100 Books Like Esalen

Okay, this one could surely be part of a list of books on artificial intelligence, but it's more than that: it's about the effects of networks of information—both real and fabricated, hallucinated, or intentionally-distorted —and their evolution and spread over the history of human culture, and secondarily, perhaps, about AI and its growing role as part of those information networks.

Despite a few flaws I found maddening (a brief section early in the book argues that genes don’t carry information), it is a very thoughtful and provocative work.

This unusual book deserves to be included in some list or another; to that end, I have included it here.

It views cities, from their urban high rises to McDonald’s roadside eateries, from the standpoint of a burglar (with an architect’s eye), examining how to break in, steal, and make a clean getaway. Although I’ve never broken into a home (other than my own after locking myself out), I found the book eye-opening.

Don’t put it down until you get to the description of the movie Die Hard, which rethinks the skyscraper as one of the key characters of the movie. Okay, I admit it may not be central to who we are, but it is different!

My gosh, this was an interesting book.

It provides a historical perspective on our rapidly evolving technological world by looking at how technology influenced humanity’s era of evolutionary adaptation. Among the accounts are how fire promoted brain growth (by permitting humans to extract more calories from their food), and the almost certain early development of baby slings, that made it possible for human communities to migrate long distances.

Such reflections seem particularly useful today as we face working with AI—and as we wonder how it will affect us.

Looking for a literary alternative to some of my doctoral work in psychology, I signed up for a specialty exam with Professor Robert Plank.

As part of the experience, I read his work, “The emotional significance of imaginary beings,” which was accessible and delightful. A beautifully written and somewhat dreamy review of imaginary beings from Shakespeare’s characters in The Tempest to alien abduction stories circulating in the 1950s and 60s, and including analyses of various science fiction movies, it built a vivid and poetic sense of why we seek such creatures. 

Shortly after its publication, the work was panned by psychoanalysts, who may have been disappointed in the work's focus on people’s everyday hopes, fears, and dreams; the reviewers might have preferred more in-depth analyses following then-current psychoanalytic theory. But the book is an insightful and accessible tour through many literary and film masterpieces (Forbidden Planet among them), as… show more.

Robert Aitken was the first American born Zen teacher to be ranked an equal among the first generation of Zen missionaries from East Asia. Several of his books count as classics, but Mind of Clover stands out for its clarity while introducing Zen's ethical precepts as an essential container of Zen practice. 

This is a book that gets obstacles for seeing out of the way. This is the book I turn to if I’m sad, unsure, not confident. It’s not that this Zen master makes me happy or sure of myself. No, she puts my life in perspective: What is the big deal? I imagine her saying. You are a small thing in the universe. But while you are here, it's important to do your work. Read it and you’ll be back in the river, whisked along in the current, one more unimportant but vitally aware part of the great stream of life.

Dharma successor to Taizan Maezumi Roshi, Charlotte Joko Beck, was a musician, mother, partner and a person deeply interested in the integration of deep practice in the midst of our ordinary lives. Through her warmth and clarity, this book explicitly explores love, relationships, work, dear, ambition, and suffering. It is a beautiful book about how to live fully.

It’s the 2nd book on my list that’s about happiness, but it’s more philosophical and personal than Dan Gilbert’s book. This book changed my life. It made me realize that I had an expectation that my life should be easy and comfortable. Before I read this book whenever something happened in my life that was not easy and comfortable – my plane was delayed, I got sick, a client was late paying an invoice – I would spin into unhappiness. Why was this happening to me? Everything was personal. Stuff happens all the time. What makes us miserable is how we react to it. I remember reading a passage from the book and feeling my frame of reference change. It permanently changed my view of myself and how I deal with life.

When a clearly enlightened spiritual master speaks to us, our first reaction is often resistance because the message is designed to end the reign of egocentricity and return us to Authentic Being. To me, everything Leo Tolstoy wrote in his maturity offers the same possibility, but none so starkly as My Religion. As with reading Mahatma Gandhi, we have the opportunity to witness the deep practice of an aspirant grappling with transcending the suffering of the human condition, in much the same way John of the Cross describes the “dark night of the soul.” It illustrates every person’s spiritual journey and the uncompromising nature of the path to awakening.

This book inspired my own integration of service and Zen. Issan Dorsey is a person who did not hold back. This portrait of a teacher whose creativity, love, honesty, joy, and compassion continues to awaken new possibilities for engaged Buddhism.