James Redfield’s zillion-selling Celestine Prophecy has tapped into the spiritual hunger of a beleaguered world-but does it offer real nourishment, or just candy-coated cliches? ROBERT S. BOYNTON confronts the man behind the message

IT IS NO ACCIDENT THAT YOU ARE READING this sentence. Indeed, the fact that you just happened to pick up this article in the first place is surely no mere coincidence. More than luck, more than chance—it is fate.

That, anyway, is the opinion of James Redfield, the author of The Celestine Prophecy, a, best-selling book whose central teaching is that we can develop our spirituality by discerning the mystery and “synchronicity” in everyday coincidences. Judging by its phenomenal popularity, there are a lot of people who agree with him—a financially fortuitous convergence of message and audience Redfield cites as further evidence of his theory’s validity. After being rejected by a slew of New York publishers, The Celstine  Prophecy sold 150,000 copies in a self-published edition before Warner Books purchased it in November 1993 for $800,000. With over 1.5 million copies in print, it has been bobbing around the top of the New York Times best-seller list ever since it was rereleased last March and is currently being translated into twenty three languages.

In a market thoroughly glutted with self-help titles, The Celestine Prophecy stands out because of its form: It is a novel—the story of a middle-aged Everyman’s journey to Peru in search of an ancient manuscript whose nine “Insights” are transforming mankind. At the heart of The Celestine Prophecy is the conviction that by studying these insights we can become more spiritual, riding through life on a glorious stream of synchronistic intuition and eventually transporting ourselves to a higher plane of being.

Redfield originally wrote the book as a nonfiction nine-step guide to enlightenment, but after deciding his first draft was dull, he struck on the idea of wrapping it up in an adventure tale—complete with action-packed shootouts and a love interest—to make it more palatable. The result? Think of, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark as a New Age self-helpmanual, and you begin to get  the picture. The critics, for the most part, have not been kind. The Minneapolis Star Tribuner railed that the book was “so turgid and self-important that to categorize this as literature makes no more sense than calling a connect-the-dots painting a work of art.” The New Yorker sneered at Redfield’s “home- made religion” and labeled him a “Madame Blavatsky for the nineties.” Even someone more sympa chetic to Redfield’s vision would have to admit that neither the insights chemselves (a series of homey New Age aphorisms about energy fields, childhood trauma, and co-dependence) nor the story (a formulaic thriller with stilted dialogue) would seem to add up to the publishing event of 1994.

The book’s success has unleashed a virtual Celestine deluge. Next month Warner Books is month Warner Books is publishing The Celestine Prophecy: An Experientia Guide, a workbook for those who want to study the insights more deeply. The Tenth Insight, a sequel to the novel, will be out in late 1995. Also in the works are the official Celestine poster and the Celestine meditation tape, conceived and narrated by Redfield’s wife, Salle Merrill-Redfield. Aready available are The Celestine Journal ($29.95/year-printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink) and a personalized “Life Analysis” audiotape ($30), in which James offers advice on your spiritual mission. Redfield is contemplating novels for the eleventh and twelfth Insights, and, of course, there are the  movie rights, which are currently being fought over in Hollywood.

By pairing self-help spirituality with a fictional plot, Redfield may have inadvertently created a new, and extremely profitable, literary genre. The Celestine Prophecy’s astounding grass-roots popularity has set profit-hungry packs of editors on a mad search for similar titles, such as acupuncturist-turned-author Marlo Morgan’s novel, Mutant Message Down Under. The story of a middle-aged woman’s four-month walkabout in the Australian outback with a pack of telepathic Aborigines, it has sold more than: 370,000·copies in Morgan’s self-published edition: Harper Collins reportedly paid $1.7 million for it, and Publishers’ Weekly dubbed it “the next Celestine Prophecy.” Many more are on the way. Although I first became interested in The Celestine Prophecy as great publishing story (good old boy, snubbed by snotty New York editors, self-publishes kicks ass, and then makes them beg for it!), my curiosity grew as I saw the variety and number of people reading it. Straitlaced businessmen on airplanes, housewives in Laundromats, society grandes dames in the Hamptons, struggling New York actors—everybody seemed to have their nose buried in this dowdy, blue-green tome with goofy type and no cover illustration. My neighborhood bookstores could barely keep the book in stock. The people at Warner told me it had just gone back to press for the twenty-first time.

