The Celestine Prophecy Fulfilled
The Insight of No Free Will
The Celestine Prophecy Fulfilled is a passionate thesis against free will.
Nick Vale’s philosophical text The Celestine Prophecy Fulfilled suggests that abandoning the idea of free will could propel humanity to a more compassionate era.
Picking up where the The Celestine Prophecy—which “foresaw that human beings would be able to achieve a huge breakthrough in spiritual consciousness”—left off, the book proposes that the absence of free will was missing from that book’s insights. Without the idea of free will holding people back, it says, people might heal and become more empathetic. Its resultant vision of society involves rules and morals sans concepts like religious persecution and the ego. Utilizing rationales like causality and nature versus nurture, it submits a passionate thesis against free will.
However, the book’s explorations of free will are often unconvincing. For example, in the illustration of a child being asked to choose between chocolate and vanilla ice cream, curiosity is used as an explanation for why different choices might be made on different dates. Other illustrations also fall short, as with an anecdote about a man getting a job at a car dealership when he’s down on his luck, used to complement the notion that all is predetermined and that people have no control over their lives.
Progressing in stream-of-consciousness style, the prose is verbose and repetitive, turning over the concept of free will’s absence ad nauseam. Lengthy descriptions of concepts like the “2 Levels of Reality” hold audiences at a distance with their esoteric flourishes:
Understanding the difference between the pragmatic Waking/Competition Hours blameless/faultless responsibility level and the fundamental level/Bedtime/no more competition Hours of innocence and no responsibility or accountability level is of utmost importance to the Insight of No Free Will.
Muddled syntax here and elsewhere also impedes the book’s progression, as do the two forewords, which echo the central assertions that free will does not and cannot exist. The levels of reality are addressed in two separate chapters as well.
Elsewhere, sentences and terms appear in all caps to denote enthusiasm, but the technique is distracting, as is the excessive, unnecessary use of quotation marks around key words throughout. In the end, the text feels too wandering to be compelling, and its analysis too monotonous to convince audiences of its perspective on free will.
A passionate philosophical text, The Celestine Prophecy Fulfilled argues that the idea of free will prevents society from evolving.
Reviewed by
Jennifer Maveety
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
