Remember how the universe is all energy? Well, the Insights also teach that children need energy growing up — for that healthy glow! So people shouldn't have more children than they can energize — which is achieved by looking at children "with regard". One to zero child per couple is ideal. Good for the child, and good for the planet.

Typical of Redfield's loopily unrealistic characters: a fortysomething Peruvian peasant with only one child, which she bore in her late 30s, by a younger husband. (Finally, an indigenous Third World peasant that American feminists can identify with!)

More good news from these "ancient" Insights. It's unimportant that a child be raised by his own parent(s), only that he be raised by at least one caregiver committed to focusing all of his or her energy (literally) onto that child. Welcome news to single parents who deposit their kids at daycare.

Food is an important source of spiritual energy. Vegetables contain more and purer energy than meat. Just compare their glows. (Naturally, vegans glow attractively than meat-eaters.) The book's "scientific explanation" is that plant energy is depleted when consumed by cows. Thus does Redfield mix religion, pseudo-science, and squishy-left politics in typical New Age fashion.

But the highest concentrations of energy reside in pristine rain forests, so it's important to leave them uncut, and to reduce the human population to 100 million to create room for new forests. This gels neatly with the optimum one-to-zero child per caregiver.

Money and greed are bad energy. (And make you glow ugly.) In the future there will be no money. People will take what they need and give back what they can. Sounds like Marxism? Yes, but Communism only failed, the yuppie learns, not for economic reasons, but because the Soviets were atheistic and materialistic, rather than spiritual. But in the coming New Age, people will be spiritual, so they won't want unnecessary material goods which rape the planet, and which corporations convince us we want, but don't really. And because everyone will be Really Nice, nobody will feel pressured to horde more food than they need for their own use, because they won't be afraid that it won't be there if they need it, because, it will. So there'll be plenty for everyone. Especially since there'll only be 100 million people on the planet (at most, but hopefully less), which is really all that a healthy Earth can sustain and still have room left over for all those new rain forests.

Barter will be the "new" currency. And those without skills or goods to barter can still trade energy for food, in the form of spiritual insights. Everyone's got those! But here Redfield (with his usual sloppiness) contradicts himself. He'd previously stated that minor personal insights (as opposed to the Big Nine Insights) are exchanged whenever two people meet, even if they are unaware of it. So really, neither party owes anything to the other. The poor man earns no food for his insight, having already been paid with the rich man's insight, even if the rich man was unaware of providing one. (It all has something to do with the coincidences in every encounter.)