Books on Wisdom and Enlightenment.

I'll start.

In no particular order, these are some of the books that I have come across in my never ending journey to the Know Thyself and that I thoroughly would like to recommend to others on the path.

1. A treasury of traditional wisdom by Whitall N. Perry.
2. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian.
3. The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley.
4. Tao te ching by Lao Tzu.
5. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

1. An overwhelming act of love by Whitall N. Perry, who devoted more than 10 years of his life to compile this mammoth 1144 pages.
2. Spanish wit at its best.
3. The seminal work on Perennial Philosophy, by one of the smartest writers in the 20th century.
4. The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.
5. A sharp view on enlightenment that transcends forms and norms by an authentic and honest human being, Herman Hesse.

You follow.

Books 3 - 5 (above) are some of my all-time favorites. Here are a few more:

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

The Portable Dragon

Inner Chapters of Chuang Tsu

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Walden

Some of my teachers:

Tolstoy

Dalai Lama

Wendell Berry

Shakespeare

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

Thanks Douglas,

Definitely the joy for The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is shared here too. A must read for anyone.

"In the end, only kindness matters." And after some googling, said by Jewel no less.

Now that's some food for thought on a rainy Sunday evening in London, nice pearl! ;)

Another pearl.

What you give away, you give to yourself.
What you don't give away, you take away from yourself.
Alejandro Jodorowsky.

I and Thou, Martin Buber

Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt

The Tao of Leadership, John Heider

Uncommon Wisdom, Fritjof Capra

Check out: On Having No Head by D.E. Harding and any/all of the wei wu wei books, especially Ask the Awakened and Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon.

Also, in the more western tradition, I recommend Pathways Through to Space and The Philosophy of Consciousness Without An Object by Franklin Merrell-Wolff. Franklin was a western mystic with mathematics and philosophy background, which makes his writing particularly lucid and accessible to the scientifically oriented westerner. Here's a sample:

"S = 1/P", or "Substantiality is inversely proportional to Ponderability." i.e., the more material (physical) a thing is, the less real it is.

a Course in Miracles

the Disappearance of the Universe, Gary Renard

This Side of the Gate, John P. Johnston

the Book of Master Messages

Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East

the writings of Alice A. Bailey and Yogi Ramacharaka also have places of honor in my library.

Goethe's Faust
Spinoza's Ethics

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9% of everything you think,
and everything you do, is for yourself
and there isn't one........ Wei Wu Wei

I have read at one time or another most of the books mentioned here. The one book on the subject of reality that I will never part with is "Awarness" the Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello

A martial slant on wisdom, but I think these books deserve a mention here. The book of five rings and Zen in the art of archery. Please check out the group Books that made me think as well!

It's fun reading all of these lists.

I've read so many great books. But here are a few that immediately come to mind...

Awareness, Anthony DeMello
The Tao Te Ching
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
The Heart of Awareness translated by Thomas Byrom
Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi
Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

My teachers...

Leo Lionni
Dr. Seuss

South State Street Journal is one of the best contemporary offerings I have read in a great while. It is not only entertaining but very thought provoking.

There is another by the same author The Thrill of Hope which is quintessential enlightenment for our era.

I agree. I read The Thrill of Hope, Concepts to Ponder by Trish New when it was first published three years ago. It is destined to become a modern classic.

Thanks guys!

There's a long list of books I could list here, but I think the one I think about most often is Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Ironically enough, I read most of it while riding around the Mojave desert on a 1965 BMW motorcycle.

And then, of course, there's always Tolstoy and Huxley.

Some great books are being listed here, thanks!

I'll join the Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance recommendation. And definitely Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl is another must read for anyone.

I'd like to share another gem with you:



The Art of looking sideways by Alan Fletcher.

A book on its own class. 30 out of 34 reviews at Amazon have awarded it 5 stars as of now. Not only you'll thoroughly enjoy it but, you will also find yourself purchasing this as a great gift for your friends. Loads of food for thought, wisdom and enlightenment here!

Excellent guys, keep the books and the pearls coming!

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Anais Nin.

Authors I keep going back to and those I remember as important to my understanding of things

Robert Ardrey: African Genesis; The Territorial Imperative. A dramatist and amateur anthropologist who, as a generalist, ties together the findings of various scientists, especially Louis Leakey.

Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba The Greek; Report to Greco (autobiography). His book The Greek Passion was made into a movie He Who Must Die, produced by Jules Dassin and starring his inamorata, Melina Mercuri of Never on Sunday fame.

George I. Gurdjieff: Meetings with Remarkable Men (made into a movie with Terence Stamp) and many other, difficult-to-read-tomes, e.g., Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. It may be helpful to read Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff as Recollected by His Pupils, E.P. Dutton & CO. Inc, New York, 1973.

Students and Explainers of Gurdjieff
Rafael Lefort: The Teachers of Gurdjieff, Samuel Weiser, Inc., Box 612, York Beach, Maine 03910, 1984
J.G. Bennett: Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row, New York, 1976
Colin Wilson: Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep, The Aquarian Press,Thorsons Publishing Group, Wellingborough, Northamp-tonshire, NN8 2RQ England

P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way; A New Model of the Universe; The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution; Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York

Robert S. De Ropp: The Master Game; Warrior’s Way. In the Latter book, his autobiography, he quotes Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan⎯the (fictional?) Yaqui Indian sorcerer ⎯ “The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse”. De Ropp was a student of Ouspensky who, in turn, was a student of Gurdjieff.

