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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The spirituality of economics, and vice versa, May 31, 2002
There are two books I regard as the absolute cream of "hippie spirituality"; this is one, and the other is Stephen Gaskin's _This Season's People_. This one is something like a hippie _Tao Te Ching_, and (as another reviewer has noted) its focus is on the energy that some traditions call "ch'i".Paul Williams originally published this book in 1973 and it became an underground classic in pretty short order. Its title is intended to parallel Marx's _Das Kapital_; Williams's essential thesis is that just as capital replaced land in modern economies, so "energy" will replace capital. (I'm putting the word "energy" in quotation marks so that it won't be misunderstood as having something to do with, say, solar heating or wind electric power generation.) Readers with a background in economics may find Williams unconvincing on this point if they don't see what he's really driving at. For example, at one point he declares roundly that money and property are obsolete concepts. What he really means is that we're on the verge of transcending these concepts _as_ the concepts on which the economy is founded. But he doesn't mean we just won't use money or property any more, or that we'll do away with the concepts altogether; after all, we didn't just stop using land when we started using "capital," did we? The real, underlying point is that money and property can't be shared in the way that ideas and energy can be. If I give you some of my physical/material property, I have less myself; but if I share an idea with you, then we _both_ have it. (Which is, by the way, a powerful argument against legally enforceable patents, as distinguished from copyrights and other sorts of intellectual property.) Similarly, if I share my "energy" with you, I don't become less conscious or receive less of what I need; just the opposite. For Williams, the spiritual laws governing "energy" are the true foundation on which the human economy is really based. Williams states these spiritual laws and fleshes out the book with lots of spiritual advice of the hippie-wisdom variety; you can look at the book's sample pages to get an idea of where Williams is coming from in this regard. Again, Williams's essential thesis is that the role of these laws in the spiritual economy is about to become clear. Writing in 1973, he was convinced that a sea change in human consciousness was just around the corner and we were about to take the next step in planetary evolution. Was he wrong? I don't think so, but this isn't the place for an extended discussion of the point. Suffice it to say here that the growth of the Internet and the recent development of intellectual property law, prosaic though these phenomena may seem to some, are also an indication that the economy is moving in exactly the direction Williams describes in this book. At any rate, this book is a modern spiritual classic, a masterpiece of "hippie spirituality," and a good exposition of perennial philosophy. It also, but less obviously, belongs to a sort of "underground libertarian" tradition that predates the '60s: the "energy" in this book is the same "energy" Isabel Paterson was writing about in _The God of the Machine_. Williams's approach to spirituality also goes well with Mary Ruwart's _Healing Our World_, a book I strongly recommend to any libertarian hippies (and anyone else) who may be reading this review.
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by Paul Williams
by Stephen Gaskin
by Eckhart Tolle
by Ram Dass
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