The Celestine Prophecy
by James Redfield
Warner Books, 1993
Outlined by Laura Bryannan

First insight
A reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet.
We experience mysterious coincidences which show us that there is another side of life we have yet to discover--some other process operating behind the scenes.
A world transformation is taking place now because the number of individuals conscious of such coincidences is growing dramatically.
Once we reach a "critical mass" of such individuals, the culture will begin to take these coincidental experiences seriously, and we will wonder, in mass, what mysterious process underlies human life on this planet.

Second insight
History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.
By understanding the reality of the people who came before us (what they felt and thought) we can see why we look at the world the way we do, and what our contribution is toward further progress. The world is about to identify a particular preoccupation that developed during the later half of this millennium (the Modern Age).
The Middle Ages (1000 BCE): the reality of this time was defined by the Christian Church.
The world the church described as real is, above all, spiritual.
Life was defined as having one solitary purpose: to win or lose salvation.
Churchmen were there to interpret the scriptures and tell you whethe you are in accordance with God or Satan; if you followed their advice, you were assured a rewarding afterlife.
Every aspect of the Medieval world is defined in other-worldly terms.
All phenomena of life is defined either as the will of God or as the malice of the devil.
All people took for granted that the world operated solely by spiritual means.
Fourteenth-Fifteenth centuries: the previous world view begins to fall apart.
Improprieties on the part of the churchmen cause rebellion; Martin Luther calls for a complete break from papal Christianity.
The men who defined reality for centuries lose their credibility.
The clear consensus about the nature of the universe and humankind's purpose here collapses.
Scientific discoveries proved that the realities about our world as maintained by the Church were incorrect: the Earth is not the center of the universe, for ex.
All ideas about the world taken for granted now need new definition, especially the nature of God and our relationship to God.
Modern Age: a growing democratic spirit and a mass distrust of papal and royal authority.
Definitions of the universe based on speculation or scriptural faith are no longer automatically accepted.
To avoid some new group stepping in to control reality as the churchmen did, a method of consensus-building (the scientific method: testing an idea about how the universe works, arriving afterward at some conclusion, and then offering this conclusion to others to see if they agree) was developed.
Explorers were sent out to the world, armed with the scientific method, to find out how it works and what it means that we find ourselves alive here.
We sent these explorers out to bring back a complete explanation of our existence, but because of the complexity of the universe they weren't able to return right away.
When the scientific method couldn't bring back a new picture of God and of mankind's purpose on the planet, the lack of certainty and meaning affected Western culture deeply.
We needed something else to do until our questions were answered.
We shook off our feeling of being lost by taking matters into our own hands, by focusing on conquering the Earth and using its resources to better our situation.
This focus became a preoccupation. We lost ourselves in creating a secular society, and economic security, to replace the spiritual one we lost.
The question of why we were alive, of what was going on here spiritually, was slowly pushed aside and repressed altogether.
We've forgotten that we still don't know what we're surviving for.
It is time now to wake up from this preoccupation and reconsider our original question: What's behind life on this planet? Why are we really here?

Third insight
A new understanding of the physical world: humans will learn to perceive what was formerly an invisible type of energy.
The basic stuff of the universe, at its core, is a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation in a way that defies our old mechanistic model of the universe--as though our expectation itself causes our energy to flow out into the world and affect other energy systems.
Human perception of this energy first begins with a heightened sensitivity to beauty.
The perception of beauty is a kind of barometer telling each of us how close we are to actually perceiving the energy.
When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color. It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive.
The next level of perception is to see an energy field hovering about everything.
Plants which have the most direct conscious human attention are more potent and grow faster than plants which do not get conscious attention.
Plants grown in this way, when ingested, increase the body's efficiency dramatically.
Two periods of the day most conducive to seeing energy fields: sunrise and sunset. How to begin:
Touch the tips of index fingers together, with blue sky in background.
Separate the tips about an inch and look at the area directly between them.
Take eyes out of focus a bit and move the tips closer, then apart.
Once humans learn to observe energy fields, our understanding of the physical universe will quickly transform.
We would become conscious that certain localities radiate more energy than others, the highest radiation coming from old natural environments, especially forests

Fourth insight
Eventually humans will see the universe as comprised of one dynamic energy, an energy that can sustain us and respond to our expectations.
