This book brings together for the first time many if the leading writers and thinkers from the psychological and mental health fields. Contributes include Robert Jay Lifton, Joanna Macy, Roger Walsh and others.

Personal empowerment in the face of planetary despair

How can dystopian futures help provide the motivation to change the ways we operate day to day? This book raises and tackles a number of important questions about the future and the lessons we can learn for the present.

In addition to the apocalyptic prospect of global nuclear destruction, there are other dismal scenarios involving resource and environmental issues that are less imminent but still serious in the long term. Past analyses, seeking remedies, have focused on symptoms rather than causes. They represent extensions and expressions of the same philosophies and strategies that created these situations. This book brings a fresh and optimistic perspective to the problem area. It explores modern consciousness research and transpersonal psychology for practices that accelerate the development of consciousness. It covers a wide range from laboratory techniques of experimental psychiatry, transpersonal psychotherapies, and Jungian psychology to the Oriental and Western mystical traditions.

Every day, people who push against violence and injustice or pull for peace and freedom must face their own fears. Many activists also must struggle with "aftershock," the physical and emotional reverberations of frightening, horrifying, or otherwise traumatizing experiences endured in the course of their activism. Jones explores the culture of trauma that people have created through our violent exploitation of the Earth, other animals, and one another. As long as we continue to perpetrate such violations, we will never fully heal our own traumatic injuries. This book, therefore, is for survivors of all kinds of trauma, for therapists who treat trauma, and for anyone who hopes to reduce the amount of terror in the world. --From publisher description.

Some kinds of death are caused by people, deliberately or accidentally. This work argues that horrendous death - by war, homicide, poverty and other man-made means - is the greatest public health problem of our time and can only be defeated by strong co-operative action.

Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology whose decades of writing, teaching, and activism have inspired people around the world. In this collection of writings, leading spiritual teachers, deep ecologists, and diverse writers and activists explore the major facets of Macy’s lifework. Combined with eleven pieces from Macy herself, the result is a rich chorus of wisdom and compassion to support the work of our time. “Being fully present to fear, to gratitude, to all that is—this is the practice of mutual belonging. As living members of the living body of Earth, we are grounded in that kind of belonging. Even when faced with cataclysmic changes, nothing can ever separate us from Earth. We are already home.”— Joanna Macy

Winner of the 1988 Crossroad Women's Studies Award

Shaping the Future maps out the ascetic practices of a Neitzschean way of life. Hutter argues that Nietzsche's doctrines are attempts and 'temptations' that aim to provoke his free-spirited readers into changing themselves by putting philosophy into practice in their lives.