The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness

When James Redfield wrote The Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth Insight, he crystallized a new spiritual vision for millions of people around the world. The books describe an emerging global renaissance already under way and point to exciting spiritual experiences we can all recognize. Now in The Celestine Vision, the author discusses for the first time the historical and scientific background of this planetary awakening . . . an awakening that will shape us and our world in the new millennium.

Focusing on our individual perceptions of synchronicity, Redfield cites examples from his own experience as he clarifies how mysterious coincidences lead us toward our special destiny. He examines one hundred years of discovery in physics and psychology to show an inevitable synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas. The unmistakable message in this convergence is that human history is purposeful, that both miracles and scientific discoveries are part of the same unbroken chain of evolution toward a better world.

Then with the same immediacy that made his earlier books so revelatory, Redfield guides us through the strategies that help us recognize and explore our own vision for our lives. He delves into the hidden energies of our personal dramas, the mystical experiences that resolve them and the process through which we can discover our unique missions on this planet. Step by step, Redfield helps us explore the farther reaches of our memory, recalling the details of the Afterlife and a World Vision that can guide our actions in the future.

For everyone who read The Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth Insight and hungered for more about the ideas expressed there, The Celestine Vision further expands our consciousness about the changes coming to fruition in this historical moment. The truth of The Celestine Vision is that we are all spiritual beings acting to spiritualize the culture of planet Earth. All we have to do is hold this vision and act with courage and the world will truly transform. (From the jacket flaps of the new book.)

Preface: Observing the Transformation

It does not take the mystery of a new millennium to convince us that something is shifting in human consciousness. For those with a perceptive eye, the signs are everywhere. Polls shows a growing interest in the mystical and unexplained. Respected futurists see a world-wide search for inner satisfaction and meaning. And the general expressions of culture -- books, television documentaries, the content of the daily news -- all reflect a growing outcry for a return to quality and integrity and for the rebuilding of a community-based sense of ethics.

Most important, we can sense something changing in the quality of our own experience. Our focus seems to be shifting away from abstract arguments about spiritual theory or dogma and reaching out for something deeper: the real perception of the spiritual as it occurs in daily life.

When I am asked about the popularity of my first two novels, The Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth Insight, I always reply that this acceptance is only a reflection of the mass recognition of the specific spiritual experiences these books describe.

Increasingly more of us, it seems, are becoming aware of the meaningful coincidences that occur every day. Some of these events are large and provocative. Others are small, almost imperceptible. But all of them give us evidence that we are not alone, that some mysterious spiritual process is influencing our lives. Once we experience the sense of inspiration and aliveness that these perceptions evoke, it is almost impossible not to pay attention. We begin to watch for these events, to expect them, and to actively seek a higher philosophical understanding of their appearance.

Both of my novels are what I call adventure parables. They were my way of illustrating what I believe is a new spiritual awareness sweeping humanity. In the adventures, I was trying to describe the personal revelations that each of us seems to be experiencing as our awareness increases. Written as stories, and based on my own experiences, these revelations could be easily portrayed within a specific plot and group of characters much like they were happening in the real world.

In this role, I've always thought of myself in terms of a journalist or social commentator, attempting to experientially document and illustrate particular changes in the human ethos that I believe are already occurring. In fact, I believe the evolution continues to move forward as the culture experiences ever more spiritual insight. At least two more novels in the Celestine series are planned.

I've chosen a nonfiction format for this book because I think, as human beings, we're in a very special place in relationship to this growing awareness. We all seem to glimpse it, even to live it for a time, and for reasons we will discuss in this book, we are often thrown off balance and have to struggle to regain our spiritual perspective. This book is about dealing with those challenges, and the key, I believe, lies in our ability to really discuss what we are experiencing with each other, and to do so as openly and as honestly as possible.

Fortunately, we seem to have passed an important landmark in this regard. Most of us now seem to be speaking about our spiritual experiences without undue self-consciousness and fear of criticism. Skeptics still abound, but the balance of opinion seems to have shifted, so that the knee-jerk ridicule of the past is no longer so common. We once tended to hide our synchronistic experiences from others, and even to dismiss them ourselves, for fear of being the subject of jokes and laughter. Now, in what seems like only a few short years, the scales have tipped in the other direction, and those who are too closed-minded are now taken to task for their skepticism.

Public opinion is shifting, I believe, because enough of us are aware that such extreme skepticism is nothing more than an old habit fashioned by centuries of adherence to the Newtonian-Cartesian view of the world. Sir Isaac Newton was a great physicist, but as many current thinkers have declared, he shortchanged the universe by reducing it to a secular machine, describing it as operating only according to unwavering mechanistic laws. The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes preceded Newton by popularizing the idea that all we need to know about the universe is its basic laws, and that while these operations might have been first pushed into motion by a creator, they now function totally on their own. After Newton and Descartes, any contention that there is an active spiritual force in the universe or that higher spiritual experience is anything other than hallucination was too often dismissed out of hand.

