A New and Ancient Story Network

We are an online network of care, discussion, exploration, and development of a new (and ancient) mythology. We hold each other in the heart's knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible. We encourage each other to deepen our service to that possibility. Our forum topics span the political and the personal, the ecological and the relational, as no aspect of life will be untouched by the transformation that is before us.

Please scroll down to read community description, guidelines and common sense rules before requesting to join at the end of this page. 

Thank you.

This network is for subscribers of courses or programs created by Charles Eisenstein. Please visit our website at CharlesEisenstein.org to explore courses and programs. 

Our topics span the political and the personal, the ecological and the relational, as no aspect of life will be untouched by the transformation that is before us.

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Inside this Network

The Sanity Project - a six-month live cohort

This cohort is scheduled to start from 8AM EDT, June 11th, 2023, and its content will be offered over a period of six months. 

To read more about this program and register, please CLICK HERE. 

Charles' online Course Forums

If you are here to participate in forums of Charles Eisenstein's course and have already complete your registration process via our website portal, you may use this form to request to join. Once you are in the network, you will be able to select the appropriate forum from Course Forums list.

NAAS & Communities

The NAAS community, (NAAS is short for “A New and Ancient Story”), is an on-line community with in-person gatherings that was created in September 2020 to connect Charles’ readers. Since its inception, its members have cultivated friendships and resonance, fostering experiences of  “interbeing.” We invite you to join us. Once you register for any course, you will find a landing page in this network with an application for membership. It is a unique space where online and in-person connections bring people together from across the globe based on the principles of reverence and interbeing. 

To encourage localized connections, members at NAAS also facilitate more intimate regional communities as well. These can be found under "Communities" in the top menu of the network.

Special Interest Groups

These are groups formed to support local connections or special interests groups that generally run for a fixed period of time and are organized by network members. You can find more information on how they function inside the network platform in the About This Network section.

You can find them under "Groups" in the top menu in the network.

Events

You will find both virtual and in-person events facilitated both by members and by Charles. Charles' events are generally held under his active programs, such as The Sanity Project, which will run from June 11th, 2023 for six months.

There are also in-person retreats organized by community members and the NAAS hosting team. Many of those in-person retreats will feature Charles either as the keynote speaker or main program facilitator. While we enjoy a degree of inclusivity to include anonymous online forum participation, we apologize that some of these events are not available to online members who wish to remain anonymous, in order to honor the requests of our members.  

**Important** Please only request to join after you have read through and fully resonate with and accept our Posting Guidelines below. You may request to join through Charles' courses and programs via CharlesEisenstein.org.

To better understand the vibe of this community before you request to join, we will share the posting guidelines below. Please join only if you resonate with them. But first, a few details:

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Network Posting Guideline

The principle of reverence

Instead of patronizing you with guidelines about being respectful, I would like to invoke the principle of reverence. Reverence is the awareness that one is addressing sacred beings. It is not the same as solemnity; it includes humor, playfulness, and ease as well.

To maintain reverence means noticing habits of polarization and judgment that arise in the presence of difficult information or difficult emotions. Although this community is conceived as a sanctuary, inevitably it will mirror the divisions and conflicts of the outside world. The answer is not to avoid them or to plow them over with positivity. Rather, I invite us to hold them in a non-ordinary way.

Specifically, that means that we help each other

• to express anger without diverting it onto hate

• to hold grief without diverting it onto despair

• to share compassion without diverting it onto pity

• to interpret each other's words generously

• to let go of being right and seeming smart

• to value each person’s unique window on the world

• to be willing to see each other fully, shadow and gold

• to be willing to be truly seen ourselves

Challenging material is sure to come up in any community once it progresses past initial politeness. Here, our exploration of a new story will reveal our own unconscious beliefs and habits of separation; that is, the ways in which we still see and act from an old story. If we can hold reverence through that process in our own community, which will surely mirror the divisions and conflicts of the larger world, then there is a chance for the world to move toward peace as well. To the extent we succeed in holding reverence, we establish a precedent and prefigure a possibility. 

It is much easier for me to admit I was wrong, when I’m in an environment where no one is shamed for holding wrong beliefs. It is much easier for me to speak my truth, when others are welcome to speak theirs. It is much easier for me to question my beliefs when humble people surround me. In a community that provides such conditions, each member can grow beyond where they could alone.

