Rating: 
Summary: Rehashed Ken Wilber and a Huge Reading List
Review: When I saw Michael Murphy's name on the book, I knew that I had to pick it up (he's a giant in the Transpersonal field). I wilfully overlooked James Redfield's name, however. (Purveyor of new-age Schlock)The book was a waste of money. All that the authors manage to do is give a brief survey of the perennial philosophy (done far more masterfully in Aldous Huxley's famous anthology), talk about exceptional capabilities manifesting in human beings (accomplished with far more documentation and flair in Murphy's own "Future of the Body"), and tie it together with evolutionary rhetoric pulled straight out of Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution" (one of the best books I have ever read). Then they go on to list a few basic, debatable
"spiritual practices", and one of the biggest reading lists I have ever seen. Bottom line: Skip it. Get the three other books listed above instead- they're all very worthwhile reads, unlike this tired summary.
Rating:
Summary: Gentle and simplistic
Review: While the topic and content of this book seems interesting at
first, the authors have presented the material in such a simple
way that it looks like if human evolution was so obvious and
linear. Most of the examples and works that support the viewpoint
of the authors seem to me quite ok, but the authors probably did
not read them thoroughly because they left much of their depth
untouched. What this book provides is merely inconsistent and
unexplained information about aspects of humanity that are better
discussed elsewhere. So the value of reading this book might be
to get you frustrated and make you go to the references of the
book, to get the original sources of the material of the book in
their full depth. But at least reading it from cover to cover
will not cost you much intellectual effort...
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