100 Books Like The Essence of Enlightenment

Happiness Beyond Thought gives practical guidance on experiencing mental peace that lasts. It isn't caught up in mysticism, but manages to show how some of the wisdom in ancient spiritual traditions make solid scientific sense. As a scientist himself, Weber wanted a secular means of experiencing mental clarity. Since clearing his own mind of unwanted thoughts, he has helped many others do the same.

Although it might seem like it is impossible to rid your mind of unwanted thoughts, Weber is careful to explain that he is focused on a particular kind of thought. Once you understand this genre of thinking, it's much easier to reduce its energy-draining impact on your life. The exercises are simple, but not too simple. When your mind is clear, your memory improves because you have more space for reflective thinking. It's that simple and I highly recommend this book.

In this follow-up to Happiness Beyond Thought, Dr. Gary Weber takes things to the next level by examining a text called Ribhu Gita. Whereas many meditation traditions like Zen are based around difficult-to-understand koans, Weber provides translations and commentary on an easy-to-memorize text that cuts to the core of what "enlightenment" is all about.

Through a series of negations, you learn to think better about your mind, your body, and your fears. As concerns about each of these topics diminish, you're able to enjoy the present moment more fully. When you're more present, you pay more attention and remember more as a result.

Although it is not absolutely necessary to read Happiness Beyond Thought first, it is how I read the books and I do think it would be helpful. Weber provides video links to demonstrations of how he works with the text himself, including mudras that connect you… show more.

Giordano Bruno was a great memory master who refined a meditation technique he learned from Ramon Llull. The technique involves using a "memory wheel." Different parts of the wheel contain problems, and an inner wheel contains solutions. Bruno gives many tips on how to use memory techniques so that you can meditate using the memory wheels.

Although very challenging, John Michael Greer's translation is clear and the illustrations help make your use of the memory techniques easy. The book also offers fantastic ideas for developing the best possible mindset for pursuing your meditation and learning goals over the long term.

As a student of Giordano Bruno,  Alexander Dicsone keenly observed the problems his students had with Bruno's meditative memory techniques. In two commentaries, he unfolded the memory tradition from another angle, including how to use the moon as a Memory Palace.

The book is not only instructional but humorous and the translation is a delight to read. It is also annotated for the more serious reader who wishes to go deeper into the references in the text and follow up with additional resources.

This book explores the healing capacity of the disciplines of Vedanta and Jungian Psyche for a human being. It describes how the emotional well-being and non-dual wholeness of a human being can be achieved.  The author emphasizes when using Vedanta that the lack of differentiation of self from the mind and the world creates our suffering. Therefore, the solution to our problems lies in self-knowledge only. The degree of identification of self with the non-self is causing one to suffer to that degree. All human beings seek love. When we discover the Vedantic self as the source of love then the search for wholeness completes. When we know that the self of others is myself, then we reach the supreme level of intimacy and know others in truth.

The book clearly states that cognitive change is required to ensure our well-being. Cognitive change is a change in our outlook on ourselves, God, and the outside world. we need to change from within to face ourselves. Vedanta leads to cognitive change in the fundamental way we look at ourselves and the world. Anger is an expression of the unconscious of a human being. Anger must be managed with a better understanding that it is within the universal psychological order. Because a human being is self-conscious, he finds himself as a person who is lacking and always strives to complete himself through various achievements, relations, and objects. The constant urge to be free from all limitations and lack lies in the self-knowledge that “I am happiness itself”.

If Japanese Zen is best expressed through haiku, Bhagwan Shri Ramana Maharshi’s teachings are the Vedantic equivalent. Simple, direct, straightforward – just the bare minimum a person needs to practice to awaken. This little book distills his teachings and takes the practitioner into a process designed to, as D.T. Suzuki might say it, “grasp the ungraspable nature of the ungraspable.”

The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is one of those characters that you loathe, but cannot help but find fascinating. By all standards, this deviant aristocrat was a gentleman in name only. Yet his remarkable life (32 years of it spent in prison) and amoral philosophizing provide the grist for a great biography under the pen of Gray. Readers will find many of de Sade’s horrific exploits here, yet this book also explores his relationship with the two most important women in his life: his beloved wife, who indulged him for decades, and his hated mother-in-law, whom he envisioned flaying alive before throwing her “into a vat of vinegar.” To a large degree, Marquis’s life and philosophy were an intentionally extreme version of the Enlightenment’s emancipation of the individual. A great window into the dark side of the Enlightenment.

First published in 1947, this iconic book of the “Frankfurt School” could not be a study of AI and 21st-century technologies per see.

Instead it is a phantasmic explainer of how the mistakes of the past impinge on our humanity and the prospects for a better future. "What we had set out to do," Adorno and Horkheimer famously wrote in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

With spectacular erudition, the authors clearly show how the terror regime of the Nazis was rooted in the nefarious legacies of enlightenment Europe and its obsession with racial purity. As such, Adorno and Horkheimer presaged why it is that our polluted history feeds into racist AI technologies: Bad data, Adorno and Horkheimer would agree, produces bad outcomes. 

Zhu Xi (also written Chu Hsi; 1130-1200 C.E.) was among the very greatest Confucians both as theorist and as teacher. I love how contemporary his concerns seem; when he worries about students who are "just hurrying through the texts, reading for their literal meaning and taking little pleasure in them," he might as well be talking about most of us today. In Gardner’s fluid translation, Zhu’s millennium-old ideas about how and why to learn—ultimately aimed at becoming a “sage”—turn out to be remarkably relevant.