Hope Begins in the Unknown

Audio, video, and transcript of the first More Beautiful World Progress Report

Note: This is from the first “More Beautiful World Progress Report,” a monthly live call I give for members of the online community I host with Patsy. If you want to participate in those and the Q&A sessions and forums, you can join here. Otherwise, stay tuned and I’ll continue posting excerpts and sometimes whole sessions here on Substack.

Here is the YouTube version. Here is the audio version. And now for the transcript:

Welcome, everybody, to the first More Beautiful World Progress Report. The first time I did something like this I called the State of the World Address, which seemed a little bit too grandiose or too pompous. The More Beautiful World Progress Report is more in line with what I'm intending for this, which is to share my notes on our progress — though it sometimes doesn't seem like we are making any progress — toward what I call the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

That title is the title of one of my books. I chose it very deliberately. The heart knows it's possible, but the mind does not, or does not always know that it's possible.

The mind doubts. And in those moments of doubt, we have to, if we're going to continue serving the emergence of that world, we have to trust the heart. There are times when the heart and mind will be in alignment. But as we make our way from an old story into the next story, often the things that we need to do, the sense that we need to make, conflicts with the inherited programs of the mind.

In those moments, we have to trust the discernment of the heart. And it is that same function of heart discernment which allows us to see that we actually are making progress. Because from our received perceptual set, from our received ways of seeing the world, it looks very much like things are getting worse and worse, that we are making not progress toward a more beautiful world, but we are actually going the other direction.

So my purpose here is to bring in some of the phenomena, some of the events, some of the movements that might be underneath the surface, that can be seen from the heart's perspective — hopefully not too much in contradiction with the mind — and to share those so that all of us can see them together.

I'm calling this first more beautiful world progress report “Hope begins in the unknown.” And I guess I'm using “known” in a very specific way. Mental knowledge, empirical knowledge, mostly it's inherited knowledge, what we have inherited from the society and the mythology that we grew up in.

And when we are, at least I've experienced this an awful lot, when I get locked into that set of the known, locked into the legacy knowledge, then I lose hope. Because again, from that constricted sense of what is possible, there is no hope.

I'm probably not the only one here who has gone through periods of despair. So I'd like to bring in a couple of things. In these broadcasts, I'm going to draw on things that are in the news, and also things that are not in the news, either because they're happening just in a much smaller sphere, or because they are not deemed important enough to be in the news.

This is part of the foray into the unknown, the gathering of threads from the unknown that allows us to weave a fabric of hope, a fabric of possibility that is not delusional. It's simply recognizing that we have to bring things in from outside of normal.

So the first thing I wanted to talk about is, I read this report of a dialogue between former President Donald Trump and a judge. Judge, what was it? Napolitano, Napolitano, I think it was, and in that dialogue, basically the judge was like, “Hey, you promised that you were going to make all of the JFK assassination records public as required by law, and you didn't do it. I'm very disappointed. Why didn't you do it?” And Trump said, “If you had seen what they showed me, then you wouldn't have made them public either.” And the judge was like, “Who is they? What do you mean, ‘they’?”

And Trump said, “I'll tell you another time when we're not on the phone with 15 other people listening.”

So this is one of the peeks behind the curtain that we get sometimes. Now, I could speculate what was in those documents that, 60 years later, is so sensitive that Donald Trump thinks that it is unfit for the American public to view. Joe Biden also has not released the full JFK assassination documents. So we have basically a bipartisan contempt for democracy and contempt for the people.

So 60 years later, what could be so sensitive that the people who are supposed to be the sovereigns in a democracy, the people are not allowed to see it, they're not fit to see it, they're not trusted to see it, what could it be?

I could speculate on it, but I'm not going to do that right now, because I don't know, actually, I don't know. I have my theories, but I don't know. But what we can know for sure is that there is something there.

There is a layer of reality that is outside of public awareness. And I'm sure that that is not the only bit of reality outside the public awareness. Everybody knows this. What happened in 1963, — I'm just going to go into this a little bit — was that the official story of the assassination was an obvious lie. Obvious, the whole thing, the lone gunman, the magic bullet that went in and out and then hit somebody else, the assassination of the assassin on national TV before he could testify, his CIA background, There are whole books on this.

