The New Spiritual Vision: Initial Intuitions (The Celestine Vision), by James Redfield

In this unique book, James Redfield analyzes a hundred years of discoveries in physics and psychology to show an inevitable synthesis of ideas from the East and West. The unmistakable message of this convergence is that human history has a purpose, that both miracles and scientific findings are part of evolution towards a better world.

With the same immediacy that made his previous books so revealing, Redfield guides us through the strategies that help us recognize and explore our own existential vision. Probe the negative energies of our personal dramas, the mystical experiences that solve them and the process by which we can discover our unique mission on this planet. Step by step, it helps us examine the farthest borders of our memory, evoking the details of the Other Life and a World Vision that can guide our actions in the future.

The ultimate truth that guides us towards this transcendental rebirth is that we are all spiritual beings that act to spiritualize the culture of the Earth. All we have to do is sustain that vision and act courageously, and the world will really transform.

JAMES REDFIELD INVITES US TO DISCOVER OUR AMAZING INTERIOR POTENTIAL AND TO PARTICIPATE IN THE PLANETARY AWAKENING THAT IS ALREADY RUNNING

When James Redfield wrote "The Ninth Revelation" and "The Tenth Revelation" crystallized a new spiritual vision for millions of people around the world. These books describe a global renaissance that has already begun and point out exciting spiritual experiences that we can all recognize.

Now, in "The New Spiritual Vision", discuss for the first time the historical and scientific background of this planetary awakening ... an awakening that will shape us, as well as our world, in the new millennium.

Chapter by chapter, Redfield reveals this new vision and invites us to explore a new universe of possibilities:

- Initial intuitions

- Experience the matches

- Understand where we are

- Entry into the sensitive universe

- Beyond the power struggles

- The experience of the mystic

- Discover who we are

- A conscious evolution

- Live the new interpersonal ethics

- The advance towards a spiritual culture

- The vision from the next life

Those who read their previous books and longed to know more about the ideas expressed in their pages, will see that "The New Spiritual Vision" will further expand their awareness about the changes that will take place in this historical moment.

Those who read it for the first time will be surprised at the strength and clarity of their transformative message.

* * *

For all who seek inner light

THANKS

The people who guided the evolution of The new spiritual vision are many more than I can cite here. But I must mention John Diamond and Beverly Cambe for their strategic intuitions, John Winthrop Austin for his inexhaustible investigation, Claire Zion for her careful correction, and Salle Merrill Redfield for her constant support. I want, above all, to thank the brave souls, past and present, for producing the truths that illuminate our awakening.

PREFACE:

OBSERVE THE TRANSFORMATION

It does not take the mystery of a new millennium to convince us that something is changing in human consciousness. For those who have a perceptive look, the signs are everywhere. Surveys reveal an increasing interest in the meticical and the inexplicable. Respected Futurists see a universal search for inner satisfaction and sense. And all the general expressions of culture - books, television documentaries, newspaper content - reflect a growing protest whose objective It is to return to quality and integrity and rebuild a sense of community-based ethics.

Most importantly, we can feel that something is changing in the quality of our own experience. Our point of attention seems to be moving away from abstract arguments about spiritual theory or dogma to reach something deeper: the true perception of the spiritual as it occurs in daily life.

When I am asked what I attribute the popularity of my first two novels, The Ninth Revelation and The Tenth Revelation, I always answer that this acceptance is no more than a reflection of the massive recognition of the specific spiritual experiences that these books describe.

Apparently, we are increasingly more aware of the meaningful coincidences that occur every day. Some of these facts have a wide scope and are stimulating. Others are small, almost imperceptible. But we are all given proof that we are not alone, that some mysterious spiritual process is influencing our lives. Once we experience the feeling of inspiration and intensity evoked by these perceptions, it is almost impossible not to pay attention. We begin to be attentive to these facts, to wait for them and to actively seek a superior philosophical understanding of their appearance.

My two novels are what I call adventure parables. They were my way of illustrating what a new spiritual consciousness that descends upon humanity is for me. In the adventures I tried to describe the personal revelations that each of us experiences as awareness increases. Written as stories and based on my own experiences, it was easy to describe these revelations within a specific argument and a group of characters very similar to those in the real world.

