Book Review

The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature

N Engl J Med 1993; 328:216January 21, 1993

Article

The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature
By Michael Murphy. 785 pp. Los Angeles, Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992. $30. ISBN: 0-87477-686-4

In this book Michael Murphy, cofounder of the Esalen Institute and an activist in the “human potential movement” for 30 years, presents an encyclopedic overview of extraordinary human physical, mental, and spiritual capacities. In 785 pages with more than 1000 footnotes and 3000 references, he surveys the oral and written histories of ancient and modern cultures as well as contemporary scientific studies of exceptional functioning. As an accurate summary of this vast literature, his book is unmatched in either scope or scholarship. Murphy's editorializing on the meaning of these extraordinary abilities, however, while true to the spirit of the popular human potential movement, espouses a minority opinion unpalatable both to mainstream science and to traditional spiritual disciplines. His thesis is basically that these examples of performance far beyond the ordinary attest to an imminent evolutionary growth spurt, one that we have the ability to accelerate.

Murphy includes in his purview 12 categories of extraordinary capacities: perception, including extrasensory processes; somatic self-regulation; communication, again including the extrasensory; “excessive vitality”; movement; influence over the environment, including psychokinesis and spiritual healing; inexplicable joy; intellect, including artistic genius and mystical intuition; volition; “personhood,” including both cosmic unity and unique individuality; love; and altered bodily processes. The success of this book is in its melding of data from sources as divergent as contemporary neuroscience, the annals of sports and martial arts, anthropology, comparative religious studies, the arts, and parapsychology. Although the quality of the data varies greatly from one discipline to another, Murphy presents them in sufficient detail and with sufficient citation of primary sources to allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

An argument critical to Murphy's work is that different disciplines require different exploratory tools, and that the scientific technology of one field should not necessarily be applied to others. Obviously, the double-blind, randomized experiments so important to pharmacologists are not helpful to astronomers. But Murphy argues further that disciplines sometimes regarded as pseudoscience, as well as spiritual disciplines and the arts, all have some internal technique for testing hypotheses and verifying data, and that all data verified by these diverse processes are as relevant to ultimate reality as are the facts of the “hard sciences.” Whereas we are accustomed to thinking of science as the tool for expanding knowledge, Murphy argues that there are equally valid parallel paths. In this book he attempts to make those paths intersect.

Having argued that these exceptional abilities presage the next phase of human evolution, Murphy presents a program of “integral practices” to accelerate that evolution, ranging from biofeedback and psychotherapy to athletic training and martial arts to yoga and meditation.

Medical scientists and clinicians can well imagine the objections of mainstream science. Parapsychological research, which Murphy takes seriously and evaluates fairly but critically, is often rejected out of hand as incompatible with the materialist worldview predominant in science, and the truths developed by spiritual disciplines, which Murphy takes equally seriously, are often rejected as unprovable and therefore scientifically meaningless. Thus, many of the data so impressively catalogued in this book and so central to Murphy's theory of our ongoing evolutionary transformation will be regarded by scientists as flawed, or at least suspect.

Less obvious to medical practitioners and researchers are the challenges this book poses to established spiritual traditions. Most Eastern philosophies and Western mystical disciplines alike view the physical world as either a distraction or a necessary intermediate step that must be transcended on the path to truth. The extraordinary physical and mental abilities Murphy has painstakingly documented in this book, which he presents as evidence of humankind's future potential, are likewise regarded by most spiritual teachers as distractions or barriers to true spiritual transcendence. Murphy is not oblivious to this problem; in fact, he criticizes spiritual disciplines for seeking to transcend the body and the ego, which he argues are equally vital to our evolutionary development.

This book will fascinate anyone interested in the further limits of human capacities. It catalogues the extensive evidence for them and explores their possible mechanisms, interactions, and implications in a lively but never sensational style. Murphy's comprehensive scholarship is unimpeachable, and this book is an outstanding guide to primary sources. Although the answers he comes up with may seem naive to scientists and shallow to followers of spiritual disciplines, readers would do well to ponder his questions.

Bruce Greyson, M.D.
University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, CT 06030