Charles Eisenstein at AUREA: The Habit of Asking Permission

Charles Eisenstein's first act on the AUREA stage was to rearrange the room. "I don't know, you guys are feeling a little bit distant here," he said. "Can everybody pull their chairs up like six feet?" They did. "We are here now. Now I can see your faces."

He is the author of Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, Climate: A New Story, and The Ascent of Humanity. He was on the schedule to speak about the first of those. He did not.

Reality is not a given

The chairs were where the chairs were. Someone had put them there. Everyone had sat in them.

"Reality is not a given. It is given, but it is not a given."

That was the hinge of the whole talk, and he found it by noticing his own hesitation. "I just remembered that," he said, "and I'm like, hold on, I don't have to just accept the way that it is. I can change it, maybe."

The word he used twice is doing two jobs. Reality is handed to you, the way a room arrangement is handed to you. That does not make it fixed.

The habit of asking permission

What interested him was not the request. It was the impulse that arrived before the request.

"It's funny, like, my first impulse was to ask permission," he said. "To like look around. Okay, who's in charge here?"

He was careful not to make the impulse a villain. "That is a really deeply ingrained habit, and it's not always a bad thing to show respect to the host." Then he named what it actually was in that moment.

"That impulse wasn't actually coming from respect for the host, much as I do respect the host. It was coming from a habit of permission seeking, which is something that has been revealing itself a lot to me in the last few years."

Notice the tell. Speed. The scan for authority ran before the thought did. A habit that fast is not a decision anymore. It is a reflex, and it operates in rooms far more consequential than this one.

He hopes you don't understand

He then read the room some lines from the author Ursula K. Le Guin: "Only in silence the word, only in dark light, only in dying life, bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." He read the last part twice.

Then he asked: "Do you understand that? I hope not. I hope not completely. I hope that there's a little bit of a question mark there."

This is where the talk stopped being charming and started being an argument. "I think that we need to learn right now to be more comfortable in not understanding things."

His reason was specific, and it was a diagnosis of the last several years. He described people facing uncertainty and "defaulting into lockstep with obsolete belief systems and ways of seeing the world that lead to reiterations of the same patterns of solution that are actually the cause of the problem."

"To enter into a new story requires crossing an in-between space of not knowing."

Certainty is the cheapest available exit from that crossing, and it always deposits you back inside the story you were trying to leave.

What Sacred Economics is actually about

"On the schedule it said that I am supposed to be speaking about sacred economics," he said. "Not sure how that got there." He wrote the book a long time ago. He offered the room its core in one line instead.

"Really the core of sacred economics is the power of word," he said, "because money is nothing but symbols, ultimately, that we invest with meaning and invest with value."

He got as far as the word fiat, "which really means to speak something into existence, which is really our primary power as human beings in a social context." Then he pointed back at the chairs. He had just done it. He spoke, and the room moved.

And then he abandoned the lecture in front of everyone, out loud, and told them exactly how he decided. "Something different is necessary right now. How do I know that? Just tuning into my level of excitement about lecturing about something, and I'm like, no, I'm not really there, too excited about that right now."

A man who writes about the power of word declined to spend his word on something he was not lit up by. That was the demonstration, not the detour.

The gathering with two shrines

What he told instead was a story, delivered deadpan as field anthropology. He had attended a gathering in another culture, similar in nature to this one.

Outside the gathering space, that culture had erected a temporary outer shrine, unusual for them, because normally they keep only one. You passed the outer shrine, then the inner shrine, then you entered.

At the outer shrine, everyone performed a divination ritual. "They would take a little magic wand and moisten it with your body fluids, and then they would put it into this mystical device that would give a reading, and the reading would determine whether you were possessed by an unclean spirit." If you were, you were not admitted to the sanctum.

He declined. Standing in line beside a friend, he said it plainly: "I'm not doing that."

He was direct about the line he was drawing and where it sat. "I'm all about respecting indigenous cultures, and when I go to a place I usually will at least perform some of the rituals and respect the taboos of this culture. But at some point, certain body rituals especially, I'm just not willing to do." His friend's entire reply: "Well, that'll be interesting."

At the inner shrine, the ritual was a name checked against a list of those who had performed a different ritual, the typing of numbers from a sacred card that everyone carries. He took his own card out of his wallet and held it up. Then you receive a necklace, or a stamp, or a temporary tattoo, some badge that "communicates to the unconscious mind of the superstitious natives that you are entering a different space."

Then the punchline landed. Every person ahead of him in that line heard the same question: can I see your COVID test. He stepped forward one at a time. He reached the woman at the table. She looked at him and asked his name. Charles Eisenstein. "Yep, you're on the list, go ahead in."

"I was the only person that she didn't ask."

He immediately offered the mundane explanation himself, which is the mark of someone who actually thinks rather than performs thinking. She may have known him by reputation, seen where it was heading, and preferred to avoid a scene, "but I'm not even sure if that's really the explanation here."

A declaration of truth

Then he named what he had noticed, and it is the reason the whole talk hangs together.

"When I said 'I'm not doing that,' it was in the spirit of making a declaration of truth."

Look at what is missing from that sentence. No request. No argument. No search for who is in charge here. He did not petition the ritual, debate the ritual, or ask to be excused from the ritual. He stated what was so for him, and then he walked forward one step at a time to find out what reality would do with it.

That is the same act as the chairs. Word spoken into a social space, which by his own account is where reality is made and remade. It is also the exact opposite of the reflex he had caught in himself minutes earlier, in front of everyone, and refused to hide.

Most leaders are still waiting to be given something they already have. Not confidence, and not a strategy. Standing. The habit of scanning for the authority in the room runs faster than thought, which is why almost nobody catches it, and why catching it once changes what you are willing to say out loud for the rest of your life.

Frequently asked questions

What did Charles Eisenstein speak about at AUREA?

He was scheduled to speak on Sacred Economics and chose not to. He spoke instead about permission seeking, the value of not knowing, and the power of the spoken word to bring things into existence, and he illustrated it with a story about being asked for a COVID test at the entrance to a gathering.

What did he mean by "reality is not a given"?

His full line was "reality is not a given, it is given, but it is not a given." Reality is handed to you, the way the arrangement of a room is handed to you. Being handed something does not make it fixed. He demonstrated it by asking the whole audience to pull their chairs six feet closer, which they did.

What is Sacred Economics about, in his own summary?

He compressed it to one idea from the stage: "the core of sacred economics is the power of word, because money is nothing but symbols, ultimately, that we invest with meaning and invest with value." He connected it to the word fiat, which he described as meaning "to speak something into existence, which is really our primary power as human beings in a social context."

What was the story about the two shrines?

He retold a modern event check-in as if he were an anthropologist observing an unfamiliar culture: an outer shrine with a divination ritual involving a wand and a reading device to determine whether you were possessed by an unclean spirit, then an inner shrine where your name was checked against a list and you were given a badge. The reveal is that he was describing a COVID test requirement and an event registration desk.

What is a "declaration of truth"?

It is what he noticed he had done when he told his friend "I'm not doing that." He did not ask permission to skip the ritual and did not argue about it. He stated what was true for him and kept walking. In his framing, that is the opposite of the permission-seeking habit he had caught himself in earlier that morning.