there's humility in gratitude. It's truly when I revert something higher than myself, regardless of what name I can put to it. But gratitude is always a wonderful step to a humbleness, to humility. But when I say thank you, truly, I surrender to the majesty of something larger, whatever, I don't know, I don't know, whatever mention. Right, because the state of gratitude is a state of knowing that you've received a gift. So it's not something that you did or that you created. And to be in that state, I think that there has to be some sense that there is a giver that is beyond oneself, therefore humility. It brings to mind, I heard a beautiful, beautiful speech by David White, and he was describing a visit he had to some like Scottish fisherman or some very traditional person, maybe in the Hebrides, some who is really still indigenous in a way. And he said this man lived his life in constant prayer. There was a prayer for getting out of bed in the morning. There was a prayer for opening the blinds and letting the sun in. There was a prayer for lighting the hearth, a prayer for breaking your first piece of bread, for walking out the door, for getting into your boat. That only makes sense if there's something listening to your prayers. And a lot of the prayers are prayers of gratitude. So that man is not alone in the universe. That's another dimension of gratitude. It breaks loneliness. You are in touch with something majestic whatever it is you can. But also besides humility and that sense gratitude brings with it, let me put it this way. Gratitude is a deep emotion we may feel, right? And as every emotion puts you in a place to act in a particular manner. The other side of gratitude is that when I am in gratitude my desire to be of service is absolutely present. So gratitude is not just, oh, I say it to the world, and it is that too, and I feel it. But it immediately put me in a sense that I want to respond to the gift with being myself a gift. So gratitude creates a disposition in the world that otherwise we lack. I want to serve you and I want to serve others, those who I love. I don't want to serve this planet. So why I want to serve to make you money? No, no, no. Forget any other. I want to serve to respond to the gift I just received. It's that sense of service that comes from gratitude. And this is related to something else you were talking about that most people when they see results in their lives they don't like, or a society sees results it doesn't like they say well we have to change our actions that produce the results. But you're saying that that usually fails because usually the change in the action is something else that's already on your existing menu of actions that you've already tried before. Usually it means just working harder. So you get some different version of the same results or maybe even exactly the same results or even worse. And you're offering well the actions come from a worldview, come from a state of being. What if we change that instead? So part of the, and I kind of talk about the same thing you know in terms of the story that we live in and a transition into the story of gift. So this when you, when anybody is in gratitude like you're saying every perception is different and every response to a situation is different. The colors your whole world and the things that we try so hard to achieve become either irrelevant or they become effortless. Now the sense of, let me put it, this desire to do more, to work harder, to come from a place of blindness. See if I don't like my results as you were pointing to let's do something I want to work harder more hours than that now. But if my view of the world doesn't change, I am trapped in a pattern. It would be a little different here and there, but that's basically what it would be. You know what? The other thing, when I said what if I change my view, the perception I have of the world that the way I see it, the observer I am, that requires a profound act of reflection. Because first of all, most of us are completely unaware that we are observers of a particular kind. We think I see because the kind of guy I am. And surprise, surprise, I will be seeing very different if I have been born in a different place. But in any way, that, so the fact that we don't go to other place to change our result is not because we are not intelligent or nice or whatever. It's not coming from any particular intention. It does come from blindness. What else? I need to do something different. But we are so taken by the drift in which we live that we don't, it's not even part of our thinking to get out of the drift. And that act, profound act of awareness of the drift in which I am caught, which for me, transparent by the way, what else is there? Right. Seems like reality itself. It's reality itself. It's exactly that. It's reality itself. So what are you asking me to look to what? Well, this brings up an interesting point. I think that what you're saying can bring people to a readiness to see in a different way, but they can't actually see in a different way through an act of will. Something has to happen to them. And that thing could be a breakdown in their lives. Usually, I