Published in 1995, the book is a work in which Wilber grapples with modern philosophical naturalism, attempting to show its insufficiency as an explanation of being, evolution, and the meaning of life.

In the first chapter, "The Web of Life", Wilber uses Arthur Lovejoy's account of the Great Chain of Being to show how the mechanistic, materialistic modern worldview triumphed over the West's traditional, holistic, hierarchical view.

In the second chapter, "The Pattern That Connects", Wilber uses Arthur Koestler's account of holism and holarchy and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory to describe approximately twenty tenets of all holons.

In the sixth chapter, "Magic, Mythic And Beyond", Wilber uses Jean Piaget's theory of developmental psychology to describe the individual development of the contemporary human being.

Wilber describes vision-logic, a non-dominating, global awareness of holistic hierarchy, in which the pathological dissociations of Nature from Self, interiority from exteriority, and creativity from compassion are transformed into healthy differentiations.

In the tenth chapter, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly", Wilber describes various attempts to repair modernism's fractured and flattened worldview, especially Schelling's existential idealism.

In the twelfth chapter, "The Collapse Of The Kosmos", Wilber uses Taylor's account of the effects of the Enlightenment paradigm to show how vertical depth was collapsed into horizontal span and how the ascending drive was dissociated into the "Ego camp" (Immanuel Kant's and Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Transcendent Ego) and the "Eco camp" (Baruch Spinoza's deified Nature).

The result was the rise of Thanatos (Sigmund Freud's death drive), and Phobos (existential fear), which are the respective pathological versions of Agape and Eros.

In the fourteenth chapter, "The Unpacking Of God", Wilber describes aspects of particular historical nondual views that could possibly heal the noetic fissures in the West, especially spiritual practice as understood by Zen and Dzogchen.

[citation needed] The cultural historian William Irwin Thompson harshly criticized Wilber's project, contending that systematic "theories of everything" were inherently misguided.