The Future of the Body by Michael Murphy

In the oral and written histories of every culture, there are countless records of men and women who have displayed extraordinary physical, mental, and spiritual capacities. In modern times, those records have been supplemented by scientific studies of exceptional functioning. Are metanormal attributes latent within everyone? What is the evidence that all humanity has unrealized capacities for self-transcendence, that the limits of human growth are not fixed? And are there specific practices that ordinary people can do to develop these abilities? Michael Murphy has studied these questions for over thirty years. In The Future of the Body, he presents evidence for metanormal perception, cognition, movement, vitality, and spiritual development from more than 3,000 sources. Surveying ancient and modern records in medical science, sports, anthropology, the arts, psychical research, comparative religious studies, and dozens of other disciplines, Murphy has created an encyclopedia of exceptional functioning of body, mind, and spirit. He paints a broad and convincing picture of the possibilities of further evolutionary development of human attributes. By studying metanormal abilities under a wide range of conditions, Murphy suggests that we can identify those activities that typically evoke these capacities and assemble them into a coherent program of transformative practice. Such practice, he believes, if embraced by enough people, would constitute a crucial next step in the world's evolutionary adventure.

In 1961 Michael Murphy cofounded, with Richard Price, Esalen Institute, a learning center in California that fosters change in individuals and society, and has hosted thousands of human potential workshops and conferences led by such notables as Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Joan Borysenko, Allen Ginsberg, and Linus Pauling, to name a few. In 1980, he helped create the Esalen Institute's Soviet American Exchange program, which, among other things, initiated the first live television space bridges and hosted president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin during his first visit to the United States. Murphy is the author of The Future of the Body, Golf in the Kingdom, and An End to Ordinary History, and the coauthor of The Psychic Side of Sports. He lives in San Rafael, California.