With great honesty, and both drama and romance, Mind Flight weaves together personal narrative and intellectual odyssey, taking readers along on the author’s pursuit of wisdom and enlightenment, his search for love, and his quest for an inspiring vision of the future. Encyclopedic in scope, the book pulls together Plato, Freud, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and other epochal historical figures with Pink Floyd, the Hippies, the Sexual Revolution, A Clockwork Orange, the Yin-Yang, the madhouse world of mental health, and the fantastical visions of science fiction. What results in this grand saga is not only a chronicle of one man’s journey from industrial, middle-class America—where weightlifting and fist fighting define virtue and value—to the philosophical life in the mystical expanse of the Southwest, but a profound exploration of the archetypal themes of order and chaos; good and evil; truth and beauty; passion and reason; and science and God. Mind Flight draws the reader into the vast wonders and possibilities of the future, and is a stunning example of “living the examined life.”
Book Reviews
“Mind Flight is a truly remarkable book. Its subject is Tom Lombardo’s life to date, but the various aspects of that life appear as multiple threads, interwoven with great story-telling skill. One thread is that of biographical fact: The teenager who was also a champion weight-lifter. The sequence of educational pursuits. Jobs. Relationships. The immersion into academic life. The departure from that life. The finding of a soul mate. And much more. A second thread is the psychological/emotional thread; the inner reaction to the unfolding factual thread, and the ups-and-downs, forwards-and-backwards of that. A third is the thread of intellectual development, and here Lombardo the educator shines. He not only tells us which philosophers, scientists, psychologists, futurists and others influenced his developing worldview, but again and again shares with us succinct and lucid encapsulations of their ideas. In this way he takes us readers on an intellectual tour de force of important ideas that can’t help but expand our own worldviews. A final — and key — thread is the evolution of his own worldview, his own ever-clarifying sense of what is really important, what really matters, and the integration of his passions into a direction for his personal future.
In short, Mind Flight is a deeply engaging and stimulating book. It’s a book you’ll want to read.”
Copthorne Macdonald
Connect to The Wisdom Page to read the beginning of the book
Five Stars * * * * * on Amazon
In Mind Flight: A Journey into the Future, Tom Lombardo (in collaboration with his wife Jeanne Belisle Lombardo) has written a provocative history of his personal life and intellectual development, especially during a period when he expanded his professional horizons to include the study of the future. He tells a series of connected stories mostly about his personal dreams, intellectual discoveries, periods of intense professional productivity interspersed with periods of shattering malaise, his interpersonal relationships, and his persistent, life-absorbing search for an understanding of human consciousness, wisdom and the meaning of a better future.
Lombardo, a psychologist and a futurist, is an important contributor to the emerging canon of the futures field, having written several books and many articles dealing with the future. Thus, futurists should have an interest in this book about the intellectual trajectory of a well-known futurist and some of his current views. Moreover, Lombardo’s intellectual journey will also benefit the general reader. The futurist ideas and topics covered in the book, as well as the life lessons discussed, will inform and enrich their lives.
The book contains a series of related topics, ranging from a psychology of future consciousness, human and technological evolution, and order and chaos to the importance of character virtues (e.g., self responsibility, courage, optimism), preferable futures and utopian thinking, and some major and insightful works in science fiction (a topic that fascinates Lombardo), to take only a few examples.
Parts of the book read more like a gripping novel than an academic treatise. The book is filled with honest, self-searching questioning, and contains passages of emotional and compelling personal stories. It also includes the drama of Lombardo’s conceptual and interpretative struggles and his explorations of social thought and philosophical ideas. Lombardo brings ideas to life and shows how they helped shape his existence as he fully gives himself over to a journey of the intellect.
Some readers might think that the book is too long and too confessional. But they would be wrong. For cutting back and forth between his personal and his professional lives, Lombardo reveals the human costs and benefits of the intellectual commitments and obsessions that drive him. He provides the social contexts and meanings that deepen the significance of his intellectual probes, and he gives exemplars of self-reflection for his readers, guides of where we should go in our lives, of how a history of life’s learning can help us create roadmaps to a better future, and of how we can empower and transform our future selves.
Clearly, Lombardo himself was transformed by his experience of writing this book. His readers may be equally transformed by reading it. With a bit of luck, when you complete this book, you may transcend it, envelop it and pass through it to the other side. In doing so, you will end up being more. You will see who you want to become and how you want the future to be. And you will understand why.
Wendell Bell, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Yale University
Center for Future Consciousness 