c. 1999 Religion News Service

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. _With 10 million copies of”The Celestine Prophecy”in print and 6 million of its sequel,”The Tenth Insight,”spiritual novelist James Redfield has become a publishing phenomenon.

The soft-spoken Birmingham native, who maintains an Alabama home on a lake surrounded by pine trees, sees himself as an interpreter of universal religious trends.”What I see myself doing is trying to chronicle and illustrate what I believe is a budding spiritual renaissance emerging all over the world and crossing all religions,”Redfield said.”I’m trying to look at human culture and what people are moving to next.” His third novel,”The Secret of Shambhala,”continues the Celestine series with an adventure into the mythological utopian community of Shambhala, part of Tibetan Buddhist lore.”Shambhala is where people know how to pray to uplift the world,”Redfield said.

In August, Redfield and his wife, Salle, traveled to Tibet.”Tibet is a place of mystery, intrigue and physical beauty,”he said.”The Tibetan people are arguably the most spiritual in the world. They are concerned about making the world a better, more compassionate place.” The Redfields also visited China, an officially atheist communist country that reasserted control of Tibet in 1951, installed a communist government in 1953 and crushed a rebellion in 1959. China continues to undermine the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. “It’s a great juxtaposition of a spiritual culture and a non-spiritual culture,”Redfield said.

Tibet made the perfect setting for a novel that reveals what Redfield calls his eleventh spiritual insight _ that all people have prayer fields and send out strong prayer energy at all times, positive or negative, through their thoughts. “It’s really about a call to prayer and a challenge to this generation to meet some of the same challenges as the World War II generation,”said Redfield, whose father was a U.S. soldier who landed on Normandy beach. Instead of fighting military enemies, this time he hopes people will fight the world’s problems with prayer.”There’s a prayer field we create at all times,”Redfield said.”We’re really praying all the time.”That energy must be used to solve the problems of the world, he said.”Living a higher spiritual awareness is our call, our challenge.” Science is only beginning to address the power of prayer by studying the health of patients who have been prayed for, Redfield said. “Our spiritual intuition is that of course prayer works,”he said.”If prayer works, influence across space by the mind works.” Redfield, 49, has a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in counseling and psychology from Auburn University. He counseled Alabama juvenile offenders from 1975 to 1989. He self-published”The Celestine Prophecy”in 1993 and in less than a year sold 180,000 copies from the trunk of his car and in New Age bookstores. “There’s never been a self-published book that did that,”Redfield said.

Warner Books bought the rights to it in 1994. Since then Redfield’s books have been fixtures on national fiction bestseller lists.

His wife, Salle Merrill Redfield, has followed him into publishing with her books”The Joy of Meditating”and the newly released”Creating a Life of Joy.” The success of Redfield’s books increased the demand for spiritual writing and helped Mrs. Redfield sell 100,000 copies of her first book.

The Redfields are on a 10-city book tour in November that started on the East Coast and will end up in California.”People are so welcoming everywhere we go,”Salle Redfield said.

James Redfield notes that spiritual books similar to his were around long before he arrived on the scene. He pointed to Richard Bach’s”Illusions”and Carlos Castaneda’s series on Native American shamanism and spirituality as examples.

But he has been a primary force in the establishment of a genre called visionary fiction.”I made it more universal across cultures,”Redfield said.

IR END GARRISON