
"I've found a synchronicity!"
The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, was a self published book of the early 1990s, that went on to become a major best seller; and contributed to the sense of millennial anticipation among "New Age" spiritual seekers.
On the one hand, the book was much read and discussed - on the other it had a reputation of being day dreamy, wishful, vague, and ineptly-written in the cynical and materialist mainstream.
I encountered the CP about a decade after publication, and found it a rather charming and naive book, with a pleasant kind of atmosphere about it; and which helped make a significant step towards me becoming a Christian - although that is not the book's intent.
A few days ago, I downloaded an audiobook copy from Archive.org, and found that I still responded to its earnest and positive tone, while at the same time seeing more clearly the self-imposed limitations that derive from its being a continuation of the idealistic sixties counter-culture.
The main positive effect of the Celestine Prophecy (and I sampled some of Redfield's follow-up books as well) was to focus my attention on the importance of synchronicity - the idea that the remarkable and positive "coincidences" of life may have meaning, and point to a purpose.
I reasoned that if synchronicity was a real phenomenon, then events must be arranged in accordance wit some plan or intention. To my mind, this must mean not just an ordered universe, or a transcendent deity, but a personal and loving God.
Because otherwise reality would not arrange itself around individual people, around me and my destiny. An abstractly structured universe would have no reason to care about individuals or their fate in the world.
For synchronicity to happen, and to have significance for the future; the events of an individual life must (I thought) be somehow "arranged" and therefore have a spiritual significance.
In a nutshell; there must be a personal creator God, who loves me (and others) as individuals, and who is continuing to create for our ultimate spiritual benefit.
Such was my eventual benefit from reading the CP back in the middle 2000s.
But re-listening to the CP, I see that the author's intentions are different. It is not Christian, not focused on resurrected eternal life; but instead hopes for a transformation of this life on earth so as to become a kind of blissful spiritualized paradise of peace, love, harmony - without pain or suffering.
Indeed, CP asserts that this is happening, and will happen - it will happen to us; because of the direction of history and reality. People fail to see it, because immersed in survival and the seeking of possessions, status, thrills etc. But it will happen anyway, because it must.
Related to this is the vision of synchronicities as something that also happen to us, guideposts pointing at our better future, and which it is best if we follow.
The prophecies are presented as "insights" - which are items of knowledge that need to be grasped, internalized, lived.
The picture is of some higher reality that communicates to our senses pieces of information that are qualitatively and positively transformative for the people, and societies, that acknowledge them.
These are precious insights which need to be preserved, disseminated, read, pondered and internalized. That is how things are meant to happen - and that is what is resisted by the regressive forces, the materialists, the power structures, the exploiters...
The Good Life of the CP is therefore one in which we are guided through the world and our lives by synchronicities, to attain sequential insights, towards a state of enlightenment that is also contageous - in a good way.
The insights spread from person to person, and each is permanently transformed by each insight - so there is a ratcheting positive movement (albeit this may happen quickly, or else be delayed considerably by our faults and my malign meddling).
In sum - I find the Celestine Prophecy to envisage a very passive form of spiritual life. The millennial New Age will happen to us, will be imposed from externally; and synchronicities likewise. Our job is to follow - and our reward is that these are for our own good - and to make a world where people can be qualitatively more spiritual and happier.
From here-and-now, I regard these as fallacies, because I do not believe that goodness or spirituality can be imposed from externally. People cannot be made good, the world cannot be made good - good just isn't a top-down imposable thing; it must come from individual choices, from personal freedom, fro the good in individual beings.
I do not believe, either, that there can be a paradise on earth - because entropy and evil are part of this world. Evil cannot be cured from externally, and entropy is the primal state "within" which creation is always being made.
I think that evil and entropy can therefore only be escaped and left-behind by a new, Second Creation, which is Heaven, which is post-mortal.
In sum; the New Age aspect of Celestine Prophecy, and its counter-culture origins and continuation, is seen in a this-worldly (and indeed leftist) vision of the desirable future - a coming Golden Age on earth as culmination of social changes that were the basis of 1960s radicalism.
It was written more than thirty years ago when tens of millions of people in The West believed that this not only can happen, but would happen - irresistibly. That all people were changing, were being made more spiritual.
Due to some external and universal influence - sometimes called a higher frequency of consciousness, higher vibrational level, new energy or the like (invariably, some term derived from physics - it seemed).
And that this did not come from the personal loving creator God of Christianity; but from a purposive movement within the whole of reality - a wholly immanent, discarnate, spiritualized idea of everything as ultimately one.
The millennium was seen as a restoration of a harmony which was actually a unity. There was to be no pain or suffering, because there was no conflict or competition, because everything was one.
And that is what humankind, and everything on earth and everywhere else, was irresistibly and necessarily moving-towards.
Yet it did not happen.
That was not how the millennium went for us. That does not describe the world, now.
But, somehow, this not-happening hasn't dented the assumptions behind the New Age. Tens of millions of people still seem to live in optimism for the paradisal Golden Age, here on earth - and in line with sixties idealism - they still see this as actually happening.
A further thing about synchronicity. It now strikes me as ultimately false to suppose that our lives are segmented such that particular bits of them count as synchronicities.
In truth: our life is continuous, a living process - and while our consciousness may be detached and alienated - created reality is (and always has been) a kind of loving family of relationships.
The reason why we cannot usually understand The Meaning of a synchronicity, is because in defining it, we thereby chop it out from this process and web of meaning.
We pull out a synchronicity from life, like Little Jack Horner extracting a plum from a pie; and examine it minutely - but cannot see from that one plum the pie itself, nor who made it, nor why it was baked...
The synchronicity thereby becomes mysterious in its meaninglessness!
Such are my thoughts from a brief re-engagement with the Celestine Prophecy