The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure Read Online Free PDF Page B

corrupt, they say, demanding an end to the churchmen’s reign over the minds of the people. New churches are being formed based on the idea that each person should be able to have access to the scriptures personally and to interpret them as they wish, with no middlemen.
    “As you watch in disbelief, the rebellion succeeds. The churchmen begin to lose. For centuries these men defined reality, and now, before your eyes, they are losing their credibility. Consequently, the whole world is being thrown into question. The clear consensus about the nature of the universe and about humankind’s purpose here, based as it was on the churchmen’s description, is collapsing—leaving you and all the other humans in western culture in a very precarious place.
    “After all, you have grown accustomed to having an authority in your life to define reality, and without that external direction you feel confused and lost. If the churchmen’s description of reality and the reason for human existence is wrong, you ask, then what is right?”
    He paused for a moment. “Do you see the impact of this collapse on the people of that day?”
    “I suppose it was somewhat unsettling,” I said.
    “To say the least,” he replied. “There was a tremendous upheaval. The old world view was being challenged everywhere. In fact, by the 1600s, astronomers had proved beyond a doubt that the sun and stars did not revolve around the Earth as maintained by the church. Clearly the Earth was only one small planet orbiting a minor sun in a galaxy that contained billions of such stars.”
    He leaned toward me. “This is important. Mankind has lost its place at the center of God’s universe. See the effect this had? Now, when you watch the weather, or plants growing, or someone suddenly die, what you feel is an anxious bafflement. In the past, you might have said God was responsible, or the devil. But as the medieval world view breaks down, that certainty goes with it. All the things you took for granted now need new definition, especially the nature of God and your relationship to God.
    “With that awareness,” he went on, “the Modern Age begins. There is a growing democratic spirit and a mass distrust of papal and royal authority. Definitions of the universe based on speculation or scriptural faith are no longer automatically accepted. In spite of the loss of certainty, we didn’t want to risk some new group controlling our reality as the churchmen had. If you had been there you would have participated in the creation of a new mandate for science.”
    “A what?”
    He laughed. “You would have looked out on this vast undefined universe and you would have thought, as did the thinkers of that day, that we needed a method of consensus-building, a way to systematically explore this new world of ours. And you would have called this new way of discovering reality the scientific method, which is nothing more than testing an idea about how the universe works, arriving afterward at some conclusion, and then offering this conclusion to others to see if they agree.
    “Then,” he continued, “you would have prepared explorers to go out into this new universe, each armed with the scientific method, and you would have given them their historic mission: Explore this place and find out how it works and what it means that we find ourselves alive here.
    “You knew you had lost your certainty about a God-ruled universe and, because of that, your certainty about the nature of God himself. But you felt you had a method, a consensus-building process through which you could discover the nature of everything around you, including God, and including the true purpose of mankind’s existence on the planet. So you sent these explorers out to find the true nature of your situation and to report back.”
    He paused and looked at me.
    “The Manuscript,” he said, “says that at this point we began the preoccupation from which we are awakening now. We sent these explorers