The Passionate Mind

     The Passionate Mind: A Manual for Living Creatively with One’s Self by Joel Kramer (North Atlantic Books*) contains his timeless talks demonstrating his unique approach to the Yoga of Mind (jnana yoga) by enabling people to experience it. This form of mental yoga teaches you to look within, expanding consciousness through self-seeing and self-understanding. It is a meditation in action that can be done whenever, wherever, alone or in relationship. The book deals from a new vantage point with the perennial issues of living: the nature of belief, freedom, conflict, time, death, meditation, the unconscious, violence and evolution.
     The Passionate Mind offers a methodology which suggests that the reader initially read the words without focusing on whether one agrees or not, but rather let the words carry one wherever they do. What happens then to many readers is that they shift into a broader way of observing what goes on inside themselves and also in the world outside. The language is simple and does not assume any prior study in any realm. Instead it examines what each of us can be an expert in—what it means to be a human being from one’s own unique perspective.
     Playing the edges of the mind, though not identical to doing so with the body, is part of the process of exploring the nature of what it is to be human. By using thought to explore itself, Joel leads people in a living inquiry, which is also an expression of his own inner inquiry concerning the basic mechanisms of thought. This includes an examination of fear, desire, pleasure and pain and how they create conditioning. As the mind turns inward upon itself to discover how thought works, it observes thought’s processes and the way beliefs, fear and desire filter and bias perception.
     The Passionate Mind does not present a philosophy, an ideology, a theory, set of beliefs or content that can be mastered. Rather it gives the reader an experience of a process of self-inquiry by exploring the way thought itself functions, filters and structures experience, perception, emotions and ideas. This form of Yoga of the Mind is concerned with observing oneself in daily life rather than serving as a vehicle toward some ideal way to be. It is a meditation grounded in living, not a path to follow or a prescribed technique with predicted results, such as “becoming more spiritual.”
     Usually growth does not come from trying to grow because your ideas of what growth is are limited by what you are now. If instead we are interested in experiencing what we are in a curious, attentive manner, including any judgments, comparisons, agendas, liking or disliking that may occur, we can sometimes move beyond these into something more objective or truly new and unknown. So unlike many traditional forms of meditation, the Yoga of Mind is not primarily concerned with quieting thought, but rather with non-evaluatively seeing how one’s mind works, including the values it has and judgments it makes. Though thought does construct goals, judgments and the like, one can observe them in a goal-less fashion. Replacing such ideals as silencing thought or transcending ego with a real curiosity about how one actually works, minimizes effort and conflict.
     Through awareness of the mind’s mechanical aspects (how thought operates, its structures, habits, subjective filters and preferences), one can perceive the nature and limits of thought. As well as bringing self-knowledge, this very seeing can move one in any given moment out of the habits of mind. Clarity about the dynamics and functions of thought allows the possibility of springing out of personal and cultural conditionings, subjectivity and patterns. Being truly interested in “what is” in the living moment contains its own momentum. “Seeing clearly moves one—a movement into newness and the unknown, which is where growth and creativity lie.”

     The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power (co-authored by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad) continues the thread of examining the mind’s workings, this time with the focus on social influences—especially how individuals and society manipulate fear and desire to maintain power. It unmasks authoritarianism in ideals and ideologies that we take for granted, including traditional spiritual frameworks and their unlivable ideals of purity and selflessness. Since fear, desire and belief—the topics of The Passionate Mind—are at the root of authoritarian mental control, The Passionate Mind and The Guru Papers are useful complements to each other.

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* The Passionate Mind is based on transcripts of Joel Kramer’s early yoga seminar talks (1968-74). It was originally published by Celestial Arts in 1974. When it went out of print in 1982, upon reading it Richard Grossinger, president of North Atlantic Books, realized that it is a classic that should remain in print and offered at once to publish it. He later published The Guru Papers, which is also still in print.

Review Excerpts

“Intriguing topic discussed with eloquence....Stimulating and mind-stretching....Subjects of elemental and universal interest: belief, pleasure, freedom, fear, death, time, analysis and the unconscious, images, love, sexuality, meditation, evolution” – L.A. Times

“The Passionate Mind held my interest throughout, which for me is unusual. It presents basic verities in a way that anyone could assimilate, with beauty and simplicity.” – Anais Nin
“Joel Kramer, in his own unique way, shares direct ways of helping you to experience being both the Known and the Knower.” – Alan Watts
“A manual of magnitude for today's living” – New York Culture Review

“A passionate and fascinating thinker” – Marin Independent Journal

“Perhaps Joel Kramer's singular merit lies in his content which is so unusual, so startling, as to grip the mind and shake its foundations. He deals with simple, even commonplace subjects which have been abused again and again. Only he brings fresh impact to their understanding.”
-- Gordon Sherman, former Chairman of the Board, California School of Professional Psychology

The Passionate Mind: A Manual for Living Creatively with One’s Self
112 pages, $10.95 ISBN 0-938190-12-1
North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, CA) www.NorthAtlanticBooks.com