Dossier, Volume 14 #2: A Spiritual Sampler

The Celestine Prophecy's Antiseptic World

James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy, published by Time Warner in 1993, has by now sold well over 300,000 copies in Canada, and its sequel, The Tenth Insight, is just hitting the bookstands. The Celestine Prophecy has spawned a host of devotees, a monthly newsletter entitled The Celestine Journal, and an Internet bulletin board dedicated to actualizing its ideas.

It is a novel about an American man in a search of an ancient lost manuscript containing nine "insights," a search that takes him into the mountains of Peru where he encounters danger from Peruvian military and Roman Catholic Church officials, but encounters others, mostly American academics or Spanish priests, who, one by one, teach him the insights. These include elements of New Age spirituality, Jungian psychology, Twelve-Step theory, apocalyptic writings such as Nostradamus, quantum physics, indigenous and eastern religions, the Gaia hypothesis, and Christianity.

Like much of New Age literature, the book expresses the belief that we are on the verge of a radical spiritual transformation of human consciousness. The Celestine Prophecy talks about the immanent presence of the divine in the human, what it means to be a human being, and what we need to do while we wait for the eschaton, the final destiny--all supremely Christian concerns. But does the Celestine vision offer the fullness of our potential as human beings, or does it truncate us and therefore belittle us? To answer this question, I tried to read the book from the vantage point of the incarnation, or the kenosis of God.

There is only one Scripture passage (Philippians 2:6-11) in which the word kenosis, which means "emptying out," is used, but the idea of God's kenosis is not a bolt out of the blue. In this passage Paul is reciting possibly the oldest Christian hymn we know of. It is also the strongest suggestion of Christ's identity with humanity and all the weakness and frailty that entails.

"Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus," Paul urges his readers, "Who, being in the form of God,/did not count equality with God/something to be grasped./But he emptied himself,/taking the form of a slave,/becoming as human beings are;/and being in every way/like a human being,/he was humbler yet,/ even to accepting death,/death on a cross."

"We have to attain a fuller consciousness, an inner connection with God, because only then can our evolution towards something better be guided by a higher part of ourselves," says one Celestinian to another. The idea that in making an inner connection with God we will somehow launch our consciousness up into "a higher part of ourselves" is worth examining.

At the heart of every human being is a mystery, our "inner connection with God." But the inner connection with God that Jesus had in the incarnation was not something beyond his humanity, but a precisely human consciousness. Jesus does not survey the progress of his life from a higher plane, but as Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote, he "questions, doubts, learns, is surprised, is deeply moved...is overwhelmed by a deadly feeling of being forsaken by God."

The mystery of God, our "inner connection," is what makes it possible to empty oneself, as Jesus did. Paul was so confident in his inner strength being renewed day by day that he fearlessly gave himself over to a stormy and precarious outer life.

Far from giving oneself to the outer storm, the Celestine advice is that we must concentrate very hard on the process of our evolving consciousness. Celestine language frequently uses words like "getting", "attaining", "grasping" the mystical experience of oneness. The main thing about Jesus, as one Celestinian priest explains to an unbelieving cardinal, is that he "grasped the exact way of connecting with God's source of energy and direction." The word is used in exact contradiction to the Philippians hymn, in which Jesus "did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but he emptied himself."

Celestine consciousness is only maintained by relating to people who have attained a similar level of consciousness. Talking to people "living in a world where conflict is still happening, we get knocked out of this advanced state and fall back to the level of our old selves." Living in the world among the nonelect, then, is a veritable hindrance to our personal evolution.

This is certainly not the way God has chosen to relate to us. God not only chose to hang around with human beings, but Jesus pointedly hung around with the nonelect, very much "in a world where conflict is still happening." He challenged the Syro-Phoenician woman, who was pushed aside by her own religious community, to deep conversion at the same time as he gave her the space to grow in freedom towards God. And Paul challenges the Corinthians to give up their spiritual prerogatives, their rights, their privileges, in relating to the world that does not yet share their spiritual riches, while they wait for the eschaton.

When it comes to romantic love, the Celestinians maintain that we mistake the "in-love" energy for the real thing, and become addicted to each other. But there isn't enough energy to last, and when it runs out we start competing again. Instead, "we have to complete the circle on our own. We have to stabilize our channel with the universe." Then we can have a "higher" relationship, where we see people's "higher self" without "attachment or intention."

Surely it's true that the more genuinely we love someone, the more we respect their uniqueness, without asking them to be projections or fulfilments of our own needs. On the other hand, this description of the ideal way to love is passionless and distant, coming from healed, self-contained individuals who have "completed the circle on their own." It implies that relationship is a secondary concern, after individual healing is completed.

For 2000 years theologians have struggled to give the relational quality of God its full, constitutive importance, rather than seeing it as God's afterthought. God is not lessened or divided by reaching out to us and becoming human. Emptying out towards the other, manifest in God's emptying out towards us, is also at the heart of our human reality. Jesus' willingness to be emptied out, indeed his wounds, are integral to our healing, and our own wounds are integral to our relationships with others.

The apostle Peter's response to the Transfiguration was that he wanted to set up a tent at the top of the mountain. Jesus said no, we're going back down the mountain (Mk 9:2-13). The new humanity of the Celestine Prophecy refuses to come down the mountain with Jesus. It refuses to reenter the disordered world of humanity and suffer with it. It inhabits a controlled, antiseptic world that has cleaned away all dirt, all passion, all abandonment and all despair, leaving behind those who cannot see beyond their pain. As Daniel Berrigan said, in contemplating the monumentally difficult life of the fiery prophet Jeremiah, "we must enter a more modest and humiliated landscape of the spirit."

Louisa Blair is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an associate editor of Compass.