Remember The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield?
Well, today, Rob was going through some old papers and found an article about this book from January 26, 1995, when Redfield’s “spiritual novel” knocked Grisham and King off the top spot on the bestseller list. It was first published in 1993.
There are some interesting facts about the book. Redfield first self-published it and sold 100,000 copies before Warner Books scooped it up and paid Redfield $800 grand for the rights. At the time this article was written, it had spent more than a year on the bestseller list.
Once you write a book that sells like this one had, you can move to Fiji and drink Margaritas all day. Or you can keep writing, which Redfield did. The 10th Insight was published in 1996. He has since written other books and is now 72.
So how do the insights in The Celestine Prophecy hold up in 2022, 39 years after Redfield wrote the book? Let’s take a look. Here are the 9 insights:
1. A critical mass: there are no coincidences, everything happens for a reason.
Well, yes. It’s called synchronicity and the concept was born with Carl Jung. A lot has changed in 39 years, with more people researching, studying, and writing about synchronicity.
2. The Longer Now: As we reach the end of the second millennium of history, we are again embracing the spirituality that once dominated and defined us before we became preoccupied with the physical world.
We started drifting away from this particular insight with the electoral election of Bush in 2000. Imagine what a different world this would be now if Gore’s popular vote had ushered him into office. We might actually be tackling climate change.
3. A matter of energy: An invisible but quite physical energy connects humans to all other things.
Quantum physics seems to be right on track with this one.
4. The Struggle for Power: All human interaction is a power struggle, a”control drama” in which one person becomes stronger by taking energy from the other.
Or one faction, group or party takes energy from another group: the supremes decision on June 24 to ban abortion strips women of the power to make decisions about their own bodies.
5. The Message of the Mystics: Mystical consciousness is the key to ending human conflict in the world, because one day we will no longer need to take energy from others but we will be able to receive it at will from the universe.
We’re not there yet.
6. Clearing the past: Our control dramas were formed in childhood as as way of winning energy back from our families. Only by understanding the control dramas our parents endured can we understand – and defuse – the ones that caused us to develop.
I don’t buy this one. I think we come in to life with an idea of what we would like to experience and achieve and that we choose all of it – from the families and circumstances into which we’re born to how we ultimately leave this life. We’re not all the way we are because mom or dad unloaded their baggage on us.
7. Engaging the Flow: We begin our evolution toward complete spirituality by constantly becoming aware of coincidence. Dreams are ways of guiding us in the steps we must take in our evolution and coincidences appear to push us along.
Synchronicity, again. It pushes us along in a variety of ways – through dreams, visions, hunches, intuition, through music, art, books, experiences and people who appear on our paths. We have to interpret what the synchros mean.
8. The Interpersonal Ethic: We must focus on each other in a way that sends them energy rather than takes it from them.
A lot of us need to learn this, but it seems that our current politics is screaming for this kind of change.
9. The Emerging Culture: We are here in order to consciously evolve, and the world will evolve toward complete spirituality in a predictable, logical way.
I agree with the first part of this insight. But the last part – that the world will evolve toward complete spirituality in a predictable, logical way – is just flat-out wrong.
There’s nothing logical about this country moving toward the reality depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Fascism. Theocracy.
There’s nothing logical about a society that tries to control women by denying them the right to make decisions about their own bodies.
There’s nothing logical about a supreme court that most likely will ban gay marriage and contraception.
Spiritual evolution isn’t necessarily facilitated through oppression and suffering. That’s like a throwback to the time when suffering was believed to strengthen your spirit, bolster your masculinity or femininity, prepare you for life. You had to be dirt poor before could could appreciate wealth, when you had to suffer for your passions.
That’s bullshit. Suffering serves no one and nothing.
We choose our dramas. We may not always choose consciously, but if we’re the creators of our own realities, (Seth Books by Jane Roberts, Abraham/Hicks) then we can also change our personal realities to something that doesn’t involve suffering, fear, despair. If enough of us do this consciously, collectively, so that it finally reaches a critical mass…that’s when external change happens.