In that role, I always imagined myself as a journalist or a social commentator who tries to empirically document and illustrate particular changes in the human ethos that in my opinion are already happening. In fact, I believe that evolution continues to advance as culture acquires a greater spiritual perception. At least two more novels are projected in the series of revelations.

For this book I chose a format that was not fiction because I think that, as human beings, we are in a very special place in relation to this growing awareness. It seems that we all glimpse it, live it even for a while and then, for reasons that we will address precisely in this book, many times we lose our balance and we must strive to recover our spiritual perspective. This book raises how to face those challenges, and I believe that the key lies in our ability to talk about what we experience among ourselves, and to do it in the most open and honest way possible.

Fortunately, we have passed an important milestone in this regard. It would give the impression that we talk about our spiritual experiences without relying on shyness or fear of criticism. Skeptics still abound, but the balance of opinion seems to have changed, so the instinctive reaction of mockery of the past is no longer so common. At one time we tended to hide our synchronic experiences and even disdained them for fear of being mocked and ridiculous. Now, in just a few years, the scales of the balance leaned in the other direction, and those who are mentally very closed see their skepticism questioned.

Public opinion is changing, I think, because we are quite numerous who are aware that this extreme skepticism is nothing more than an old habit formed by centuries of adherence to the Newtonian-Cartesian vision of the world. Sir Isaac Newton was a great physicist, but, as many current thinkers claim, he did not capture the universe in its entirety, and reduced it to a secular machine by describing it as if it functioned only in accordance with immutable mechanical laws. René Descartes, a seventeenth-century philosopher, preceded Newton by popularizing the idea that the only thing we should know about the universe are its basic laws, and that, although these operations may have been set in motion by a creator, they now work by themselves. same? After Newton and Descartes, any claim that there was an active spiritual force in the universe or that this higher spiritual experience was more than a delirium was almost always rejected flat.

In this book we will see that this old mechanistic worldview fell into disrepute already in the first decades of the twentieth century, especially through the influence of Albert Einstein, the pioneers of quantum physics and the most recent research on prayer and intentionality But the prejudices of the mechanistic worldview remain in our consciousness, guarded by extreme skepticism that serves to keep away the most subtle spiritual perceptions that would cast doubt on their assumptions.

It is important to understand how this works. In most cases, to live a superior spiritual experience we must be at least open to the possibility that such perception exists. We now know that, in order to experience spiritual phenomena, we must suspend or “put brackets” on skepticism and try to open ourselves to them in every possible way. We must "knock on the door, " as the Scriptures say, to detect any of these spiritual experiences.

If we approach the spiritual experience with a mind that is too closed and hesitant, we perceive nothing and with this we prove ourselves, erroneously and repeatedly, that the highest spiritual experience is a myth. For centuries we separated these perceptions, not because they were not real, but because at that time we did not want them to be, since they did not fit our secular vision of the world.

As we will see later in detail, this skeptical attitude acquired supremacy in the seventeenth century because the declining medieval worldview that it replaced was full of artificial theories, delusional charlatans, witches, sale of salvation and all kinds of follies. In this context, thinking people yearned for a scientific and established description of the physical universe that would ruin all that ridiculousness. We wanted to see around us a reliable and natural world. We wanted to get rid of superstition and myth and create a world in which we could develop economic security, without thinking that strange and curious things would arise in the dark to scare us. Because of this need, in a very understandable way we begin the modern era with a highly materialistic and simplified view of the universe.

To say that we sin by overzealous is little. Life in modern times began to be devoid of the inspiration that only the highest spiritual sense can bring. Even our religious institutions were affected. The miracles of religious mythology were often reduced to metaphors and the Churches became more concerned with social union, moral teaching and spiritual belief than with the search for a true spiritual experience.

However, with our perception of synchronicity and other spiritual experiences in the current historical moment, we are connecting with a genuine spirituality that was always a potential. In a way, this awareness is not even new. It is the same type of experience that some human beings had throughout history, documented by a treasure trove of authors and artists from all over the world, including Williams James, Carl Jung, Thoreau and Emerson, Aldous Huxley ( He called that knowledge "perennial philosophy") and, in recent decades, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, Fritjof Capra, Marilyn Ferguson and Larry Dossey.

However, the level at which these experiences are currently entering human consciousness is unprecedented. There are so many people who are having personal spiritual experiences, that we are creating nothing less than a new worldview that includes and extends to the old materialism and transforms it into something more advanced.

