34 Books Like The Message of the Upanisads

I like and dislike this book! Ricard is a scientist and a Buddhist monk, and is reported to be the happiest man on earth. I know, respect, and like Ricard, and this book harkens back to the Stoics by suggesting that moderation is the key to happiness. My research says yes and no to this.  Ricard is correct that spending too much time worrying about the past or future will drag down one's happiness. My research, and that of many others, have shown the positive effect of meditation on happiness and here Ricard is masterful in explaining how and why meditation is important. Calmness and self-insight are very important to avoiding depression and setting the conditions for happiness, but, as Ricard notes, we must be in communities of other people to truly thrive. A little wildness is awesome, go for it!

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”.

This book describes in detail with extreme clarity that knowing our true being is peace, happiness, and love. Our true self is always present consciousness which knows the mind, body, and the world. The belief in the existence of a separate inner self and an external world obscures our true nature. With the veiling of our true nature, an imaginary self that is limited and situated in the mind-body is seemingly created and the search for happiness in the outside world begins. Suffering is the veiling of one's true nature or happiness, not the lack of happiness. After the dissolution of the separate self that we think and feel to be, happiness and love shine forth. Peace and happiness are not the states of body and mind, but inherent to our real nature.

This recently published excavation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is almost as thick as Beauvoir’s massive tract, but don’t let that put you off. The photo of Beauvoir on the cover conveys an insouciant “Yeah, sure” attitude, and Meryl Atman uncannily channels that sentiment into a dazzlingly authoritative and entertaining discussion of why the overwhelming majority of the criticism of Beauvoir’s famous tome happens to be misguided and wrong. The book is about gender, race, sexuality, class, and privilege, but it isn’t a polemic. It is an exercise in critical reading at its most invigorating.

Where The Alchemist is considered the beginner's book on esoteric wisdom, The Puppet Master's Secret is the PHD book about Fractals and what it means to be one, how it feels to be one, as well as the possibilities an awakened Fractal may consider after an incarnation.

This book hits home hard as I'm a Fractal of my Overself as well. The author is a personal friend who used some of our conversations in this book, making it a private biographical adventure for me. This book is meant to assist other Fractals on their journeys to decide if they want to become their own individuals.

Geoff Dyer has a funny, trenchant persona in his writing on travel and art, and this novel delivers those pithy insights through two fictional alter egos. This book does so many things I love, giving me fresh ways to see places, books, and ideas I know but never thought of this way, including new ways of thinking about the self.

The book’s first part tells of a middle-aged Brit called Jeff at the Venice Biennale; in the other, an unnamed middle-aged Brit relates an ill-fated voyage to one of India’s holiest—and most polluted—sites. The title is an obvious play on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, but Dyer’s trying for the death of the author in autofiction. It set my neurons alight. 

A classic treatise on how the mind works in a social context by two of the most famous social psychologists in the world. Why do people do what they do? It is not just a matter of their character or personality; we all respond to social norms, social pressures, and cultural contexts, more so than we think we do. And to understand someone else, we have to put ourselves inside their head and understand how they see the world, and how culture and the social context shapes that view. Many people who have read this book say it has fundamentally changed the way they view the world.

An autobiography like no other. Though written sixteen centuries ago, Saint Augustine’s Confessions are more gripping and surprising than any contemporary memoir I know. Cast in the form of a prayer to God, the book reveals the inner turmoil of someone who, on the surface, at least, seems happy and talented.

But that is only because he keeps his misery from himself. “I have become a question to myself,” he writes. When a painful moment of self-revelation finally arrives, he sees all his inner pain and blemishes and is horrified. And in that same moment, with God’s help, it all disappears. And life begins again.

“This book was written in good faith, reader.” It’s hard not to love a book that begins with a lie. Written in the late 16th century, during the Wars of Religion, Montaigne’s Essays purport to be the occasional, delightful jottings of a distracted nobleman.

In fact, his large ambition was to ease his readers into a revolutionary new way of thinking about themselves that would temper their passions. He wanted to persuade us that we are always changing our feelings and, tastes and ideas; the only thing constant seems to be our inconstancy. And “that’s ok,” purrs Montaigne, because I’m the same way. Forget sin, you can’t be fully responsible for yourself. Forget heaven, learn to live happy on earth. Saint Augustine fumes….