think it happens, whether for individuals or society, it happens when the old story just isn't working anymore. And when it's not working anymore, not just automatically something else comes up. Sometimes, and very often is the case, there is a collapse. And we need to come out of the ashes again. Because if the act of reflection for whatever reason is not present or the possibility, then life will hit us with a big stick before we even move to something else. And actually, that's my concern with the situation of the present civilization. Yes. But then on the bright side, often after that big stick hits us and things fall apart, on the other end of it, we realize, you know, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. What seemed like the worst case scenario from before, once I've gone into that and gone through that, I discovered capacities and resources that I just had no idea existed. And that means I grow and learn that reality, because if reality isn't what you thought it was, then what's possible isn't what you thought it was either. So new capacities are discovered. And I think society will go through that too. I often say that we don't need any new technology to live in peace and harmony and enormous abundance on this planet. We have it all. You know, it's not a hard thing. But it's invisible to us at the same time, because for you to appreciate that you have all, gratitude is indispensable to begin with. You once told me a story about your father and gratitude. Yeah, right, I did. I loved that story and I really, that's a medicine story. Would you be willing to share that? Yeah, of course. When I was five or six years old, my father used to tell me that during the war, the civil war in Spain, he was in charge because given that he knew how to type, type, what are you calling it in English? Yeah, he could type, yeah. And they're all machines that we had at the time, right? And because he had that, he was in charge in the Republican, I don't know what you call it in the military, but to distribute the food and everything to the troops. So he told me that he was once in a particular town in a house where he has his headquarters. My father was a humble man. I'm talking about a small battalion or something like that. But food disappeared. They were surrounded by the Franco troops. Nothing came in to eat. And my father said that there were days not eating. And they began to eat rats and begin to eat whatever they could. And he told me, you have no idea, son, he said to me, what hunger is. So he told me the following story then that one day he was in the place and he had reserved, saved, a piece of bread. And the piece of bread was hard like a rock because he ate a little bit every day just, but he was so scared not to have anything that he kept it, kept it, kept it. Anyway, and in a moment, a woman from the house that was across where he was, crossed the street and asked him, Mr. Olayev, I need your help. My father is dying. I have nothing to give him. Please, do you have anything for him to eat because he's dying? And my father thought of his piece of bread and he was in this horrendous thing. His anger was enormous. Bread was all he had and this woman begging him to save the life of his father by feeding him with something. And in some moment, my father said, I couldn't take it. And I got it and gave the piece of bread and the woman high me, kissed me and left. And he said, that was it, my son. And I don't know why I did it, but my hunger, my hunger was so big and so forth. But anyway, it was an act and he told me that story. When I was 19, I went to Spain with my father and we rented a little car and my father guided me to drive through areas where he fought the war. And suddenly, we arrived to this little town near Santander and he said, that's the town where the story of the bread happened. I said, let's save my father. I said, let's go and we start running. I said, wow, this is the house where I was when the story took place. So we went to the house. Of course, the house was inhabited by some people. So from outside my father looked and it was, of course, an old house. And he said, gosh, I remember this and that and do record the story. I said, I record your story, father. And suddenly, across the street, the door is open and a woman came out and the woman walked towards us and she said, are you Mr. Olaya? I said, yes. Do you remember me? My father said, I don't know exactly. He said, do you remember when I came to visit you because my father was dying and drinking the bread and my father was taken and she had him in front of me. For them, I had disappeared. They had for I don't know how long. And that day, I understood gratitude for the place that I never imagined it would be like that. That's the story of my friend. And I cannot remember the story without being touched by it. Thank you. When I hear stories like that, I say it's a medicine story. And I have the feeling that that choice that your father made to give that bread from the rational causal linear standpoint, that was an insignificant act. Given the deluge of suffering that engulfed Europe, starting at that time, one piece of bread to feed one