The social change we are talking about is not a revolution, in which the structures of society are destroyed and rebuilt when one ideology defeats the other. What is happening now is an internal change in which the individual changes first and the institutions of human culture seem more or less equal but are rejuvenated and transformed in situ, due to the new perspective of those who maintain them.

When this transformation occurs, it is possible that most of us continue in the general line of work that we always follow, in the families we love and in the specific religions that seem more true to us. But our vision of how we should live and experience work, family and religious life will be transformed considerably by integrating the superior experiences we perceive and acting on them.

My observation - as I said before - is that this transformation of consciousness is spreading in human culture through a kind of positive social contagion. Once a sufficient number of individuals begin to live this consciousness openly, to speak about it freely, others will see this consciousness modeled and then they will realize that it allows them to live out more than they already intuitively know in their inside. Later, these others will begin to emulate the new approach, they will discover in the long run those same experiences - and others - for themselves, and they will become models in their own right.

This is the process of social evolution and consensus production in which we are all engaged in these last years of the twentieth century. In this way we are creating, I believe, a way of life that will ultimately boost the century and the millennium. The purpose of this book is to analyze more directly the experiences that many of us share, examine the history of our awakening and look closely at the specific challenges of living this way of life every day.

I hope that this work confirms the reality implicit in the information illustrated in the first two novels of the series of Revelations and that, although you were complete, it helps to clarify our image of the new spiritual consciousness that is already being formed.

JR

Summer 1997

one

INITIAL INTUITIONS

Our new spiritual consciousness began to appear, I believe, in the late 1950s, when, at the very top of modern materialism, something very deep began to occur in our collective psyche. As if, standing on the pinnacle of centuries of material achievement, we had paused to ask ourselves: "And now what?" There seemed to be a massive intuition that something else was possible in human life, that it was possible to achieve a broader sense of fulfillment than our culture had been able to articulate and live.

The first thing we did with our intuition was, of course, to look at ourselves - or rather look at the intuitions and lifestyles we saw in the culture around us - with a sort of ruthless criticism. As was clearly documented, the emotional climate of the time was rigid and focused on the idea of ​​class. Jews, Catholics and women had a hard time reaching leadership positions. Blacks and other ethnic minorities were completely excluded. And the rest of the wealthy society suffered a generalized case of material categorization.

With the meaning of life reduced to the secular economy, the status was achieved by the success that was shown, from which all kinds of efforts were invented to be no less than others. Almost all of us were instilled in a terribly rigid outward orientation that made us judge ourselves always according to what the people around us might think. And we longed for a society that could somehow unlock our potential.

THE DECADE OF THE 60

That is why we began to ask our culture for more, which led to the many reform movements that characterized the 1960s. Many legal initiatives that sought racial and sexual equality, environmental protection and even opposition to disastrous war not declared in Vietnam. Now we can see that, below the shock, the 1960s represented the first massive starting point - the first "crack in the cosmic egg, " as Chilton Pearce called it - in the dominant secular worldview. ' Western culture, and to a certain extent human culture in general, began to overcome its materialistic orientation to seek a deeper philosophical meaning in life.

We began to feel, on a larger scale than ever, that our conscience and experience did not have to be limited by the narrow vision of the materialist era, that everyone should function and interact on a higher level.

We knew, on a deeper level than we could explain, that we could somehow escape and be more creative and free and be more alive as human beings.

Unfortunately, our first actions reflected the competitive dramas of the time. We all looked at others and the different institutions that irritated us and demanded that social structures be reformed. In essence, we looked around our society and said to others: "They should change." While this activism undoubtedly brought with it basic legal reforms that proved useful, it kept intact the most personal problems of insecurity, fear and ambition that always constituted the core of prejudice, inequality and environmental damage.

THE DECADE OF THE 70

By the time the 70s arrived, we began to understand this problem. As we will see later, the influence of depth psychologists, the new humanistic approach to therapy and the increasing volume of self-help literature in the market began to infiltrate the culture. We realized that we were asking others to change but we overlooked the conflicts we had inside. We began to see that, if we wanted to find that "more" we were looking for, we should put aside the behavior of others and look inward. To change the world, we must first change ourselves.

Almost overnight, going to see a therapist stopped having a negative stigma and became acceptable; It became fashionable to actively analyze our psyche. We discovered that a review of our early family history, as Freudians knew, often created a sort of perception or catharsis about individual anxieties and defenses, and also how and when these complexes originated in our childhood.

