Showing posts with label james redfield. Show all posts
Showing posts with label james redfield. Show all posts

Wednesday, 5 December 2012

James Redfield

James Redfield (born March 19, 1950) is an American author, lecturer, screenwriter and film producer. He is notable for his novel The Celestine Prophecy (1993).

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[edit] Biography

Redfield grew up in a rural area near Birmingham, Alabama. As a young man, he studied Eastern philosophies, including Taoism and Zen, while majoring in sociology at Auburn University. He later received a Master's degree in counseling and spent more than 15 years as a therapist to abused adolescents. During this time, he was drawn into the human potential movement and turned to it for theories about intuitions and psychic phenomena that would help his clients.
In 1989, he quit his job as a therapist to write full-time, synthesizing his interest in interactive psychology, Eastern and Western philosophies, science, futurism, ecology, history, and mysticism.
When Redfield self-published his first novel in 1992 (Satori Publishing), the immediate interest from booksellers and readers made The Celestine Prophecy one of the most successful self-published books of all time.[1] Warner Books bought the rights and published the hard cover edition in March 1994. The book quickly climbed to the #1 position on the New York Times Best Seller List. According to Publishing Trends, The Celestine Prophecy was the #1 international bestseller of 1996 (#2 in 1995). The novel spent over 3 years on the New York Times Best Seller List. As of May 2005, The Celestine Prophecy had sold over 20 million copies worldwide and had been translated into 34 languages. In 1996, the sequel, The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (Warner Books), also became a bestseller. The two books spent a combined 74 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, making their author the best-selling hard cover author in the world in 1996, as cited in BP Report (January 1997).
In his non-fiction title, The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness (Warner Books, 1997), Redfield explored the historical and scientific background of the "emerging spirituality" discussed in his novels. The Celestine series of adventure parables continued in 1999 with the publication of The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (Warner Books). In 2002, Redfield joined author Michael Murphy and filmmaker Sylvia Timbers in a collaborative non-fiction work entitled God and the Evolving Universe (J.P. Tarcher).
The novel was filmed as The Celestine Prophecy, which made its U.S. theatrical (Celestine Films) and DVD (Sony Pictures) release in 2006. Redfield produced and co-wrote the screenplay (with Barnet Bain & Dan Gordon).
James and Salle Redfield are the founders of the Global Prayer Project, a bi-weekly telewebcast which offers guided prayer and meditation.
Redfield's newest offering, The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision, was published by Grand Central Publishing in February 2011.

[edit] Awards

In October 1997, Redfield was awarded the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Senate at the XXIII Pio Manzu International Conference in Rimini, Italy. In the spring of 2000, Redfield joined Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat For Humanity, as the only two recipients of Humanitarian of the Year honors from their alma mater, Auburn University.[2] Two months later, he received another Humanitarian of the Year award from the International New Thought Alliance. In March 2004, Redfield received the World View Award from the Wisdom Media Group for engaging the discussion on the nature of human existence and for his ongoing efforts and contributions to the bettering of humanity.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

  1. ^ Adams, Stephen (Aug.8, 2008). "The 12 top titles that booksellers must always stock". The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2523171/The-12-top-titles-that-booksellers-must-always-stock.html. "But the self-help book The Road Less Travelled by American psychiatrist M Scott Peck is included, as is James Redfield's New Age tome, The Celestine Prophecy - which the author originally published himself."
  2. ^ "Redfields receive Humanitarian Award". Auburn University, Auburn, AL. June 5, 2000. http://www.auburn.edu/administration/univrel/news/6-5-00aur.html. "Authors Salle and James Redfield receive the President's Award for Humanitarian Service from AU President William Muse. The annual award recognizes Auburn alumni who have made exceptional service to humanity. The Redfields have developed a worldwide following for books such as The Celestine Prophecy which examine spirituality in the modern world."

