James Redfield is the best-selling author of The Celestine Prophecy, which was recently made into a major motion picture, and several other books on spirituality.

Guy Spiro: James, it’s been a heck of a ride from driving around with boxes of books in the trunk of your car to where you are now. I don’t know how many people are aware that you started out guerrilla marketing the The Celestine Prophecy.

James Redfield: That’s exactly right. We ran up against one of the main problems. We had a book that we thought was timely and some publishers wanted to publish it. But it is typically a two year cycle to get into the book stores. We just thought that was too long and we needed to get the book out immediately, so we started our own company and got it out there.

GS: Well, you were certainly proved right. The Celestine Prophecy exploded.

JR: We just put into words what people were discovering in their own lives and passed that idea around.

GS: When we last talked, I think it was in ’99 for a subsequent book, the Secret of Shambala. Talk a little about what has happened since then. The movie came out and it is really very good, by the way.

JR: In 2001, I was working with Michael Murphy, one of the founders of the Esalen Institute out in California . He wrote a wonderful reference book called The Future of the Body.

GS: Of course, I know Michael and I’m very fond of Golf in the Kingdom. Did you play a round of golf with him?

[Editor’s note: Anyone interested in the connection between sport and spirituality will want to check out Golf in the Kingdom, a classic in the field.]

JR: Oh yes, I have played many rounds of golf with Michael. That was all fun, and Michael is kind of a godfather of the theoretical space that supports spirituality from an evolutionary point of view. And he just knows so much. We put this book together called God in the Evolving Universe in which we essentially made a case for The Celestine Prophecy. The idea is that humanity is evolving psychologically and spiritually and it is a natural, inevitable path based on what we are learning. The expansion of human consciousness, the integration of the left and right hemispheres in the brain and east and west on the globe is creating the ongoing momentum of evolution. As Michael says, the dice are loaded in our favor.

GS: One of my main sweeping generalizations is that there are two kinds of people. Consciously evolving and unconsciously evolving.

JR: I tell ya, the latter is the harder route to take

[laughter]

So we put that book together and I guess it was out in 2001. From there I was working on the screenplay for Celestine and really starting to think seriously about getting the movie made. In 2002 and 2003 we did the prep work on the movie and partnered with some people. Terry Collis, a great producer, Barnet Bain and some other people really had the skills to put the project together. We shot in ’04 and did some additional shoots in ’05 and did the post production and editing in ’06. About a year ago we started a grass roots theatrical release and played in the top sixty markets around the country. Then in December, it went into DVD and we were picked up by Sony who is getting it out everywhere now. I wanted to see it in DVD form because then it can be shared and loaned and given away and all the things people do now.

GS: I first saw the movie in the sanctuary of a Unity Church and I was thinking how the guerilla marketing worked for the book, and now you were doing it for the movie, too.

JR: We thought that there is no really good way of doing it through the studio system, or even through any major distribution system. This way you can maintain control over the integrity of the movie. That was our goal all along, to stay true to the book. We would have taken some of those huge offers in the ’90s if we had wanted to just turn it over to a big studio to do the movie.

GS: But then the suits would mess with it.

JR: They would have had, by definition, a hard time keeping it on track to be something that is not just entertaining, but something that is spiritually activating and inspiring from the point of view of the book. We stuck with that and now it is out there all over the world.

GS: The movie is true to the book. You guys did a great job with it

JR: It was the hardest work that I have ever done. It’s ten times the work of the book, at least.

GS: It is fun, I would imagine.

JR: Especially when you are counting on having intuitive help with parts of it. I always like to tell the story of casting. We were really looking for a cast to resonate with the book, actors who knew about it and wanted to be involved. We found our main character very quickly. Matthew Settle, he’s every person. He’s done a lot of work with Spielberg and knows how to evoke an awakening within confusion. He came to us very quickly. We wanted Thomas Kretschmann as Wil, his mentor. Thomas Kretschmann people may recognize from King Kong. He got his initial fame with The Pianist years ago. He’s a total rock star in Europe . He’s German, but he lives and works a lot in L.A. We had a hard time getting in touch with his handlers. It was real difficult getting callbacks. He is so busy and these people are so busy. We didn’t know how we were going to get him, but we just held the vision. So Matthew walks in one day and says that he’s changed his whole management group and here is the card of his new manager. He handed us the card, and it was the wife of Thomas Kretschmann.

GS: Synchronicity strikes again.

JR: So that’s how we got Thomas, and it just went on and on through the making of the movie. We had help and it was fun.

GS: As it should be. For those of us who are the lucky ones, our careers are being who we are.

