Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.28 AVERAGE
3.28 AVERAGE
An insipid, miserable, frigid, empty view of human life bereft of joy, fellowship, understanding, beauty or truth, packaged and presented as though it is the answer to all human problems and the culmination of cultural and spiritual progress.
What little plot exists is shockingly tedious. The writing is atrocious: designed, I think, to better circulate among people who can barely read, as they make better marks for the scam at the heart of this tract. This intentional dumbness is the same rationale behind the Nigerian people emailing you about your billion-dollar inheritance who never bother to improve their grammar: fixing it would be worse for the conmen, so they’d rather steer their efforts toward the people their scam is most likely to work on.
The book is thin, warmed over new-age hokum wrapping in a garish pyramid scheme celebrating American anti-intellectualism and mindless consumerism; we gag our way to the final pages only to discover we are supposed to give lots of money to the author and to any erstwhile friend who inflicted this wretched book on us, and then we are instructed to pass this paperback onwards to the next set of victims. There is no closer analogue than a venereal disease.
Mildly criminal extortion scheme aside, this book also includes a few scraps of utterly banal advice on human interactions and values, and this advice comes from a barely literate gleeful solipsist who you will never convince me has ever interacted with another human psyche nor had a normal conversation in his life.
The characters in this book - every last godforsaken one of them- are dumb receptacles, fenceposts, pod-folk, less than cut-outs. They are all walking zombies, horrific, lurching automated frankenpeople robotically animated by a diseased brain in some ghastly satanic pantomime of human interaction. This is to say every single cardboard character in the book are all named ‘Wil’ or ‘Phil’ and are all exactly the same, each thinks exactly the same, emotes exactly the same, is motivated by exactly the same contrived plot for exactly the same unconvincing reasons. Every character is no character at all, they are the Author. And this author has the smug self-confident righteousness and the piercing intellect of someone whose last three decades were spent huffing glue. Each interaction in the entire execrable book is as automatic and cold, and as rote as a visit to a fast-food drive-through.
“But wait!” you might say, “that’s unfair- Redfield isn’t a dramatist, he is more interested in folding his spiritual views into the form of a novel!”
An eye-watering terrible novel yes; a stain on human culture certainly, but it pales next to the gaping void that is Redfield grab-bag of spiritually bankrupt ideas. And those ideas include, specifically, that we humans should meander through life waiting for half-baked ideas to fall into our lap from whichever random dingleberry we ran into most recently and base our life on them. Conveniently, this means discouraging questions about whether Redfield himself has the faintest idea what he is talking about.
It also means that the braindead, drive-through social transactions that Redfield brutalises us with through every flat and inane chapter in the book are not just an injury against literature itself, and not only a devastating indictment of Redfield's own withered humanity, but this entirely dessicated view of what people and relationships are also forms the whole basis of Redfield's spiritual cosmology that he wishes to impart to us.
Understanding a person, for Redfield, then, is not a matter of seeing some part of yourself in them, or of ever deepening understanding of their desires, their struggles, their thoughts and hopes and their grief. It is, instead, about sitting by a forest or stream, whacking off until you’ve decided you have gained enough invisible energon cubes and then spouting meaningless jargon at them until you receive some hallucinated “message from the universe” *through them* that has nothing to do with what the actual person in front of you is pleading with you -begging you- to pause masturbating for a second and listen to.
It isn’t just that this creepy dismissal of human empathy is celebrated multiple times throughout the novel, it presents a catastrophic problem for Redfield who is trying to put forward a case for the value of his spiritual beliefs here. The built-in sociopathic disregard for other people that Redfield’s beliefs lead to leaks out into horrors even within invented marketing advertisement story that Redfield has crafted to sell these beliefs to us.
Let’s take for example the episode where someone is shot to death nearby and where any normal reaction would be trying to see whether the victim is dead or in need of hospital treatment. Instead, the protagonist here decides to sit with his eyes crossed for a few hours instead. This is because Redfield’s cosmology actually has no room in it for other people and their needs, instead it is wholly concerned with each person absorbing (or missing) the messages that the Universe itself is supposedly transmitting all the time in different ever more superstitious ways.
After lobotomising our own critical faculties in the first “insight”, and eviscerating our human compassion in the second and third, the lessons Redfield inflicts veer into a kindergarten model of psychology, and then start to make more and more grandiose pronouncements about the “emerging culture”. This level of presumption would be hard to swallow among even people who had done years of work to make sure they know what they’re talking about.
But Redfield seems not to have an understanding of any issue you could care to name.