old starving man, what influence could that possibly have on the tides of history? But another aspect of my being knows that that was a significant act that ripples out through the underground parts of causality, through invisible, tugs on invisible threads that shift the whole universe. And it's almost like those events are almost set up that way to be in the moment to seem completely hopeless, completely inconsequential. And it's just you and that person and this choice, just a bare naked choice. But actually those decisions are more important than anything Barack Obama could do publicly. What is amazing about something like that is that that story, first of all, happened when it happened. But the story lives in me and through me, it has given food for the soul of so many people who have heard me telling the story. So independently of anything else and without any other intention, the story does its work every day constantly in ways that the only place to look is magic. Absolutely the magic of life, which from a rational perspective is nonsense altogether, but I enjoy the magic of it. So this is before we were talking about the impossibility of changing one's world view or the possibility of knowing the things that were beyond the scope of one's knowing through will. And I mean, I often think about how any teaching becomes people try to make it into a formula where the separate self accomplishes something. So then the question is, well, how does one change if not by making a project of it? And one way is to receive stories like this. You hear this story and you are not the same. Even if you never make a declaration or a vow or a quote intention, you are not the same because you've received the story. And you will make different choices. I mean, maybe the effect is small for some people. For some people it might be big, but you will make different choices just because you've received this thing. Oh, definitely. The story for me means so much. The fact that I have in my memory the scene of those two human being hiding in silence after 30 years of the event, 30 years after. And on then there was something, a connection that was bigger than what we sometimes achieve in a whole life with anyone. As I said, the magic of it and how that story shifted me and allowed me to do what I do. In other words, the story, as you are implying or I understand what you said, became a school of a different sort. It truly was a place for learning. Beyond any planning, beyond any idea of achieving anything. It gives me a sense of this hidden intelligence in the universe, too. Who arranged that this incident would happen, that your father would tell you the story, that you would then go to that town and that woman would look out her window just at that moment and recognize your father and that this would be instrumental in you becoming a founder of the coaching movement and bringing, I mean, you know, my conditioned mind of separation says it was a chapter of accidents. Yes, a chapter of accidents. But there's another part of me that really feels gratitude. Of course. Feels like I could not have designed this. I could not have written such a story. And the magic doesn't stop there if we keep looking at this. My father left Spain. He left Spain and went to France in an act of despair. He took a little boat with a group of other soldiers and a band that was literally leaving everything behind. And through days of navigating and how do you call it in English growing and all of that, it's a dangerous place. They arrived in France. And when he was in France, the French told him, but yeah, you cannot be in France for too long. We are in serious danger. We have a guy next door called Hitler. Things are getting really tough. We are preparing for something here. So think of something. And my father thought if I go back to Spain, I'm dead. I'm dead. No kidding. And he then recalls a story. And the story was that a nephew of my father was living in Chile, a country that he never knew anything about it, except that one day someone told him, you have a nephew in Chile because his mother, sister, went to live in Chile, you know, years and years past. He never met them. But my father in his despair remembered that one day someone came in his home in Spain and said to him, you know that your nephew in Chile got married with a boxing champion in Chile? Oh, and it was interesting. And everybody we have a boxing guy, a boxer in the family. But my father recalled that the nephew couldn't have married him. And it's a niece. So my father then got a paper and wrote a letter to the Chilean boxing champion because he didn't even know the name of the guy. And in the letter he said, I know you're married with a niece of mine. Please give this letter to her. All I'm asking you is that you speak with anyone that you can talk to get a ticket, a passage, to go to Chile, because in France I'm in despair, blah, blah, blah. And he said, put a stamp, send another. No dress or anything, right? Just Chilean boxing. What happens? Right. And then weeks after, a letter came back and it was for his aunt, the mother of this woman, saying, we know, my dear nephew, that you are in France