Through that process we were able to identify the ways in which we restrained our realization or repressed ourselves. We immediately realized that this inner focus, this analysis of our personal history, was useful and important. However, in the long run, we kept seeing that something was missing. We saw that we could analyze our internal psychology for years and that, nevertheless, every time we were in situations of great stress and insecurity, the same old fears, reactions and outbreaks reappeared.

At the end of the 70s we realized that our intuition of "more" could not be satisfied only with therapy. What we sensed was a new consciousness, a new sense of ourselves and a flow of superior experience that would replace the old habits and reactions that afflicted us. The fullest life we ​​felt had nothing to do with mere psychological growth. The new consciousness required a deeper transformation that could only be qualified as spiritual.

THE DECADES OF THE 80 AND 90

In the 80s, this perception made us go in three directions. The first was marked by a return to traditional religions. With a renewed spark of commitment many of us embark on a new reading of the Scriptures and the sacred rituals of our heritage, seeking the answer to our intuition in a deeper consideration of conventional spiritual paths.

The second course was a more general and personal spiritual quest that we directed ourselves, in which we sought a tighter understanding of the more esoteric spiritual paths that had been found throughout history.

The third direction was a total escape from idealism or spirituality. Frustrated with the introspection of the 60s and 70s, many wanted to re-capture the lethargic materialism of the 50s, when economic life alone seemed to be enough. However, this attempt to transform economic gratification into a substitute for that higher sense of life that we sensed perhaps led to simply an internal pressure to enrich ourselves quickly. Examples of the excesses that characterized the 1980s were the scandals of the savings and loan companies and the great corruption in the stock market.

I always defined the 80s as a return to the Wild West, in which the three impulses - an attempt to return to materialism and a renewed analysis of the spiritual both old and new - were agitated and competed violently. As we see now retrospectively, they were all attempts to find that something “more” that we felt around the corner. We experimented, pretended, competed to attract attention, thereby elevating much of what we did to the level of a superficial fashion and, in the long run, we were disappointed.

All in all, I believe that everything that happened in the 1980s was important, especially this first massive interest in different spiritual approaches. It was a necessary step that left us tired of inflated advertising and commercialism and took us to a deeper level. In a way it was a cleansing that led us to look for a true essence and convinced us in order to try a deeper change in our attitudes and our way of being.

In fact, I believe that the collective intuition of the 80s took the form of a basic message: beyond analyzing the spirituality of our traditional religions or the experiences described by the mystics of a more esoteric path, there is a profound difference. between knowing and discussing spiritual perception and really experiencing these perceptions on a personal level.

At the beginning of the 90s, well, we were in a very important place. If our intuition of the 60s was right and a fuller life experience was possible, we knew clearly that we should overcome a purely intellectual consideration and find the real experience. As a result, inflated advertising and fashion disappeared, but the search for real experience did not. That is why our openness to spirituality has now reached a new level of authenticity and discussion.

THE SEARCH FOR THE REAL

Within this framework were published The Ninth Revelation, The Tenth Revelation and a whole series of books that addressed the issue of real spiritual perception. Books that were read by millions of people around the world and that reached the mainstream precisely because they were trying to describe our spiritual desires in real terms, pointing out experiences that could really be lived.

In the 1960s, the predominant idealism of the time led me to a career in which I worked with teenagers with emotional problems and their respective families, first as a social worker and then as an administrator. Looking back, I see a deep relationship between these work experiences and the subsequent creation of the Revelation. Through working with these young people, who in all cases had experienced serious abuse in their childhood, I began to have a broader picture of what they had to overcome. To repair what had happened to them, they had to embark on a particular journey that in some ways should include the transcendent.

The anguish of abuse in the first years of life creates in children a marked need to control existence. They model dramas, sometimes serious and self-destructive, to make sense and thereby reduce their anguish. Breaking the scheme of these dramas can be extremely difficult, but the therapists succeeded, facilitating the perception of peak moments of success with athletic exercises, group interactions, meditation and other activities. These activities aim to promote the experience of a higher self that replaces the old identity and its concomitant reaction scheme.