For starters, Redfield appears to know nothing about Peru, except perhaps that Machu Picchu is there. He thinks they Mayans had something to do with it, which is moronic because it was Inca and plenty of high schoolers could tell you that the Mayan civilisation wasn’t in Peru. The complete absence of any depiction of modern Peru whatsoever is one of the better examples of oblivious White Man syndrome I’ve come across. I am not kidding when I say the single concession Redfield makes to his setting is that a single one (1!) of the endless parade of creepily identical characters that Redfield trots out is named “Pablo”. That’s it. And that is pretty much the level of engagement Redfield gives on every single thing in his book.
The Catholic Church is trying to suppress some Manuscript! Redfield knows nothing about the Catholic Church either, imagining that they’re threatened by the theory of evolution. The Catholic Church has plenty of problems, but that actually isn’t one. Having apparently never even talked to a Catholic person, Redfield has made them his cartoon villains here. Nope, James, being threatened by evolution is a hobby of dipshitted American Protestants.
Redfield doesn’t happen to know the first thing about what evolution is either, but this doesn’t stop him from thinking the significance of his brainfarts must surely have extraordinary implications for the evolution of the human species. Redfield is ignorant of everything including the entire central insight of Darwin’s theory, the demonstration that **completely unguided**processes resulting in differential reproduction give rise to speciation.
Redfield is also into “conscious evolution” and if that sounds to you like a completely made-up thing that doesn’t exist, you are in for a treat, because everything in this book - from the vibrating energy Redfield imagines he is seeing while he whacks himself off yet again - to the nauseating grandiose pronouncements about the future of human culture made by a man incapable of understanding even part of any current human culture or society - are completely made-up things that don’t exist.
Of course an author can write fiction or fictional cosmologies that lead readers to draw insights about the real world we live in. Many of my favourite authors do this exceptionally well. But Redfield’s book is the opposite of this, it is a lifeless, banal fictional cosmology that instead leaves the reader with a thoroughly demented misconception of how our world works: instead of growth, we receive a bizarre celebration of vague, self-absorbed intuition that impedes us from genuine understanding the people we encounter and engenders indifference—and then later contempt—for any effort to understand the world we have found ourselves in.
What little plot exists is shockingly tedious. The writing is atrocious: designed, I think, to better circulate among people who can barely read, as they make better marks for the scam at the heart of this tract. This intentional dumbness is the same rationale behind the Nigerian people emailing you about your billion-dollar inheritance who never bother to improve their grammar: fixing it would be worse for the conmen, so they’d rather steer their efforts toward the people their scam is most likely to work on.
The book is thin, warmed over new-age hokum wrapping in a garish pyramid scheme celebrating American anti-intellectualism and mindless consumerism; we gag our way to the final pages only to discover we are supposed to give lots of money to the author and to any erstwhile friend who inflicted this wretched book on us, and then we are instructed to pass this paperback onwards to the next set of victims. There is no closer analogue than a venereal disease.
Mildly criminal extortion scheme aside, this book also includes a few scraps of utterly banal advice on human interactions and values, and this advice comes from a barely literate gleeful solipsist who you will never convince me has ever interacted with another human psyche nor had a normal conversation in his life.
The characters in this book - every last godforsaken one of them- are dumb receptacles, fenceposts, pod-folk, less than cut-outs. They are all walking zombies, horrific, lurching automated frankenpeople robotically animated by a diseased brain in some ghastly satanic pantomime of human interaction. This is to say every single cardboard character in the book are all named ‘Wil’ or ‘Phil’ and are all exactly the same, each thinks exactly the same, emotes exactly the same, is motivated by exactly the same contrived plot for exactly the same unconvincing reasons. Every character is no character at all, they are the Author. And this author has the smug self-confident righteousness and the piercing intellect of someone whose last three decades were spent huffing glue. Each interaction in the entire execrable book is as automatic and cold, and as rote as a visit to a fast-food drive-through.
“But wait!” you might say, “that’s unfair- Redfield isn’t a dramatist, he is more interested in folding his spiritual views into the form of a novel!”
An eye-watering terrible novel yes; a stain on human culture certainly, but it pales next to the gaping void that is Redfield grab-bag of spiritually bankrupt ideas. And those ideas include, specifically, that we humans should meander through life waiting for half-baked ideas to fall into our lap from whichever random dingleberry we ran into most recently and base our life on them. Conveniently, this means discouraging questions about whether Redfield himself has the faintest idea what he is talking about.
It also means that the braindead, drive-through social transactions that Redfield brutalises us with through every flat and inane chapter in the book are not just an injury against literature itself, and not only a devastating indictment of Redfield's own withered humanity, but this entirely dessicated view of what people and relationships are also forms the whole basis of Redfield's spiritual cosmology that he wishes to impart to us.
