Handfuls Of Dust And Splinters Of Bone

Recently, closing out 2022, on his Substack, Charles Eisenstein published his long essay "Handfuls Of Dust And Splinters Of Bone" in a series of six Parts, a sober contemplation around a discussion of George Orwell's seminal, prophetic work, "1984".

By way of introduction he writes:

"I wrote the bulk of this essay in 2010, and returned to it sporadically over the years since. I have spent the last week shaping it into publishable form, but I have scrupulously avoided updating it with examples from the Covid era. Why? Because I want to make it clear that despite the Orwellian dimensions of the Covid response, the phenomenon I describe far transcends that issue. “Evil” did not start in 2019."

In Part 1, he begins bleakly:

"Looking at the state of the planet today, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that evil is running the world. Everywhere, it seems, vast impersonal forces conspire to destroy all that is good and beautiful. Green spaces and living soil are paved over, made into parking lots and strip malls. Rain forests are cut down, fisheries exhausted, soil washed into the sea, wetlands drained, lakes polluted, the atmosphere poisoned, all to feed a money machine that serves no authentic human happiness. People disappear into secret prisons, walls and fences go up everywhere, indigenous tribes are forced off their land, coups depose leaders who would return power to the people. Wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, whole nations and peoples devote their productive lives to debt service. Every night a billion people go to bed hungry. And all of this happens through the actions of human beings. We cannot blame any agency external to ourselves."

By Part 5, he describes the search for truth and warns:

"When Orwell wrote 1984 in the late 1940s, the technology to alter records of the past was in its infancy: airbrushed photographs and so forth. Today, when nearly all records are electronic, this alteration can happen with a few keystrokes. Entire events can be rewritten or erased. We are entering an era of intensifying confusion as to what is real. Struggles for power are escalating into struggles to control reality itself, via the control of words and minds."

As I see it, the times we are living through are beset by risk and danger as powerful political systems attempt to exercise control over the personal and private spheres.

By the conclusion of Part 6, Charles's tone is positive, hopeful, transforming:

"...each human soul, eventually, will return to its divine nature: love. We hold open that possibility, naively if need be, for everyone. Even if it happens not in our lifetimes, not in ten thousand years, still we hold it open. We hold it open for each person and, therefore, hold it open for all people, foreseeing a future built on a new story of the human being. Only if we give up on it does that possibility vanish. Maybe indeed we will participate in such a future only as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. The timeline does not much matter; our work is the same.

Looking at the machinations of power today, it appears that we are very very far from the Revolution of Love I have described. Yet maybe we are closer than it seems. Awakenings are happening, invisible to us. The Inner Party is full of incipient defectors. A new and ancient consciousness is seeping up through the earth. Perhaps the long, lonely work of our ancestors, whose dust and bones became the earth, and whose tears watered it, is reaching fruition in our time."

The last three years have been hard, throwing up immense challenges on global, societal, community, and personal levels. As a society we have regressed into the patterning of fearful behaviours. My hope is that can move forward by pivoting on all these levels to a much more positive energy and vibration as we move from fear and deception to truth and love.