James Redfield is the author of the best-selling book, The Celestine Prophecy, which chronicles Redfield’s “Nine Insights” into how we can lead a life more attuned to its spiritual dimensions. After studying Eastern philosophies, including Taoism and Zen, while majoring in sociology at Auburn University in the 1970s, Redfield earned a master's degree in counseling and spent more than 15 years as a therapist to abused adolescents. During this time, he turned to the human potential movement for theories about intuition and psychic phenomena that would help his troubled clients. What he learned helped form ideas that would eventually find their way into The Celestine Prophecy.

In 1989, Redfield quit his job as a therapist to write full-time, synthesizing his interest in interactive psychology, Eastern and Western philosophies, science, futurism, ecology, history, and mysticism. He published The Celestine Prophecy in 1993 and has since written two sequels,The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision, and The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight. He is also the author of The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness, and coauthor (with Michael Murphy and Sylvia Timbers) of God and the Evolving Universe.The Celestine Prophecy movie, for which Redfield cowrote the screenplay and served as producer, was released in 2006.

Redfield has been awarded the highly prestigious Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Senate. He has also been honored by the International New Thought Alliance with their Humanitarian of the Year award, and by the Wisdom Media Group with the WorldView Award for engaging the discussion on the nature of human existence and for his ongoing efforts and contributions to the bettering of humanity. Redfield and his wife Salle Redfield host the popular Global Prayer Project, a twice-monthly teleconference and webcast offering guided prayer and meditation to uplift our world.