and this situation, we are sending you a ticket to come to Chile and boat or whatever. And my father got that letter and stopped running all over the town. He said it was the craziest day in my life, jumping with the letter himself. So he went to Chile. When my father died, I flew from the USA to Chile. And he had been buried, I didn't arrive on time. So I went to his room and I started getting all his paper and I found the letter. And the letter is in my home, framed in my home. And there's another lesson about the magic of life. Without the letter, I wouldn't be here talking with you. Without the letter, many people have never been in touch with how many things that just by the mystery of my existence have been in touch with and on and on and on. So again, another story, another dimension of magic of life with something else. A few years after, I went to exile. My father exiled, I am exiled. And then I began to wonder, what is the message? Because you had to flee Pinochet. Yes. So my father has left Franco and I have, I left Pinochet, but we were both exiled. So one day I found myself in San Francisco wondering what the hell is all this about. And the message came around the following. He says there will be exile as long as we cannot accept fully that other people can see the world different than you see it. Because your exile then is kind of mirroring the exiling of others by casting them into it out of your universe. Yeah, you're not in reality, only I am. Exactly. Yeah. So the story triggers, the story that triggers another one in a magic sequence. And for that, I'm grateful. I often speak to people who are in a pretty profound state of despair over the future of the planet. And how hopeless it is. And they might think that I'm naive for being optimistic. And it's not that I dispute any of their evidence, but it's that they're ignoring something. And the thing that they're ignoring is this kind of magical intelligence. This, yeah, this intelligence to, that is within the events of our lives. And that you could dismiss as, like the mind of separation has an explanation for that. Well, that was just coincidence. And the reason it seems that those coincidences happen more than you would expect is merely that you only report those. You don't report the story of the time your father gave someone a piece of bread and never saw them again. You don't report the mundane, you only report the extraordinary. So it makes the world seem extraordinary, but it actually isn't. Sorry. The problem with that refutation is that it is not actually evidence based. It's, it's what's it called a, it's not disprovable. You can, you could account for anything with that story. You know, some of the most amazing, I mean, I've heard many magical stories too. And one by one, if you explain them away like that, it's sort of satisfying to the mind. Yeah, you know, that might have just been coincidence. Yeah, you know, lots of stories happen in war and the ones that weren't lucky, like your father randomly lucky, they perished from the pages of history. So we don't hear their stories. You know, you can kind of construct or reconstruct a dead world by, you know, drawing on coincidence and things. But when you hear enough of those stories, something, at least something stirs in me when I hear enough of them. This part of me that says that can't be, that can't be just random coincidence. You know, a woman who's, she told me a story. She was in despair, suicidal, and she goes to the ocean and she says, please, if there's anybody out there, and she was, she was in a state of desperation, you know, like the words came out of her mouth. If there's anything out there, please give me a message. Tell me that there's something out there. And nothing happens. And despondent, she sits in the sand and puts her hand down behind her to lean on her hand. And there's a hard object there. And she pulls pulls out this gold medallion solid gold medallion on a chain and says, I love you on it. Wow. Yeah. So when we are in despair over the future of this planet, we're not taking something into account. But it's not something we can control. It's not something that we can fit into a formula for manipulating reality and intentionally creating a future that our ego self or small self wants. So it doesn't satisfy that desire for certainty and control and security. But there's kind of a larger security feeling of being held. For me, the feeling of being held by an inconceivably huge purpose and unfolding, that if I listen to it, I can maybe serve it. And I want to do that because I'm in such awe and gratitude that such an intelligence exists. And the other thing that came to me as you speak is that when we have restricted thinking, the rational thinking, the realistic thinking, and so forth, we don't look at reality from other perspective because come on, guys. We got science. We know better. It's time to give up about all this nonsense. But we do that because we have access now to the truth. It's just a matter of testing and there you go. So the price of holding now, quote, an access to the truth is that the voice, the multiple voices of the universe now are mute. We don't listen