The Head Game

By R.Z. Sheppard

POWERS OF MIND by ADAM SMITH 418 pages. Random House. $10.

On a slow day Western history might be reduced to a tale of two apples. The first comes wrapped in art and myth: Eve took the bite and mankind got its eviction notice from Paradise. The second is baked in its own apocryphal jacket: Isaac Newton got his deep insight into gravity when struck by a falling fruit. Result: a new brand of physics that relocated us even farther from the godhead--and a reverse anthropomorphism that saw the human body as a machine. Today Adam Smith implies the West has an urge to work its way back, past technology, past sin itself.

Smith's special, almost occult power is an ability to read the marketplace. He wrote The Money Game at the peak of the 1960s' go-go stockmarket. In 1972 he successfully sold short with Super Money, an amusing chronicle about the fall of top-heavy conglomerates. Powers of Mind is further evidence that Smith's publishing instincts are like those of a surfer who knows just when to catch the curl of the wave. For the New Purity is upon us--or at least upon the affluent who enroll in TM classes, biofeedback training, Esalen body rubs and Zen tennis lessons. Adam Smith has had a crack at all of these and more.

In real life, Smith is George Jerome Waldo (Jerry) Goodman, novelist and screenwriter (The Wheeler Dealers), former editor of the financial monthly the Institutional Investor, and a man who has enjoyed most of the good things as defined by most of the human race.

But they are not enough. Now 45 and quoting the beginning of Dante's Divine Comedy ("Midway upon the journey of our life,/ I found that I was in a dusky wood"), Goodman takes the reader on a well-packaged tour just the other side of that wall we call common sense.

"The mind is a drunken monkey," says Richard Albert, a former associate of Timothy Leary and now known as Baba Ram Dass. Goodman, his skepticism crumbling, subjects his mind to all sorts of sobering-up exercises: Transcendental Meditation, sensory deprivation and "rolfing," a painful massage that seems to have been developed during a subway rush hour. The purpose of these activities is to shut out the world, to listen to the wisdom of one's body Goodman finds that such pursuits are surprisingly effective--although success can be full of paradox. "Concentration is effortless effort, is not trying, " claims Tim Gallwey, a former follower of Guru Maharaj Ji and author of The Inner Game of Tennis. Goodman gives it a try and improves his serve.

As in any tour, there are obligatory stops: Esalen, ESP and the elusive Carlos Castaneda, whom Goodman traps briefly in a stair well. "I'm Carlos' double," the gentleman insists before scooting off. Indeed, many people are not what they seem to be. Swami Hal, for example, is a 260-lb. mystic who runs a kind of Boys' Town ashram in the Northwest wilderness and talks like a dead-end kid.

Uncertainty Principle. When the physicists begin to talk like Zen masters, Powers of Mind shakes loose of the familiar. Goodman shares his genuine wonder and enthusiasm at discovering the mysteries of subatomic particles -- "quarks," which seem to be more idea and process than material. In quantum mechanics and Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, notions of scientific objectivity fly out the window. The observer is part of the process; he affects what is being observed by his very presence.

This key idea has been around for many years. It underlies the sort of participatory journalism that Smith-Goodman practices so well. Yet in a culture renowned for its ability to spread knowledge and information, quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle are surprisingly little known. The value of Powers of Mind is that it amplifies such theories and finds intriguing parallels in the religion and poetry of the past. Given his subject matter, the author could have settled for far less. Instead, he provides a bestseller with a considerable educational function as well as high entertainment.

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