It was an obvious lie; hence, on some level, nobody believed it. Nobody believed it. But to countenance a lie, to admit to yourself that you didn't believe it was too much cognitive dissonance for people to handle.

Not everybody, but collectively the public decided that they would believe the lie. That opened up the doorway to believe a hundred, a thousand, a million other lies. That created a separation between and a breach of trust not only between the people and their government, but also within ourselves.

Today, 60 years later, even if most people don't know anything about this historical event, we are becoming conscious of what we’d only know unconsciously — that we are being lied to, that there is something, another reality behind the curtain. For example, UFO disclosure, things like that. But it doesn't have to be conspiratorial esoteric stuff. There's also the level of how to be healthy. And rejecting this pretense that everything is okay.

Chronic disease, which used to afflict maybe five, ten percent of the population now affects more than half — half the people, every family. something like 60% of children, if you include childhood obesity and diabetes and stuff like that. This is not normal.

We are in a time now — and this is part of the progress toward a more beautiful world — we are in a time where we start to look outside of what has been narrated to us as reality.

A few days ago I was at an event where I heard Zen Honeycutt share a really beautiful story about her son. It’s a more positive example of what I’m talking about, what is possible when we do look outside of the known. That is where hope begins, but it doesn't end there.

So Patsy, if you can find Zen here, hopefully she's on.

Zen Honeycutt

Hi, Charles. Hi, everyone.

Charles Eisenstein

Hey, Zen. Thanks so much for coming on.

Zen Honeycutt

Thank you. It's an honor. I appreciate it. Yes. So the story about my son, he was nine years old, my son Ben, and he had been struggling with food allergies for years. He had actually almost died from pecans and the stuffing on Thanksgiving.

So we almost lost him. But at this time, he was nine years old, he had been suffering with allergies, about 20 different allergies for about four years. And he was sitting at the breakfast table with his lips swollen, red cracked, it looked like his mouth had been sucked on by a vacuum cleaner.

And he looked at me forlornly. And he said, “Mom, I wish all my allergies would go away.” And I said, “Me too, buddy.” But in my head, I was thinking, that's never going to happen. Because the doctors had told me that with every exposure, his allergies would get worse and could eventually be life threatening, especially the nut allergies.

And then I realized what the voice in my head was saying, I was aware of it. And I said, Wait a second, that's not empowering. I'm committed to being courageous, and creative and a contribution in this world.

And that voice is a victim voice. It's seeing my son as small, it's seeing myself as small. What if something else was possible? And then I realized that my cousin, Sarah had gone gluten free for a year.

And she was able, after healing her gut, to eat a piece of pizza at a birthday party or a piece of cake at a wedding, and she was able to be okay. So I reminded my son of this story and said to him, Ben, would you like to someday, like a year from now, be able to eat a slice of pizza at a birthday party?

And he looked at me and his eyes got big, and he said, “Yes!” And I said, “Well, then would you do whatever it takes? Would you be my partner in your health? Would you drink green drinks and try Chinese herbs and you know, acupuncture? Would you do whatever it takes to get better?”

He thought about it seriously. And he said, “Yes!” And so I put my hand out and we shook hands. I said, “Then I promise you, buddy, you will get better.” Now at that moment, it was like one of those white light moments, like holy crap, what did I just say?

I did not know how he was going to get better. But I did know that if I made a promise to my son, when you make a promise to somebody, you step up, you take actions that you normally would never take.

And that promise and that partnership created a new future that we could both envision with him eating a slice of pizza at a birthday party a year from now, that we were in alignment with. And we did. We researched GMOs and glyphosate, we learned about the food supply, and within four months, that red line that was wrapped around his mouth that usually lasted two weeks, only lasted two days. And it was just a pink line under his lip when he was exposed to his allergens. And within a year of eating all organic and non GMO, within a year of going all organic, his allergies that were life threatening at a 19 went down to a point two.

He no longer has any life threatening allergy. I have a priceless peace of mind that my son will not die from food. And he has been an organic whole food plant based diet advocate for I think 10 years now and has not been to the doctor during that time once except for physical checkups for sports.

Charles Eisenstein

Wow.

Zen Honeycutt

So he's a food advocate and we've created Moms Across America. We have reached millions of people around the world now, and people are getting better when they eat organic. That was not something that I knew was possible, but absolutely I can see as possible when you get in alignment with that new future.

