THE MORE BEAUTIFUL WORLD OUR HEARTS KNOW IS POSSIBLE

Meeting Charles Eisenstein over dinner on a winter's evening in Scotland, I was left with the impression of a man who has stepped into the wellspring of his message and whose gift is to share that story with us. He is aware, though, that the significance of sharing is more in the enjoyment of giving than in the gift itself. In person, as on the page, it is the buoyancy, the optimism of this awareness that makes his a vital voice in a zeitgeist chorus of brittle denial or apocalyptic doom. His message is a simple one: we are living in the exhausted denouement of the story of separation and 'we need to enter a fundamentally different story', the story of interbeing. His point is, that it is for us to remember our heritage as story-tellers, that the power of our own song is the gift, the sharing of which is the warp and weft the new story. As such, then, this is not a new story at all, but an age old perennial tale and the more I read, the more I felt that The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible is a Bhagavad Gita for our time. It is rare not to hear a note of despair in the voices of people who see themselves aligned against a mighty army of exploitative corporations, banks, and the governments and ideologies that facilitate them, but Eistenstein's advice is the same as that of Krishna's to the faltering Arjuna: act but do not be attached to the fruit of your actions and make each act a gift from the heart wherever you are and whomever you meet. Eisenstein counters criticism of his naivety through explaining that naivety is the fertile ground in which the miraculous seeds of the new story can flourish. He recounts anecdotes of Occupy protesters responding to police brutality and pepper spray with smiles and invitations to dinner, of an unassuming shrimp boat operator preventing a multinational chemical company from building the complex which she feared would pollute the Gulf coast where she lived and worked. He cites these as examples of the kinds of culture jamming needed to enact the new story but to those for whom such direct engagement is difficult or too frightening, his message is reassuring, the seeds of the new story are sown in the simple actions of everyday lives and these are as important as grand acts of protest, televised speeches, and best selling books. In this, Eisenstein brings a new twist to an old tale. Claiming no definitive personal awakening, he strips himself of guru status, and the story of any cloying mystical exclusivity by affirming that enlightenment is a collective act and that everyone has a role to play in its realisation. To this end, Eisenstein has avoided signposting his book with references to the august canon of perennial texts and personages. Despite alluding to a few selected passages from his own translation of the Tao Te Ching, and a passing mention of Gandhi, most of his references, quotations and anecdotes are local and contemporary. Although there is no doubting that his ideas are underpinned by a keen and knowledgeable intellect, I could see that Eisenstein wanted to democratise a story that often seems to exist only for souls living in the rarefied heights of advanced spiritual attainment but, I wondered, wasn't the sermon on the mount an attempt to do precisely that too? By doing so, this book escapes the confining categorisation of spiritual or New Age literature, no doubt reaching an audience who would otherwise dismiss it, but the absence of any sense of its perennial heritage left me dissatisfied, even uneasy at times: is not the depth, the richness of our sense of interconnection arrived at through seeing the tapestry the threads of this story have woven through time, and the vast variegated experience of human endeavour to keep them alive? In the same way, Eisenstein distances the realisation of this collective enlightenment from the process of spiritual techniques and practices, instead advocating the Taoist principle of wu-wei, non-forcing, or freedom from reflexive doing. Nevertheless, implicit in the book is the demanding practice of learning to recognise the conditioned, often reactive, ways we use the language of separation continually to prolong and extend the narrative of separateness in our daily lives. I found myself wanting a sharper focus on this at the expense of some of the slightly repetitive meandering of the middle section of the book. Overall, I felt the book could have been edited more thoroughly and that some of the chapters, psychopathy, for example, deserved a couple of paragraphs in the chapter on evil, and that fewer chapters would have created a clearer, more effective narrative. There is no doubt that as I was reading, I felt Eisenstein was articulating what I, and I'm sure many others, have felt for a long time and in a fresh, inspiring way. I would recommend the book for that alone. However, I did wonder whether this book might become fertile ground for a sequel that would consider in greater depth the language and art of story telling in the light of the story tellers and stories that have passed on the narrative of the heart through the age of separation.