In this book, we will see that this old mechanistic worldview has been discredited since the early decades of the twentieth century, chiefly through the influence of Albert Einstein, the pioneer of quantum physics, and the newer research on prayer and intentionality. But the prejudices of the mechanistic worldview linger in our consciousness, guarded by an extreme skepticism that serves to screen out the more subtle spiritual perceptions that would challenge its assumptions.

Understanding how this works is important. In most cases, to experience higher spiritual experience, we must be at least open to the possibility that such perception exists. We know now that one actually has to suspend or "bracket" skepticism and try in every way possible to open up to spiritual phenomena in order to experience them. We must "knock on the door," as it has been expressed in Scripture, before any of these spiritual experiences can even be detected at all.

If we approach spiritual experience with a mind that is too closed and doubting, we perceive nothing and thereby prove to ourselves, quite erroneously and repeatedly, that higher spiritual experience is a myth. For centuries, we cast out these perceptions not because they weren't real, but because at the time, we didn't want them to be real. They didn't fit into our secular view of the world.

As we shall see in greater detail later, this skeptical attitude gained supremacy in the seventeenth century because the failing medieval worldview it succeeded was so full of contrived theories, charlatans on power trips, hexes and salvation for sale, and all manner of insanity in this setting, thinking people longed for an established, scientific description of the physical universe that cut through all the nonsense. We wanted to see the world around us as reliable and natural. We wanted to be free of all the superstition and myth, and create a world where we could develop economic security -- without thinking that strange and weird things were going to pop up in the dark to scare us. Because of the need, we understandably began the modern age with an overly materialistic and simplified view of the universe.

To say that we threw the baby out with the bath water is an understatement. Life in modern times began to feel devoid of the inspiration that only higher spiritual meaning can provide. Even our religious institutions were affected. The miracles of religious mythology were too often reduced to metaphors, and churches became more about social togetherness, moral teaching, and intellectual belief than about the pursuit of actual spiritual experience.

Yet, with our perception of synchronicity and other spiritual experiences in the current historical moment, we are connecting with a genuine spirituality that has always been our potential. In a sense, this awareness is not even new. It is the same kind of experience that some human beings have had throughout history, documented by a whole treasury of writers and artists around the world, including William James, Carl Jung, Thoreau and Emerson, Aldous Huxley (who called such knowing the Perennial Philosophy), and, in recent decades, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, Fritjof Capra, Marilyn Ferguson, and Larry Dossey.

The scale on which these experiences are now entering human consciousness is, however, completely unprecedented. So many people are now having personal spiritual experiences that we are creating nothing less than a new worldview, one that includes and extends the old materialism and transforms it into something more advanced.

The social change we are talking about is not a revolution, where the structures of society are torn down and rebuilt as one ideology overcomes another. What is occurring now is an internal shift in which the individual changes first, and the institutions of human culture more or less look the same but are rejuvenated and transformed in place, because of a new outlook by those who maintain them.

As this transformation plays out, most of us will probably remain in the general line of work we have always pursued, in the families we love, and in the particular religions we find most truthful. But our vision of how our work and family and religious life should be lived and experienced will transform dramatically as we integrate and act on the higher experiences we perceive.

My observation -- as I have expressed before -- is that this transformation in awareness is sweeping across human culture through a kind of positive social contagion. Once enough people begin to live this awareness in an open way, discussing it freely, then others see this modeled awareness and immediately realize that it allows them to live outwardly more of what they already intuitively know inside. Afterward, these others begin to emulate the new approach, eventually discovering those same experiences -- and others -- for themselves, and go on to be models in their own right.

This is the process of social evolution and consensus building in which we are all engaged in the waning years of the twentieth century. In this way, we are creating, I believe, a way of life that will ultimately drive the next century and millennium. The purpose of this book is to more directly explore the experiences so many of us are sharing, to review the history of our awakening and to look closely at the specific challenges involved in living this way of life every day.

It is my hope that this work will confirm the underlying reality behind the information illustrated in the first two novels of the Celestine series, and, while far from complete, will help to further clarify our picture of the new spiritual awareness already forming out there.

The above is the preface from The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness, a new book by James Redfield, printed with permission of Warner Books.

James Redfield is the author of The Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth Insight. He writes widely on the topic of human spiritual awareness and is active in the worldwide effort to save our last remaining wilderness areas. James lives with his wife, Salle, and cat, Meredith, in Alabama and Arizona. James Redfield's website: www.celestinevision.com.

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