[edit] Sources

  • "Celestial reasoning." People Weekly. New York: Apr 25, 1994. Vol.41, Iss. 15; pg. 85
  • McDonald, Marci. "Celestine prophet." Maclean's. Toronto: Oct 10, 1994. Vol.107, Iss. 41; pg. 54

[edit] External links

The Celestine Prophecy

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The Celestine Prophecy - An Adventure
Current printing
Author(s)Redfield, James
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish + 34 languages
SeriesCelestine series
Genre(s)New Age, Religious Fiction
Publication date1993
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBNISBN 0-446-51862-X
OCLC Number29768419
Dewey Decimal813/.54 20
LC ClassificationPS3568.E3448 C45 1993c
Preceded byNone
Followed byThe Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision; The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight; and The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision
The Celestine Prophecy is a 1993 novel by James Redfield that discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas which are rooted in many ancient Eastern Traditions and New Age spirituality. The main character of the novel undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights on an ancient manuscript in Peru. The book is a first-person narrative of the narrator's spiritual awakening as he goes through a transitional period of his life.

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[edit] Summary

The book discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas that are rooted in many ancient Eastern Traditions, such as opening to new possibilities can help an individual to establish a connection with the Divine. The main character of the novel undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights on an ancient manuscript in Peru. The book is a first-person narrative of spiritual awakening. The narrator is in a transitional period of his life, and begins to notice instances of synchronicity, which is the belief that coincidences have a meaning personal to those who experience them.
The story opens with the male narrator becoming reacquainted with an old female friend, who tells him about the Insights, which are contained in a manuscript dating to 600 BC, which has been only recently translated. After this encounter leaves him curious, he decides to go to Peru. On the airplane, he meets a historian who also happens to be interested in the manuscript. As well, he learns that powerful figures within the Peruvian government and the Catholic Church are opposed to the dissemination of the Insights. This is dramatically illustrated when police try to arrest and then shoot the historian soon after his arrival.
The narrator then learns the Insights, one by one, often experiencing the Insight before actually reading the text, while being pursued by forces of the Church and the Peruvian government. In the end, he succeeds in learning the first nine Insights and returns to the United States, with a promise of a Tenth Insight soon to be revealed. The Insights are given only through summaries and illustrated by events in the plot. The text of no complete Insight is given, which the narrator claims is for brevity's sake; he notes that the 'partial translation' of the Ninth Insight was 20 typewritten pages in length.
In the novel, the Maya civilization left ruins in Peru where the manuscript was found, whereupon the Incas took up residence in the abandoned Maya cities after the Maya had reached an "energy vibration level" which made them cross a barrier into a completely spiritual reality.

[edit] Influences

Redfield has acknowledged that the work of Dr. Eric Berne, the developer of Transactional Analysis, and his 1964 bestseller Games People Play as a major influence on his work. We can observe this influence, in the sixth insight when the authour refers to a precise point of the transactional analysis: Our behaviour as grown up comes from our childhood. Specifically, the "games" which Berne refers in his theories are tools used in an individual's quest for energetic independence.[citation needed]

[edit] Publishing history, adaptations and sequels

Redfield originally self-published The Celestine Prophecy, selling 100,000 copies out of the trunk of his Honda before Warner Books agreed to publish it.[1]
As of May 2005 the book had sold over 20 million copies worldwide,[2] with translations into 34 languages. Celestine Films LLC released a film adaptation in 2006. Redfield expanded the concept[which?] into a series, which he completed in three sequels:
  1. The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (1996)
  2. The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (1999)
  3. the fourth and final book, The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision, released in February 2011[3]

[edit] Reception and critique

The book was generally well received by readers and spent 165 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.[4] The Celestine Prophecy has also received some criticism, mostly from the literary community, who point out that the plot of the story is not well developed and serves only as a delivery tool for the author's ideas about spirituality.[5] James Redfield has admitted that, even though he considers the book to be a novel, his intention was to write a story in the shape of a parable,[6] a story meant to illustrate a point or teach a lesson.
Critics[who?] point to Redfield's heavy usage of subjective validation and reification in dealing with coincidences to advance the plot thus spending more time concentrating on the explanation of spiritual ideas rather than furthering character development or developing the plot in a more traditional manner.
Critics also point to improperly explained and, in some cases, completely unexplained “facts” as flaws in the story.[7] Examples of this include the author’s suggestion of the presence of a Mayan society in modern day Peru, rather than in Central America, as well as the suggestion that the manuscript was written in 600 BC in the jungles of Peru, despite the fact that it is written in Aramaic. This shares a thread with the Book of Mormon, which is a purported history of Hebrew people who migrated to the American continent 600 years B.C.[8] Another point of criticism has been directed at the book’s attempt to explain important questions about life and human existence in an overly simplified fashion.[9][10]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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