omniharmonicStory of Separation
The story of separation is the dominant Western ontological frame — articulated most clearly by Charles Eisenstein — that understands the self as fundamentally separate from other selves, from the community, from nature, and from the cosmos. In this story, the individual is an isolated rational agent, the natural world is inert material for human use, and meaning must be constructed rather than discovered in relationship. Competition is natural, accumulation is rational, and the boundaries of the self end at the skin.
This narrative is not merely a philosophical abstraction; it is the operating system of modern civilization. It structures economic systems (individuals maximizing utility), governance (atomized voters choosing representatives), science (the observer separate from the observed), and culture (the heroic individual against the world). The ecological crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the erosion of community, and the capture of democratic institutions all flow from an ontology that treats relationships as optional rather than constitutive.
The antidote to the story of separation is not a return to pre-modern tribalism but an evolution toward what Eisenstein calls the “story of interbeing” — a recognition of interbeing as the fundamental condition of existence. This connects to decolonization because the story of separation is historically entangled with colonial expansion and the reduction of Indigenous relational ontologies. It relates to wetiko as the psychological pattern that thrives in separation’s soil, and to dominator-culture as its social expression. Regeneration, living-systems thinking, bioregionalism, and commons-governance all represent practical institutions that embody a relational rather than separative ontology.