I have read four books of James Redfield – The Celestine Prophecy, The Tenth Insight, The Secret of Shambala, and The Twelfth Insight. I like his way of writing and more importantly the insights are real. They are presented as fiction but they are insights gleaned from several world religions and an attempt has been made to put together a cogent set of learnings. The only dark lining in an otherwise silver cloud is the proselytising that the author does as part of the 9th insight. Thousands of years before Jesus, mystics in the East have vaporized 🤣. Guess after all the knowledge gathering James Redfield did he just found comfort in his own religion. His loss ! But, let that not stop you from learning about his insights and it doesn’t stop me from recommending his books.
Am re-reading all the four books and finding some interesting frameworks that can be used by everyone.
Here are some excerpts that are powerful –
“He said the First Insight occurs when we become conscious of the coincidences in our lives.” “We are experiencing these mysterious coincidences, and even though we don’t understand them yet, we know they are real. We are sensing again, as in childhood, that there is another side of life that we have yet to discover, some other process operating behind the scenes.”
“History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.”
“The Second Insight extends our consciousness of historical time,” he added. “It shows us how to observe culture not just from the perspective of our own lifetimes but from the perspective of a whole millennium. It reveals our preoccupation to us and so lifts us above it. You have just experienced this longer history. You now live in a longer now. When you look at the human world now, you should be able to clearly see this obsessiveness, the intense preoccupation with economic progress.”
“The Third Insight is that the universe on the whole is made up of this energy, and we can affect perhaps not only plants but other things as well, just by what we do with the energy that belongs to us, the part we can control,” He paused for a full minute. “I wonder how we affect other people with our energy?” “That we humans, although we are unconscious of it, have the tendency to control and dominate others. We want to win the energy that exists between people. It builds us up somehow, makes us feel better.”
“Understanding the Fourth Insight, it said, is a matter of seeing the human world as a vast competition for energy and thus for power.”
“The Fifth then shows us that an alternative source exists, but we can’t really stay connected with this source until we come to grips with the particular method that, we, as individuals, use in our controlling, and stop doing it—because whenever we fall back into this habit, we get disconnected from the source.”
“It echoed exactly the words of Father Sanchez and Father Carl. was a precise process of becoming aware of our individual ways of controlling learned in childhood. And once we could transcend this habit, it said, we would find our higher selves, our evolutionary identities.” …. the sixth insight.
“Once you become conscious of the questions active in the moment, you always get some kind of intuitive direction of what to do, of where to go. You get a hunch about the next step. Always. The only time this will not occur is when you have the wrong question in mind. You see, the problem in life isn’t in receiving answers. The problem is in identifying your current questions. Once you get the questions right, the answers always come.”
“Seven deals with the process of consciously evolving yourself, of staying alert to every coincidence, every answer the universe provides for you.”
“The Seventh Insight says that we all have many more such thoughts than we realize. To recognize them we must take an observer position. When a thought comes, we must ask why? Why did this particular thought come now? How does it relate to my life questions? Taking this observer position helps us release our need to control everything. It places us in the flow of evolution.”
“The Eighth Insight,” Karla explained, “is about using energy in a new way when relating to people in general, but it begins at the beginning, with children.”
“It says that whenever people cross our paths, there is always a message for us. Chance encounters do not exist. But how we respond to these encounters determines whether we’re able to receive the message. If we have a conversation with someone who crosses our path and we do not see a message pertaining to our current questions, it does not mean there was no message. It only means we missed it for some reason.”
“The Ninth Insight explains how human culture will change in the next millennium as a result of conscious evolution. It describes a significantly different way of life.”
“The Ninth Insight says that once we begin to give constantly, we will always have more coming in than we could possibly give away.”
Fascinating stuff !! and I love some of the insights – the control dramas for instance or the fact that there are no chance encounters. Meeting every person is deeply significant. Do read all four books. They are written as a fiction but treat them more as parables – the fictional story is merely to provide a canvas for the author to share his insights.