Parables for the New Conversation is a spellbinding odyssey through metaphor and prose, personal sagas and historic events, where together author and reader explore the proposal that at its most profound level, life is really about having fun.

This book might remind one at first of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, with its collection of metaphorical stories on a variety of subjects relating to the human condition, as told by the prophet Almusafa to the people living in the isle of his birth. And yet, from the very first parable in Parables for the New Conversation, the tone is noticeably different. The people on the island of Allandon begin to laugh when the hermit emerges from forty years of silence to speak his wisdom, because they have already ascertained the lesson he offers through their lived experience. As a result of their collective evolution in consciousness they have in fact been engaging in a new conversation, which has diminished the need for a spiritual figurehead or  ‘guru’.

The new conversation is shown in the book to have its roots in antiquity, yet it is new in the sense that only now has it begun to become part of our normal thought processes and everyday interactions. This is due to the fact that we are individually and collectively more conscious than at any time in our history. The conversation about our purpose in life and the guidelines of our conduct has moved from the loftiness of the ritualized religious discourse of the past to a simpler and more personally grounded spiritual space where people are invited to bring all their thoughts, beliefs, fears, and dreams without being judged.

Rather than being a typical self-help book in which people are given an organized set of steps to follow in order to become more healthy, wealthy, or wise, this book proposes that we can actually help ourselves, by powerfully supporting one another as we become more versed in the language and ideas of the new conversation. The parables that start each of the 36 chapters exemplify an aspect of the new conversation in action: as parables, they do not tell the reader what to think or how to live. The reader is able to take from the parable, and the entire book, what they are ready for. The book remains true to the spirit of the new conversation—an invitation to plunge more deeply into ourselves, at whatever depth the reader chooses.

One of the unique points raised in Parables for the New Conversation is a serious exploration of what the next leap in consciousness entails, and the proposal that it involves a synthesis of the two diametrically opposed bodies of thought: traditional Eastern holistic spirituality and modern Western scientific materialism. Some books have discussed the obvious signs that East and West are starting to align with each other, but nowhere have I seen these two paradigms lined up side by side as equal partners, both essential to our collective rise to the next level of awareness. 

This book could be put in the same genre as Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations With God and Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth:: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose, in that one of the main goals is to bring the spiritual back to everyday life and everyday language. I believe that this book provides those who are disillusioned with religious precepts and terminology a comfortable space in which to consider how they are living and how to get where they really would like to be. In effect, the conversation slowly delves into the deeply spiritual without requiring the ‘leap of faith’ uncomfortable to agnostics and atheists. Unlike CWG, which is a conversation between the ‘student’ and the ‘ultimate authority’, my book is more like a conversation between learners, (i.e. the new conversation) where I share my paradigm about life and spirit that has been built out of my years of study but more importantly my actual life experience which is elaborated upon in the book, usually rather unflatteringly. In contrast with the ‘expert’ standpoint from which Eckhart Tolle speaks, I believe that my approach as a humble seeker of a personal truth and a better way of life can actually attract a whole new population of people who have moved away from the sin-and-judgment discourse of their religious heritage but still remain in a spiritual holding pattern, continuing to seek most of their satisfaction in the material.