We have been disconnected from the larger source of this energy; we have cut ourselves off and so have felt weak, insecure and lacking.
In the face of this deficit, humans have always sought to increase our personal energy in the only manner we have known: by seeking to psychologically steal it from others--an unconscious competition that underlies all human conflict in the world.
When a person engages another in a conversation, one of two things can happen: that person can come away feeling stronger or weaker.
We prepare ourselves to say whatever we must in order to prevail in the conversation.
Each of us seeks to find some way to control and thus remain on top in the encounter.
If we are successful, if our viewpoint prevails, then rather than feel weak, we receive a psychological boost.
When we control another human being we receive their energy. We fill up at the other's expense and the filling up is what motivates us. Most people are in a constant hunt for someone else's energy.

Fifth insight
Humans must learn to gain energy from the universal source, not other humans.
Food is the first way of gaining energy, but in order to totally absorb energy in food, the food must be appreciated, savored.
Taste is the doorway; you must appreciate taste; this is the reason for prayer before eating--to make eating a holy experience--so the energy from the food can enter your body.
After personal energy is increased through conscious eating, you become more sensitive to energy in all things, and then you learn to take this energy into yourself without eating.
To be open to universal energy, you have to connect--to use your sense of appreciation, as in seeing auras--but you take this one step further so that you get the sensation of being filled up.
When you successfully appreciate something, you allow the love that underlies all to enter you.
When you appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of things you receive energy. When you get to a level where you feel love, then you can send the energy back just by willing it so.
Even though an alternative source of energy exists, we really can't stay connected with it 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.
This habit is always unconscious at first; the key to letting it go is to bring it fully into consciousness.
This is done by seeing that our particular style of controlling others is one we learned in childhood to get attention, to get the energy moving our way.
Our parents and siblings operated in a drama themselves, trying to pull energy out of us as children. We had to have a strategy to win energy back.
This style is something we repeat over and over again. It's called our unconscious control drama.
Each person must reinterpret their family experience from a spiritual point of view, and discover who they really are. Once we do this, we can go past these control dramas and see what is really happening.
General control drama styles. Everyone manipulates for energy either aggressively--directly forcing people to pay attention to them, or passively--playing on people's sympathy or curiosity to gain attention.
Aloof: in order to get energy coming your way, you withdraw and look mysterious and secretive. You hope that someone will be pulled into this drama and try to figure out what's going on with you. When someone does, you remain vague, forcing them to struggle, dig and try to discern your true feelings. As they do so, they give you their full attention and that sends their energy to you. The longer you can keep them interested and mystified, the more energy you receive.
Interrogator: sets up a drama of asking questions and probing into another person's world with the specific purpose of finding something wrong. Once they do, they criticize this aspect of the other's life. If this strategy succeeds, the person being criticized is pulled into the drama. They find themselves becoming self-conscious around the interrogator and paying attention to what the interrogator is doing and thinking about, so as not to do something wrong the the interrogator would notice. This psychic deference gives the interrogator the energy he desires. Interrogators pull you off your own path and drain your energy because you judge yourself by what they might be thinking.
Intimidator: someone who threatens you, either verbally or physically. You are forced, for fear of something bad happening to you, to pay attention to them and so to give him energy. This is the most aggressive kind of drama.
Poor Me: someone who tells you all the horrible things that are already happening to them, implying perhaps that you are responsible, and that, if you refuse to help, these horrible things are going to continue. Someone who makes you feel guilty when you're in their presence, even though you know there is no reason to feel that way. Everything they say and do puts you in a place where you have to defend against the idea the you're not doing enough for them.
People use more than one drama in different circumstances, but most of us have one dominant control drama that we tend to repeat, depending on which one worked well of the members of our early family. A person goes to whatever extreme necessary to get attention energy in their family.
Interrogator parents tend to create aloof children. When someone continually asks you questions, only to find something wrong with your answers, you must get vague and distant, to try to say things that will get their attention, but not reveal enough to give them something to criticize.