To some extent, each of us is affected in one way or another by the same kind of anguish that battered children experience. Fortunately, in most cases this anguish is of a lower degree and our reaction schemes are not so extreme, but the process, the level of growth involved, is exactly the same. This awareness of what I saw in my work clarified in my mind what the whole culture seemed to be living. We knew that life, as usual, seemed to be missing something that could be reached through an inner transformative experience, a real change in the way we perceived ourselves and our life capable of producing a higher personal identity and more spiritual. The effort to describe this psychological trajectory was the basis of The Ninth Revelation.

THE REVELATION

The period in which I wrote The Ninth Revelation lasted from January 1989 to April 1991 and was characterized by a kind of trial and error process. Interestingly, while remembering previous experiences and writing about them, intertwining them in an adventure story, amazing coincidences occurred that emphasized the specific arguments I wanted to raise. Books appeared mysteriously, or he had timely encounters with the exact class of individuals he was trying to describe. Sometimes strangers approached me without an obvious motive and told me about their spiritual experiences. Forced to give them the manuscript, I discovered that their reactions always indicated the need for a revision or an extension.

The sign that the book was almost finished came when many of those people started asking me for copies of the manuscript for their friends. My first search for an editor was unsuccessful and hit the first of what I now describe brick walls. All coincidences were interrupted and I felt paralyzed. At that moment, I finally began to apply what I consider one of the most important truths of the new consciousness. It was an attitude that I knew and had experienced before but was not yet sufficiently integrated into my conscious to resort to it in a stressful situation.

I interpreted the total lack of editing opportunities as a failure, a negative fact, and that was the interpretation that slowed the coincidences that until that moment I felt had made me move forward. When I realized what was happening, I suddenly paid attention and made more corrections in the book emphasizing this point. And in my own life, I knew that I should treat this breakthrough like any other fact. What was the point? Where was the message?

A few days later, a friend told me that she had met an individual who had just moved to our area from New York, where she had worked in an editorial for many years. I immediately saw in my mind an image of myself going to see it, and the intuition contained a deep sense of inspiration. The next day I went to see him and the coincidences resumed. I wanted to work with individuals who planned to publish personally, he told me, and since my manuscript was obtaining a considerable amount of word of mouth references, it seemed to him that such an approach could succeed.

Soon we were ready to print and I had met Salle Merrill, who gave me a sensitive female perspective and a timely emphasis on the importance of giving. Of the first three thousand copies of the book we print, we mail or deliver in a personal way one thousand five hundred to small bookstores and individuals from Alabama, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. The word of mouth recommendations of the first readers took care of everything else.

In six months, the book had more than 100, 000 copies in print, circulated in all fifty states and was published in countries around the world. So many copies were sold

so fast because of the publicity that I did but because others began to give it to friends everywhere.

GO FOR OUR DREAMS

I mention this story to illustrate that our new spiritual consciousness has to do with the realization of our dreams, an experience that was always at the center of human effort everywhere. The universe really seems to be armed as a platform for the crystallization of our deepest and deepest aspirations. It is a dynamic system driven by nothing less than the constant flow of small miracles. But there is a catch: the universe is armed to respond to our conscience, but it will return only the level of quality we put into it. Por lo tanto, el proceso de descubrir qui nes somos y para qu estamos aqu y de aprender a seguir las coincidencias misteriosas que pueden guiarnos depende, en gran medida, de nuestra capacidad para ser positivos y encontrar una perspectiva consoladora en todos los hechos.

Vivir la nueva conciencia espiritual implica atravesar una serie de pasos o revelaciones. Cada paso ampl a nuestra perspectiva. Pero cada paso presenta asimismo su propia serie de desaf os. No basta simplemente con echar un vistazo a cada nivel de conciencia expandida. Debemos tener la intenci n de vivirlo, de integrar cada grado aumentado de conciencia a nuestra rutina diaria. Basta una sola interpretaci n negativa para frenarlo todo.

En las p ginas que siguen analizaremos esos pasos no s lo en t rminos de experiencia interior sino desde la perspectiva de sostenerlos firmemente en nuestras vidas y llevarlos a una pr ctica efectiva.

Extracto del libro: La nueva visi n espiritual

Cap tulo: 1. INTUICIONES INICIALES: La d cada de los 60 La d cada de los 70 Las d cadas de los 80 y 90 La b squeda de lo real La revelaci n Ir en pos de nuestros sue os.

La nueva visi n espiritual, (The Celestine Vision), por James Redfield