85 Books Like Handbook to Higher Consciousness

This book helped me shift my mindset, and I first picked it up during a stressful phase of my life. I gave myself some time to simply breathe and take it in. It reminded me that the “now” is not just a passing second, but a sacred space where peace and clarity live.

I love how it helped me stop living in the echo of yesterday or the fear of tomorrow. I remember closing my eyes and whispering, “This moment is enough,” and feeling my shoulders relax for the first time in weeks. It helped me feel more connected with myself, my son, my clients, and in doing so, intentionally live every moment with more compassion, stillness, and supremacy.

This book is the number one book I’d bring along if stranded on a desert island. Like my magickal friend Stephanya once said, “I rejoice that such a beautiful thing can spring from the brain of a human being!” I couldn’t agree more. This book begins with a story documenting the author’s psychedelic research as a Harvard professor (then known as Richard Alpert), as well as his adventures in India, where he met his mountaintop Guru, Neem Karoli Baba. Ram Dass would soon become a Guru himself and help introduce Western spiritual seekers to deep mysticism and Eastern philosophy.

So, why is this relevant to empaths, even those who aren’t into psychedelics? The reason is simple: every part of this book, most especially the profoundly artistic “brown pages,” deeply, acutely, and spiritually reminds us that separation is an illusion, that we are all one, and we need to live in… show more.

This book gave language to something I had long practiced intuitively: doing less, but better. McKeown’s concept of “the disciplined pursuit of less” is critical in a world where distractions are disguised as opportunities. It reminds us that focus isn’t just a tactic—it’s a strategy.

I often recommend this book to leaders and individuals who feel overwhelmed and are struggling to regain control of their time.

As a spoken word artist accustomed to embodying different characters, Embracing Our Selves provided me with a profound insight: our personalities are a tapestry of internal characters.

This book masterfully unpacks the various voices within us, from the vulnerable child to the ambitious pusher. It teaches that these voices, each a distinct part of our being, seek recognition and understanding. By identifying which 'character' is in control at any given moment and exploring its desires, we gain deep insights into our own psyche.

This book has been instrumental in my life, offering a framework for understanding the complexity of human personality in a way that aligns with my experiences as an artist. It's a must-read for anyone interested in delving into the multifaceted nature of their inner self and learning how to harmoniously integrate these diverse aspects.

Most people think of time simply as a passive, mechanical tool for measuring reality. But in this groundbreaking book, Janet Sussman introduces the idea that time is a dynamic field responsible for creating the material universe. Readers interested in the study of consciousness will begin to understand the importance of time to the unfoldment of unity consciousness and self-realization. 

This book is a brilliant combination of the science of consciousness and human development, written in beautiful, lyrical language. It invites the reader into a world that is non-linear yet coherent. It causes the reader to quantum leap over the logical mind into an experiential event of time as one's own consciousness. The author describes her book as giving "voice to the freedom enjoyed by those who can transcend time through their own awareness and be free of imposed restrictions on the naturally holographic avenues of the mind."

What we liked is the book gives so much hope for the future.

It is very easy to read, and the chapters are divided by themes about various aspects of our society, such as education, health, travel, law, and politics, and how they may be in the future. 

It has sections on how to prepare ourselves for the new consciousness with meditations and lots of information to guide us in living in harmony with what is coming. It's a book tightly packed with exciting knowledge and wisdom.

A doctor in early twentieth-century Trieste demands that an eccentric patient write his memoirs as a form of psychotherapy. These pages are those memoirs – the doctor calls them all lies – and form the fictional life story of one of my favourite misfits, the unreliable Zeno Cosini, with his horde of idiosyncrasies. Between proposing to three sisters within an hour and making a fortune on the stock market by mistake, he spends his time nurturing his hypochondria and trying to give up smoking, which means endlessly smoking ‘last cigarettes’. A seminal work of modernism, this is another novel with autobiographical ties to the author, and I left it torn between laughter and tears over just how complex, ironic and funny we humans can be.

This book includes essays by some of the foremost thought leaders of our time, on the topic of consciousness seen through the eyes of postmaterialist science. Each seeks a scientific understanding of consciousness that is not reducible to physical processes in the brain. Their intention is not to exclude traditional science and its reliance on neurology and the brain, but rather to reach for a broader view of reality, one that includes well documented nonphysical dimensions of conscious experience, including phenomena such as out-of-the-body and near-death experiences, as well as telepathy, precognition, and more.

Each of these authors is well known and respected in their own field and presents here the cream of a lifetime of research in these areas.

In the mid-1980s, Patricia Churchland started to pursue the idea that philosophers interested in the mind might want to have a look at what is going on in neuroscience, in her book Neurophilosophy.

This book was formative for me, in that it showed a way I could combine my interest in the brain with my love for philosophy. Since then, new generations of graduate students have seen the naturalness of the link and begun to bring the wealth of neuroscientific discoveries into the philosophical debates. 

In Conscience, she looks at the evolutionary roots of our tendencies to form bonds and create social norms to approach the issue of whether our sociality is hardwired. She also discusses the troubling case of sociopaths, who appear to be naturally unethical.

Les Fehmi (recently deceased, to my great sadness) was a mentor of mine from the early days of biofeedback training decades ago. He was truly one of the great pioneers in the study of consciousness and the brain. This book, co-authored with Jim Robbins, is a succinct presentation of his brilliant discoveries about the deep mysteries of attention as a gateway to experiencing the most subtle aspects of consciousness in general.