to them. And therefore, this magic disappeared. But if we look at existence in itself, the act of just existing, not as human being, everything existing, that is not explained by the chemistry or the physics of anything, at least it's room to begin to think that all our thinking is insufficient to deal with this mystery. So that gold medallion that says, I love you belongs to a place that the logic, the sequence, the testing and all of that begins to be insufficient. Yeah. I mean, of course you can say, well, obviously somebody dropped out on the beach, took it off, they were going swimming, something like that. Of course. But that explanation doesn't invalidate anything. Yeah. It's not the point. It's not, we're saying that it magically teleported there. Yeah. Yeah, it's just the confluence of circumstances. Yeah. The fact that we have stopped listening to the universe to nature and so forth has created an ass going back to the issue of solitude because there are no other voices, only human voices, no other voices, which, and remember our friend who spoke about the fact that we can only be human when we are in contact with that, that it's not human, that in some moment when we stop truly walking in the trees, not to analyze the composition of the tree, but rather to be with them, there's a different knowing that takes place. There's a different message that we can listen, but those walks are now less often done. And therefore those voices are not feeding who we are. And for me, the expression I use is that we stop being in touch with the magic of existence. And I don't know if the word is magic, mysterious, I don't know, it doesn't matter, but wonder all is gone. And those little stories or big stories depends how you judge them. Bring back all. At least being brought, they bring back questions all new that we need to ask that will feed us. It doesn't matter if we answer them or not, that's not my point. But it's going back to the fact that what is this phenomenon called existence? Is that explained by any of that? What truly is this beyond all the stories we can invent? Why we grew so, so dramatically arrogant about what we know? How do we get there? In which moment we develop such an arrogance that now we have the way to go there, to the truth, and that is above anything. What was that? In which moment? One of my friends was told by Shaman in Africa, there are no facts, there are only stories that essentially the building blocks of reality are not things, but they are stories. So it's kind of like, another way of saying what you've been saying is that we've always lived in a story, every culture lives in a story, but the difference between us and the other cultures is that our story says we don't live in a story. But nonetheless, that's still a story. The story that the scientific method is based on, which says there's an objective testable reality outside of ourselves that's independent of the observer. That is a metaphysical assumption. That's not scientific. It's a doctrine. So the question then is in that story, what is possible from that story? What is impossible? What does that story do to you when you inhabit it? What can you create from that? What can you not create from that? And we see all around us the results of that story. It is a powerful story for certain types of creation. But as you were saying today, one thing that has not brought us is happiness. Just that, oh, can you tell that story about the rich people in that seminar? That was really. The seminar that I was having too. As you say, everywhere you go, you find one thing in common among all civilized people, which is what? Suffering. Suffering. Suffering. And a suffering that we do our best to cover. Let's get to work. Let's get... A suffering that is so disguised in so many tricks we play. But the story I was telling is that I was hired by university. I would keep the name of the university to work for six days with a group of people that in order to be there, they have to have, I know, a hundred million dollars, something other personal, something like that. And of course, when they hired me, the conditions to lead that program were that I didn't know the name of the participants, except a first name, but I couldn't know their full names. I had to sign an agreement that I would never ask them for anything. And therefore, when I signed that, only when I signed that, I was officially hired to do the job. And when I worked with them, what I found is the same suffering with all the shapes, all the character of that, but deep, deep suffering. And then a question came, the illusion of our time is I get to that level of wealth, I should be happy. What an illusion? And a lot of political dialogue, even on the left, says that the world is divided between the vast number of victims and the oppressed and then the few who are the beneficiaries of the system. But if being a beneficiary means this deep suffering that you're talking about, like you're talking soul level suffering, is that really a beneficiary? You know, I mean, what's the suicide rate among those people? I don't think the depression rate is all the depression rate. I remember some of them went