And when you make a promise to somebody and you step up and take actions and you create partnership and that's what I see you're creating Charles with your work and with the Kennedy campaign.

Charles Eisenstein

Thank you, Zen. You know, when you made that promise to him, even though you didn't know how to get there, I'm sure that you would not have said it to him if you didn't believe it were possible in some level.

Where did you access that belief in that moment? How did you know? How did you recognize it?

Zen Honeycutt

You know what, I had a moment where it was like, I don't care if I have to eat birdseed with my son. I am going do whatever it takes to get my son better. And I'm going to do that in partnership with him.

I realized we needed to do it together. I needed to step up and have some commitment to him. And I knew from my cousin, Sarah, that somebody else, she had healed her gut a bit. She had gotten at least somewhat better.

And the ironic thing is, of course, he didn't want to eat the pizza at a birthday parties after he got better. He knew that that food was crap, and now he eats only organic whole food plant. He'll go to a restaurant with other people and sit there and just eat nothing.

If it's not organic, whole food plant -based, he won't eat it. So he has pristine health and is an amazing condition. But I just knew that he could get better. And if he didn't get as well as I wanted him to, at least he would get more well.

But we would only do that if we made a promise to each other and had partnership. Just, eh, I'll try 80 -20 – that just wasn't gonna cut it. We needed a hard line of “We're gonna do this all in.”

Charles Eisenstein

When I make those kinds of vows, those moments of “I will do whatever it takes,” I've noticed that if I have any reservations, if I'm carrying any doubts or reservations, then the universe will basically say to me, “Are you sure you will do whatever it takes?”

It does that by presenting me with a situation that calls on me to make a sacrifice or calls on me to do something brave, in order to actually demonstrate that I was serious when I said that I will do whatever it takes.

And I'm wondering if, I know you have to go soon, but did you have any moments like that?

Zen Honeycutt

In that moment, no, I was crystal clear and I really appreciate you bringing up that because there have been, I can relate, there have been moments when I haven't been crystal clear about something and things get wishy -washy and the universe doesn't really present what needs to come along, but in that moment I was so clear that it was time for him to get better.

He had suffered for years before that with all these different allergies and I realized that I had been full of resignation and doubt. I did this program called Landmark, so I had learned about breakthroughs and all that stuff and I saw myself being full of resignation and doubt for those past few years, just putting up with the fact that he had these allergies and was going to be a lifetime of suffering.

I mean this kid was going to school with this mouth, you know, it was horrible and I said, “No, enough is enough, he's going to get better and I'm going to figure out how to do it with him.” I was extremely clear about that and that's why I say it was a white light moment. It was really something that I felt called to do. I think that if we are open and committed to it, we can create that, it doesn't have to just be waiting for God to send it to us, when we put ourselves on the line.

Charles Eisenstein

Right.

Zen Honeycutt

And we can cause that. And that's why the first word for our nonprofit is “empower.” Well, it was empower, now it's educate and empower, but that is what I believe needs to happen for us to move the needle in creating this new world.

We need to be clear about what it is we're creating. We need to promise that we're going do it, put our butts on the line in a serious way, and we need to have partnership, we need community.

And so that's why I love you're creating this community with people, because I get that sense from them when I'm with them in person at your NAAS gathering in Asheville, I get the sense of commitment and dedication from people that is very rare to find and it should be more prevalent for sure.

Charles Eisenstein

Thank you Zen, thank you so much for sharing that with us. I'm going to unpack some elements of that story, although you've already said a lot of what I would say. Maybe I’ll start by picking up on what I was saying before about the internal reservations and doubts that prevent full commitment to something that we say we want.

I don't want to treat those reservations and doubts as necessarily an enemy. Sometimes they can signal that what we say we want isn't actually the highest or best thing that we could be committing our life energy to.

So if that's the case, then maybe there's some internal work to do to become clear on what you want. When you're clear as a creative being, you are unstoppable. You are at least, let's say, a mighty force. And when many people are clear and aligned, then it is an even mightier force.

This is the essence of democracy. It is to collectively become clear on something that forges the people into an unstoppable force. Democracy is not something that gets allotted to us from the outside. It's not something that we can beg the authorities to grant us and hope that an appeal to them will be successful to relent in their nefarious projects, their censorship, their corruption and their manipulation of the system for profit.

“Please stop doing that.” No, that's not going to work. We have instead to forge an agreement field and act upon that in clarity and coherency. That's what democracy is. It is a positive movement.

So that’s one thing. The next thing was Zen got an agreement. This was crucial. She got the agreement of her son, Ben. And she knew to get that agreement before she went in; otherwise she would be a “rescuer” trying to compensate for his lack of commitment.

Third, she had to know on some level that what she had promised her son is possible. How do you know something is possible that you never seen? It's very hard, when your entire reality has been in one enclosure, to know that there is anything outside of that enclosure.

That's why it is so important for us to share with each other. It is one of the one of the main functions that I want to establish on this platform. These more beautiful world reports are embedded in a program we’re calling “The Turning of the Age.” I hope that doesn’t sound grandiose too. Anyway, it is an online community with forums, discussion rooms after this, and Q &A. We also have incubators for projects and all that kind of stuff.

One of the main reasons, one of the main intentions of this is to help each other know that there are possibilities beyond what we have been able to see ourselves. Because, we have all been cast into the story, the society, the matrix of separation, the story of the separate self, the story of self versus other, the story of an objective reality separate from ourselves, the story of humans separate from nature.

We've been born into all of these deep mythologies. In them, something like Ben's healing seems miraculous, seems medically impossible. That's what all the doctors said.

That is an indication that as a society, we have accepted as reality itself that which is actually just a story, actually just a belief system.

Our seeing of something beyond what has been narrated to us as real comes as a gift, it comes as a vision, it comes as a glimpse, it comes, in Zen's story, from hearing her cousin going gluten -free and now she's not allergic anymore.

So that was a glimpse from outside the matrix, outside the matrix of the doctors saying it's impossible. I admire Zen for trusting that glimpse, because I know that I have gotten many glimpses and ignored them, and basically on some level pretended to myself that that isn't real.

“That didn't happen.” “That doesn't count.” “I need more proof.” “I don't believe it,” I stayed in a smaller reality, a smaller possibility, and therefore foreclosed the possibility of committing to something that I know is real.

To even know what we want, we have to see the menu. We have to see the menu to choose the dish. And the menu that we are given conventionally is a very narrow, limited menu. I mentioned at the beginning, the incredible levels of chronic disease in this country, that afflict every family, that make this smaller reality and this limited possibility more and more uncomfortable. That's the push, that discomfort. It becomes intolerable and it pushes us out of the womb, out of the enclosure of the old story.

And then there's also the pull, which is the glimpses that we get, what we see outside of it, the stories that we hear. When we do have that commitment, when we do have that clarity that Zen exemplifies, we can then carry those stories to others and first say, “I've seen that too, and here's my living example of what is possible when I step into that space, when I make that commitment.”

First we say it exists, that here's another menu item. Then we also accompany each other on the journey of commitment to that possibility. That was the key part — “I will do whatever it takes” is what Zen said.

“I will do whatever it takes.” Those are not just words in the head. It corresponds to, I would even say, a physiological change. It is an act of self-transformation. It says, “I will become the person who will do whatever it takes.”

That change in the self is… so contrary to the Cartesian story of an objective reality, self and other, inner and outer, all of us know that they are intimately connected. So when you have such a profound change in yourself, you also change the world. Things that were impossible become possible. This gets very paradoxical: Things that were objectively truly impossible now become possible.

Why? Because you are in a different reality. You have shapeshifted into a different cosmos almost. And how did you do that? You let go of who you had been and step into something else.

Let’s link this to the global level. How about the possibility of peace? Are we ready for that? Are we ready to say, “I will do whatever it takes”? To be ready to do that, you have to know that it's possible. You have to see that it's possible.

What we are seeing now in the news tells us the opposite. It looks like the best case scenario is, say in Gaza, a temporary ceasefire. It is so far from the possibility that I sense of, you know, of joint stewardship of the three Abrahamic religions over the Holy Land in peace and love and mutual respect, mutual admiration even.