Intimidators tend to create poor me children (or another intimidator). If someone is draining your energy by threatening you with physical, mental or emotional violence, being aloof doesn't work; you can't get them to give you energy by playing coy; you are forced to become more passive, and guilt-trip them about the harm they are doing. If this doesn't work, then, as a child you endure until you are big enough to explode against the violence and fight aggression with aggression.
Aloof parents tend to create interrogator children. If you were a child and your family members were either not there or ignored you, playing aloof would not get their attention. You would have to resort to probing and prying and finally finding something wrong in these aloof people in order to force attention and energy.
To find your true self you must go back to your family experience and review what happened. Once we become conscious of our control drama, we can focus on the higher truth of our family that lies beyond the energy conflict. Once we find this truth, it will tell us who we are, the path we are on, what we are doing.
Look past the energy competition that existed in your family and search for the real reason you were there.
Ask yourself the question, "Why was I born to this particular family? What might have been the purpose for that?"
Ask yourself what each of your parents stood for. Each parent will try to claim your allegiance to their particular point of view. Every human being, whether they are conscious of it or not, illustrates with their lives how he or she thinks a human being is supposed to live.
Each of us must try to discover what our parents taught us about this and, at the same time, what about their lives could have been done better.
What you would have changed about your parents is part of what you are working on.
Every person begins their spiritual life in a position between their parent's truths. That's why you were born there: to take a higher perspective on what they stood for. Your path is about discovering a truth that is a higher synthesis of what these two people believed.
If you look closely at all the things that have happened to you since birth, if you view your life as one story, you'll be able to see how you have been working on this question all along.

Sixth insight
Getting clear of our family control drama opens the way for us attune to our particular mission in this life.
Each of us must look at the significant turns in our lives and reinterpret them in light of our evolutionary question.
Try to perceive the sequence of interests, important friends, coincidences that have occurred in your life. Where were they leading you?
We must all spend as much time as necessary doing this process of clearing our pasts. Once we transcend our family control drama, we can comprehend the higher meaning of why we were born our particular parents, and what all the twists and turns of our lives were preparing us to do.
We all have a spiritual purpose, a mission, that we have been pursuing without being fully aware of it. Once we bring it completely into consciousness, our lives can take off.
The truth we pursue on our particular spiritual mission is as important as the evolution of the universe itself, for it enables evolution to continue.
Humans are born into their historical situations and find something to stand for. They form a union with another human being who also has found some purpose.
The children born to this union then reconcile these two positions by pursuing a higher synthesis, guided by coincidences.
Each time we fill up with energy and a coincidence occurs to lead us forward in our lives, we institute this level of energy in ourselves, and so we can exist at a higher vibration.
Our children take our level of vibration and raise it even higher. This is how we, as humans, continue evolution.
The current generation is ready to do this consciously and accelerate the process. No matter how scary, there is no longer any choice in this matter. Once you learn what life is about, there is no way to erase the knowledge. If you try to do something else with your life, you will always sense that you are missing something.
How to help this process of maintaining one's path:
Insure that your energy level is high by focusing on the unique beauty and shape of everything, especially nature.
Try to experience a feeling of closeness, the feeling that no matter how far away something is, you can touch it, connect with it.
Breathe in this energy by taking deep conscious breaths, holding each about five seconds before exhaling.
Visualize that each breath pulls energy into us and fills us like a balloon; experience becoming lighter and more buoyant.
After you breathe in the energy, check your emotions. Do you feel love? This is the true measure of whether you are really connected. Love is not an intellectual concept or moral imperative. It is a background emotion that exists when one is connected to the energy available in the universe.
Once you are connected with the energy, examine your thoughts.
The words you habitually will through your head in an attempt to logically control events stop when you give up your control drama.
As you fill up with inner energy, other kinds of thoughts enter your mind from a higher part of yourself. These are intuitions. They appear in the back of your mind, sometimes in a kind of daydream or mini-vision.
When you have acquired enough energy, you are ready to consciously engage evolution, to produce the coincidences that will lead you forward.
Remember your basic life question--the one your parents gave you--because this question provides the overall context for your evolution.
Next you center yourself on your path by discovering the immediate, smaller questions that currently confront your life.
These questions always pertain to your larger question and define where you currently are in your lifelong quest.
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.