through a profound pain and the pain was nobody approached me for who I am. That was one of the biggest. Everybody who approached me, I know, is because of my money. For instance, that's the only one. And leaving that thinking, that story, with a hundred million in your pocket, doesn't change the story, only reinforces the story. And there we go. The next step for that person is going out there to do business to get more. Right. Because what you're doing doesn't work, it must be because you're not doing enough of it. So we see the same thing across the spectrum. And what you were talking about before, the mutant of the voices of non-human beings, of other than human beings, of nature, of the land, which of course has extended to the indigenous, to the animals, to the plants, the muting of those voices means that concepts like respecting nature, we hear them as not fully taking it seriously. We hear them kind of as these poetic truths. But ultimately, what is there to respect when it's just a bunch of building blocks? So really respect for nature, the scientific or the rational program of mine says, well, really what we mean is more cleverly manipulating these building blocks so that we don't destroy ourselves. Resources. Yes, resources. So you look at climate change policy and stuff, it's about reducing a measurable number called greenhouse gas equivalents. And the solution then is like you were saying, it's a change of action. But it's not a change of perception. There's level after level. And one level is happening. We have to give credit where credit is due. The level of the old perception that we don't depend on nature. We can endlessly engineer substitutes for the resources that nature gives us. That story is falling apart. But the deeper story is still needs to fall apart. The deeper story that nature does consist of resources that it doesn't have its own beingness, intelligence, voice, awareness, consciousness that is separated from us. Yes. So we don't see that the woods are not separated from me. We are one in a bigger dance. It's only that we don't see the bigger dance. So what is when we talk, when we listen to the voices of that, we're talking our own voices in some way, but in a different space and context. I am not separated from that place or the ocean or the air. I'm one with it. It's only that I have the illusion that I exist by myself. But what is by myself? I'm breathing every moment. I'm exchanging everything with everything. Not only in a physical level, in every other level. In this conversation, what was happening here? Who is you? Who is me? Yeah. In which way? Oh, this is just you. And now it's just me. We are completely separated. Or we are building something that is indistinguishable, you or I. So that illusion of separateness is also part of that story. And if we don't change the story, then we deal with nature as if we need to, quote, protect it. Because we need the resources. Yeah. Again, I don't dispute the good will behind that thought. That's... But it's not revolutionary. Nope. It's not. It's part of the same observer, but it's an observer with good will. Let's put it that way. Right. But we've always been observers with good will. Yeah. Imagining ourselves to be... Yeah. Yeah. So you're now 70 years old. Yes. And would you say that you are more optimistic about the future of this planet or the condition of this planet or less than you were 30 years ago? I think I'm more optimistic. Three years ago and a little before when I came to exile and I left, remember that the world we live at that time was the bad communist side and the good capitalist side, and that was the division of the planet. Yes. That division disappeared. But at that time, Chile was moving into the bad guys and therefore the whole thing. For me, it was hopeless somehow because of the power. We were little pieces in a huge material power, the Soviet Union and the United States and all that move there. At that time, my desire, my biggest desire was social justice. That was the top of my wishes, social justice. It wasn't there yet. They conserved for the planet or the person. Not yet. It was social justice and that was it. And the social... Looking for social justice was about accusing the other guys. That was pretty much the mechanic of the... Which is the same mentality. I mean, it's the mentality of conquering evil. The world would be a better place if we can finally conquer evil. Exactly. Yeah. So we were again within the same story and the story of the Soviet Union and the story of the Americans may be a little bit different here and there, but the fundamental pieces, indisputable. Both want to grow, wants to conquer nation. Yeah. Once they believe that happiness is about wealth, one is for everybody, the other one is not so much for everybody, sharing a little bit of it. But if you look at that fundamentally at the end of the bottom line, there was not much difference if you look at it. There's quote John Kenneth Galbraith economist. He said, capitalism is a system in which man exploits man. In communism, it's the other way around. It's exactly what you're talking about. Right. That's what I'm referring to. It's a good