Back in 1993, Celestine Prophecy, a self-published novel about the approaching millennium, came out of nowhere to sell 100,000 copies. A major publisher picked it up, and it went onto the New York Times Best Seller list for three years in a row, selling 20 million copies. The writer, James Redfield, started out as a simple social worker in Alabama helping disturbed adolescents before trying his hand at writing.
How can we account for this story’s unparalleled success? Was it because it foresaw the approaching millennium as both a transformation of Planet Earth and our collective enlightenment?
Celestine Prophecy: Then and Now
James Redfield never claimed to be introducing earthshaking ideas. Rather, he has consistently seen himself as a synthesizer of the best insights of the New Age movement, most particularly how we can individually and collectively experience for ourselves mystical truth.
When the novel was first released, Bill Clinton from Arkansas was the new America President. Despite his downhome manner, Bill was an extraordinary intellectual. For example, he brought one of the leaders of the New Paradigm, the physicist, Dr. Fritjof Capra, into the White House to explain the new model of reality to all his staff.
As we approached the millennium, we were hungry and thirsty for a revelation. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union had transitioned into the Commonwealth of Independent States. The E.U. had just formed. The global “Superhighway” was in, and political correctness, Hillary Clinton-style, was considered hip.
Twenty years later, the Global Warming of Vice President Al Gore seems all too real with superstorms and wild swings of hot and cold. The icepacks are melting. All the while, religiously inspired and sanctioned terrorism is reaching an all time high, and governments around the world, perhaps in reaction to President Obama, have swung sharply to the right.
Where is the promised millennium? Where is the global enlightenment? The world is flat, but is humanity any wiser?
Why Is Cultural Evolution Important to All of Us?
We have a mountain of biological evidence for physical evolution, but scant proof, since it would take millions of years to witness it in action. The missing links still have yet to be resolved. It has already been 150 years since Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, written from the perspective of Newton, not Einstein or Heisenberg. With systems theory and ecosystems, we now realize that species cooperate as much as they compete with one another.
What cannot be denied is that society and culture have evolved. While we cannot say that humans have become any better, we have certainly become a whole lot more sophisticated. You can’t even compare the infrastructure of the Roman Empire with the digital complexity of our global civilization. While you still see pockets of barbarism here and there, such as demonstrated by ISIS, you couldn’t go around literally crucifying people without universal condemnation.
Dr. Deepak Chopra maintains that today it is all about metabiological evolution. We have the evolution of evolution, itself. We are rapidly evolving our notions of what it means to be human. We have gone from spoken words to written words to print to video clips. All human knowledge is now online, and it is doubling every year or two. That we have a global brain is hardly an exaggeration.
Are the Nine Insights All There Is?
The Celestine Prophecy (book) opened up a daring new perspective on consciousness and energy. Evolution is not arbitrary; rather, it is God’s way of continuing creation. We gradually evolve from son and daughter of man to Son and Daughter of God. This is theistic evolution, pioneered by the French paleontologist and priest, Teilhard de Chardin.
Everything can be seen as the interplay of energy within a conscious universe. We find in the old growth forests and deserted beaches a stunning sacred beauty. When we tune into the aesthetics of our environment, we see an inherent loveliness in all created forms.
The Celestine Prophecy has a compelling story which is meant to function as an allegory or parable. If you take Redfield’s masterpiece too literally, you miss the whole point. It is a brilliant work, because his ideas come alive in a way that profoundly speaks to the reader or filmgoer. The exotic locale of Peru near the ancient ruins of Machu Pichu, as well as the mythical city of Shambhala in Tibet, fuel the imagination,
Already, James Redfield has gone to Twelve Insights. We have reason to suspect he will come up with even more. We may come up with our own insights that can lead us toward a magical experience of life.
What If I Can’t Tune into Synchronicity?
When I met James Redfield in San Francisco at the world premier of his Celestine Prophecy Movie, James invited the audience to tune into coincidences in their own life. He maintained that synchronicity is for him a spiritual practice. He invites meaningful coincidences every morning, and then proceeds to look for them.
Having enjoyed brief periods of extraordinary coincidences, I am convinced of the validity of synchronicity. However, I haven’t been too successful in doing it on demand. I notice them when I notice them. When they appear meaningful, I probe.