The only time this will not occur is when you have the wrong question in mind. 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.
After you get an intuition of what might happen next, the next step is to become very alert and watchful. Sooner or later coincidences will occur to move you in the direction indicated by the intuition.
Always remember to stop as often as necessary to reconnect your energy. Stay full, stay in a state of love. Once you achieve this state of love, nothing nor anyone can pull more energy from you than you can replace. But you must stay conscious of this process in order for it to work. This is especially important when you interact with people.

Seventh insight
Certain objects will jump out at us; our thoughts, dreams and daydreams often come to us as guidance.
Dreams can be interpreted by comparing the story of the dream to the story of your life. Bad dreams have the most important messages.
Daydreams show us a scene, a happening, and this is an indication that this event might happen. If we pay attention we can be ready for this turn in our lives.
We have many more of these kind of 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.
Fear images should be halted as soon as they come. Then another image, one with a good outcome, should be willed through the mind. Soon, negative images will almost never happen; your intuitions will be about positive things.
When negative images come after that, they should be taken very seriously and not followed.
Example: If the idea comes to you that you're going to have a wreck in a truck and someone comes along and offers you a ride in a truck, do not accept it.
Build your energy and center yourself in your situation, in the questions you have; you will then receive some form of intuitive guidance, an idea of where to go or what to do, and then coincidences occur to allow us to move in that direction. Each time these coincidences lead us into something new, we grow, we become fuller persons, existing at a higher vibration.
We must assume that every event has significance and contains a message that somehow pertains to our questions. This especially applies to what we call bad things. The challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative.

Eighth insight
All the answers that mysteriously come to us really come from other people.
Not all the people you meet will have the energy or the clarity to reveal the message they have for you.
You must help them by sending them energy; consciously projecting energy into a person helps them see their truth. They can then give this truth to you.
We must honer this interpersonal ethic and treat others in such a way that more messages are shared. This insight is about using energy in a new way when relating to people in general, but it begins with children.
Children need energy on a continual basis, unconditionally.
The worst thing that can be done to children is to drain their energy while correcting them. This is what creates control dramas.
These learned manipulations can be avoided if the adults give them all the energy they need no matter what the situation.
Children should always be included in conversations, especially about them.
Adults should never take responsibility for more children than they can give attention to.
Any one adult can only focus on and give attention to one child at a time.
If there are too many children for the number of adults, then the adults become overwhelmed and unable to give enough energy.
In this situation, children will begin to compete with each other for the adult's energy and time.
Adults often glamorize the idea of large families and children growing up together, but children should learn the world from adults, not from other children. In too many cultures, children are running in gangs.
We should not bring children into the world unless there is at least one adult committed to focus full attention, all of the time, on each child.
All the energy does not have to come from the parents alone; in fact, it is better if it does not. But whoever cares for the children must provide this one on one attention.
Give children energy and always tell them the truth of every situation in language they can understand. Much damage is done when adults create distortions on the spot because they want to have a little fun, or because they believe the truth is too complicated for a child to comprehend.
When children experience continuous sincere attention, they will assume they will continue to have enough. This makes the transition from receiving energy from adults to getting it from the universe much easier for them to grasp.
When one first learns to be clear and to engage one's evolution, any of us can be stopped, suddenly, by an addiction to another person.
When love first happens, the two people are giving each other energy unconsciously and both people feel buoyant and elated: "in love."
Once they expect this feeling to come from the other person, they cut themselves off from the energy in the universe and begin to rely even more on the energy from each other--only now there doesn't seem to be enough.
They will then stop giving each other energy and fall back into their dramas in anvattempt to control each other and force the other's energy their way. At this point the relationship degenerates into the usual power struggle.
Because of the energy competition in families, most of us were unable to complete an important psychological process: integrating our opposite sexual side. We become addicted to someone of the opposite sex in able to access this energy.
The energy of the universe we can tap is both male and female. We can eventually open up to it, but the process takes time. If we connect prematurelyvwith a human source for our female or male energy, we block the universal supply.
Example: We are walking around "incomplete" like the letter C. We are susceptible to a person of the opposite sex who can complete the circle, giving us a burst of euphoria and energy that feels like wholeness that a full connection to the universe produces, a letter O.
