If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to yearn for the endless immensity of the sea.” Who are you? You are a separate individual among other separate individuals in a universe that is separate from you as well.” Loving across enemy lines (within our own inner world or with others) is the most courageous and powerful medicine. The More Beautiful World offers a refreshing and confronting take on the wrongness in the world and where it truly comes from. One day the elders of the tribe called a meeting. They gathered around, and one of them spoke very solemnly. “My friends,” she said, “there is a world that needs our help. It is called Earth, and its fate hangs in the balance. Its humans have reached a critical point in their collective birthing, the same point our own planet was at one million years ago, and they will be stillborn without our help. Who would like to volunteer for a mission to this time and place, and render service to humanity?”

Now all this may seem somewhat idealistic. Or you may be thinking “That’s all well and good, but HOW exactly?” And this is precisely my point. The “how” is what we’ll need to work out. It is the task of our age. That’s what happens when you gather people together to yearn for the sea. They teach each other how to build a boat. You don’t have to know how to do it before you make a start. No-one ever knew before they began, the precise details of how they were going to achieve the most challenging things.Acting accordingly, our choices often seem, to those operating within the old paradigms, to be crazy: naive, impractical, irresponsible. Indeed, they seem that way to that part of ourselves—and I trust that it lives just as much in you as it does in me—that also inhabits the old story. You might recognize its voice, critical, disparaging, doubting, insinuating. It wants us to stay small, safe, protected in our little bubbles of control. My purpose here is not to urge you to fight that voice or purge it; simply recognizing it for what it is already begins to loosen its power.“

The More Beautiful World is about navigating the space between these two stories and inhabiting the new story of interbeing. That my being partaken of your being and that of all beings. This goes beyond interdependency -- our very existence is relational. In the darkest despair a spark of hope lies inextinguishable within us, ready to be fanned into flames at the slightest turn of good news. However compelling the cynicism, a childlike idealism lives within us, always ready to believe, always ready to look upon new possibilities with fresh eyes, surviving despite infinite disappointments.” Eisenstein’s theory is this new story holds the answers and solutions to the most significant challenges of our time. It also invites us to heal within us what ever is stopping us from being able to love the ‘enemy’ - whether it’s an inner enemy you are ‘fighting’ or someone or something externally.I felt it again when I gave birth to my son at home, this feeling---this knowing---that I was a part of an eternity of creation and in that one moment, that eternity came through me. It's difficult to explain, but since then, I've worked to recapture that feeling of oneness and belonging. I've studied Buddhist, Jewish, Taoist, Baha'i, Muslim, and Christian traditions, and this feeling of oneness is only heightened as I see similarities between each of these traditions. The more I see the oneness, the more I want it, and the more I seek it.

This summer, while helping to run a workshop on social entrepreneurship, I met a young Mexican migrant called Roberto. By coincidence Roberto had landed upon three core themes for a good life: A Life of Purpose, Healthy Relationships with Others and Respectful Interaction with Nature. The resonance with what I’d been encountering rang clear as a bell.I was deeply disillusioned by the state of the world, the environment, the things that modern society prioritises, and the things it neglects. That is the self of interbeing. Divested of “situation,” your attention is my attention is everyone’s attention. We are the same being looking out at the world through different eyes. And these “eyes,” these vantage points, are each unique. As the comedian Swami Beyondananda puts it, “You are a totally unique being—just like everybody else!” Most of us cannot stand alone in the new story—to do so would contradict the basic principle of interbeing. If you are part of me, then if you are in separation, so also is a part of me. Lord knows there are a lot of social and economic forces holding us in the old story. A miracle or a breakdown can catapult us temporarily out of the world of separation, but to stay there, most of us need help. This is something we can all offer each other. That is why I say enlightenment is a group effort.

Then there’s a theme about how we live our lives in relation to each other. I’ve encountered a deep yearning for closer or more meaningful relationships with others. People talk about getting to know their neighbours, living in communities where they know other people well, spending more time with loved ones. Often this is accompanied by a desire to give – to support friends when they are in need, to visit the vulnerable, to help out when needed. To find a place of value, contribution, connection, love.Behind the fog of helplessness of the question “Will we make it?” is a gateway to our power to choose and to create. Because written on its threshold is another question, the real question: “Who am I?” That humanity is meant to join fully the tribe of all life on Earth, offering our uniquely human gifts toward the well-being and development of the whole. The title alone shifted something in me. It sparked a deep remembering in my soul. That yes…. there is a more beautiful world that my mind can’t imagine… but that my heart knows to be true. A tribeswoman asked, “How do you know this will work? Are you sure our shaman’s powers are great enough to send us on such a journey?”