Christopher Avery's favorite books that contributed to his consciousness-growth and freedom

This rocked my world.

As an analytical person, I loved Carse’s precise logic—that every human activity can be seen as either a finite game, played to win and end the game, or an infinite game, played to keep playing. Simple. Devastating.

What stopped me cold was seeing myself in it—when I was playing to dominate, demean others so they’d shrink, and I could feel bigger, transacting rather than connecting. Carse gave me a framework to see that honestly, and to choose differently—to play to connect, to stay in the game with everyone around me.

I have never seen life the same way since. The ideas contributed profoundly to my work on personal and shared responsibility, especially in consulting with teams and leaders.

Hawkins is my favorite scientist-spiritualist—and the only writer I’ve found who succeeds at being both at once.

This is the most powerful book I have ever read—and that includes the Bible. When I first read it, it was too much. Too dense, too confronting, too world-changing to absorb and apply. I could grasp it conceptually, but couldn’t live it yet.

It took becoming ill and turning to consciousness growth as a path toward healing before I picked it up again. That second reading changed everything. The Map of Consciousness became my most important tool for understanding human behavior—mine and everyone else’s. 

As an applied behavioral scientist, I have since become deeply versed in his body of work and feel compelled to teach it. I have never found a more complete explanation of why humans do what we do.

Katie’s central insight is disarmingly simple: it’s not events that cause our suffering—it’s our thoughts.

Epictetus said it two thousand years ago. Katie gave it a method. We spend our lives trying to fix the projection—out there—when the problem is the projector (in here), our story. 

Katie’s process—writing down that story, four honest questions, and then turning it around—is so gentle it almost disguises how radical it is. Where other frameworks ask you to face your fears, Katie asks you to question your thoughts. The result is the same: freedom. 

She went to sleep one night struggling in a halfway house and woke up fundamentally changed. I find that kind of transformation both credible and compelling. This book is life-changing.

This book captivated me from the first page.

A gorilla places an ad in a newspaper: “Teacher seeks student.” The narrator responds, and what follows is a Socratic dialogue that dismantles the deepest myth of our culture—that humans are separate from nature, exempt from its rules, destined to conquer it.

Quinn spent decades writing and rewriting this book. It won the Ted Turner Prize for the work of fiction most likely to change the world—and it did change mine. He exposes a cultural story so old and so taken for granted that we don’t even know we’re living inside it. That’s the most dangerous kind of myth.

I tracked him down after finishing it and discovered he lived in Austin, where I lived. He and his wife, Rennie MacKay, became friends with my wife, Amy, and me. We shared many dinners and many conversations. I miss him dearly.

Frankl wrote that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast should be matched by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

That idea stopped me cold—and stayed with me for decades. I even spent time collaborating with Gary Lee Price, the sculptor commissioned to design it, and his wife, both of whom are board members of the Statue of Responsibility Foundation.

But the deeper gift from Frankl is the distinction between liberty and freedom. Liberty is the absence of physical confinement. Freedom is something else entirely—it is mental and emotional, it must be claimed, and it must be practiced every day. No one can give it to you. That insight lives at the heart of everything I teach.