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Futurists such as Thompson and McLuhan are talking about the mystic

intuitive experience. Others are focusing on the feeling experience. (Note

that no one is talking about the intellectual experience, which is

becoming as passé as psychoanalysis.)

Part of how you feel is how your body feels, which of course is directly

related to how your feelings feel. Wilhelm Reich's theories of character

armor (body defense against feelings) and the flow of energy within

the body foreshadowed the current Western interest in such systems

as bioenergetics, the Alexander technique, Rolfing, Hatha Yoga, and

Shiatsu. All these techniques seek to liberate the body and focus on

inner well-being as opposed to outer success.

Esalen, the number one growth center of the sixties, is now concentrating

on increasing body energy toward flowing with the universe. Among their

"new" techniques: tennis and golf!

Those deeply into body techniques claim that the story of our lives is

stored in aching muscles, low back pains, headaches, and all the other

aches we try to eliminate with tranquilizers, sedatives, and painkillers,

drowning our feelings in order to "feel better."

In accepting the fact that body feelings are inseparable from emotional

feelings, the question "How do you feel?" becomes more relevant today

than ever.

When I was a child, I wouldn't dream of telling people what I felt

unless it was an "up" feeling, nor would I divulge my feelings about

another person unless they were positive. But it was O.K. to describe

the bellyaches and headaches that resulted from the fear or anger or

other taboo emotions I couldn't talk about.

Nowadays people express their feelings about rage, sex, sorrow --

you name it -- with the ease that their parents once talked about the

weather. Which may be one of the factors that led Jean-Paul Sartre,

in a recent interview, to predict a future "transparent man" in whom a

thought would be immediately visible, eliminating the need or desire to

hide it or pretend another.

The keynote of the present is in the words "unity" and "integration."

Thus, the new disciplines seek to integrate mind, body, and soul --

how we sit, the way we breathe, what we eat, what our inner voices tell us,

how our gut reacts, who we really are -- so that we can experience our

totality, our wholeness, our oneness with the universe.

A lot of this may not sound especially new and, in fact, a lot of it

isn't. What is new is the way it is becoming known. In Arica,* I went

through meditations and special exercises to experience my oneness with

all living things and my harmony with the vast universe. In the past,

the closest I might have come to this understanding was by listening to

someone pontificate from a pulpit or lectern on the ways of God.
* A self-transformation discipline developed by Oscar Ichazo,
    in Chile, to improve clarity of mind and body through a forty-day
    curriculum of exercise and movement for the physical body, and
    meditation, mantram, and individual analysis for spiritual and
    cognitive growth.

Which gets me back to est . If what you have, what you do, what

you think you are supposed to be, isn't working very well; if hard

work, success, romantic love and all the other concepts you were taught

were important as a child no longer seem to have meaning in your life;

then maybe it's time to look elsewhere, away from the tenets of your

past into the here and now of your experience. One way to describe

what est is all about is to say it's into the here and now of

experienced experience.

In experiencing your own nature in the est training, the est literature states, you are able to transform your ability to experience

life. More specifically, the training offers an opportunity to realize

a transformation of your experience of knowing; of your experience of

experiencing; of your experience of self; of your experience of others.

Werner Erhard, est 's founder, described the training in

an