James Redfield: The Celestine Prophecy

Well, I suppose I better get around to updating this blog, or else forget about it forever. I actually read this book months ago, but haven't been feeling particularly motivated. As a result, my impressions have dulled a little bit and I don't expect this post to be very long or informative.

I read this book on the strong recommendation of a respected friend, and, as it happens, many of my friends are familiar with and recommend it. Several times, as I was visited in the hospital, friends would notice what I was reading and and express their general approval. And understandably so; the first half of the book is nothing short of visionary, and I find it remarkably well-fitted to what I have come to believe on my own. The idea that our unseen energy fields interact as described in The Celestine Prophecy is a conclusion I have come to on my own, based on personal impressions and the occasional striking experience. That the book is a thinly disguised theophilosophical treatise is a mixed blessing for the reader; Redfield is not a strong prose writer, and his characterization is so weak as to be painful. Nonetheless, the tone of the book is far less didactic than one might expect, and the narrative format generally makes the clearly evangelical message more palatable.

Up until the midway point of the book, in fact, I found myself agreeing with the author point for point. It is when Redfield crosses the line from philosophical to psychological that I began to have a problem with his premise. It is one thing to delineate a model of the energetic universe, and another to superimpose on that nicely functional model an explanation that feels oversimplistic and false. I have this problem with most so-called new-age thought. Whereas I agree with their descriptions of the way the universe functions, most feel the need to explain in detail why it does so, either with alien intervention, marginally Christian theology or faux science, and such explanations always feel post factum; they come up with the explanation to fit the experience. I do not happen to think that human experience needs a "why;" I am perfectly happy to know and trust how things are and to live in line with that information without tacking a story onto it to make me feel better. In short, the what of existence is more imprortant to me than the why or how.

I guess I had a lot to say after all.