Carlos Castaneda: Tales of Power; Journey to Ixtlan. The first and and most popular book was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Castaneda may or may not have been reciting actual encounters with Don Juan, through which he received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. Richard de Mille debunked Castaneda in Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory, Capra Press, Santa Barbara, 1978.

Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Michael Murphy: Jacob Atabet; An End to Ordinary History. Murphy was co-founder of the Esalen institute. He also wrote Golf in the Kingdom which is sort of a “Zen and the Art of Golf”. The first two books are generally on the subject of bodily transformation and telepathy.

J.G. Bennett: Making a Soul: Human Destiny and the Debt of Our Existence. Bennett wrote a great many articles, books and speeches, all of which are offerred by: Bennett Books, P.O. Box 1553, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504. Bennett was seen briefly in the movie “Meetings With Remarkable Men.”

Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf; Siddhartha; Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game).

S. I. Hayakawa: Language in Thought and Action. I met Hayakawa as he lay aged and ill in the hospital of which I was CEO. I was able to tell him that his lectures and this book helped me understand the key lesson of general semantics: the map is not the territory. It also prepared me to appreciate the field of neurolinguistics.

Douglas R. Hofstedter: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I have not been able to complete this book, after trying many times. It is very compelling and difficult. The major thing I learned is that the principles of mathematics are not God-given or universal; they are a convention made by man to help him measure and understand the universe. This supports my perception and assertion that “reality” is subjective, not objective. The book is a marvel of human invention and integration of important measurable and non-measurable concepts.

John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman; The Magus (Original edition and the edition revised about 20 years later). It is interesting that the main protagonists in Zorba and Magus were young, stupid Englishmen captivated by old, wise Greeks.

Thomas S. Szasz: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. This I read in 1970 and, together with a textbook from university days Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates By Erving Goffman I gained insight into the inhumane and ignorant manner we treat behaviors and utterances that vary significantly from the current mode. A poignant literary treatment in this realm is One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

Colin Wilson: The Strange Life of P.D.Ouspensky; C.G.Jung⎯Lord of the Underworld; Life Force;The Outsider;The Philosopher’s Stone; The Mind Parasites; G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep.

Alan Watts: Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship; This is It; The Book; Nature, Man and Woman; Psychotherapy, East and West; The Wisdom of Insecurity; In My Own Way: An Autobiography; Behold the Spirit.

Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul; Soul Mates.

Others, as seen in my LibraryThing library.

I'm glad to see somebody recommending the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky/Bennett/etc. books!

I've been very surprised that a group I started here, The Fourth Way, to discuss these books/ideas has yet to attract any members.

Needless to say, it would be great if anybody with an interest in these authors would drop by there.

Wes Nisker's Crazy Wisdom is one of my favorites.

There are a lot. Plus, like everyone else, I am constantly discovering new titles and new titles often discovering me. Nevertheless, here are a few that have made a difference in my world:

1) Confirmation the Spiritual Wisdom That Has Shaped Our Lives by Khephra Burns and Susan L. Taylor.
2) The Complete Perfectionist by Juan Ramon Jimenez, translated by Christopher Maurer.
3) Essentials by Jean Toomer.
4) The Sufis by Idries Shah.
5) Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin.
6) Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Some.
7) Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts/Seth.
8) The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois by W.E.B. Du Bois and Aberjhani

Ok for a starter I guess. In regard to number 8, I initially omitted it but that didn't feel right because both Du Bois' wisdom and my work on this specific title had a profound impact on my life. It has been good to learn that others have also benefitted from it in a powerful way.

Aberjhani

Gee, there are SO many books that come to mind. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Bhagvad Gita
The Tao Te Ching (every translation I can find)
I Ching
Bible
The Feminine Face of God
The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot
78 Degrees of Wisdom
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Tao of Willie Nelson
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Cloud of Unknowing
The Illuminated Rumi
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Monkey Wrench Gang

Okay, I'll stop there!

~Marion

Sorry, I meant to just post a few of the most intense works that I have experienced, but I apparently got carried away. So, here they are:

The Awakening of Intelligence – Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas a Kempis
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Book of Strangers – I.N. Dallas
The Outsider – Colin Wilson
Religion and the Rebel – Colin Wilson
The Seventh Solitude: Metaphysical Homelessness in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche
Demian – Hermann Hesse
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The Fall – Albert Camus
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death – Albert Camus
Concluding Unscientific Postscript – Soren Kierkegaard
Parerga and Paralipomena (both volumes) – Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Representation (both volumes) - Arthur Schopenhauer
Theodicy – Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
The Philosophy of Disenchantment – Edgar Saltus
Resurrection – Leo Tolstoy
Confession – Leo Tolstoy
Master and Man and other Stories – Leo Tolstoy
The Discourses – Epictetus
The Phenomenon of Man – Teilhard de Chardin
Dark Night of the Soul – St. John of the Cross
The Age of Reason – Thomas Paine
Unto This Last – John Ruskin
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Reveries of the Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Fear and Trembling – Soren Kierkegaard
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
Tragic Sense of Life – Miguel de Unamuno
The Wrong Side of Paris – Honore de Balzac
The Life Before Us (Madame Rosa) – Romain Gary
The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
Silence – Shusaku Endo
Conversations in Sicily – Elio Vittorini
Gravity and Grace – Simone Weil
Saint Francis – Nikos Kazantzakis
The Saviors of God – Nikos Kazantzakis
Barabbas – Par Lagerkvist
Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence – W. Somerset Maugham
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

“I am a man and I am the guest of my fellow-men; it is pure humanity that I have to thank for my sustenance.” – Rousseau

- Joseph.

