The spiritual revolution of the west.
The prosperity brought on by the end of the second world war made a lot of things accessible to the masses. It made a lot of people (on our side of the world anyway) feel more secure in the world. Perhaps unconsciously they’ve replace the one thing they could always count on for shelter— religion—with the confirmation that they could after all always have ‘real’ material shelters: a house, a TV, a wife, a baby or two and a car, because they had a good and safe job and that was reality, and they deserved it, because they were good people.
In the sixties and beginning of the seventies, thousands of their grown-up spoiled ‘good kids’ decided they needed a little more adventure. Their sense of safety in the world, their money, and some major technological improvement allowed them, to travel to India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Tibet where they had heard they could live like kings on a dime. There, they were faced with brutal poverty, but also fascinated with some weird new to me ‘non-religions’. There, they could live and love so easily. They could give and people around them would be grateful and look up to them. They could do nothing all day, call it meditation and feel fulfilled and content.
In this spirit of adventure and innovation, full of love, hepatitis B and self fulfillment, they came back home with fantastic discoveries they could call their own and proceeded to try and ‘enlightened’ their parents.
Of course that didn’t go over so well so they had to leave and apply what they had learned somewhere else. They lived in communes for a while. After a few years they realized they might just have to get a job. Which worked pretty well until 82. Life got more difficult after the crash.
By the 90’s they realized that they had fallen in the same trap as their parents. They had a job, a car, a family, and an oversized gut, but they still felt empty. They couldn’t travel to cheaper countries anymore, but they still remembered what they were looking for.
So they stated reading and writing, remembering what they’d learned once as children in Sunday school, blending it in with interesting stuff they had seen abroad, and removing the indigestible bits, they still hadn’t grasp…
In 1993, The Celestine Prophecy was published.
There are a lot of great authors of spiritual books in the west, but unfortunately or fortunately, James Redfield isn't one of them. I guess the book doesn't hurt anybody. it had good intentions after all. It is just like a bit of junk food every once in a while. To me the book is more like a sad benchmark of where we are at in terms of spirituality.
In the sixties and beginning of the seventies, thousands of their grown-up spoiled ‘good kids’ decided they needed a little more adventure. Their sense of safety in the world, their money, and some major technological improvement allowed them, to travel to India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Tibet where they had heard they could live like kings on a dime. There, they were faced with brutal poverty, but also fascinated with some weird new to me ‘non-religions’. There, they could live and love so easily. They could give and people around them would be grateful and look up to them. They could do nothing all day, call it meditation and feel fulfilled and content.
In this spirit of adventure and innovation, full of love, hepatitis B and self fulfillment, they came back home with fantastic discoveries they could call their own and proceeded to try and ‘enlightened’ their parents.
Of course that didn’t go over so well so they had to leave and apply what they had learned somewhere else. They lived in communes for a while. After a few years they realized they might just have to get a job. Which worked pretty well until 82. Life got more difficult after the crash.
By the 90’s they realized that they had fallen in the same trap as their parents. They had a job, a car, a family, and an oversized gut, but they still felt empty. They couldn’t travel to cheaper countries anymore, but they still remembered what they were looking for.
So they stated reading and writing, remembering what they’d learned once as children in Sunday school, blending it in with interesting stuff they had seen abroad, and removing the indigestible bits, they still hadn’t grasp…
In 1993, The Celestine Prophecy was published.
There are a lot of great authors of spiritual books in the west, but unfortunately or fortunately, James Redfield isn't one of them. I guess the book doesn't hurt anybody. it had good intentions after all. It is just like a bit of junk food every once in a while. To me the book is more like a sad benchmark of where we are at in terms of spirituality.
posted by minetto at 4:46 PM
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