Charles Eisenstein, “A Gathering of the Tribe”

“Once
upon a time a great tribe of people lived in a world far away from
ours. Whether far away in space, or in time, or even outside of time, we
do not know. They lived in a state of enchantment and joy that few of
us today dare to believe could exist, except in those exceptional peak
experiences when we glimpse the true potential of life and mind.

One
day the shaman of the tribe called a meeting. They gathered around him,
and he spoke very solemnly. “My friends,” he 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, 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?”

“Tell us more about his mission,” they asked.

“I
am glad you asked, because it is no small thing. I will put you into a
deep, deep trance, so complete that you will forget who you are. You
will live a human life, and in the beginning you will completely forget
your origins. You will forget even our language and your own true name.
You will be separated from the wonder and beauty of our world, and from
the love that bathes us all. You will miss it deeply, yet you will not
know what it is you are missing. You will only remember the love and
beauty that we know to be normal as a longing in your heart. Your memory
will take the form of an intuitive knowledge, as you plunge into the
painfully marred earth, that a more beautiful world is possible.

“As
you grow up in that world, your knowledge will be under constant
assault. You will be told in a million ways that a world of destruction,
violence, drudgery, anxiety, and degradation is normal. You may go
through a time when you are completely alone, with no allies to affirm
your knowledge of a more beautiful world. You may plunge into a depth of
despair that we, in our world of light, cannot imagine. But no matter
what, a spark of knowledge will never leave you. A memory of your true
origin will be encoded in your DNA. That spark will lie within you,
inextinguishable, until one day it is awakened.

“You
see, even though you will feel, for a time, utterly alone, you will not
be alone. I will send you assistance, help that you will experience as
miraculous, experiences that you will describe as transcendent. For a
few moments or hours or days, you will reawaken to the beauty and the
joy that is meant to be. You will see it on earth, for even though the
planet and its people are deeply wounded, there is beauty there still,
projected from past and future onto the present as a promise of what is
possible and a reminder of what is real.

“You will also
receive help from each other. As you begin to awaken to your mission
you will meet others of our tribe. You will recognize them by your
common purpose, values, and intuitions, and by the similarity of the
paths you have walked. As the condition of the planet earth reaches
crisis proportions, your paths will cross more and more. The time of
loneliness, the time of thinking you might be crazy, will be over.

“You
will find the people of your tribe all over the earth, and become aware
of them through the long-distance communication technologies used on
that planet. But the real shift, the real quickening, will happen in
face-to-face gatherings in special places on earth. When many of you
gather together you will launch a new stage on your journey, a journey
which, I assure you, will end where it began. Then, the mission that lay
unconscious within you will flower into consciousness. Your intuitive
rebellion against the world presented you as normal will become an
explicit quest to create a more beautiful one.

“In the
time of loneliness, you will always be seeking to reassure yourself that
you are not crazy. You will do that by telling people all about what is
wrong with the world, and you will feel a sense of betrayal when they
don’t listen to you. You will be hungry for stories of wrongness,
atrocity, and ecological destruction, all of which confirm the validity
of your intuition that a more beautiful world exists. But after you have
fully received the help I will send you, and the quickening of your
gatherings, you will no longer need to do that. Because, you will Know.
Your energy will thereafter turn toward actively creating that more
beautiful world.”

A tribeswoman asked the shaman, “How
do you know this will work? Are you sure your shamanic powers are great
enough to send us on such a journey?”

The shaman
replied, “I know it will work because I have done it many times before.
Many have already been sent to earth, to live human lives, and to lay
the groundwork for the mission you will undertake now. I’ve been
practicing! The only difference now is that many of you will venture
there at once. What is new in the time you will live in, is that the
Gatherings are beginning to happen.”

A tribesman asked,
“Is there a danger we will become lost in that world, and never wake up
from the shamanic trance? Is there a danger that the despair, the
cynicism, the pain of separation will be so great that it will
extinguish the spark of hope, the spark of our true selves and origin,
and that we will separated from our beloved ones forever?”

The
shaman replied, “That is impossible. The more deeply you get lost, the
more powerful the help I will send you. You might experience it at the
time as a collapse of your personal world, the loss of everything
important to you. Later you will recognize the gift within it. We will
never abandon you.”

Another man asked, “Is it possible that our mission will fail, and that this planet, earth, will perish?”

The
shaman replied, “I will answer your question with a paradox. It is
impossible that your mission will fail. Yet, its success hangs on your
own actions. The fate of the world is in your hands. The key to this
paradox lies within you, in the feeling you carry that each of your
actions, even your personal, secret struggles within, has cosmic
significance. You will know then, as you do now, that everything you do
matters. God sees everything.”

There were no more
questions. The volunteers gathered in a circle, and the shaman went to
each one. The last thing each was aware of was the shaman blowing smoke
in his face. They entered a deep trance and dreamed themselves into the
world where we find ourselves today.”

“Who
are these missionaries from the more beautiful world? You and I are
surely among them. Where else could this longing come from, for this
magical place to be found nowhere on earth, this beautiful time outside
of time? It comes from our intuitive knowledge of our origin and
destination. The longing, indomitable, will never settle for a world
that is less. Against all reason, we look upon the horrors of our age,
mounting over the millennia, and we say NO, it does not have to be this
way! We know it, because we have been there. We carry in our souls the
knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible. Reason says it is
impossible; reason says that even to slow — much less reverse — the
degradation of the planet is an impossible task: politically unfeasible,
opposed by the Money Power and its oligarchies. It is true that those
powers will fight to uphold the world we have known. Their allies lurk
within even ourselves: despair, cynicism, and resignation to carving out
a life that is “good enough” for me and mine.

But we
of the tribe know better. 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 jejune
idealism lives within us, always ready to believe, always ready to look
upon new possibilities with fresh eyes, surviving despite infinite
disappointments. And however resigned we may have felt, our
aggrandizement of me and mine is half-hearted, for part of our energy is
looking elsewhere, outward toward our true mission.

I
would like to advise caution against dividing the world into two types
of people, those who are of the tribe and those who are not. How often
have you felt like an alien in a world of people who don’t get it and
don’t care? The irony is that nearly everyone feels that way, deep down.
When we are young the feeling of mission and the sense of magnificent
origins and a magnificent destination is strong. Any career or way of
life lived in betrayal of that knowing is painful, and can only be
maintained through an inner struggle that shuts down a part of our
being. For a time, we can keep ourselves functioning through various
kinds of addictions or trivial pleasures to consume the life force and
dull the pain. In earlier times, we might have kept the sense of mission
and destiny buried for a lifetime, and called that condition maturity.
Times are changing now though, as millions of people are awakening to
their mission all at the same time. The condition of the planet is
waking us up. Another way to put it, is that we are becoming young
again.

When you feel that sense of alienation, when you
look upon that sea of faces mired so inextricably in the old world and
fighting to maintain it, think back to a time when you too were, to all
outside appearances, a full and willing participant in that world as
well. The same spark of revolution you carried then, the same secret
refusal, dwells in all people. How was it that you finally stopped
fighting it? How was it that you came to realize that you were right all
along, that the world offered to us is wrong, and that no life is worth
living that does not in some way strive to create a better one? How was
it that it became intolerable to devote your life energy toward the
perpetuation of the old world? Most likely, it happened when the old
world fell apart around your ears.

As the multiple
crises of money, health, energy, ecology, and more converge upon us, the
world is going to collapse for millions more. We must stand ready to
welcome them into the tribe. We must stand ready to welcome them back
home.

The time of loneliness, of walking the path
alone, of thinking maybe the world is right and I am wrong for refusing
to participate fully in it… that time is over. For years we walked
around talking about how wrong everything is: the political system, the
educational system, religious institutions, the military-industrial
complex, the banking industry, the medical system — really, any system
you study deeply enough. We needed to talk about it because we needed to
assure ourselves that we were not, in fact, crazy. We needed as well to
talk about alternatives, the way things should be. “We” should
eliminate CFCs. “They” should stop cutting down the rain forests. “The
government” should declare no fishing zones. This talk, too, was
necessary, for it validated our vision of the world that could be: a
peaceful and exuberant humanity living in co-creative partnership with a
wild garden earth.

The time, though, for talking
merely to assure ourselves that we are right is coming to an end. People
everywhere are tired of it, tired of attending yet another lecture,
organizing yet another discussion group online. We want more. A few
weeks ago as I was preparing for a speaking trip to Oregon, the
organizers told me, “These people don’t need to be told what the
problems are. They don’t even need to be told what the solutions are.
They already know that, and many of them are already in action. What
they want is to take their activism to the next level.”

To
do that, to fully step into one’s mission here on earth, one must
experience an inner shift that cannot be merely willed upon oneself. It
does not normally happen through the gathering or receiving of
information, but through various kinds of experiences that reach deep
into our unconscious minds. Whenever I am blessed with such an
experience, I get the sense that some benevolent yet pitiless power –
the shaman in the story – has reached across the void to quicken me, to
reorganize my DNA, to rewire my nervous system. I come away changed.

One
way it happens is through the “gathering of the tribe” I described in
this story. I think many people who attended the recent Reality Sandwich
retreat in Utah experienced something like this. Such gatherings are
happening now all over the world. You go back, perhaps, to “real life”
afterwards, but it no longer seems so real. Your perceptions and
priorities change. New possibilities emerge. Instead of feeling stuck in
your routines, life changes around you at a vertiginous pace. The
unthinkable becomes commonsense and the impossible becomes easy. It may
not happen right away, but once the internal shift has occurred, it is
inevitable.

Here I am, a speaker and a writer, going on
about how the time for mere talk has ended. Yet not all words are mere
talk. A spirit can ride the vehicle of words, a spirit that is larger
than, yet not separate from, their meaning. Sometimes I find that when I
bow into service, that spirit inhabits the space in which I speak and
affects all present. A sacredness infuses our conversations and the
non-verbal experiences that are becoming part of my events. In the
absence of that sacredness, I feel like a smart-ass, up there
entertaining people and telling them information they could just as
easily read online. Last Friday night I spoke on a panel in New York,
one of three smart-asses, and I think many in the audience left
disappointed (though maybe not as disappointed as I was in myself). We
are looking for something more, and it is finding us.

The
revolutionary spark of our true mission has been fanned into flames
before, only to return again to an ember. You may remember an acid trip
in 1975, a Grateful Dead concert in 1982, a kundalini awakening in 1999
– an event that, in the midst of it, you knew was real, a privileged
glimpse into a future that can actually manifest. Then later, as its
reality faded into memory and the inertial routines of life consumed
you, you perhaps dismissed it and all such experiences as an excursion
from life, a mere “trip.” But something in you knows it was real, realer
than the routines of normalcy. Today, such experiences are accelerating
in frequency even as “normal” falls apart. We are at the beginning of a
new phase. Our gatherings are not a substitute for action; they are an
initiation into a state of being from which the necessary kinds of
actions arise. Soon you will say, with wonder and serenity, “I know what
to do, and I trust myself to do it.”

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