Great books, keep them coming.

Just a suggestion, in order to make the navigation through the books easier, when you write the message, could you please enclose the book titles in between square brackets and the authors in between double square brackets, as it's shown besides the message box.

This way we can actually click on the books and locate them in Librarything.

Thanks!

Here are the above suggestions edited to be shown as Touchstones:

by Child_of_Light:

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

A Course in Miracles

The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard

This Side of the Gate, John P. Johnston

The Book of Master Messages

Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East

The writings of Alice A. Bailey and Yogi Ramacharaka also have places of honor in my library.

by Webster:

Awareness the Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello

by rpavellas:

Robert Ardrey: African Genesis ; The Territorial Imperative. A dramatist and amateur anthropologist who, as a generalist, ties together the findings of various scientists, especially Louis Leakey.

Nikos Kazantzakis : Zorba The Greek; Report to Greco (autobiography). His book The Greek Passion was made into a movie. He Who Must Die , produced by Jules Dassin and starring his inamorata, Melina Mercuri of Never on Sunday fame .

George I. Gurdjieff : Meetings with Remarkable Men (made into a movie with Terence Stamp ) and many other, difficult-to-read-tomes, e.g., Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson . It may be helpful to read Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff as Recollected by His Pupils, E.P. Dutton & CO. Inc, New York, 1973.

Students and Explainers of Gurdjieff

Rafael Lefort : The Teachers of Gurdjieff , Samuel Weiser , Inc., Box 612, York Beach, Maine 03910, 1984
J.G. Bennett : Gurdjieff: Making a New World , Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row, New York, 1976
Colin Wilson : Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep , The Aquarian Press,Thorsons Publishing Group, Wellingborough, Northamp-tonshire, NN8 2RQ England

P.D. Ouspensky : The Fourth Way ; A New Model of the Universe ; The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution; Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York

Robert S. De Ropp : The Master Game ; Warrior’s Way. In the Latter book, his autobiography, he quotes Carlos Castaneda ’s Don Juan the (fictional?) Yaqui Indian sorcerer ⎯ “The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse”. De Ropp was a student of Ouspensky who, in turn, was a student of Gurdjieff.

Carlos Castaneda : Tales of Power ; Journey to Ixtlan . The first and and most popular book was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge . Castaneda may or may not have been reciting actual encounters with Don Juan, through which he received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. Richard de Mille debunked Castaneda in Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory , Capra Press, Santa Barbara, 1978.

Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance .

Michael Murphy : Jacob Atabet; An End to Ordinary History. Murphy was co-founder of the Esalen institute. He also wrote Golf in the Kingdom which is sort of a “Zen and the Art of Golf”. The first two books are generally on the subject of bodily transformation and telepathy.

J.G. Bennett : Making a Soul: Human Destiny and the Debt of Our Existence . Bennett wrote a great many articles, books and speeches, all of which are offerred by: Bennett Books, P.O. Box 1553, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504. Bennett was seen briefly in the movie Meetings With Remarkable Men.

Hermann Hesse : Steppenwolf; Siddhartha ; Magister Ludi The Glass Bead Game .

S. I. Hayakawa : Language in Thought and Action . I met Hayakawa as he lay aged and ill in the hospital of which I was CEO. I was able to tell him that his lectures and this book helped me understand the key lesson of general semantics: the map is not the territory. It also prepared me to appreciate the field of neurolinguistics.

Douglas R. Hofstedter : Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I have not been able to complete this book, after trying many times. It is very compelling and difficult. The major thing I learned is that the principles of mathematics are not God-given or universal; they are a convention made by man to help him measure and understand the universe. This supports my perception and assertion that “reality” is subjective, not objective. The book is a marvel of human invention and integration of important measurable and non-measurable concepts.

John Fowles : The French Lieutenant’s Woman; The Magus (Original edition and the edition revised about 20 years later). It is interesting that the main protagonists in Zorba and Magus were young, stupid Englishmen captivated by old, wise Greeks.

Thomas S. Szasz : The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct . This I read in 1970 and, together with a textbook from university days Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates By Erving Goffman I gained insight into the inhumane and ignorant manner we treat behaviors and utterances that vary significantly from the current mode. A poignant literary treatment in this realm is One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey .

Colin Wilson : The Strange Life of P.D.Ouspensky ; C.G.Jung: Lord of the Underworld ; Life Force ; The Outsider ; The Philosopher’s Stone ; The Mind Parasites ; G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep .

Alan Watts : Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship ; This is It; The Book ; Nature, Man and Woman ; Psychotherapy, East and West ; The Wisdom of Insecurity ; In My Own Way: An Autobiography ; Behold the Spirit .

Thomas Moore : Care of the Soul ; Soul Mates .

by Dragonfly80:

The Bhagavad Gita
The Tao Te Ching (every translation I can find)
I Ching
The Bible
The Feminine Face of God
The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot
78 Degrees of Wisdom
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Tao of Willie Nelson
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Cloud of Unknowing
The Illuminated Rumi
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Monkey Wrench Gang

by jodavid:

The Awakening of Intelligence – Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas A. Kempis
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Book of Strangers – I.N. Dallas
The Outsider – Colin Wilson
Religion and the Rebel – Colin Wilson
The Seventh Solitude: Metaphysical Homelessness in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche
Demian – Hermann Hesse
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The Fall – Albert Camus
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death – Albert Camus
Concluding Unscientific Postscript – Soren Kierkegaard
Parerga and Paralipomena (both volumes) – Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Representation (both volumes) - Arthur Schopenhauer
Theodicy – Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
The Philosophy of Disenchantment – Edgar Saltus
Resurrection – Leo Tolstoy
Confession – Leo Tolstoy
Master and Man and other Stories – Leo Tolstoy
The Discourses – Epictetus
The Phenomenon of Man – Teilhard de Chardin
Dark Night of the Soul – St. John of the Cross
The Age of Reason – Thomas Paine
Unto This Last – John Ruskin
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Reveries of the Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Fear and Trembling – Soren Kierkegaard
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
Tragic Sense of Life – Miguel de Unamuno
The Wrong Side of Paris – Honore de Balzac
The Life Before Us (Madame Rosa) – Romain Gary
The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
Silence – Shusaku Endo
Conversations in Sicily – Elio Vittorini
Gravity and Grace – Simone Weil
Saint Francis – Nikos Kazantzakis
The Saviors of God – Nikos Kazantzakis
Barabbas – Par Lagerkvist
Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence – W. Somerset Maugham
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

Let me add a couple that come to mind.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg
The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Wow! Great list of books! If I made a list, it would have many of them on there.

I'd like to add another. Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler JSPS by Jeremy Leven Sometimes compared to the style of Catch 22 I promise you'll never again think of the 'meaning of life' in the same way after reading this book!

I've tried to make the title touchstone work twice now; if it doesn't work this time, you'll have to go by the author....

hey streamsong,

thanks for the recommendation of "Satan....". i am definitely going to read it. i just read some reviews about it on amazon and it sounds very intriguing.

that is one of the great things that i love about this site (and this group): i get to learn about awesome books that i would have probably never heard of otherwise.

joseph.

#27: I've tried to make the title touchstone work twice now; if it doesn't work this time, you'll have to go by the author....

It works this way: Satan, his psychotherapy and cure by the unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S The secret is the periods you omitted, I expect.

{For the curious, I simply went to the LT page for the book, and "edit"copied the title and "pasted" it between brackets.}

Jodavid--yeah, Satan is one of my favorite books; I stumbled onto by accident this past year, too. I think it's a definite sleeper..perhaps its unfortunate title is part of **why** its a sleeper. I didn't realize the mass market was just called 'Satan'--I liked the original title better even if it's a bit unwieldly.

Thanks for the tip,artisan. I'll definitely try the copy thing next time I have trouble. You're right about the periods. Who woulda thought 'Just Some Poor Schmuck' had to be abbreviated so formally? :)

another very wise book is: Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope by Gabriel Marcel

I read Satan... many moons ago; it's a great roller-coaster of a read, particularly if you're at all knowledgable about psychology departments, academic politics, etc.

I also meant to add anything by Thich Nhat Hanh ..perhaps Peace is Every Step is my favorite.

Hanh is definitely at the top of my list. He is undoubtedly one of the modern Zen masters. My aunt gave me a copy of his book Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, signed by Thay himself no less, which I greatly look forward to reading. I would also like to add a book titled Your Immortal Reality to my list. I just picked it up yesterday, and it is excellent. The book is a sequel to the Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard, and expands on and complements the teachings in that work.

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber
The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
everything else by Lewis Thomas
The Original New Testament by Hugh Schonfield, translator and editor
Truth Is God by Gandhi
everything by Thich Nhat Hahn
An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art by Roger Lipsey
Listening to Prozac by Peter Kramer
Prozac Backlash by Joseph Glenmullen
Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier
any collection of images by Kandinsky
The Soul of a Business by Tom Chappell
Right Hemisphere Stroke by Fred Johnson
The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing
Toward a New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller
The Heart's Code by Paul Pearsall
The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind by Deepak Chopra
. . . and others that fall on my head in the bookstore

Light on the path Mabel collins

Wake up and roar vol 1 & 2 H.W.L Poonja

Education and the significance of life Krishnamurti

The only Dance there is.. Ram Dass

Whoops! will put the titles and authors in brackets next time...

I found the 18th Century German play, Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to be an eye-opener. Lessing drew on Giovanni Boccaccio's tale about three rings representing the three monotheistic Western religions in The Decameron.

-- Robertus Minimus

here are my favorites:

1) Tao Te Ching version by Stephen Mitchell
2) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
3) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber was published recently is worth the read / fyi: the link for this doesn't seem to be working correctly
Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh is also one of my favorites

I'm new to this group and really enjoy the recommendations and content i've found here so far. let me know if you found any other great sites out there. thanks!

Gods in everyman (table of contents) and Goddesses in everywoman (table of contents) by Jean Shinoda Bolen. Very interesting. Greek gods/goddesses as archetypes in our psyche.

The treehouse : eccentric wisdom from my father on how to live, love, and see by Naomi Wolf. One of the books you hardly can put down and will be a bit sorry for having finished it so fast.

See table of Contents and excerpt at amazon.

While on your unique path, try the short book "The Way of a Pilgrim," author anonymous, but the translation by Olga Savin, Shambala Classics publication, is excellent. A simple story about how Paul's lesson to "Pray unceasingly" was learned and practiced by a simple monk.

Exciting news ...

The late Idries Shah's group The Institute For Cultural Research has updated its web presence and is now offering free .pdf downloads of nearly all of the ICR Monographs! The only ones (out of 44 put out from 1965 to 2004) that aren't included are the 5 "book-length" releases and the 2 "missing" (#13 and #14) Monographs. The most recent numbers (#45-52) are still only available in hard-copy, however.

