I think medicine is so sacred. By saying that money can be medicine, I’ve taken something that has a really negative connotation associated with it and put it with something saying that it can be sacred.

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme

financial elites are winning by the rules of a rigged game. What is required is a paradigmatic shift in the rules — moving from systemic power imbalance and wealth accumulation to distributing wealth and power equitably.

When American capitalism sends us its billionaires, it’s not sending its best. It’s sending us people who have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing inequality. They’re bringing injustice. They’re buying politicians. And some, I assume, are good people.

The basic format of the money pile is that all those who are requesting to receive money collected at an event gather together and dynamically decide how to divide the money.

Clearness committees show a type of deep valuing of one another that challenges the logic of capitalism and hyper-individualism. It invites us into a more collaborative and social form of individualism and centers the agency and autonomy of the individual and their knowledge of self.

The choice, however, is ultimately ours. We can continue to avert our gaze from the looming chaos and believe the lie fed to us that we are separate or even superior to the lifeweb that envelopes this planet. We can sleepwalk toward extinction with a shopping bag in one hand and the latest smartphone in the other. Or we can acknowledge sorrow as a natural response to catastrophe.

they are ill-​informed. These boys have been raised to believe that a rapist is a bad guy in the bushes with a gun. They aren’t that guy, they figure, so they can’t be rapists.

When we are ready to be accountable, we begin to sort through our genuine motives and feelings regarding our present situation. We become willing to experience our own uncomfortable feelings and we allow others their uncomfortable feelings too, without rescuing them.

There is no reason to feel embarrassed when you reach out to a professional for help, because the person you are reaching out to is someone who has literally dedicated their life to helping people like us live, instead of merely exist.

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.