Understanding a person, for Redfield, then, is not a matter of seeing some part of yourself in them, or of ever deepening understanding of their desires, their struggles, their thoughts and hopes and their grief. It is, instead, about sitting by a forest or stream, whacking off until you’ve decided you have gained enough invisible energon cubes and then spouting meaningless jargon at them until you receive some hallucinated “message from the universe” *through them* that has nothing to do with what the actual person in front of you is pleading with you -begging you- to pause masturbating for a second and listen to.
It isn’t just that this creepy dismissal of human empathy is celebrated multiple times throughout the novel, it presents a catastrophic problem for Redfield who is trying to put forward a case for the value of his spiritual beliefs here. The built-in sociopathic disregard for other people that Redfield’s beliefs lead to leaks out into horrors even within invented marketing advertisement story that Redfield has crafted to sell these beliefs to us.
Let’s take for example the episode where someone is shot to death nearby and where any normal reaction would be trying to see whether the victim is dead or in need of hospital treatment. Instead, the protagonist here decides to sit with his eyes crossed for a few hours instead. This is because Redfield’s cosmology actually has no room in it for other people and their needs, instead it is wholly concerned with each person absorbing (or missing) the messages that the Universe itself is supposedly transmitting all the time in different ever more superstitious ways.
After lobotomising our own critical faculties in the first “insight”, and eviscerating our human compassion in the second and third, the lessons Redfield inflicts veer into a kindergarten model of psychology, and then start to make more and more grandiose pronouncements about the “emerging culture”. This level of presumption would be hard to swallow among even people who had done years of work to make sure they know what they’re talking about.
But Redfield seems not to have an understanding of any issue you could care to name.
For starters, Redfield appears to know nothing about Peru, except perhaps that Machu Picchu is there. He thinks they Mayans had something to do with it, which is moronic because it was Inca and plenty of high schoolers could tell you that the Mayan civilisation wasn’t in Peru. The complete absence of any depiction of modern Peru whatsoever is one of the better examples of oblivious White Man syndrome I’ve come across. I am not kidding when I say the single concession Redfield makes to his setting is that a single one (1!) of the endless parade of creepily identical characters that Redfield trots out is named “Pablo”. That’s it. And that is pretty much the level of engagement Redfield gives on every single thing in his book.
The Catholic Church is trying to suppress some Manuscript! Redfield knows nothing about the Catholic Church either, imagining that they’re threatened by the theory of evolution. The Catholic Church has plenty of problems, but that actually isn’t one. Having apparently never even talked to a Catholic person, Redfield has made them his cartoon villains here. Nope, James, being threatened by evolution is a hobby of dipshitted American Protestants.
Redfield doesn’t happen to know the first thing about what evolution is either, but this doesn’t stop him from thinking the significance of his brainfarts must surely have extraordinary implications for the evolution of the human species. Redfield is ignorant of everything including the entire central insight of Darwin’s theory, the demonstration that **completely unguided**processes resulting in differential reproduction give rise to speciation.
Redfield is also into “conscious evolution” and if that sounds to you like a completely made-up thing that doesn’t exist, you are in for a treat, because everything in this book - from the vibrating energy Redfield imagines he is seeing while he whacks himself off yet again - to the nauseating grandiose pronouncements about the future of human culture made by a man incapable of understanding even part of any current human culture or society - are completely made-up things that don’t exist.
Of course an author can write fiction or fictional cosmologies that lead readers to draw insights about the real world we live in. Many of my favourite authors do this exceptionally well. But Redfield’s book is the opposite of this, it is a lifeless, banal fictional cosmology that instead leaves the reader with a thoroughly demented misconception of how our world works: instead of growth, we receive a bizarre celebration of vague, self-absorbed intuition that impedes us from genuine understanding the people we encounter and engenders indifference—and then later contempt—for any effort to understand the world we have found ourselves in.
This is the 2nd time I’ve read this book, and I listened to the audiobook.
You really have to like spiritual/new age stuff to enjoy The Celestine Prophecy. It’s different.
None of it is great…but the story is a great way to deliver the messages/information. And for that, I give it 4 stars.
You really have to like spiritual/new age stuff to enjoy The Celestine Prophecy. It’s different.
None of it is great…but the story is a great way to deliver the messages/information. And for that, I give it 4 stars.
Just started it but it's so artless and tedious. Just write a ten page pamphlet of ur dumb pseudo-spirituality and be done with it.
Update: finished now and feel the same way
Update: finished now and feel the same way
I am sorry but this is rubbish both by quality of writing and idea itself. And don't get me wrong I am actually very open minded regards spiritual perception of the world, energies, "coincidences" happening for reason,mystic quantum physics....but this is just way too much..save your money and look elsewhere...it's propably not coincidence that you are reading my review either;-)
inspiring
slow-paced
adventurous
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Worth the read. Makes you think. Not too complicated, a very easy read. If you're a voracious reader then it shouldn't take you more than an evening to finish this. And that evening will be splendid, I must say.
adventurous
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes