James Redfield presents his book The Celestine Prophecy.
Celestine Prophecy
James Redfield came to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in 1994 to talk about his book The Celestine Prophecy.
James Redfield is an author, lecturer, screenwriter and film producer. The Celestine Prophecy (Satori Publishing) started out as a self-published book in 1992. James Redfield traveled about the country giving away many copies as well as selling them from the trunk of his automobile. A word of mouth campaign whirled about the book bringing it to national attention and publication by an international company, Warner Books in 1994. The book became a national and international bestseller. In 1996, the sequel, The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision, also became a bestseller. As a testimony to the potency of the Celestine vision, the two books spent a combined 74 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, making James Redfield the best-selling hard cover author on the planet in 1996. The Celestine series of adventure parables continued in 1999 with the publication of The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight
Born in 1950, James Redfield grew up in a rural south near Birmingham, Alabama. As a young man, he studied Eastern philosophies, including Taoism and Zen, while majoring in sociology at Auburn University. He later received a Master's degree in counseling and spent more than 15 years as a therapist to abused adolescents. During this time, he was drawn into the human potential movement and became immersed in theories about intuition and psychic phenomena.
In 1989, he quit his job as a therapist to write full-time, synthesizing his interest in interactive psychology, Eastern and Western philosophies, science, futurism, ecology, history, and mysticism.
James Redfield has also published a number of non fiction books about the spiritual matters and practice underlying his books. They include The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness (1997) and Holding the Vision: An Experiential Guide (1996) with Carol Adrienne. James joined author Michael Murphy and filmmaker Sylvia Timbers in a collaborative non-fiction work entitled God and the Evolving Universe (2002).
The Celestine Prophecy Movie made its U.S. theatrical (Celestine Films) and DVD (Sony Pictures) release in 2006. Redfield produced and co-wrote the screenplay (with Barnet Bain & Dan Gordon).
James and Salle Redfield are the founders of the Global Prayer Project, a bi-weekly telewebcast which offers guided prayer and meditation. For additional information see the Redfield’s extensive web site at www.celestinevision.com.
The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure by James Redfield
In the rain forests of Peru, an ancient manuscript has been discovered. Within its pages are 9 key insights into life itself--insights each human being is predicted to grasp sequentially, one insight then another, as we move toward a completely spiritual culture on Earth.
To find the manuscript--and its hidden treasures--you will join one person’s search. It is a quest that will carry you high into the Andes mountains, to ancient ruins deep in old-growth forest, and to a startling discovery. You will quickly recognize the truth of the First Insight: in each of our lives occur mysterious coincidences--sudden, synchronistic events that, once interpreted, lead us into our true identity.
When you find and understand all 9 of the insights you will have an exciting new image of human life, and a positive vision of how we will save this planet, its creatures, and its beauty.
The Celestine Prophecy will give you hope...and chills...as you begin to perceive its predictions unfolding all around you in intimate relationships and in international affairs. And you will suddenly recognize the quantum leap forward mankind is preparing to make as we approach the new millennium. Important works such as Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan and the prophecies of Nostradamus have helped prepare the way for the revelations you will find in James Redfield’s life-changing words. The time is right to hear them, and to discover the personal journey that is opening in your life.
The following excerpt is from the talk that James Redfield gave at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore as part of a national campaign to promote the 1994 Warner Books edition of The Celestine Prophecy.
James Redfield : One of the really great things about being able to travel around and see what kind of light this book stirred up is to see how many people are buoyant, full of light and possess a really powerful presence of love and who are resonating with this book. It’s absolutely astounding to me. As most of you probably know, we started out with a little printing of three thousand. We didn’t have many publishers beating on the door for this book [laughter] and we also didn’t want to wait twelve months to get it out, so we figured we would just do it and see what happened. And what happened was that people began to resonate with the book, to endorse the book saying that it had a message. And that is why The Celestine Prophecy is a book that people have continued to pass around and circulate to their friends and colleagues around the country.
