The Passionate Mind Revisited

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.

"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 The Passionate Mind, Joel Kramer asserts that "what we believe determines much of what we think and do: the way we move, the way we respond to people, how we think of ourselves, how we see the world in general." His basic message, stated in short, clear prose, is that passion is to be found only in the present moment, and mainly through becoming aware of the thoughts flowing through our minds, and through the primal process of observing our thoughts, they begin to self-correct. From the author of The Guru Papers, The Passionate Mind is a wonderful journey for anyone seeking to discover how to look at oneself.

One of “the most comprehensive, erudite, and timely” explorations of power dynamics and authoritarianism in religions, institutions, relationships and even personal struggles (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review) Authoritarian control, which once held societies together, is now at the core of personal, social, and planetary problems, and thus a key factor in social disintegration. Authoritarianism is embedded in the way people think—hiding in culture, values, daily life, and in the very morality people try to live by. In The Guru Papers, authors Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad unmask authoritarianism in areas such as relationships, cults, 12-step groups, religion, and contemporary morality. Chapters on addiction and love show the insidious nature of authoritarian values and ideologies in the most intimate corners of life, offering new frameworks for understanding why people get addicted and why intimacy is laden with conflict. By exposing the inner authoritarian that people use to control themselves and others, the authors show why people give up their power, and how others get and maintain it.

Consciousness, declares Robin Fox, is "out of context." Useful as an adaptation in the Stone Age, it brought humanity to the top of the food chain but has now created a world it cannot control. The Passionate Mind explores this paradox not through academic demonstration but through satiric dialogues, blank-verse ruminations, lyric, narrative & comic verse, & Aesopian fables. This mix of genres & styles forces us out of our usual linear modes of thinking to confront a harsh thesis. Because of consciousness we cannot operate without ideas, but once in thrall to ideas-whether of love, power, religion, or ideology-we cannot operate without destructiveness lest we become imprisoned by them. The range of subjects & genres Fox covers includes a verse summary of the key points of human evolution, a conference of farm animals ruminating on their social problems, visions of a desperate future from a neolithic hunter & a shaman at Lascaux, Kafkaesque trial scenes, & a new version of "God is dead." George Washington, having lost at Yorktown is put on trial with Adams, Jefferson, & Benedict Arnold giving evidence. Through the persona of Humbert Humbert as decadent Europe, the new world of Lolita/America is faced with the consequences of its pursuit of happiness. Scandinavian utopianism & salvation through romantic eros get their turn, & the basic "design failure" of humanity is examined in a Platonic dialogue. A bullfight & the struggle for existence in New Jersey farming lead up to a monologue from a decidedly unlikely Jesus who turns out to be part of an alien plan to control an otherwise out of control human race. Through this kaleidoscopic mix, Fox mounts a case for a thorough revision of consciousness that breaks "realistic" boundaries between science, the humanities, religion, & myth.