quote, I didn't know it. But when the whole thing collapsed, and I found myself, as I said, reflecting on the issue of what the hell is life, what I'm doing here, why is this disputing, which I've been involved so strongly and that's, what is the meaning of the whole thing? I truly collapsed with the end of the cold world, and I have to revise every presupposition I ever had, but I never saw those as presuppositions. Of course, I saw them like that's the way things went. At that moment, a humility, a profound humility visited me. Profound. I love the way you say that. A profound humility visited you. It's not something that you can achieve, is it? I had to ask questions from a place it was not about to accuse anybody. I had to visit history from a place of acceptance, which is different than a place of liking it or not. It's simply to accept using Wilbur's work, accept history in order to transcend it. Those moments when the whole thing collapsed, the whole cold world collapsed, I wonder about that. For instance, remember that before that, there was this whole thing about the nuclear. Well, something there began to change, not completely, but somehow. It's an important change because the Soviet Union was that division between communism and capitalism. That was the last time that our civilization had a really believable story of the evil other. After that collapse, then we had the drug lords, and now it's the terrorists or Islam, but no one really believes that Islam is such a big threat. It gets all hyped up and superficially satisfies our need for a threat to unite us, but people are not as fundamentally terrified of Islam as they were in the Soviet Union. I remember the map, there's the United States this big and the Soviet Union that big, and the nuclear missiles, it was full on. We have a crisis now. We don't have a bigger evil in front of us. That's a crisis for a mentality that runs the world based on finding the energy. I remember that in me. What gave me strength was fighting with these selfish guys that the military represented. Undisputably, the good guys were us. There was no way not to see that. That was clear. Of course, they thought the same thing. Of course. Unfortunately, the same thing. Exactly the same thing. So, definitely, I said it requires a deep humility. We had to receive the visitors, the visit of humility, to truly give ourselves permission to be into one, to ask new questions, to truly realize that I don't know that I was facing, I don't know, so large, so huge, that there was a little place for pretence. I don't know was brutally large. And only when that I don't know was established, I was able to begin to look at my learning from a different place. My learning didn't come from where it was coming before. It didn't mean what it meant before. It didn't have the shape that it had before. It was not an accusative learning. I had to truly rescue or maybe reinvent the meaning of learning in a way that I never ever thought before. Never. It didn't even occur to me that learning could have that dimension. I might want to wrap up my recording soon, but that feels like a potent message that actually fills me with excitement for the future, which is be ready for a learning that is beyond anything you can imagine. I actually, when I think of all this tradition in the planet of wisdom, doesn't matter how you call it, could come from Buddhism, could come from Lao Tse, could come from it, doesn't matter. Call it the way you want. The place where those guys were listening from had nothing to do with the way today we hold learning. The foreign too dominated nature, producing more stuff, gathering wealth or anything of that sort. They were looking into a completely different place. I'm not saying that place is the only place to look, but I said there's a message there that we must listen, not because they now are going to give us the truth, but rather a place to dwell. That is speaking louder and louder to me, and I'm not talking only about the eastern, I'm talking about our native people, I'm talking about French and the Polynesian people. There's so much wisdom there. I went to the European, the French are right there. And this, you know, I think it's important to emphasize that neither of us are ever saying that we should discard scientific new or technology or reality testing or anything like that. The problem is that those ways of interacting with the world have exceeded their proper domain and we try to apply those to everything and therefore marginalize and exclude things that have a value and we put them in a box. Even when you say Polynesian wisdom or indigenous wisdom or something like that, we have kind of a tidy little box for that where we treat it as almost this kind of cultural fetish object. Yes, we must respect it because you know, we shouldn't dominate other people anymore, but this kind of patronizing quotation marks respect is very different from receiving it at face value as something no less, no more, but also no less than, no less valid, no less powerful. I keep saying that constantly. I'm not saying they are better, we are worse. That's not my point. It's the capacity to listen to other