This is really remarkable, as these have been very expensive ($10 for a 6-28 page paper, which is what they're still charging for hard copies) over the years, and now you can just print out your own copy!

ICR Monograph Archive

Based on a recommendation in this thread, I recently purchased The Art of Looking Sideways. What a wonderful book! Thank you!

The master and Margarita, by Boulgalov,set in the 1920s in Moscow, is a beautiful tale on good vs evil

Nasrudin by Idries Shah

Nasrudin is a mullah who just sees the world a little differently from the rest of us.

"I can now see in the dark," exclaimed Nasrudin.

"Then why do you carry a lantern?" asked his neighbor.

"So you will not run into me," said the Mullah.

Have The art of looking sideways at home from the library - that simply won't do. What a treasure - thank you for mentioning it, knowthyself.

Pity it's too late to ask Alan Fletcher for his author picture and use the oportunity to thank him for the book - he died last September.

Thanks, Alan ... you'll always be remembered.


Alan Fletcher, author of The Art of Looking Sideways

(Douglas)

"In the end, only kindness matters>"

My list includes (in roughly the order in which I read them):

Self-reliance, and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The territorial imperative; a personal inquiry into the animal origins of property and nations by Robert Ardrey

On aggression by Konrad Lorenz

Notes from underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck

The true believer : thoughts on the nature of mass movements by Eric Hoffer

I and thou by Martin Buber

The art of loving by Erich Fromm

The unfinished universe by Louise B. Young

The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory by Brian Greene

Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals by Frans De Waal

The moral animal : the new science of evolutionary psychology by Robert Wright

and most recently, a true discovery:

Skeptics and True Believers by Chet Raymo

Am now the proud owner of Alan Fletcher's Art of looking sideways - and 100 Maverick Postcards. Ah, beauty. :-)

My personal 'life-changing book' is Managing Your Anxiety by Christopher J. McCullough and Robert Woods Mann. Absolutely recommended to the tragically ever-growing number of people with severe panic/anxiety problems.

Here are two quotes from the book:

'Anxiety is the way we have learned, based on our past experiences, to respond to situations in which we perceive ourselves to be helpless.'

'Psychological stress occurs in any situation in which we perceive ourselves to be in danger of losing our freedom and moving toward helplessness.'

A novel: Buddha Da.

Science and the Modern World
Alfred North Whitehead

Dear Group Members ,

I have long had a fondness for the thought of A.N.Whitehead and wanted to share this forward to his book Science and the Modern World . I hope i could find a few members to read along and we could all gain some wisdom from him .

Foreword To the Newly Reprinted British Edition of Science and the Modern World

by Robert M. Young

Robert M. Young is the publisher of Free Association Books, 26 Freegrove, London N7 9RQ England. The following article appeared in Process Studies, pp. 67-71, Vol. 20, Number 2, Summer, 1991. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

It is a commonplace of modern science that facts are one thing and values quite another, that we can rely on objective scientific knowledge, while subjective metaphysical thinking (the logical positivists would say) is dubious and to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, it is an assumption of our world view that progress consists in the advance of science and technology, replacing lore and craft.

And yet people are increasingly bewildered when the great resources of our research institutions bring forth products which maim -- napalm -- and threaten civilization itself -- nuclear weapons. People are ambivalent when modern medicine and medical institutions cause diseases and distress in measures which seem to undermine their undoubted benefits, as occurs in antibiotic resistance, tranquilizer dependence and the inhumanities of high-technology obstetrics. People feel consternation when microelectronics, biotechnology and the new techniques of fertilization and transplant surgery threaten to control our lives and scramble our ethics and our sense of human dignity and life, quite as much as they improve our lives from conception to a (hopefully) caring demise.

I owe it to the fact that my teachers told me to read Science and the Modern World at an early age that I have found these conundrums less confusing than I might otherwise have done. In my opinion it is one of a small number of books (others listed in bibliography) that can provide a real basis for achieving the sort of society that our imprint was created to serve: an association in which the free development of each is a condition of the free development of all.

The reason that Science and the Modern World is such a wonderful and penetrating book is that Whitehead looks at the deepest level of our modern world view -- at the metaphysical foundations of modern science. He argues with great audacity that the system of abstractions which was created by the scientific revolution to serve us has got out of control. It was created for a certain set of purposes, has been overgeneralized and should now be replaced.

He tells us in a powerful passage just how odd a world the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities which was developed during the scientific revolution gives us:

Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless, merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly (p. 80).

Born in the seventeenth century, this is still the reigning view.

Every university in the world organizes itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organizing the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reigning, but it is without a rival.

And yet -- it is quite unbelievable. This conception of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions, and the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete realities (80-81).

It was ‘a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathematicians’ (81). The result was a conception of the world which we ‘could neither live with nor live without’ (74). The consequence, according to Whitehead, is that modern philosophy has been ruined.

It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century (82).

But Whitehead is not only in the business of criticizing this world view. He believes that its weaknesses provide hope. ‘The field is now open for the introduction of some new doctrine of organism which may take the place of the materialism with which, since the seventeenth century, science has saddled philosophy’ (55). He points out that in between the material on the one hand and the mental on the other ‘there lie the concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous reality, interaction, order of nature, which collectively form the Achilles’ heel of the whole system’ (84).

