The success of The Celestine Prophecy proves there's always money to be made by telling people exactly what they want to hear. Although the book claims to be "an adventure" about the coming spiritual revolution in world consciousness, its meandering story is merely a pretext to link a series of didactic dialogues and "feel-good" predictions for the near future. In its slick packaging, the book serves as a sort of tabloid psychic for the "smart set."

I first learned of James Redfield's New Age novel in 1994 when a producer recommended it to me. I next heard it praised by a casting agent on her voice mail recording. The Hollywood Reporter reported that Cathy Lee Crosby was trying to option its film rights. When I finally got around to reading it on the New York set of The Money Train, six different women approached me to admire my taste. Curiously, all praise has come from women. Men could only comment that they heard good things about it — from wives and girlfriends. Whatever its faults, the book appears to be a chick magnet.

The Celestine Prophecy's plot is a paint-by-number utopian potboiler. An Outsider enters a Utopian Society in which he learns New Things about human interrelations. (Sharing, caring, and a clean environment are healthful for children and other living things. Greed, competition, and Western patriarchy are sickening the planet.) The Outsider is Skeptical at first, but the Utopia is filled with Beautiful And Compassionate People who explain their world to him with Tolerance And Understanding. Left free to decide for himself, the Outsider's Mind comes to realize what his wiser Feelings have all along intuited: that this New Society is the inevitable Wave Of History. He has seen The Future, and knows that it is a Good Thing.

In The Celestine Prophecy, the Outsider is a yuppie who is vaguely dissatisfied with his successful life. Something is missing. He coincidentally meets an old flame — a beautiful, liberated, thirtysomething yuppette — who tells him of an ancient manuscript of Nine Insights found in the rain forests of Peru. (Where else, but a rain forest?) She only knows the First Insight, and it concerns coincidences.

Coincidences are spiritual harbingers, and the First Insight is that many people throughout the world will one day notice that they're having an awful lot of coincidences, and that it must all mean something. This mass awareness and yearning for something more (at least, among the enlightened) will spark a New Age in spirituality, science, politics, and psychology.

Flaky readers seeking personal validation will interpret their buying this book as just such a coincidence, proving both its thesis and their own spiritual advancement. Redfield knows how to stroke a crowd's ego, making it clear that such silly happenstances are included in what he means: If you bought the book, you're likely hot stuff. (Skeptics may wish to peruse John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy, in which Paulos demonstrates via probability formulas just how common "coincidences" are in day-to-day life.)