The Passionate Mind Revisited
     Expanding Personal & Social Awareness
            by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad

                                                                                                          Praise – in 2013 e-book

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“First released in 1974, The Passionate Mind explored the functions of the mind and how to divorce perception from cultural conditioning, memory, and secondhand knowledge. The book showed a new way to be clear, aware, and radically present in the world. It was, in short, a revolutionary manifesto for self-exploration and personal thinking. [The Passionate Mind Revisited] reads like a survival guide for the new world order—a manual on how to live consciously and well in a world that seems to be collapsing around us….Help[s] us enhance self-inquiry [by asking] life’s most important questions….But this book is not just a call to awareness; it is also a well-reasoned exploration of the human condition.” 
—Yoga Journal   (2010)

“By bridging aspects of intelligent design with evolution…authors Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer probably haven’t solved the American culture wars. But they might have.”
Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics  (7/09)

– from Guernica’s introduction to its online adaptation of “Intelligence Without Design” 
              (the last chapter of The Passionate Mind Revisited

“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 what the world’s big changes are really about and what that means to you and your children is the real news of our todays. 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

“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 change your life.”
—Jeffrey B. Rubin, author of The Art of Flourishing

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. The final chapter on ‘Evolution’ takes on ‘intelligent design’ and hard-nosed scientific materialism and offers an eminently sensible alternative view of the great mystery: ‘intelligence without design.’ An important book…Deserves to be widely read.”
—Walter Truett Anderson, author of All Connected Now  

“Interesting, broad-ranging, and helpful book about the human situation…Whether it is for you depends on your interest in philosophy, human behavior, and personal development.…For philosophers, Kramer and Alstad are miraculously clear, and lead the reader by meticulous steps to some surprising conclusions.”
—Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce  

“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 world—the cosmos in which that self resides—is explored. The investment of the ‘60s and ‘70s 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, past president of Catholics for Choice 

“This book will change the way you look at things—perhaps everything. Nobody does a more masterful job of folding back the fabric of our individual, cultural, and human mindsets and revealing denials, blind spots, hypocrisies, and paradoxes than Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer. They open hidden doors to rooms in your house you never knew were there to both delight and disturb….These pages bristle with brilliant, incisive insights and surprising and important truths.”
—Kevin W. Kelley, author of The Home Planet 

“A welcome infusion of clarity, brilliance, and inspiration that will very likely blow your mind. This profound book is a philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual Rosetta Stone—not a glib compilation of simplistic answers but a critical frame of reference that challenges the way we think about the nature of thinking itself. The Passionate Mind Revisited is essential reading for anyone trying to get their bearings amid confusing and contradictory claims and ideas that have long been promoted about the meaning of self-awareness and social consciousness. If you intend to delve into any other discussion of the powerful social, religious, psychological, ecological, and ethical changes confronting us, read this book first or you may miss the crucial context that will help you make sense of it all.”
—Keith Harary, PhD, executive director of the Institute for Advanced Psychology 

“The phrase ‘looking inward’ has become anathema to many social reformers who emphasize external action. In turn, this ‘knee-jerk’ activism is criticized by those advocating inner development. A framework that includes both approaches is provided in this brilliant book. It’s rare to read a book permeated by so many challenging and provocative insights.”
—Stanley Krippner, coauthor of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder   

“A breakthrough in spiritual realism, pioneering in its confrontation of life’s perennial tough judgment calls, and courageous in its intolerance of the crypto scientific pseudo-spiritual gloss, this book will meet you where you really live.”
—Jeremy Sherman, PhD, executive director of the Berkeley Consortium on Emergent Dynamics  

“Once again Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad ignite the mind with ground-breaking perceptions and offer profound insights to investigate and navigate our own terrain in these turbulent, transitional times. The Passionate Mind Revisited is a classic reinvented for this dynamic historic moment.”
—Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief   

“Kramer and Alstad argue with clarity and passion that the simplistic ‘be here now’ mindset sweeping contemporary pop-psychology tragically fails to account for how the past and the future are always part of how we construct any ‘now’ and any ‘here.’ I actually found myself cheering at their insistence that negating the future in the name of spiritual enlightenment amounts to an amputation of our intrinsic capacity to take future consequences into account—a task of vital importance at this crucial stage in our evolutionary adventure.”
—Keith Thompson, author of Leaving the Left

“A promising re-visioning of age-old philosophical dilemmas in a contemporary setting with important social and political implications. It cuts the Gordian knot of ‘the One and the Many,’ conceptually re-casting the contexts of group and individual, spiritual and material. Seemingly irreconcilable opposites are treated as interwoven poles of an evolutionary dialectic, equally as embedded in one another as are inhaling and exhaling. The crucial chapter on ‘Time’ offers a well-argued re-thinking of traditional contrasts between ecstatic experiences of timelessness (unity, being, surrender) and ordinary goal-oriented being in time (multiplicity, becoming, control).
      The authors are poignantly aware of the effects that Eastern thought and practice have had on spiritually inclined individuals in America over the past half-century, and they challenge head-on many assumptions flowing from their own and others’ earlier teachings. Their systematic demonstration leads to the stirring conclusion that a spiritually aware, caring life has to be lived in time and future-oriented—not in some timeless realm. In freshly illuminating the roles of thought and diversity in a life of spiritual awareness, [the] book re-orients and rejuvenates spiritual work, bringing it back into the world of time to become more effective and more socially relevant.”
—James Millikan, former professor of philosophy at Yale

The Passionate Mind Revisited is an excellent resource for expanding personal and social awareness. It integrates many cross-cultural and interdisciplinary ideas to illustrate how we can continue to grow, create, and expand during times of uncertainty and open to new possibilities.”
—Angeles Arrien, author of Signs of Life     

“Nothing today is more critical than making sense of our times and what they ask of us. Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer bring important insight and integrity to this difficult task. Spiritual and scientific sacred cows get equally unsparing treatment.…A valuable contribution at both a personal and a societal level.”
—Charles M. Johnston, MD, author of The Creative Imperative   

The Passionate Mind Revisited sheds powerful light on the dynamics behind the behavior, motivations and actions of people and society—insights that contribute to the quality of my life every day, making it substantially richer, more meaningful, effective, and fulfilling. I access my own intelligence to a greater degree, enabling me to navigate the mazes, avoid the pitfalls, and celebrate the successes. Likewise, my worldview and experience of life’s spiritual dimensions are both more grounded and more expansive from the exploration of their ideas. If you find a thread of interest here, I heartily recommend that you pull on it! Much awaits you in exploring your own passionate mind!”
—Rio de la Vista, conservationist and writer 

“In times of transition and not knowing, visionary artists dance with the possibilities that they sense emerging for us. Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer see a magnificent potential for humanity and have written their insights in an inspiring and practical way….Their book [is] medicine for all who are curious about what might lie beyond the present confusion and challenges.”
—Marion Weber, founder of the Arts and Healing Network 

The Passionate Mind Revisited is a seminal book for our time….A wonderful gift that challenges our unexplored assumptions to help us shift to a world that can fulfill us all.”
—Wilford Welch, author of The Tactics of Hope 

“This book is an exciting and imaginative intellectual journey. In it, Kramer and Alstad combine over 35 years of experience, thinking and writing to construct a unique lens with which we might examine our individual world views, ideologies and beliefs….As a reader who has striven to follow their path, I have found that the journey has led to a deeper and clearer understanding of our human predicament. A superb achievement.”
—Charles H. Jones, professor emeritus of law, Rutgers University
 

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