New Age Q

Charles Eisenstein's Conspiritual Journey, Part One

“Synchronicity, Myth and the New World Order” via Midjourney

In recent posts, I explored “Conspirituality” — the overlap between the “transformational culture” of alternative wellness, yoga teachers, music festivals, and conspiracy theories such as QANON and strident anti-vaxers — along with closely related phenomena, such as what the podcast Decoding the Gurus calls “galaxy brains.” Last time, I tried to explain some of the reasons (there are more) that I can’t support RFK Jr. 

Today, I want to look at Charles Eisenstein, who the Conspirituality authors have dubbed “New Age Q” because of the extreme relativism he expresses in much of his writing, implicitly opening the gates for irrational and conspiratorial beliefs. Charles has taken the role of messaging director in RFK’s campaign, writing in ‘A Major Life Change’: 

I attended a pre-launch meeting with him and other close advisors, where I presented my ideas on strategy and message. I was deeply moved by their receptivity. I’d never expected my thinking to strike a chord with a major political campaign, at least not in my lifetime.

Charles is a primary focus of Conspirituality, the new book by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker, as well as their podcast of the same name. In fact, the podcast began with their dissection of Charles’ 90-page essay, ‘The Coronation’, which he released a mere two weeks into the lockdowns, when there were still many unknowns about the virus. 

I am undertaking this exercise for myself as much as anyone. Early on, I was a major booster of Charles’ work. From 2010 or so, we published many of his essays in Reality Sandwich, the web magazine I started. He traveled to many of the local communities that were part of the Evolver Network, giving talks. I edited and published his book, Sacred Economics, when I ran the Evolver Editions imprint at North Atlantic Books. Charles stayed with North Atlantic, publishing a number of titles with them. 

I supported Charles, back then, because I felt he and I had very complementary perspectives. By starting Evolver — a company as well as a nonprofit — I had bitten off more than I could chew. I thought I would be able to continue writing, but I found myself inundated with work to run the organization, as well as the constant need to seek more funding for the project. If I believed anyone expressed the vision of what I hoped Evolver might become as well as I could, it was Charles. I also asked Charles to help us with Evolver. I thought we could grow it into the grassroots, decentralized movement that his writing seemed to call for. But he declined. 

A few newsletters ago, I wrote about Ken Wilber’s Trump and the Post-Trump World, where he used Spiral Dynamics to analyze what happened from the 1960s until today: Why the utopian promise of a consciousness transformation hasn’t worked out. Wilber argues that “green,” with its demand for social justice and belief in universal rights and equality, became the dominant consciousness structure during the 1960s, leading to the Civil Rights movement, Feminism, the environmental movement, sexual liberation, and so on. The deficiency of the green level became apparent in the 1970s, expressed by the commonly held belief that there is no universal truth (except for the universal truth that there is no universal truth). This led to extreme relativism, “aperspectival madness,” and a collapse into localized ethnocentric identities that confront each other across the various battle zones of the Internet. Ultimately, it brought us “fake news” and Trump.

For Wilber — an Old G “Galaxy Brain” — what we need is a collective graduation into the integral consciousness stage (or at least a more self-aware green), which he describes in glowing, if highly abstract, terms: 

It is grounded in the newly emergent, most inclusive, most unified, and most embracing stages of development and evolution yet to emerge (which “transcend and include” every single previous stage, thus ensuring real comprehensiveness)—and is not merely based on an idea (as is, say, pragmatism), but is grounded in the actual territory of a level of development of being and awareness itself (namely, the integral stage/s).

Ironically, Wilber experienced his own fall from grace along with the collapse of his Integral Institute. Mark Manson wrote about this in his essay, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ken Wilber’. He noted: 

What Wilber taught me is that no depth of spiritual experience can negate our physical and primal drives for power, lust, and validation. As primates, we’re wired to seek someone to look up to as well as to be looked up to by others. And that’s true whether we’re experiencing Godhead or bodhisattva or not. It’s inescapable.

Wilber also showed me that a brilliant mind does not necessarily make a brilliant leader. Wilber bragged in an interview that he never planned anything at Integral Institute because planning would not represent a “second-tier” leadership. Despite massive funding, enthusiasm, brain power and demand, Integral Institute found a way to fail.

I would certainly say that both Charles and myself, in our different ways, have been trying to understand what, exactly, is happening in this strange, broken world? What kind of better future is possible? How do we get there?

As part of this process, we have attempted to stalk the consciousness stage (integral, aperspectival) beyond this one: How do we give expression to it? How do we enter into it? What is it exactly? This is very difficult to do. It is like walking a tightrope where you can so easily lose your balance and topple into the abyss. 

The difficulty begins when you realize that your consciousness – your subjective awareness – is not a purely contingent or detached phenomena, but on some level or other, is woven into the web of the whole. There is a delicate balance here: If you take this kind of thinking too far, you easily tip over into megalomania, a process I have seen many friends undergo as a result of overwhelming psychedelic experiences, where they suddenly find themselves at the center of a web of extraordinary synchronicities. It also happened to me, as I wrote about in Quetzalcoatl Returns. Many real-world “signs and wonders” accompanied the experience. 

“Synchronicity, Myth and the New World Order,” version 2

One of the problems that the Conspirituality authors have about Charles is that he often seems to position himself at the center of the broader subjects he writes about, in a way that verges on narcissism or solipsism. Here, for example, is a segment of a conversation Charles recently had with YouTuber Aubrey Marcus (another target for the Conspirituality team):

Charles Eisenstein: “You cannot escape from the realm of communication with each other and the group holding of a belief, and, when you understand that, then you can understand some of the weird behavior of extraterrestrial craft and extraterrestrial beings, and missing time and the sharp right angles that they execute in the sky in complete defiance of Newtonian kinetics, right? Like they, in some sense, they are not in objective reality as we know it, right? And we will never accept them – they will never become real – as long as we don't transcend the mythology, the Cartesian Newtonian mythology, that we have inherited, the mythology of modernity, because there is no room in that reality for them and, as I said before, that reality is breaking down.”

Aubrey Marcus: “So it's it's almost like, in a way, the emergence of Kennedy as president and the emergence of UFOs are both dependent upon the evolution of the field in certain ways.” 

Charles Eisenstein: “Yes, potentially. And again, Kennedy as President, which Kennedy is it going to be? Is it going to be his highest and best possible expression? That really depends on everybody, because each one of us contributes to the field that co-resonates with who this person is in objective reality – i.e. in our experience, in his intersection with ourselves.”

Somehow, it is up to Charles — and us — to both make the UFOs “real” and to make sure that RFK, as President, becomes his “highest and best possible expression.” This somehow requires overcoming the old belief structure — the “Cartesian Newtonian mythology” — and presumably entering into a new set of beliefs or myths. I find this very close to many ideas I have explored, yet subtly skewed: He too easily conflates self and world.

In ‘A Major Life Change,’ Charles ends with a somewhat strained effort to acknowledge his own shadow material. Writing about the optimism of the team around RFK:  

Everyone is ready to put aside their ego in service to the common cause. That lets in a kind of light that illuminates my own shadow parts, such as subtle twinges of territoriality, and desire for approval and recognition. For me this is a spiritual process. I may share more about that as well in coming installments.

Unfortunately, the shadow, in the Jungian sense, tends to be those parts of ourselves we can’t see or acknowledge yet, not the parts we can name and call out.