America, it seems, is on a collective spiritual quest. After the boom and subsequent bust of the ’80s, people want to know what it all means. Now that many have the cash to buy every conceivable physical comfort, they hope to purchase some of the metaphysical glue that holds us all together. Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Columbia University, says, ”After an era in which we were fixated with science and technology, we are now realizing that although they made our lives easier, they didn’t teach us how to live.”

I started to notice that people were spending their vacations at religious retreats rather than at spas, that celebrities were searching for the essence of life in the diffuse teachings of Buddhism and Taoism, not to mention the more recent gospels according to Marianne Williamson. Conventional worship was out, personal searches were in. “For many people today, organized religion is just too routinized and predictable,” says Martin Marty, a scholar of American religion at the University of Chicago. “Left on our own, we mix Eastern and New Age scuff into new amalgams. If you have a few dollars for a book, you can master what it took mystics thousands of years to learn.”

Determined to find out what all the fuss was about, I bought Redfield’s book, subscribed to the journal, ordered a “Life Analysis” tape, and even signed up for a weekend seminar the Redfields were giving later that month. If Celestine wisdom was the plat du jour, I was going to make sure I got some. The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies seemed like a good place to begin my spiritual quest. Tucked away in the lush Hudson River Valley, ninety miles north of New York City, Omega offers a range of workshops and courses, taught by such luminaries as Ram Dass, William Least Heat-Moon, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Deepak Chopra.

My first glimpse of the Redfields came on a Saturday morning in June as they walked, hand in hand, through Omega’s dew-covered fields. Blond, tanned, and trim, wearing white sneakers, loose-fitting khakis, and bright-colored short-sleeved shirts, James, forty-four, and Salle Merrili-Redfield, thirty-four, looked like lovey-dovey newlyweds-which, having been married for just over a year, they sort of are. Each with a failed marriage in the past, the Redfields were introduced by Salle’s mother, who knew James from the local Methodist church in Birmingham, Alabama. “Momma had a draft of The Celestine Propheys just lying around the house,” says Salle with a belle-ish southern lilt. “So one night I read it. James and I talked about it the next day, and we got married six months later. I’d say that was a pretty good example of synchronicity,” she says.

By 8:30 A.M. Omega’s largest meeting room is filled to capacity with the 250 people who have slapped down $335 the Redfields’ two-day course—room and board included. Several hundred others were turned away. As I glance around at the expectant crowd, I recognize the look of excitement, of “chosenness” I have sometimes seen on the faces of those given the best tables at exclusive New York restaurants. “If life is a series of synchronistic possibilities,” I imagine my fellow Omegans thinking, “then it must be no accident that I have been selected.”

After handing out pencils and notebooks—for “journaling about the synchronistic events in our life stories”—James and Salle step up to the microphone. The room falls instantly silent.

“Y’all would not be here if you didn’t already sense that there have been an awful lot of strange coincidences going on lately,” announces James in his genial, honey-coated baritone. Tall and lanky, with thinning hair, a beard, and piercing blue eyes, he possesses an aw-shucks southern modesty I don’t expect to find in a millionaire New Age guru. “Why is it that we just happen to meet the people we meet just when we need to meet them?” he asks innocently, as Omegans all around me nod in solemn agreement. “Why is it that you are sitting beside the person you are sitting beside?” Heads turn left and right, knowing glances are exchanged. “In the old way of thinking, we would have chalked this up to luck. But now we understand they are really mysteries.”

Remarkably, there is nothing slick or sleazy about the presentation, filled as it is with long pauses and inarticulate “um”s and “er”s. If Redfield is selling snake oil, he is at least clever enough to scuff up the bottle and smudge the label a bit. What must by now be a well-practiced spiel—the Redfields have just completed a seventeen-city tour—sounds anything but. He falters, as if speaking these words for the first time. The synoptic vision he sketches, however, is breathtakingly bold in its sweep. As he continues, I realize that much of his attraction, as well as the power of his book lies in this tension between message and messenger. In much the same way Moses’ stutter was thought to enhance the truth of the commandments, Redfield’s inurticulateness gives the impression that Celestine wisdom is so momentous, it , defies his merely human capacity to proclaim it. Taking a big breath, Redfield blithlysums up more than 600 years of intellectual history in less than ten minutes.