Anyone who has followed recent critiques of modern science should find in Whitehead a sure guide to the deepest issues involved. His analysis of modern materialism and his advocacy of organic mechanism’ should be comforting to those who have criticized science as domination, science as sexist, science as reductive, science as opposed to ecological and environmental values. His views are also a real advance on the many misguided scientist-philosophers who argue that recent developments in fundamental particle physics provide a new basis for holistic thinking. The point is to stop extrapolating from scientific research. Instead, with Whitehead, we need to redefine the world view we want science and other forms of research to serve.

It is time we noticed the hypocrisy in the scientific world view. On the one hand, its advocates represent themselves as humble, disinterested seekers after objective truth -- separators of facts from values. On the other hand, they serve the political, military and economic powers that be and operate as consultants to them as well as accepting invitations to generalize from scientific research to political and social philosophies -- blinkered mandarins, speaking as if they were wise.

Whenever I reread this book, its effect on me is emboldening. The absurdities of mind-body dualism lose their hold. The misplaced concreteness of mind language and body language and the impossibility of interaction between domains whose very definitions preclude causal relations, become clear in the teeth of all the theories and institutions based on a dualistic ontology, e.g., psychiatry versus neurology versus psychoanalysis versus a holistic view of humanity. In their place one puts the ontological priority of the concept of a person and the properly derivative nature of the mental and the physical.

Similarly -- and for the same reason -- Whitehead helps me to reintegrate purposes, values, goals and meanings with the other elements of explanation. In the great rent in reality which the scientific revolution codified, concepts were made separate which urgently require reintegration. The deepest divisions of our world have their philosophical roots just here -- in dualistic thinking. Many of the dualisms overlap, but the duality remains crippling.

matter -- mind

primary qualities -- secondary qualities

mechanism -- purpose

physical -- mental

physiological -- psychological

science -- arts

science -- society

nature -- culture

meaningless -- meaningful

is -- ought

positive knowledge -- metaphysics

determined -- responsible (free?)

In formal philosophical terms, the language of final causes or purposes in Aristotelian explanation, was sequestered from formal, material and efficient causes. Thus the form or plan found its way in to modern science as formal relations, plans, formulae. The material cause found its way into the theory of matter, that out of which things are made or come to be. Efficient cause remains with us in the theory of agency, energy, motion. But the purposes, goals, uses and meanings got left outside the concept of scientific explanation -- in the mind, in the church, in the domain of ethics, relative and subjective, while science was said to be objective, positivistically true.

Whitehead makes a beginning at putting the world back together by advocating the replacement of the brute concept of matter with that of organism and replacing the other parameters of space/time with the concept of event. Both are designed to be irreducibly purposeful and meaningful. The result of this drastic act of metaphysical reconstruction is intended to be the reintegration of reality into one world in which values are intrinsic, not extrinsic, to scientific explanations. On this model, of course, the separate category of ‘science’ would be reintegrated into the social totality. Research would thereby be precluded from the sequestration that now occurs in our ivory or industrial or military towers, the distinctions between which are themselves disappearing very rapidly due to the separation of the values embedded in research and patronage from the minds of the researchers -- all of which, in turn, are increasingly distanced from public accountability.

I want to conclude this foreword with three caveats. First, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is about a great deal more than I have mentioned. I have made no effort to allude to his concept of ingression, his theory of eternal objects or many other topics in Whiteheadian scholarship. Some readers will want to go further into these matters. Others, like myself, will decide to learn from his critique of the world view of modern science without wishing to become Whiteheadian organismic philosophers. A person may make a brilliant diagnosis, but it often falls to others to effect a successful cure. Even so, it is a great achievement to insist that the biological concept of organism provides a better basis for metaphysics than the physical concept of matter. This makes at least possible a project that was not conceivable if the concept of matter bequeathed to us by the scientific revolution remained our basic building block of reality. With the value-laden concept of organism as our starting point, there is a hope of having a single set of principles which encompass all forms of experience, physiology and psychology, including morals, politics and aesthetics.

My second caveat is about the text. I share the following views of the eminent Whitehead scholar, Dorothy Emmett:

Science and the Modern World (given as Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1925) is perhaps the most inspired expression of Whitehead’s metaphysical philosophy. It is a book in which lucid and illuminating reflections on the history of science in relation to philosophy are interspersed with technically difficult passages; the book might have been written, as one reviewer remarked, by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Emmett, 1967, p. 293).

She goes on to say that in this book the ‘technical passages are less overlaid with idiosyncratic terminology and a labored attempt at producing a system’ than other works of his. Cold comfort, perhaps, but this is the place to begin.

My third warning is that the framework of the book is limited. Science and the Modern World is a great work in the critical history of ideas. As Whitehead says, there are periods when philosophers can play an important role as critics of abstractions. He shows us what the scientific philosophers’ philosophical reasons were for commenting on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But he never asks what social, economic, political and ideological forces were at work in the creation of the modern scientific world view, any more than he looks at the role of those forces in the eighteenth century celebration of it, the romantic reaction against it, or the nineteenth and twentieth century codification of positive science. What he sees and says is, I think, true and profound, but it is a partial truth, deeply ahistorical. For example, he evokes Tennyson:

Tennyson goes to the heart of the difficulty. It is the problem of mechanism which appalls him, "‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run."’ This line states starkly the whole philosophic problem implicit in the poem. Each molecule blindly runs. The human body is a collection of molecules. Therefore, the human body blindly runs, and therefore there can be no individual responsibility for the actions of the body. If we once accept that the molecule is definitely determined to be what it is, independently of any determination by reason of the total organism, of the body, and if you further admit that the blind run is settled by the general mechanical laws, there can be no escape from this conclusion (113).

This example forms part of a trenchant critique of materialism, but Whitehead nowhere characterizes the industrial revolution which evoked romanticism -- early and late.

