Charles Eisenstein

That is because, contrary to the assumptions of economics, biology, political philosophy, psychology, and institutional religion, we are not in essence separate beings having relationships. We are relationship.

Martín Prechtel, speaking of his village in Guatemala,

“I’ve got a fatal liver disease, but that’s just my liver—I am

Just as my sense of self includes my liver, so theirs included their social and natural community.

It underlies the converging crises of our time, which are all variations on the theme of separation—separation from nature, from community, from lost parts of ourselves.

underlies all the usual culprits blamed for the ongoing destruction of ecology and polity, such as human greed or capitalism.

The urge to own grows as a natural response to an alienating ideology that severs felt connections and leaves us alone in the universe.

When we exclude world from self, the tiny, lonely identity that remains has a voracious need to claim as much as possible of that lost beingness for its own.

Other separate selves do the same, so we live in a world of competition and omnipresent anxiety.

Those who lack the economic means to inflate the self often inflate the physical self instead, which is one reason why obesity disproportionately afflicts the poor.