God speaks to us in other ways. For example, Neale Donald Walsh became rich and famous by transcribing his Conversations with God using a simple pen and legal pad. A friend of his typed them up into what became a best-selling book series. I have found an Inner Voice that speaks to me daily, and gives me extraordinarily accurate insights and guidance.
What works for James Redfield may not work for you, and vice versa. Not to worry. Redfield might advise us to tune into patterns in our life wherever they may appear. We certainly don’t need to be in a rush to figure it all out.
Is Energy the Basis for Everything?
James Redfield sees God in the third-person, as a Sacred Presence and Energy. Many people like this, as it throws out archaic conceptions of God as an old man on a rocking chair high in the sky. Redfield interprets everything in his novels in terms of energy. That is how the divine speaks to him.
We know from relativity and quantum physics, matter is instantly convertible to energy. Neither can be observed without consciousness. What we consider matter is actually form organized into intricate patterns in the most intelligent way possible. Thus, energy is much more fundamental than matter.
This doesn’t mean that you simply plug your fingers into an electric socket to find the divine. Here, Redfield is getting at a much more subtle form of energy. He sees a clear relationship between divine energy and life energy. In the Celestine Prophecy Movie, one of the characters points out that the halos around saints are actually an expression of this light.
What Do We Do When Things Keep Getting Darker?
Since the election of President Trump, the world has increasingly witnessed an extreme back-to-the-basics attitude, putting Fortress America first at all costs. With the increasing proliferation of terrorism, this should not come as a total surprise. Clearly, recent American Presidents didn’t deal all that well with this issue.
Today, it is easy to fall into a cynicism that the world is getting darker and darker, that hope is all but extinguished. What is hard to appreciate is that, whenever humanity takes 10 steps forward, it almost always takes six steps backward. Progress is invariably a net effect, never a straight line. Think of a never-ending spiral going up and down, and yet always moving forward.
Progress is invariably a net effect, never a straight line.
We can appreciate the Celestine Prophecy today when we realize that the world is simultaneously becoming both darker and lighter. Humanity is increasingly united through mobile technology. The number of people on Facebook has literally moved into the billions. Our hypersensitive digital news media pick up everything, whereas in previous times, we enjoyed the bliss of ignorance.
We now see people like Eckhart Tolle, appealing not to hundreds or thousands, but to hundreds of thousands and millions. Collective transformation on a massive scale is no longer a pipe dream. Today, you can reach hundreds of millions of people in a matter of minutes and hours, not months and years. Just think of Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements.
Whenever things get much darker, stop and think of all the ways they are now getting lighter.
Can We Really Unite Heaven and Earth?
The Celestine Prophecy Movie comes to a glorious climax when the key characters, John, Will and Marjorie, walk onto the ruins and find their energy stepped up to the point where the intruders literally can’t see them. They have temporarily become spirit beings. In the process, they see departed people alive, inhabiting a different dimension.
The notion that heaven is right here is compelling. It came to me shortly after I did the original est training. In point of fact, our earth already is in heaven. We are suspended way out in one of billions of galaxies, with everything around us expanding. As we come to the realization that space and time don’t exist independently of us, we can see a way to bring together heaven and earth.
The Near Death Experiences of people such as the neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, offer impressive evidence that overwhelming love awaits us when we transition, and that the next world can seem every bit as real as the one right in front of us.
What Celestine Prophecy Has Done for Me
Toshi Ide, past President of DynaWARE USA, a subsidiary of one of Japan’s leading software companies, first introduced me to the Celestine Prophecy back in 1995. Toshi got very excited Redfield’s novel, and had all his colleagues read it. While I was intrigued, I couldn’t quite make sense of it. It did, however, make me think much more deeply about the approaching millennium.
As I saw the World Wide Web mature, as well as the emergence of the Y2K crisis, I began to sense that we were entering a whole new age, that the “New Age” is what we are living right now. The French postmodernists were onto something. The industrial Modern Age in which I grew up has now been surpassed by a digital age of information.
James Redfield’s courageous vision inspired me to write with my partner a book exploring the implications of our new Planetary Age and Civilization: Awaken Perfection: The Journey of Conscious Revelation.
Even today, you may find that The Celestine Prophecy, especially in movie form via Amazon, will fire your imagination and open up the possibility of a magical life all over again.
Is the Celestine Prophecy Still Relevant? appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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