This work brings together ancient Buddhist wisdom and contemporary breakthroughs in a wide variety of fields, from neuroscience to child development, to offer insights into how we can recognize and transform the destructive emotions that pose grave dangers to our individual and collective fate. Out of a week long discussion between the Dalai Lama and leading figures from the worlds of neuroscience and psychology, Goleman weaves together a narrative account of what the destructive emotions are, where they come from, how the child and then the adult brain is shaped, how these destructive emotions (craving, anger and delusion, known in Buddhism as the three poisons) can be transformed and how they must be transformed if they are not to threaten humanity’s collective safety and its future.