Maybe so. “The Celestine Prophecy,” which Redfield and his wife, Salle, originally published on their own, has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. The sequel, “The Tenth Insight,” published in April, is number three on the best-seller list. He’s already planning the next installment. In addition, Redfield publishes a “Celestine Journal” ($29.95 a year), and Salle has written a series of “Meditations for the Tenth Insight.” A “Celestine” CD is in the works, and Hollywood continues to ply Redfield for movie rights. So far, he is holding out for control. “This is a spiritual book,” he says. “I don’t want it to become a shoot-’em-up movie.” So he’s writing the script himself. His choice for director: Chris Noonan of “Babe.”
Redfield’s books fill a long-established niche in the biz; since Gutenberg, publishers have made hay with mass-market books offering spiritual insight. At the start of “The Celestine Prophecy,” the white-boomer narrator is vaguely dissatisfied with life. On a whim he travels to Peru in search of a lost manuscript from 600 B.C. In a series of windy encounters, he receives nine ancient insights, a melange of Eastern. and Western wisdom, with tastes of Carlos Castaneda and “Codependent No More” tossed in. By the time of “The Tenth Insight,” set in the Appalachian forests, he has seen all of human existence as an evolution toward states of pure energy, with his peers in the vanguard (“a generation whose intuitions would help lead humanity toward a third great transformation”) and a benign corporate technocracy satisfying all of our material needs. Along the way, he engages in karmic battle with polluters, skeptics and the English language: “Her voice trailed off as she looked deeply into my eyes. “I think I saw you yesterday, in the other dimension’.”
The journeys, Redfield says, are largely his own, spiced up to reach a pop audience. Raised in the Methodist Church, he very early started to dabble in Taoism and Buddhism. In the ’60s, as a graduate student in psychology at Auburn, he began to explore the burgeoning “third wave” theories about intuitions and psychic phenomena as a part of therapy for abused children. “For me the ’60s weren’t about burning down the ROTC building; they were the start of the Human Potential Movement, an explosion in research into consciousness. It was our first real breakthrough out of the materialistic paradigm.” He went to Sedona, Ariz., to explore energy vortexes; he discovered his past lives among Franciscan monks in the 16th century, among Native Americans in the 19th. He experienced spontaneous healing. “There’s more and more scientific literature documenting these phenomena,” he says, reeling off the names of some studies. “We can’t ignore the evidence.”
Redfield’s odyssey is perhaps not everyone’s cup of Kombucha. But as he says, people are increasingly reporting new-agey experiences; the best-seller list crackles with close encounters of the Deepak kind. And his vision is deeply appealing-technology is good, capitalism is good, baby boomers are the chosen soldiers of enlightenment. In both books, Redfield’s white narrator builds guilt-free bridges with native cultures. And to top it off, the orgasms–revealed as gifts from the spirit world–are to shudder for. If this is the road to enlightenment, pass the Ben & Jerry’s and deal me in.
