The Passionate Mind Revisited takes readers on a liberating inner journey into the workings of their mind that can transform the way people look at themselves and the world. This expanded inquiry reflects the authors’ own and the world’s evolution since The Passionate Mind came out in 1974. The original book focusing on the individual is now extended to social and philosophical spheres and global challenges, exploring how the world’s life-threatening dramas are largely a function of people’s genetic and cultural conditioning, worldviews, beliefs, and values. Kramer and Alstad assert that humanity is on an evolutionary cusp requiring further awareness and conscious social evolution. Worldviews can create rigid beliefs and narrow identities that are destructive in a world of global impact. While acknowledging the fallibility of any mental construction, the book offers an evolutionary worldview deemed more likely than traditional worldviews or scientific materialism. In exploring what it is to be a human social animal, The Passionate Mind Revisited offers fresh vantage points on life’s core issues: the nature of thought, authority and belief, pleasure and pain, desire and fear, identity, love and care, freedom, power, gender, time, meditation, violence, and evolution. By demonstrating how to inwardly see and break through one’s conditioning, the authors delve deeply into the nature and processes of the mind, including how subjectivity filters perception. This approach to self-inquiry can help free people from mechanical responses that develop from unexamined beliefs and habits. Dysfunctional worldviews and their values inhibit the creative solutions much needed in a perilous world of runaway change. This book, through its discussion and methodology, fosters curiosity and truth-seeking. Kramer and Alstad offer new insights on personal and global issues that can facilitate a necessary shift to conscious social evolution. "In this timely, brilliant, and original tour de force , Kramer and Alstad, two of the seminal thinkers of our time, have given us a remarkable gift: a hopeful, unsentimental analysis of both how we got here and where hope for a viable future lies. If you read one book this year, let it be The Passionate Mind Revisited . It will broaden your individual and social awareness and change your life." —Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD, author of Psychotherapy and Buddhism "Don't go to the movies. Put down your magazine. Shut off your computer. Read this book. It will show you what is really happening now . Being able to understand how the world is changing and what that means to you and your children is the real news of today. Accessible and profound. Read it and weep—or clap with joy. This truly is our future and, more importantly, our choice." —Jeremy Tarcher, founder of Tarcher Books " The Passionate Mind Revisited is a fearlessly rational engagement with subjects we all too often accept as beyond rational thought—emotion, spirituality, relationships, and life in a time of conflicting realities and an endangered planet. It's a fine and important book, and deserves to be widely read." —Walter Truett Anderson, author of All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization "Whether The Passionate Mind Revisited is for you depends on your interest in philosophy, human behavior, epistemology, and personal development. This ambitious, broad-ranging book is by necessity abstract, but for philosophers, Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer are miraculously clear and lead the reader by meticulous steps to some surprising conclusions." —Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce "Nobody does a more masterful job of folding back the fabric of our individual, cultural, and human attachments and revealing hidden denials, hypocrisies, and paradoxes than Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer. They are among the very few who can open hidden doors to rooms in your house you never knew were there—to both delight and disturb. This book will change the way you look at things—perhaps everything. Are you courageous enough to risk that? Reading this book is a glimpse into what the human mind is capable of perceiving and the mindset of the evolved human mind in the next millennia." —Kevin W. Kelley, author of The Home Planet "In 1974 The Passionate Mind took me on a journey into my deepest self; it made me dance in the dark. Now, in The Passionate Mind Revisited, the entire worlds—the cosmos in which that self resides—is explored. The investment many children of the ‘60s and ‘70s made in freeing ourselves is now turned toward a globe in need of freedom from hunger, poverty, and violence. The Passionate Mind Revisited is a critical tool for social, political, and ethical transformation." —Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for Choice "A welcome infusion of clarity, brilliance, and inspiration that will very likely blow your mind. This profound book is a philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual Ro