by Charles Eisenstein  Originally posted on Nov 10, 2016, at http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/ This essay has been translated into German as well as Spanish and French. Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically works, and… Read More The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

Published on Dec 6, 2016 http://democracynow.org – The legendary singer, poet and author Patti Smith performed two songs Monday night at Riverside Church celebrating Democracy Now!’s 20th anniversary. Smith opened with “Peaceable Kingdom,” a song she wrote for Rachel Corrie, the American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. Smith dedicated the… Read More Patti Smith at DN’s 20th Anniversary

The EcoDharma Centre, Catalonia, is a retreat and training centre of the Triratna Buddhist Community. This brief documentary explains their view of the tensions and fruits of combining spirituality and activism.

I’ve written before about defining shunyata, or ’emptiness’ as “the possibility of existence.”  The great philosophical and scientific question is, why does anything exist at all? The Buddhist answer is shunyata or “emptiness,” the possibility (space, potentiality) of something coming into existence. Even Dzogchen Ponlop once said that emptiness is “room”; Chogyam Trunpa called it “spaciousness.”… Read More Shunyata: Creation without God

I’m posting this article because it captures many of the arguments on the left for a stateless transition to a post-capitalist society, achieved not through violent revolution, but through ‘interstitial’ social transformation. “Interstitial” I understand to mean thousands of tiny social movements, in localized places, networked together. (Much of my Ph.D. work, on autonomism and horizontalism, is on this kind… Read More Autonomism: Stateless Post-Capitalism

In the Winter of Our Discontentby asenauke Nyogen Senzaki was the first Japanese Zen master to live and teach on our shores. Along with one hundred twenty thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry, he was interned as an enemy alien, confined at Heart Mountain, Wyoming during World War II. Senzaki Sensei wrote this poem on Buddha’s Enlightenment Day,… Read More Senauke: In the Winter of Our Discontent