Within two months or so, our first three thousand copies were gone and we were doing nothing more than scurrying around trying to keep enough books in print. At that point, because of this grass-roots effort, the book was everywhere and it got so big that the big publishers came to call [laughter]. And I was very reluctant, really, to let a big publisher have it. Give it to a huge corporation? I was concerned how were they going to present it. Finally we decided on Warner Books because the president of Warner Books had obviously read it. He himself resonated with it. They were willing to not change anything in the book or tell us how to present it to the media. And so it just seemed the right thing to do and suddenly it was shot-gunned into mainstream bookstores and it was a lot of fun to see the pass-along effect--the resonance effect--continue. My conclusion is that there are far more people than I originally imagined that connect with a message of love, growth and the flowering of a new spiritual consciousness.
This whole idea that there’s some sort of an emerging spiritual consciousness began in a mass way in the 1960s. We went through a period of clearing in the last 25 years to bring us to the point, here in the 1990s, where we cannot just talk about this new consciousness--or hope for it. We’re are at a point where we’re actually doing it. We’re saying, “Enough of the contemplation. Enough of just thinking and hoping for it.” We’re moving into the stage here in the 1990s of doing it. Of actually pursuing the experiences inwardly that are going to result in the spiritual transformation of this planet. Our world isn’t going to change until we change inside. And it is not just shifting psychologically and processing our hurt inner child and dealing with our traumas, as we explored in the 1970s. It’s about a spiritual experience--a shift in consciousness--the kind of shift in attitude that will bring us to the place where we actually live in this new consciousness.
I am a therapist trained in humanistic psychology. I worked with emotionally abused and disturbed adolescents and their families for fifteen years. And that experience demonstrated to me the devastating long-term trauma that these children endured. It’s very difficult for abused kids to ever see the world as a positive place again, where they can have some sort of elation at their own growth. It’s very, very difficult. It’s a more intense and severe passage than the ones that most of us have to go through. We all have to leave behind our old reaction patterns that come from our feelings of early traumas. And we do that by connecting with a more liberating energy and into our Higher Self. One of the things that I’ve learned is that you can process all the stuff in your past forever.
These personal experiences led me to question the nature of our lives and to seek some answers that would make sense in this modern world. The information I was gathering was over the past fifteen years was probably no different than the information that many of you were gathering and trying to make sense of all it. What is this life that we’re really trying to live? We’ve got all these pathways to a more fulfilling life, which ones do we take something from? How do we pull it all together?
In the 90s we’re seeing a combination of the world view of modern physics and the world view of growth psychology synthesized with the insight of the mystic, from every tradition. What the mystics tell us is that there is an inner connection that we make with this force that we call God or the divine. What’s different now is that we’ve found a place of openness, of courage, where we can really apply some measures to ourselves to see if we’re really connected or just attempting to connect to this divine force. We know we’re disconnected if we’re not filled with this imbued love and sense of well-being--this sense of mission that we have--we just know it. Then we remind ourselves, “Okay, you’ve lost it. Get it back together.”
When I give these talks, the most often asked question about this book is, “How much of it really happened and how much of it actually occurred the way it’s written?” And I want to answer it this way: It’s based on my experiences and I found as I began writing, it was obvious that it was coming out to be a parable, to be an adventure tale. To be a construction of a story. A particular telling of a story. While I do think that the old manuscript is real because of information I’ve obtained and an intuitive connection I have with the message contained in it, the book really is just my way of laying out those insights.
In closing I would like to reemphasize that I think what the book is having--as so many books in the 1990s are having--is a clarifying effect. I think we’re more clear about how we need to shift, how we need to change our attitude, our approach, how we need to truly live this dream we all have inside to make this world a better and more spiritual place and I believe that it’s truly a new world view. And I think that what’s happening here in the 1990s is the vision of it is becoming clearer. The vision of how we can really live our lives is becoming clear and I think if the book has worth, it’s because it participates in that clarification that’s occurring right now in the 1990s.
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