The Celestine Prophecy is a story of a mystery and a spiritual quest, a story of the seeking and the finding of the meaning of it all – the question of why asked and answered.

Early on in his story, James Redfield has one of his characters explain how the dominant Christian world view, that had persisted throughout the first fifteen centuries after Christ, fell gradually into disrepute and came to be viewed with disbelief by more and more of us. Since the fifteenth century especially, this has led to a collective search for new spiritual meaning, for meaning more relevant for the new times we have been entering.

With the fall of our belief in Christianity, what could we believe in? What was true? How did reality work, and how did it all fit together? What could we expect? What was our place in all this? Why was it as it was? Faced with these eternal and as yet unanswered questions, we sent out scouts. Some explored the inner world of imagination and consciousness. Some explored the world of the very big, some the very small – the world of galaxies, stars and molecular gas clouds, together with the world of quarks, quantum energy and uncertainty. Some explored the physical life that we all share and our own unique nature – explored our bodies, our origins, our own place, and ourselves in this reality.
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Some five hundred years later, we are just now beginning to hear back from the first of these scouts.

One of the first, Carl Jung, returned to tell us that beneath the seeming individuality of our consciousness there is a deeper, more collective level in which we are all essentially one. He showed us that there’s much more to consciousness than our little egos with their extremely limited and always one-sided viewpoints.

Another scout, Steven Hawking, in his book, A Brief History of Time, returned to show us the common frontier that we all share, as we continue to explore together the very big and the very small of our universe. He showed us that ultimately both realms contribute equally to reality. Hawking also suggested that the universe is as it is in order to create the conditions necessary for our existence – so that we can uniquely view reality as it truly is. He hinted that if there is a God, he is not a creator God, not a spiritual force in that sense, but rather the union of our unique consciousness with the rest of the dance of energy. God is the meaning given to the dance, and we are ourselves God when we are conscious of this meaning, yet still dancing with the rest. We are the consciousness of the universe, that part of the universe asking and seeking the answer to the question why.

Other scouts, the leading biologists of our time, returned to share with us their exciting adventures tracking down the secrets of DNA. They found that we share DNA, the exact same DNA, with all of life, that we contain the same DNA as the lowliest worm, as the wildest weed, as all of life. All life shares the same DNA, differing only in amounts, combinations, and varying degrees of complexity. We humans differ only in what has been added on to make us what we are. The percentage that separates us from the rest of life is very small. Ninety nine percent of our DNA is the same as that of the chimpanzee, a mere one percent accounting for our differences. We humans are not better than the rest of life, just a bit more complex. We are all made of the same clay – “all my relatives,” as the Native Americans say.

With our scouts returning and reporting upon true reality and our relations with it all, we are finding a new and more spiritually profound way to look at reality and our place within it. We are realizing our true spiritual purpose, that of understanding the meaning of the dance of life and energy. We are the mind of God. We are also realizing our true oneness with all life, finally realizing that we aren’t set above and distinct from the rest of creation, as the old religions would have had us believe. We are also the body of God.