After making a post that cited an Occupy Wall Street piece that Charles Eisenstein wrote, I went to another piece of his: “Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order.”

I got plugged into the kind of long read I usually skim, where not only did I read all of this, I read the many comments on this highly controversial food for thought article.

There is something this took out of the shadows of my consciousness and made clear to me. I’ve always cringed at the idea of some venal power elite that, as Charles says, “explains world events as resulting from the machinations of a powerful, dark cabal of secret organizations comprising the global elite: the banks, wealthy families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, non-official organizations like the Bilderburg Council, organized crime, shadowy agencies within the government, secret societies like Skull and Bones and the Freemasons, and so on.” The UFO world, in which I often find myself, is full of such conspiratorial reasoning, which seems unreasonable to me.

I have not been able to think through or articulate my skeptical perspective until now, where Charles makes us look at the bigger picture that’s beyond a black and white polarization — a stance in reality in which we would be positioned to make the changes that we can’t make fighting our way out of paper bags.

Here are a few samples:

“In the war between good and evil, a great weapon of the forces of evil is the notion that there is a war between good and evil.”

“Rather than an evil Illuminati, could that power be money? Some say that a global elite controls humanity via the money system, but could it be that it is rather the money system that controls the global elite? I’m sure many of you have known the feeling of being enslaved to money. The wealthy are not exempt, and indeed, possessing more of it, are even more deeply enslaved to its logic. It is truly an ‘invisible hand,’ a force that ‘makes the world go ’round.’ Moreover, the end toward which money compels us is one of misery and ugliness: the destruction of nature and culture, community and health, and all that is beautiful on earth.”

“Can we overcome dualism, when our language is rife with it? Can we transcend separation, when our language assumes it in its very structure? By their very existence certain words limit us to thoughts that subtly serve the status quo. For example, when I when I say that reality isn’t what we think it is, by using the word ‘is’ I reinforce the very independently-existing reality that I am trying to deny. More generally, as a system of signs, language distances us from the reality it is supposed to represent, allowing us to more easily treat the world as other. Sometimes, during meditation or mystical experience, the veil of language lifts and the richness of the unmediated world is revealed, and along with it the depth of our thralldom.”

“The new story says that the abiding intuition that you have carried perhaps your whole life, and which drew you to conspiracism in the first place, is true. The world is governed by a secret power that holds us in bondage to no good end. But the conspirators are not others, they are we, you and I and everyone. A secret agenda of domination and control has existed in nearly everyone, and a world embodying that agenda has congealed around us, attracted to the dark, reptilian energies we have harbored.”

With the movie, THRIVE, having just exploded online, I wonder about reactions to it. (I was in a focus group a few months ago and helped them get their crop circle info right.) My Inbox has been overflowing with enthusiasts who had seen the trailer before the movie was available, and I wonder, after having seen the film, whether they would be equally enthusiastic.

The stranglehold of the money interests in our world is unarguable. But the film makes a huge leap in asserting that a New World Order is the intent of a powerful elite comprised of the likes of those entities that Charles mentions, in a conspiracy that wants to eliminate a majority of the population and destroy the solvency of the United States as they head us for a one world military dictatorship. A film that points fingers has to do the work of exposure and not just name call, and this movie doesn’t justify its accusations. Hopefully, it will engender conversation that considers the things that Charles wrote about, that helps us to become ever clearer about what is going on and what we can do about it.

I really like Elevate, the high minded auspice behind the push for THRIVE. Play It Forward is their new game, which will be utilized for other movies — maybe mine. I’d be interested to hear back about what people think about this gifting model. If you liked a socially conscious movie very much, would you put out money to send it to others?