BEING AND CARING

If you've been getting ""only partial satisfaction"" from your chosen branch of the human potential movement--if you're meditating like sixty but not relating too well, or if you've unscrambled your life scripts but just can't be here now--this might be the book for you. It bills itself as the ultimate synthesis of all those ""self-help and cult books,"" a down-to-earth, easy-to-use guide to ""the systematic development of each important part of your personality,"" salted with ""the wisdom of great philosophers and prophets of East and West."" The two authors have melded themselves into one colloquial ""I"" in what they hope is an intimate dialogue with ""you,"" the reader; plain-English explanations of ideas drawn from Gestalt psychology, Freud, Eric Berne, Carl Rogers, B.F. Skinner (even!), and others alternate with solitary and group exercises, anecdotes about people like you and me, and quotations from Nietzsche, Don Juan, Lao Tzu, the Talmud, Ouspensky, Gibran, Chief Joseph, the Book of Luke, etc. The motive, of course: to become aware and thus free of emotional blocks and habits and the internalized expectations of others; to tune in to the body's barometer and to the ""OK-ness"" of what you are and feel. All this is available in greater depth and equal redundancy elsewhere. Simplicity of language might conceivable make this book useful to people (if any exist) still unacquainted with current psychologies, if its small print and high price do not dissuade them.