Das Energi

Lots of platitudes. No guidance. "Be good". What is "good"??

i found a copy of this book in a thrift store in okc when i was 17. for a year i would read it everyday. after the southern babtist had their way with me i was looking for some truth. i found this book and formed my belief system around it. it has guided me thru life and now that i have learned more about life from experience, i'm glad mr. williams book was there to arm me. i emailed paul williams and told him how his book changed my life and not only did he write me back but, sent me a copy of waking up together. he's an awesome guy still trying to change the world.

"This is God speaking", says Williams at one point. Well yes, reading this book does rather feel like that much of the time. "Das Energi" is a mighty powerful and inspirational read. A dynamic (VERY dynamic) mix of Zen ideas, taoism, positive thinking and maybe a bit of Christian morality thrown in for good measure. However, some of the language does place the book firmly in the late sixties and early seventies (man!). Its still brilliant. Paul Williams presents us with quick, sharp "blows to the head" such as "Beware means be aware.", "Vote with your life. Vote yes.", "Stop showing off. It isn't what you do. Its what you are that matters.", "Babies see things as they really are" and so on. The uneven format of the book (could be a sentence on one page, a short paragraph on the next, then a short essay on the next) helps you to think more consciously in itself. Having read the book several times over, I finally realized what was missing for me. A sense of humour! An inspirational classic such as "Illusions" by Richard Bach for example, has the same enlightening quality but gives you a good chuckle too. Still, this is an extraordinary book and I thank Paul Williams for it wholeheartedly. Read this and WAKE UP! ;o)

Das Energi by Paul Williams lives on my bookshelf between Richard Bach's Illusions and Hugh Prather's Notes to Myself. I got this book as a gift when I was in my twenties, and it changed my whole view of the world. Since then, I have given multiple copies to other people as gifts.Paul Williams wrote Das Energi originally in the early '70's as a series of journal notes. The collection of thoughts soon developed an underground following for its insight, challenge to the dominant paradigms of truth, and breezy me-decade prose. Beauty, God, fear, truth, money, good, evil--these are just some of the topics dealt with in this browsable amalgamation of brief paragraphs and good humor.Paraphrasing one thought from the book: you don't grow just from getting up and getting another beer from the refrigerator; you grow when you do things you don't know if you can do. This particular thought stuck with me and has come back to inspire me to face what is difficult from time to time.Definitely worth your time...one of the few books that I keep in my permanent collection!

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

About 20 years ago a a friend gave me copies of Illusions and Das Energi...read them she said and move forward. You see I was searching for something but mostly myself. Das Energi brought me back to who I am, back to who i was running from and back to where I didn't think I wanted to be! Little did I know just how safe I was with myself. I keep my tattered copy close by at all times and refer to it in moments when my soul is straying or rather I am straying from it. My advice to you...get this book and don't just read it but experience it let each word and sentence penetrate every part of your heart, soul, mind and being. you will never be the same..or maybe like I did, find out It is okay to simply be......