“In the middle of the millennium, we decided to mechanize the early Christian idea of God and give our society over to science to let it figure out how things worked. Pretty soon we began to feel more secure in the universe, but in order to feel safe we screened out all its mystery.”

He leaps ahead a few hundred years. “In the 1950s, we had the leisure time to think more about the mystical. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s there was a rush of cosmic intuition, and we realized the mystical was in fact what life is all about. The problem then was we tended to ask only other people to change, and it wasn’t until the end of the 1960s that we learned we had to change ourselves first.

“But in the 1970s we made the depressing realization that we could be in therapy processing our wounded inner child forever and nothing would necessarily change. Real change, we discovered, requires nothing less than a transforming spiritual experience.

“This propelled us into the 1980s and the New Age movement. Crystals, channeling, rebirthing, et cetera—it was a big fad, although an important one because it gave us a small taste of the spirituality we were longing for. “Now, in the 1990s, our search for spirituality is more sincere and genuine. We want to experience spirituality, not just talk about it over coffee.”

Experiencing transcendence is all-important to Redfield’s Celestine system. Raised in the bosom of the Southern Methodist church, Redfield soon grew frustrated when no one could answer his questions: “How do you get salvation? What does it feel like?” As with many of his generation, Redfield turned away from the formality and abstraction of institutional religion in the hope of finding spiritual transcendence on his own. In his quest for unmediated religious experience, many readers recognize their own search.

Chief among the experiences available to Celestine seekers is the ability to see energy fields, also known as auras. According to the manuscript’s third Insight, contemporary spirituality has dovetailed with Einstein’s physics in the belief that the material world is actually composed of energy. Redfield builds on Einstein by adding the notion that this vibrating energy is essentially spiritual and under our control. What Einstein theorized as the basis for the material universe, Redfield identifies as the currency for all emotional and spiritual interaction. “We can shoot energy to whomever we want. All our control dramas are played out in terms of the energy we focus on one another,” he explains. “Remember,” he says, with a wink, “where attention goes, energy flows.”

Redfield believes that the color of our auras reveals the level of our energy—think spiritual mood ring. On the first day, about on third of the class announces that they can already see auras. Redfield promises to help teach the rest of us, with a simple exercise. Holding his hands out in front of him, he places his two index fingers millimeters apart while staring between them, and over toward the wall across the room. “Focus on the white space between your fingers, blur your fivsion a bit, and you will start to see the energy traveling between the digits,” he instructs.

Assorted wows and oofs spring up from around the room, as blurry-eyed Omegans stare intently at their fingers. After a few tries my head begins to ache. But this is only a warm-up for full-fledged aura-watching.

Standing in front of a white fold-up movie screen, James spreads out his arms, christ-like, keeping very still while Salle describes the colors she says hi aura is radiating. “There’s some yellow, and, oooh, look at that blue,” she says. Then it is Salle’s turn. After standing still for a few minutes, she begins to sway in such a way that we are supposed to see her colors blur. Back and forth she goes, while people gape intensely, whispering the names of colors from every part of the rainbow. One man in the front practically screams out, “Wow, I see a whole lotta pink and red comin’ outta you!” Strangely, for all the Omegans’ Technicolor perceptions, the Redfields never tell us what any particular color means.

During lunch I ask some of my classmates what they thought of The Celestine Prophecys. Most are in their thirties and forties and classify themselves as being middle- to upper-middle-class. Most are from the East Coast, although one couple drove from Chicago and another flew from LA. All but three are white, and nearly two-thirds of them are women.

“I think of the Insights as mantras that help center me,” said Denise, a lawyer who lives in Westchester, New York.”My lifei s so hectic that sometimes I need to remind myself of its spiritual dimension.”

Steve, a massage therapist from New Jersey, told me how the ideas of The Celestine Prophecy fit within the vast number of other competing inspirational books. “I’ve read them all—M. Scott Peck, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson,” he said. “All of them have helped me a little, but none of them pull it all together like this book does. Plus, it’s a fun story.”