In my view we need to connect the scientific revolution with the protestant and capitalist revolutions as facets of a single change in world view. Whitehead is right about the abstractions but addresses them (as befits a mathematical logician) abstractly. He does not ask what other values are served by sequestering values. They remain efficacious but are not amenable to public contestation. This is the ideological function of positivism’s separation of fact and value. His analysis calls for reintegration of the history of science with social, economic and political history just as his philosophical proposals call for integration with current reasons for making science, technology and medicine more accessible and accountable. There is, therefore, a last dichotomy to overcome: from Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World to science in the modern world.

Sartre, Jean-Paul: Les mains sales, Huis clos

Just finished reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. I had it on my shelf for several months on the "to read" list, and decided to move it to the front of the list when Oprah recently weighed in on it. I found it very transformative and encouraging. With Oprah's support, i.e. publicity, the book should have a major impact on moving a great number of people toward enlightenment. I can't imagine that anyone who gives this book a thoughtful reading, reflects on its wisdom and carries its concepts into daily life would not be fundamentally changed. While Tolle still speaks often in this book about the concept in his previous work, The Power of Now, he brings things into a more useful context this time around. This book is not written in the Question & Answer style as was his previous book, and I found that quite a relief as it seem ed to have a better flow.

The Miracle of Mindfulness by Tich Nhat Hanh and all of his books. TNH life is deep and rich, father of what is now known as engaged buddhism. This book is a great introduction to the practice that leads to a more lucid exitence. "I think, therefore and don´t exist ..." is the phrase with which he used to start his lectures. If any of you needs to be shure of meeting someone who has truly attained the subject of this group, meet him or his writings for that matter.

Great is the matter of living and dying. Hurry, hurry, hurry, for time passes inexorably. This is the writing in the back of the wooden instrument that announces the time to start sitting in the zendo.

Thank you for recommending The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I just joined this group. I have an ex boyfriend named Mark, and his mother liked to call him Marcus after Marcus Aurelius. I found the book on amazon.com and put it on my wish list to purchase soon.

I noticed this one came up a lot: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I'm about halfway through it and already I'm in love with it. Some others that come to mind:

-Essential Zen (this is a collection of Zen poems, stories, anecdotes, proverbs, etc.)
-Walden by Henry David Thoreau
-Buddhism and Zen by Nyogen Senzaki
-An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life by Dalai Lama
-Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
-Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-Siddartha by Herman Hesse

Any books by

1. Alan Watts
2. Joseph Campbell
3. Heinrich (Henry) Zimmer
4. Christmas Humphreys
5. Lama Surya Das

also the individual books:

1. ONE: Essential Writings on Nonduality – edited by Jerry Katz

2. What Makes You NOT a Buddhist – Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

3. Why Buddhism? – Vickie Mackenzie

It's a long and interesting journey to gather up the bits of wisdom that have meaning to us. Here is my list of notables:
from many years ago -
Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Island and The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach
Let Me Explain by Teillhard de Chardin
Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin
The Findhorn Garden in Scotland produced many powerful books describing our mystical relationship with nature such as Revelation:The Birth of a New Age by David Spangler and To Hear the Angels Sing by Dorothy Maclean.
From this foundation I have moved on to investigating the hero's journey as so ably described by Joseph Campbell in The Man With a Thousand Faces.
The hero's journey is so entertainingly presented for us in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkien and Harry Potter by J.K.Rowling that the deeper message is there for everyone.
A very powerful teacher for me in recent years has been Eckhart Tolle whose Power of Now and A New Earth are much needed at this time in history.

Re: Message #18 on the Art of looking sideways, I was impressed by the various reviews, and I was just about to purchase the book on Amazon.com, when I noticed (on the Amazon website) a remark on the sidebar to the effect that unfortunately the pages were made of thin paper, otherwise the book would have weighed 100 lbs.

This conflicted with a line I had read in one of the reviews, which I'll paste here: "The different paper types and textures, intriguing layouts and inviting formats mean that every page turned leads to new discoveries "

Are there two versions of this book? I would appreciate comments, because I'd like to buy the book; but I'd especially like to buy the book with "the different paper types and textures etc." Thank you all.

Re - Message Number 62: My copy has just one type/texture of paper. I don't believe that there are two different versions. I could see, perhaps, where the reviewer was fooled by the extraordinary graphics on almost every page, most of which "seem" to have different textures, but only in a visual sense. I wouldn't hesitate in the least, however, buying the book, because it is unique (well, in my own experience, at least) and is well worth the price.

If it turns out, though, that you aren't happy, then give it away to a friend as a gift. I have bought at least four copies of this book as gifts and every one of them was received with (eventual) enthusiasm. First, though, each person opened the book with that skeptical "what in the hell is THIS book all about." Ten or fifteen minutes later, however, I couldn't hold a decent conversation with them, because their noses were stuck in the book and all they could utter were soft "oohhs" and "wows!"

:-)

It is such a treasure.

Mine has normal paper pages, I doubt that there are two versions, but here are the details to mine: Phaidon Press 2007 (first published 2001), 978-0-7148-3449-8.

Should I go and weigh it? ;-)

Thank you for your wonderful recommendations, the one i have picked up most and read often is one of those gems that you can open at any page, and no matter where you are, it is quite powerful
I AM THAT by Sri Nisagadatta Maharaj
regards
Catherine

NonDuality by David Loy.