voices. That's all I'm saying. And to dismiss the arrogance that we have the way to get to the truth, the only way. And we have, we're so lucky that we are the one who have that, which is called science, more than a scientism, not science. Science I respect, but scientism is the point, that religion. It's hard to listen to other voices when you have been immersed your whole life in an ideology that says that those other voices don't exist, that you're inventing them. So, I mean, I have that, you know, if I'm in some kind of workshop and they say, okay, you know, go to the tree and put your hands on the tree and listen to what the tree is saying to you, I know that, so part of me knows that I have that capacity, all human beings do. But another part of me is saying, you're wasting your time. If you hear anything, you're making it up. It's just some woody tissue. It doesn't have a voice. You can't hear anything. And when that chatter is there, and there's an emotional aspect to it too, a feeling of having been betrayed, a feeling of having been crushed, a fear that that will happen again if I am so foolish as to open up to this. And I'm sure that you would say that there's a somatic dimension to that as well of being closed and contained. I remember my mother became, she's now close to being 92, but when she was 90, I took her to some woods in southern Chile where there are trees of 800, 1000 years old, something like that. And I walk with her slowly as she can work right now. And I was just being with her. And usually I talk with her about all memories because it's easy for her to go there. And suddenly we get to a tree that I had been there before that is around 850 years according to the reports I have. It's a beautiful, beautiful tree. And I said to my mother, do you see that tree, ma'am? She said, yeah, it's beautiful. You know, ma'am, that is 850 years old. And she looked at me and said, come on. So she walked to the tree and I said, nowhere. And she had the tree. And I took a picture of my mother hiding the tree, the peace in her face, the surrenderness that I saw in her. I had not seen her in my mother ever before. And it was a silent moment. I don't remember how long she was there. She was hiding there. And then she separated from the tree, hold my hand and we kept walking. But definitely that moment, something was manifested. And I saw in my mother something that I had never seen before. Something majestic, that's the only way I had, took place in the most simple step of a walk. I had no idea. I don't know how to speak about that, but it was so into my heart. And when I see that picture that I have of my mother hiding the tree, it's very difficult not to move, not to be moved by it because of the surrender that I saw in her. And when I hear stories like that, I feel the presence of an invitation from the old story that despite 30 or 40 years of work still operates in me, which wants to kind of discount that as the self comforting delusions of an old lady who's imagining that the tree is, right? Like there's that whole very, very pained cynic. But that story is an invitation to me into a world where I can see the majesty of that. And I get those invitations again and again and I think how many times would it take for me to fully step into that forever? You don't want to think just for you to know, my mother was not reflecting about the act of hiding the tree. She did not have a story. She's not in that situation in her life where she's building a kind of metaphysical story of any sort. Something called her. I have no clue because I just only told her that tree I've been told is 80 or 150 years old. And she simply walked with me and she was close to the tree, left my hand, hide the tree, but there was no nothing. It was a primal response of her unconditioned life. Yeah, it was nothing like, oh, okay, I want to hide a tree in order to connect. Nothing of that. And when she left the tree, she didn't talk about it, did she? Yes. That's an important data point. It's an important data point. There was nothing, nothing that I can say, do you remember when you had the tree with tree, which you said? But the moment, the moment I got it in my soul, watching her, I remember that I was, I couldn't believe by eyes, by the peace I saw in her face that I hadn't seen probably in her own life. And I had another story very painful. Well, I feel grateful to the absurdly unlikely sequence of events that's led us to be together. And I just give thanks to that, to that organizing intelligence. Me too. I'm very grateful of this possibility to be together and chat a little bit. And this afternoon, when we get together for the closing, who knows where we will be headed? Who knows? Who knows? Well, this has been Charles Eisenstein speaking with Julio Alaya, founder of the Newfield Network and a dear friend. You've been listening to a new and ancient story with me, your host, Charles Eisenstein. To engage more deeply, you can join our community on newandancientstory.net, where we have live chats, forums, meetups, and all kinds of other tools for collaboration. If you want to find out more about my work, then visit my website, CharlesEisenstein.net.