As we continued talking, I began to understand something about The Celestine Prophecy. Much of its popular appeal lies precisely in its utter (and deliberate) lack of originality and sophistication. “There’s nothing here you probably haven’t already seen going on around you,” Redfield is fond of saying. And he’s right. The book is a veritable smorgasbord of twentieth-century pop psychology and philosophy: There is, of course, C. G. Jung on synchronicity, the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller on parent-infant relations, Freud on sibling and oedipal rivalries, Marx on utopian, postcapitalist society. Many Omegans I talked with had even annotated passage ins their texts with their likely sources.” The Insights don’t represent just my view,” Redfield says. “They are coming up for all of us now because of where we are in the history of the world.”

For modern-day seekers tired of being yanked from one self-help fad to the next, The Celestine Prophecy delivers the comforting news that the past decades of dead ends were in fact crucial stages in their spiritual evolution. When they pick up The Celestine Prophecy they’re not searching for new truths; they want to make sense of the old ones. Redfield offers a coherent story about the confusion and frustration they’ve felt in their quest for self-knowledge. Jungian therapy, Freudian psychoanalysis, Einsteinian physics, Marx, the ’60s, the inner child, near-death, past lives, Eastern mysticism—all these, Redfield says, lead to the Celestine awakening.

You don’t have to learn any new answers to life’s big questions, Redfield insists, because we know them already. The trick is to pay closer attention to what is going on. While standard twelve-step programs require lots of inconvenient meetings and uncomfortable self-sacrifice, Redfield’s nine steps ask only that you remain open to the unfathomable mystery of the life you are already living—that you look for synchronicity, nurture your energy, meditate, and be nice. Celestine wisdom is est without the angst.

In addition to its reassuringly familiar ideas, The Celestine Prophecy appeals because of its relentless millennial optimism. Its hopeful sensibility is distinctively American, and many people are attracted to it because of its certainty that mankind is moving ineluctably toward a more spiritual, happy whole—rather than devolving into the fragmented mess predicted by some less sanguine social critics. Once we realize that the good life is all about spiritual enlightenment, Redfield explains in an author’s note, “human society will take a quantum leap into a whole new way of life—one that realizes the best of our tradition—and creates a culture that has been the goal of history all along.”

By ingeniously placing himself in an indirect yet influential relationship to the reader-he is, after all, only a first-time author of a clumsy novel about a bunch of fictional characters searching for a make-believe manuscript—Redfield may be America’s first postmodern prophet.

Panama City, Florida, is about as far from New Age as you can get. Sitting on the Emerald Coast, so named for the luminous green water that washes up on its brilliant white beaches, the region is better known as the Redneck Riviera for the pickup truck-driving vacationers who flock to it from all over the Deep South. After maneuvering through miles of strip malls, cheap bars (“Fill up yer gallon beer here!”), and neon-drenched motels, I find the Redfields living twenty miles outside of Panama City in a cluster of expensive houses overlooking the sea.

Although it’s still early morning, the temperature is already in the mid-90s and Florida’s damp, hot air wraps itself around my head like a wool blanket. Salle gives me a tour of the off-white stuccoed rooms, the floors newly covered with bright Mexican tiles. My eyes fall on a spacious room with a skylight, whose sole occupant is a freestanding Jacuzzi large enough to hold a football team. Salle sees me staring and beams with pride. “Once we saw the hot tub,” she says, “we just knew we had to have the house.”

Wearing a batik short-sleeved shirt, baggy jeans shorts, and white sneakers, James offers me a place on the couch and tells me about all the Celestine projects in the works. He is just finishing the Experiential Guide, which he was at first reluctant to do—after all, the Guide is pretty much the book Redfield set out to write before he lit on the idea of the novel. But once Warner confronted him with some very thisworld- y logic (if you don’t do it, someone else will) he relented.

Little more than an explication of The Celestine Prophecy, along with exercises for studying the nine Insights, the Guide reinforces the notion that Celestine wisdom can only be learned firsthand. “There is no Celestine school from which accredited trainers graduate, and never will be,” it warns. “We endorse no one who teaches workshops on the subject.” Like the novel, Redfield says, the guide is merely a catalyst to aid readers in their own searches. “The last thing I want to be is someone’s guru,” he says wearily. “The world doesn’t need another Shirley MacLaine.”