A call to inquiry

Gigi Coyle, my dear friend and a teacher of the Way of Council, offers a mantra for speaking in circle that I think can be profitably translated into online conversations. The mantra is W.A.I.T. – “Why am I talking?” On the surface level, it is an antidote to habits of dominating others with ones speech, or speaking to get attention or approval, demonstrating how smart you are, or signaling in-group membership. All of these habits can dilute the power of our words. WAIT, however, is not actually meant as a device to suppress those habits; it is meant to illuminate them. It is not a rule that says, “Never speak if you are just doing it to gain approval, seek attention, show off, etc.” It says, “If you do that, know that you are doing that.”

WAIT springs from a deep trust in human beings, that says whatever wound or insecurity might drive your habits of speech, who you really are and what you really want is to serve the group, the conversation, and the higher purpose that brought it together.

In WAITing, we understand ourselves as more than separate individuals. Many voices, each with different motivations and goals, murmur within us and around us: the voice of the ego, the inner child, the higher self; the voice of beings of nature, spirits, and ancestors; the voice of social forces like patriarchy or peace; archetypal voices to which we may be attuned…. Which shall we allow to issue from our mouths or fingertips? Gigi asks, “Which one wants and needs to speak? Which one may be heard and actually serve life, healing, and contribute to more love, truth and wholeness?”

In an actual circle of humans, only one person can intelligibly speak at once. On an online forum, many conversations can run simultaneously. Attention-seeking or dominating speech can’t monopolize the group’s listening as it can in a live gathering. Nonetheless, people (hopefully) have lives off line too. If they read your post, then they are not doing something else. So another motivation for WAIT is the recognition that the attention of other people is precious. In fact, if I may wax metaphysical for a moment here, attention is the only thing we truly possess. Whatever we pay attention to is a kind of food. By paying attention to something, we accept its imprint and it becomes part of ourselves. To offer something for another person’s attention is not a trivial act. WAIT recognizes that and helps bring consciousness to that offering. Therefore, it too is a principle of reverence.

The question “Why am I talking (or posting)?” might not have an answer you can explain in words. The answer could well be a feeling. What feeling-state are these words coming from? Who am I, as I speak this? WAIT is a moment of self-considering, a mental and emotional check-in, that may result in hitting delete, or in changing some wording, or in replacing the words with others, or in no change at all. It helps uncover what one really wants to say (or not say).

As with reverence, WAIT allows light-hearted banter, humor, wit, and customs of etiquette, as well as discussion of personal and social issues. It is not an overriding rule or guilt trip meant to squelch bad speech. It operates from underneath, subtly aligning conversations to their best potential. It also establishes a habit of mindful intention that may bleed over into other areas of life. By maintaining a constant background question of “Who am I, really?” it induces, on the community level, an inquiry and an awareness of “Who are we, really?”

I don't know the answer to that question now. In fact I am deliberately cultivating a state of open curiosity about that, letting go of ideas about what it should be. I invite you all to do the same. Let us see what emerges.

In Service,

Charles & Patsy

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Common Sense Rules

Be a bastion of good will with generous words and honorable deeds. The NAAS Network wishes to give its community members the greatest freedom of personal expression possible. Please treat others with respect and do not personally condemn others. We welcome debate. Please challenge the topic, not the person.

Any post that is outside of the following common sense rules may be removed from public space. We will give you an opportunity to repost, and we welcome your ideas shared in a way that honors others.

Please refrain from the following-

1. Making negative assumptions and remarks on members’ personal characters or their motives. 

2. Vilifying another human 

3. Foul language directed at another human

4. Personal attacks, harassment or bullying

In addition, the following actions obviously will also not be tolerated:

5. Stalking or sexual advances/solicitation, including via private messaging

6. “Trolling” and acts deemed predatory in nature

7. Copying content of NAAS posts outside of NAAS without consent of members

Suggestions when facing issues with a member or a post-

• If you have an issue with another member, work it out through private messaging and keep it off the public platform. 

• If you feel a problem is serious enough to require intervention please contact the hosting team or your own support group ASAP.

• Any severe or irresolvable "personal" issues should be reported to the network hosting team for a mediation process.

If you agree with our guidelines and rules, please CLICK HERE to subscribe to program or a course. Thank you.

Please CLICK HERE to complete the form.

We review form approximately once a week. So it could take 1-9 days to receive an invitation. 

If you encounter technical trouble requesting to join, please email Patsy, your network host, at [email protected]

If you are already a member and having technical trouble sign in, please click here. 

We, as a host, automatically receive your personal information in the host database when you create an account to this network. However we do not share members data with third party organizations. For privacy policy of Mighty Network, please click here.