The Passionate Mind Revisited: Expanding Personal and Social Awareness

The Passionate Mind Revisited: Expanding Personal and Social Awareness, by Joel Kramer 
and Diana Alstad. North Atlantic Books; 
northatlanticbooks.com

Hillari Dowdle reviews a new book that works to expand awareness.

By Hillari Dowdle

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. This revised version 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. Economies, ecologies, policies, authorities, establishments—all these Kramer and Alstad use to help us enhance self-inquiry (or, in yogic terms, the practice of svadhyaya). The authors urge us to ask ourselves 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. Kramer and Alstad show us that the truth lies within us and that to know it, we must not only be open to it but also listening for it. At the heart of the authors' message is that the changes so desperately needed in today's world must necessarily begin within each of us.

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