With a few unfortunate exceptions, you would be successful if you obeyed the rules of our society: if you followed the latest medical advice, kept informed by reading the New York Times, got a good education, obeyed the law, made prudent investments, and stayed away from Bad Things like drugs. It’s like when you build a tower to heaven, no matter how high you build, you’re not actually ever any closer to the sky, but you’ve built a big, big tower.

And take heed, it will open your heart and mind, arouse ire and derision, and change the way you think about your life. I also have to credit psychedelic medicines for exposing the narrowness and artificiality of what I’d until then accepted as real. And the way it answered it was who you are, is a separate self in a world of other that is not a self this world outside of ourselves. The first step is to give attention to your yearning, to do that, and to bring into consciousness, things that may have been excluded from the table of your awareness, such as the dissatisfaction with the success arc that maybe has taken you, taking you to a certain place and then hit a glass ceiling, and you realize there’s some other level of wellbeing and happiness that I’m not getting any closer to.I couldn’t have articulated the feeling at the time, but I just couldn’t accept my situation as good and right, sitting in rows in the classroom, forced to do things I didn’t care about, filling out worksheet after worksheet, watching the clock tick slowly toward recess. When the organs of Gaia are strong, she will be resilient to changing levels of greenhouse gases and other challenges.

It is in many ways a less precise language than English; the same is true of the various Taoist sciences. Well, there are certainly plenty of multilingual people around, and not all of them are creative thinkers. And it spreads in a con in a way that we rational mind can understand, but it could be that as you’re doing this, someone across the world is doing the same, pretty much the same idea, because it’s like, it’s an idea whose time has come and by doing it, it’s like, you’ve kind of crystallized this, this change in the world.I’ve thus found myself comfortable with being in many ways “on the fringe” but it’s not something I sought out. Perhaps these feature of the Chinese language primed me to explore non-reductionistic thinking and the relationship between story and reality in my later work. I was quite timid, but I remember secretly siding with the “bad” kids and glorying in their insubordination.

Of course, many of us have presaged this development as sense and meaning, story and structure, have broken down in our own lives. I became aware of a deep wrongness in the world that I won’t try to establish in our conversation right now, whether it was objective true or just my own psychology.

We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. I first came to Charles’ body of work with his astounding “ Coronation” essay from April 2020 (which we discuss a little below). You mention in The More Beautiful World… how a lot of people have seemed for some time to somewhat perversely be looking forward to normal life and society breaking down, in whatever manner comes along, like an alcoholic needs to truly bottom out before seeking help, or like the necessary flames before the rebirth of the phoenix from the ashes.