JR: We go through periods when we are on the right path and when we are off the right path. How you know you are on the right path is that you have these mysterious coincidences. That’s why I always have to add footnotes when people say you can manifest anything you want. You can manifest most easily with great inspiration and less of a shadow, the things that your higher self wants. You know, the part of you that is connected with God and in harmony with a divine intent for the evolution of the world. That is what you can manifest very readily.

GS: What is cutting edge for you now besides continuing to promote the movie?

JR: I’m working on The Twelfth Insight, which is the final book in the Celestine series. I always like to remind everybody that I am not making this stuff up. This is not James Redfield’s theory of a happy life. I am trying to describe steps in an awakening that is already happening out there. I think The Twelfth Insight is coming into the world. It has to do with the keys to staying in a deeper spirituality and the flow it gives one in life. What we are learning to do now is master the self-corrective and ethical understanding that keeps us on the path and flowing. There are certain things that if we do, we stop dead in the water. For instance making a negative interpretation of an event that happens in our lives. As soon as we do that and go into a lull, “I thought I was supposed to do this. Why isn’t this working?” As soon as we go into that, we are just cut off. We cut our spiritual wings off right there. Victimization of our self concept is so self destructive. There are little keys out there that we are understanding now in order to really let the Celestine point of view and the higher consciousness of intuition, of guidance, and the sense that we are on a mission, let all that flow, and flow consistently and efficiently.

GS: Do you teach any sort of meditative practice to go along with this?

JR: I leave that to my wife Salle, and she does a lot of guided meditation. In fact, we are doing something now that we’re calling The Global Prayer Network.

GS: That was the next thing I was going to.

JR: That, in some ways, will be the Twelfth Insight. The eleventh insight is in The Secret of Shambala, amplifying your life with a prayer field, a conscious prayer attention that is put out in the world ahead of you. Meditation is the engine that makes it work, prayer and the quiet times in which we receive messages and establish a prayer vision. The prayer project is that we have a free hook-up for people twice a month where they can join with others in guided prayer. There are always hot spots in the world that need help. That is half the hour. In the other half, we do a meditative prayer hot house in which we use the collective energy of the group and bring people who are in grief or are angry or are in conflict with another person. They bring that person and themselves into it and the problem is dissolved in our energy. Some people need some inspirational stuff. It is something we might do at a church somewhere. We have thousands of people involved.

GS: That’s a great idea. When we talked in ’99, we were in agreement that the global prayer and meditation for peace events in the ’80s was what ended the cold war.

JR: I think that is absolutely right, that and other outreach between people—the outreach that occurred on an informal basis. Michael Murphy and Esalen had a whole host of scientists and theologians, as well as bureaucrats invited to Esalen. Something about it cleared the air, you know. It was amazing. That whole time was amazing. We need another one of those.

GS: A critical mass of light gets generated and the world changes. Can you talk a little bit more about The Twelfth Insight?

JR: Yes, it is about the keys. The establishment for one’s self of the experience of the connection with the divine within. There are specific elements to that experience. The right brain activation is the actual experience of feeling the energy coming into one’s body, the sense of higher wisdom, the transformation of the biographical self concept into a cosmic self concept. These are all things that people have talked about through the years, but what I think is important now is that people are discovering a set of experiences for all those things, and it is that experience which is the grounding of the culture. We are starting to live that and teach our children. We are handling the spiritual energy coming in and all those things people are beginning to understand experientially. When that happens, we can consciously create culture around it and that is what we have been getting at.

GS: You are going to be in the Chicago area. What do you do in these workshops?

JR: It will be a three-hour talk and experience. I’ll talk about these keys that are the Twelfth Insight, the keys to living all this at a deeper level. Making it work for you. That’s what is important, that it moves from the mental level and level of possibility to an actualization. That is the hardest step for everybody out there, especially for people in the west. We go from one mental stimulation to another and it is absolutely fundamental that we move from the knowledge about this and the knowledge of the spiritual and apply it to an activation within one’s own experience. What it gives to one is a fail safe and very intuitive life and guidance mastery over synchronicity, being really perceptive of what coincidental events mean and how to pursue them accurately. Interpretation means a lot, and we need confirmation for interpretations and synchronicity and that is what we provide.

---

James Redfield and his wife Salle present “Synchronicity: Deepening Spiritual Awareness” at Infinty Foundation, a daylong workshop on Sunday, May 20th. Please see the ad in this month’s magazine, or call 847-831-8828 or visit www.infinityfoundation.org for more details.

---

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to the Home Page