Keeping the Fear alive

James Redfield´s "The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision" (1996) is the sequel to the New Age publishing phenomenon "The Celestine Prophecy" by the same author. Like the first book, it´s written in the form of a novel, but the plot and the characters are just vehicles for the author´s spiritual message. In many ways, the sequel is worse, since the New Age lectures are even longer and extremely repetitive. This is somewhat ironic, since the ideas expounded upon are actually more interesting. They include near-death experiences, heaven and hell, reincarnation and the "soul group" concept. In many ways, "The Tenth Insight" is more explicitly "supernatural" or paranormal than "The Celestine Prophecy". And yet, it feels as if Redfield soon gets lost in his expositions. 

In "The Celestine Prophecy", the first-person narrator (who is unnamed) searched for a lost ancient scripture in Peru, a manuscript containing nine "insights" of a broadly New Age nature. In the sequel, the narrator travels to the Appalachians to find an even more advanced tenth insight. Meanwhile, a group of mad scientists are trying to find paranormal portals in an Appalachian valley, presumably to suck "free" energy out of the astral world and into ours (where it will be harnessed by the military-industrial complex, or some such shadowy cabals). After a series of visionary experiences, the narrator realizes that he is part of a "soul group" who unsuccesfully tried to stop a war against the Indians at the same place 200 years earlier. Brought together by their karma, they must now make another attempt to save the world. 

As already indicated, the message of the book is typically New Age. The eclecticism is there, with American Indian vision quests co-existing with dreams of advanced technology. Gnosticism and the Franciscan "Spirituals" (a radical faction within the Franciscan Order during the Middle Ages) are appropriated for the New Age. The utopian-evolutionary perspective is there, too. So is the pop psychology. Even dark periods in human history have some kind of meaning, and so has bad earthly experiences of individual humans. Indeed, our souls freely choose the conditions under which we incarnate. More peculiar are the author´s polemics against Christian fundamentalist apocalypticism. Or perhaps not, since Redfield grew up in the Deep South. 

I have many objections to "The Tenth Insight", but the main one at a time like this (July 2022) would be the dreams of a soon-to-come universal New Age utopia. Ironically, the character Joel Lipscomb, who represents "Fear", sounds more realistic than the narrator. The hard-nosed Joel manages to almost exactly predict America´s current predicament! 

Of course, we still have to overcome Fear, but presumably it must be done in some other way than chasing after utopian insights in a scenic North American valley...