It is no accident, they argue, that the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed a revolution in new human capacities. Daily we hear and read about supernormal athletic feats; clairvoyant perception; lives transformed by meditative practices; healing through prayer-and we ourselves experience these things.

The authors contend that thousands of years of human striving have delivered us to this very moment, in which each act of self-development is creating a new stage in planetary evolution--and the emergence of a human species possessed of vastly expanded potential.