After some small talk about his plans for more sequels (The Twelfth lnsight will be the last) and the movie (“I envision it as a cross between Field of Dreams and Three Days of the Condor—starring someone like William Hurt”), our conversation turns to the role of synchronicity in everyday life. I ask Redfield to help me understand some of my own synchronicity, which, I confess, rarely involves fortuitous or mysterious coincidences. On my way to Panama City, for instance, two of my flights were canceled, and—although I didn’t know it then—I would have more trouble coming back. I offer a litany of my life’s petty mishaps: important phone calls missed, wrong trains boarded, awkward encounters with ex-girlfriends …. Where, I wondered, is the synchronicity in all of this?

“Synchronicity isn’t always immediately apparent. But there is always a silver lining in whatever happens, no matter what it is,” Redfield assures me. “The more we get in tune with the higher parts of ourselves, the more we expand our perceptions of beaut and energy and realize that we are living in a heavenly place, the faster we will proceed on our spiritual mission in life and the more synchronicity we experience.”

As Redfield describes Celestine consciousness, telling me, in short, that everything will take care of itself, I find myself growing deeply irritated. Is synchronicity about understanding the positive role of  strange coincidences in everyday life? Or is it merely about seeing everything as a strange and portentous coincidence? If so, then Celestine wisdom is ultimately trivial and empty; by offering an explanation for absolutely everything that happens to us, it ends up telling us nothing.

Finally, I’ve had it with his “all for the best” talk. “Okay, well, what about the 500,000 people massacred in Rwanda?” I ask. “What about AIDS, which may eventually kill one-fifth of the population of Africa? Is there synchronicity in these events? Where is the silver lining?”

For the first time, Redfield loses his sunny composure. A long silence descends over the room as he slowly settles back into the overstuffed white canvas couch and folds his arms tightly across his chest. His blue eyes narrow and seem to darken before he slips on a pair of heavily tinted aviator sunglasses, as if erecting a wall between us. The atmosphere is charged, and I shift uncomfortably in my seat.

“Well, as a result of AIDS we are certainly approaching sexuality a lot more seriously,” he says in a measured, terse tone. “We are pulling into consciousness the violence that occurs in some families in Africa where everybody is screwing everybody—even children—which is terribly traumatic. And all this is coming into consciousness primarily because if it doesn’t, a whole bunch of people are going to die. Now, that sure is a tough silver lining, but it is important in trying to understand the traumatic ways we treat each other.” He purses his lips and glares at me through the dark shades.

We fall into an icy silence again, and Redfield gives no indication he’s about to break it. Realizing that the interview is more or less over, I excuse myself and call a taxi. When I return, he is standing outside on the porch, staring at the turquoise ocean. Stepping out into the steamy heat, I try to make small talk, filling the heavy minutes till my cab arrives. Redfield nods, silently acknowledging my politesse, when suddenly four black crows, flying up the beach in a tight formation, pause and begin to circle just above us. After four languorous passes, they shoot out to sea, soaring Icarus-like, directly at the rising sun.

Redfield’s face breaks into a tight grin. “Now tell me that wasn’t synchronistic,” he says, emphasizing each word with just a hint of contempt. “Those crows are a sign. They mean that there is a reason you are here. There is something you are here to tell me, and something I am here to tell you, as well.” I am stunned. What I thought of as an awkward clash Redfield views as a synchronistic exchange of truths, a Celestine Moment, as Warner publicity suggested he call it.

But on the drive back through Panama City, I can’t seem to get my mind off those damned crows. It’s not that I agree with Redfield that they were some kind of sign—I don’t. What intrigues me is the part of myself that wants to believe it. Like most people, I yearn for some cosmic principle or transcendent truth that will reveal order (Celestine or otherwise) amid the anarchy—but so far that nagging spiritual urge hasn’t propelled me to belief in a coherent meraphysical system.

After reading The Celestine Prophecy, meeting some of its devotees, and talking with its author, I began to understand just how deeply rooted this desire for clarity is; most people I know are searching, in one way or another. But I also saw that Redfield’s true genius lies in selling us an enormous tautology, which goes something like this: The fact that everybody is searching is itself evidence that a more spiritual age is dawning—and, since this spirituality is the aim of our quest, our goal has been accomplished. By looking for Celestine wisdom we, in effect, bring it into existence.

Redfield is certainly correct when he points out that a huge number of people today are dissatisfied with the old ways of looking at the world. They want more out of life, and as their disenchantment increases, so too does the intensity of their longing. But the mere fact that so many are searching doesn’t necessarily mean they have found anything—yet.