cover image What Really Matters

What Really Matters

Tony Schwartz. Bantam Books, $23.95 (472pp) ISBN 978-0-553-09398-8

Feeling empty despite the success of The Art of the Deal, which he coauthored with Donald Trump, Schwartz began meditating in 1988, thus embarking on a four-year quest in which he crisscrossed the country meeting mystics, psychics, philosophers, healers. He took breathing classes with LSD researcher Stanislav Grof, joined a dream-analysis workshop led by psychoanalyst Montague Ullman, did body exercises at California's Esalen Institute and was hooked up to biofeedback machines at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kans. He tapped an ``ideal performance state'' while playing tennis in a Florida training academy. He reports that a mind/body technique cured him of chronic back pain. Schwartz benefited most from use of the Enneagram, a system of classifying personality types said to help people overcome self-destructive behavior patterns. His spiritual odyssey, reflecting a smorgasboard of approaches, incorporates an insightful social history of the human potential movement with profiles of key figures like Esalen founder Michael Murphy, transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber and psychologist/guru Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass). (Mar.)