I know when I've been prodded on Facebook in those silly surveys of 'five most influential books' I have tended to gravitate back to the same handful that have had enormous impact on my own thought and praxis. I stand within the judaeo-christian tradition so that of course limits my catchment (though not exclusively), but nevertheless, here's some thoughts in fairly random order, though broken loosely into categories. Most have appeared above, mind you (I too rarely drop in on the boards, nor ever have an original thought!):

The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann
Between Cross and Resurrection: a Theology of Holy Saturday by Alan E.Lewis
Paul the Apostle by J. Christiaan Beker
In the End, God ... by J.A.T. Robinson
Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? by Oscar Cullmann

The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky
Les Miserables Victor Hugo

Waiting for Godot of Samuel Becket, which takes me to the heart of human ennui and, strangely,
Journey to the End of the Night by Céline, which takes me deep into meaninglessnees (as does Eliot's "The Wasteland"),
Death in Venice by Thoman Mann
and Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
(to my shame I still haven't read Camus ).
As an antidote to these novels of existential despair I would add The Chosen by Chim Potok. I am after all a theologian, and I like to find some good news!

H'm, by R.S. Thomas, The Way of It (no Touchstone on that one), Frequencies and Mass for Hard Times in particular, all by R.S. Thomas

Collected Poems, 1909-1962 of T.S. Eliot,
Colected Poems of James K. Baxter
Birds Beasts and Flowers and Lady Chatterley's Lover in particular of D.H. Lawrence
Ullyses of James Joyce

(which brings to mind the Odyssey and Iliad of Homer ) and, for all its faults, The Divine Comedy of Dante.

Inevitably I've missed some - many - and I have omitted here the great masterworks of religious history, the collections of works that became the Bible, or the narratives of the Eastern religions, of which the Bhagavad-Gita is one of the least significant but the one which I know best. I've also omited some of the great works of poetry, because they appear in conglomerate editions - I think of "In Memoriam", or the great works of the Romantics (should that be the 'works of the great Romantics'?). Or individual poems that have touched and even transformed my existence.

Damn: where did all my nice touchstones go? }-:

zappa, can I suggest that you start your reading of Camus with The Plague(La Peste). It's a well-crafted novel, but in that circumscribed place and time of plague in Oran, Camus contrasts his view of Christianity (Père Paneloux is flawed) with the noble and courageous secular saint (like le Docteur Rieux): great characters, challenging wisdom.

The Flight of the Wild Gander: Exploration in the Mythological Dimension
- Joseph Campbell

A New Guide to Rational Living
- Albert Ellis

Report to Greco
- Nikos Kazantzakis

Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown
- Alan Watts

In Days of Great Peace by Mouni Sadhu (Anything else by Mouni Sadhu as well, but this is the best with which to start.)
How to Be an Adult by David Richo
A New Model of the Universe by P.D. Ouspensky
Initiation Into Hermetics by Franz Bardon
The Book of Secrets by Osho
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
The Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross
The Way of Hermes

I am helped by everything Zeera (Zee) Charnoe has ever written or spoken.
I have had the pleasure of being
his student, partner and assistant for 21+ years.
There are tens of thousands of pages
of short writings and short books at his website:
http://ecophysics.org/component/option,com_docman/task,cat_view/gid,32/Itemid,30...
There are four actual books there,
with numerous more writings and books
in process:

1. What Life Is and What Life Is For

2. Anaclysm

3. The Soul of a Poet-Philosopher
(poetry and short stories)

4. Language, Literacy and Intelligence:
Made For Each Other ! ? (thesis)

There are also hundreds of audio recordings
of lectures, meditations and hypnosis scripts,
that are available on DVD's,
and are played (and archived) at a webcast:
ANACLYSM radio program
www.blogtalkradio.com

Thank you for sharing at this group,
I see that many of us share common concerns and pursuits.

Jennifer (ecohealth2003)

While having many books listed here in common...surprised a little by no mention of "Vivekananda" writings...there are 9 wonderful volumes!

I've been reading Stephen Batchelor for non-fiction and H.P. Lovecraft for fiction lately. I think that's fairly balanced reading.

Would definitely include The Gospel of Shri Ramakrishna on this list. This is one of the most satisfying, gentle and yet immensely powerful book on spirituality that you would find anywhere.

Also, I would second another writer's opinion that Swami Vivekananda should definitely be on this list. His Raja Yoga is one of the most important books to understand Yoga in particular and Hindu thought in general.

I'd like to recommend Robert Augustus Masters' Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond: Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality, and Liberation. Yes, a two colon title.

The author, a psychotherapist and all-round spiritual guy, upon smoking too much 5-MeO-DMT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-MeO-DMT), suffered a psychotic break and many months of daily/nightly terror. He learns a lot. The book is very well written.

From the Amazon description: "DARKNESS SHINING WILD is an investigation of sanity, suffering, identity, death, and the far frontiers of spirituality, all constellated around the story of an extremely harrowing near-death experience. The hellish journey following that experience provides a jumping-off point for deep-diving reflections on topics ranging from the anatomy of dread to the relationship between madness and spirituality."

The book is out of print (on Amazon: 1 new from $333.64, 7 used from $93.46!), but will soon be available as a $10 PDF ebook from the author: (don't be fooled by its apparent availability on this page, trust me!) http://www.masterscenter.net/darkness-shining-wild-ebook

As a newcomer to this fantastic group I'd like to recommend The Invisible Way by Reshad Feild, a beautiful story illustrating the Sufi way.

Another of my favourites is A Gradual Awakening by Stephen Levine, which shows how meditation can lead us to deep self-awareness and growth.