To even say that sounds so naive, but I invoke it nonetheless because I know that it is possible. And when you know something's possible, then you can commit to it. And when something isn't possible, your reservations and doubts and fear can signal that. They might be telling you, that your ambition to, you know, become president of the world, or your ambition to establish a base on Mars or something like that, is not actually possible. Maybe that vision is just a projection field of some kind of internal story, some kind of grandiosity, some desire for respect, for love. Who knows? All kinds of psychology could be going there.

Another thing I want to draw out of Zen's story is that moment where she said, Enough! It preceded her commitment. Enough! Enough! And I'm sure that many of you, as I do, look at the world, look at all that's happening, and we say, Enough! Enough of the division, enough of the pollution, enough of the destruction of rainforests, enough of the ruining of water, enough of the squandering of our energy and resources and attention.

Enough! The No precedes the yes. Thank you. The No opens up the possibility of seeing what to say yes to. And so to bring it back to chronic disease, the grievous, grievous condition of our country (and I say our country even though I know a lot of people on this call are not in the United States, not in North America. We're kind of the epicenter here of the illness, of the global illness, our chronic disease. Here I'm going to allow my national pride to swell. You know, we are number one, number one in the whole world in chronic disease. Number one, well, I don't know if that's strictly true, but pretty close in concentration of wealth. Maybe not number one, but many, in many ways, my country is the epicenter of a global illness. And so we have, you know, a majority of the population chronically ill.

And why is that? I could talk about all the factors that Zen's organization works with, such as the pollution of our soil, of our air, of our water, the degradation of the food supply, electromagnetic radiation, pharmaceutical drugs injected and fed people throughout their entire lives. Trauma, despair, loss of meaning, addiction. On a deeper level, the chronic disease epidemic is caused by neglect, neglect of ourselves, and the neglect of each other, and the turning of our attention toward conquest, toward domination, toward expansion, toward desire for things that we think we want but that we actually do not want, things that are substitutes for what we really want. The kind of wealth that America, my country, the United States, has led the world in the pursuit of, the kind of wealth which doesn't meet the real needs of a human being.

That is the origin of, or part of, the neglect that I'm talking about. And so now, after years, after decades of neglect, we are crying for attention. We are not okay. And it is becoming harder and harder to pretend that we are okay.

What have we neglected in the pursuit of what we don't even actually want and need? That pursuit kind of made sense as long as the misery levels were not so high, but now the misery levels are rising, and we reach that point of “Enough!” We cannot do this anymore.

It's still hideable for a lot of people. You know, you go out, see people driving in their cars. It's not obvious the amount of suffering behind those windows. You drive through a neighborhood, it's not obvious the amount of suffering in those houses behind closed doors.

Walk through the airport, or a train station, shopping malls… it’s not obvious the amount of suffering behind those faces. All these brave people doing their best. Heroic. Each one of those people is life. Powerful, resilient. But when you start to look for what is in that realm of the unknown, what we do not see, you start to see it. You start to see the suffering.

You start to notice people walking in a way that, oh yeah, that person has debilitating back pain. Someone's rude to you in the checkout line. You start to see, oh, who knows, their teenager is cutting themselves. There's some pain there. And we see it with the same heart function that I spoke of at the beginning, that also allows us to see the beauty and the possibility.

It's the same one that allows us to see the suffering. They all come together. The no and the yes. And so we begin to see these things and it stirs our compassion, and the compassion that stirs in anger.

You can hear it in “Enough!” Anger, like fear, is not a bad emotion. It enforces a boundary. It expels, it says, No! Enough! That is an initiatory moment.

One of my favorite sayings — I don't know if I coined it or if I got it from somewhere, I'm sure other people said it before — is “The illness seeks the medicine.” And also, “The medicine seeks the illness.” So here we are at the epicenter of a global illness in my country. With historically maybe unprecedented levels of chronic disease, of sickness, I don't know if it compares to the Black Death, but the amount of suffering is staggering.

Here we are. So what is the medicine that it is bringing? Well if the origin of the illness is neglect, then the medicine that it is bringing is compassion. And on a more mundane level, more practical level, it's also bringing incredible healing technologies and understanding, modalities that can accomplish the impossible.

When we trust the perception of that the impossible is possible, when we have been clued in by those stories — gluten-free for a year, look what happened — when we get clued in by the stories that we share on our platform and commit to it, then they become possible.

The anger then has somewhere to go, somewhere constructive. So, neglect — the illness —brings compassion — the medicine.