The problem with this completed person, this O, that both partners think they have reached, is that it has taken two people to make this one whole person.
This one whole person consequently has two heads, or egos. Both partners want to run this whole person they have created.
Both partners what to command the other, as if the other were themselves. This kind of illusion of completeness always breaks down into a power struggle.
In the end, each person must take the other for granted or invalidate them so they can lead this whole self in the direction they want to go.
We must first stabilize our channel with the universe. After we do this we will attract a higher relationship, one that will not pull us from the path of our individual evolution.
Resisting "love at first sight" feelings is a good way to avoid this kind of entrapment. Learn to have platonic relationships with the opposite sex.
Have these relationships only with people who will reveal themselves totally, telling you how and why they are doing what they are doing--just as what might have happened with the opposite-sex parent during an ideal childhood.
By understanding who these opposite-sexed friends really are on the inside, one breaks past one's own fantasy projection about that gender, and that releases us to connect again with the universe.
This is not easy, especially if one must break away from a current co-dependent relationship. We are all co-dependent in some way.
The idea is to begin to experience that sense of well-being and euphoria experienced in the first moment of a co-dependent relationship when you are alone. You must get him or her in the inside.
After that, you evolve forward and can find that special romantic relationship that really fits you.
How we approach other people determines how quickly we evolve, how quickly our life questions are answered.
How open are you to the messages other people may have for you?
Whenever people cross our paths, there is always a message for us. Chance encounters do not exist. 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 nomessage, it only means we missed it for some reason.
We should stop what we're doing, no matter what, and find out the message we have for that person, and that he person has for us.
Once we grasp this reality, our interactions will slow down and become more purposeful and deliberate.
When you encounter a group of people--too many to engage with all individually--how do you know who has the messages you need? Look for signs:
Sudden, spontaneous eye contact is a sign that two people should talk.
A sense of recognition, someone who looks familiar, even though you know you've never seen the person before.
A person that seems "highlighted."
When we appreciate the shape and demeanor of a person--really focus on them until their shape and features being to stand out and have more presence--we can then send them energy, lifting them up.
The more we appreciate their wholeness, their inner beauty, the more the energy flows into them and, naturally, the more that flows into us.
The more we can love and appreciate others, the more energy flows into us.
When you give someone more energy than they would have otherwise, you can see your truth and more readily give it to them. When you do that, they will have a sense of revelation about what you're saying. This will lead them to see your higher self even more fully and so appreciate it on an even deeper level, which amps up the cycle even more.
Two or more people consciously doing this together can reach incredible highs as they build one another up and have it immediately returned.
Consciously interacting in a group:
As the members of a group talk, only one will have the most powerful idea at any one point in time.
If they are alert, the others in the group can feel who is about to speak, and then they can consciously focus their energy on this person, helping to bring out their idea with the greatest clarity.
Then, as the conversation proceeds, someone else will have the most powerful idea, then someone else, etc.
If you concentrate on what is being said, you can feel when it is your turn; the idea will come up into your mind.
The key is to speak up when it is your turn and to project energy when it is someone else's turn.
Some people get inflated when in a group: they feel the power of an idea and express it, then because the energy feels so good, they keep on talking, long after the energy should have shifted to someone else.
Others are pulled back and won't risk expressing an idea, even when they feel the power of it. When this happens, the group fragments and the members don't get the benefit of all the messages. The same thing happens when some members of the group are not accepted by some of the others.
When we dislike someone, or feel threatened by someone, we tend to focus on something we dislike about the person.
When we do this, instead of seeing the deeper beauty of the person and giving them energy, we take energy away and actually do them harm.
Humans are aging each other at a tremendous rate with these kinds of violent competitions.
What if the person we are speaking with is operating in a control drama and trying to pull us into it?
If you do not assume the matching drama, the person's own drama will fall apart.
Each drama needs a matching drama to be fully played out. Example: an intimidator needs either a poor me or another intimidator.
Naming the drama the other person is playing will usually dissipate it.
Control dramas are covert strategies to get energy.
Covert manipulations for energy can't exist if you bring them to consciousness by pointing them out. They cease to be covert.
After that, the person has to be more real and honest.