I first read this book as a teenager while at a family reunion. As an introvert, I said my "hellos" to various relatives - most of whom I barely knew, if at all, then I hunkered down in the garden and got lost in Paul Williams's words, oblivious to those around me. Later, on the car ride home, my mother screamed at me for being an antisocial "weirdo." Luckily, the book's wisdom steeled me against the onslaught. Karma, I guess. So, I just ordered it again. I hope I find it just as groovy as I did 35 years ago.

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.

I'm sure this is a wonderful book but the printing is so faint I have to get a magnifying glass and good light to read it. The only parts that are legible are the page numbers. The friend who recommended this book says hers is regular print and reading no problem. I try and read some of it every day but quite often I don't which is a shame.

This was a replacement for a loved book that was lost. My wife is very fond of it.

Incredible book! Someone gave me one back in 1990 and I've read it a thousand times, and the older I get, the more I wake up, the more I realize how profoundly awake Paul was. I buy these to give to others...

More inspiring than most motivational books out there- and the ideas are still somewhat provocative after all these years; it stands up to repeat readings and I recommend it be read in tandem with another book called Echoes From A Bottomless Well. They really compliment each other and will get you thinking even if you don't care for philosophy books.

I was do happy to find this book on Amazon's website.My aged copy is in a drawer by my bed and occaisionally, I open a page looking for guidance. Knowing that this would be a welcome book for one of daughters, I ordered it for her and she loves it. Probably, I will order some more copies for some friends as well.

There are some good bits in here that are just as solid today as when it was first written, such as this one:

Two people do not have to agree on what's right to be together.
They just have to want to be together.
If that sounds simple, try it some time.

Well I did try it one time. It was that simple, and it worked. A lot of other bits in here are common feel-good self-help insights that are not new (and were not when the book came out) but just verbally repackaged in a way that spoke to the generation it was written for; some of it hilariously so.

Other bits in here are pure hippie poppycock and rubbish, then and now. Just a bunch of puff-pass campfire garbage that some dude is using on a girl to impress her and hopefully score.

I first read this book in high school with a friend. We both loved it and marveled at some of the phrasing, but even then I could suss out the bullsh*t. Now at the age of 44 I bought it again just for a lark, and to see what resonates 25+ years later. A lot less is the answer. I still smile at some of it, but so much more of it is just naive, delusional and annoying; of no help whatsoever. Gratuitous verbal riffing.

I kept the rating's head just above water at 3 stars though, because I still think it's worth taking a look at.