Books like The Religion of Tomorrow — picked by fans

This book is at the leading edge of providing expert insights and techniques for advanced use of psychedelics, particularly 5-MeO-DMT. Martin Ball validated the profundity of my years of working with psychedelics and fractal energetic yoga. He provided me with new techniques and thought forms for working one-on-one with others in sharing consciousness, clearing energetic blockages, and delving into the infinitude of nonduality.

I found his description of the ego as an energetic construct particularly valuable for understanding how we navigate the physical world and its positive and negative impact on the body's energetics. I also benefited from his knowledge of the opportunities and challenges associated with using psychedelics.

I loved how this book provided me with the most expansive maps of the territory of consciousness to be explored using psychedelics. In the two-volume set, Stanislav Grof summarizes his lifetime’s wisdom of personal discovery and working with thousands of people using high-dose psychedelics and Holotropic Breathwork.

I learned about the paramountcy of set and setting and how my biography, including prenatal and ancestral roots, can influence my psychonautical exploration. I further learned about how trauma is stored in the body as systems of condensed experience (COEXs), how it can be released when using psychedelics, other benefits and challenges of using psychedelics, and the nature of the spiritual emergency. Grof also taught me more about navigating archetypes and the cosmos and connecting to the powers of synchronicity.

This book chronicles the heroic journey of Christopher Bache’s 73 high-dose LSD sessions over twenty years and how these sessions impacted his life.

His story was a testament to me of the incredible hard work and persistence required to clear the body of energetic blockages when using psychedelics to reach the highest states of consciousness, including tapping into the cosmic creative principle of the living universe, exploring hell and heavenly realms, and nonduality. I loved how compelling and inspiring Bache’s story is.

While this book is not about the use of psychedelics, I loved how this book on astral travel provided me with expansive maps of what realms and beings can be explored in the infinitude of consciousness when using psychedelics.

Leland provided me insights into a long list of energetically advanced beings, whom he defines by their function, who can be called into psychedelic sessions for guidance and help. He also taught me how my biography and cultural beliefs can create the visual personal experience of cosmic energies experienced during psychonautical explorations.

Learning the nuances of using thought forms to create my immediate reality and experience was of the greatest value to me: awareness follows thought, and when out of the body, thought manifests itself instantly.

Buddhist philosophers had much to say about how we should live our lives and how we should treat others. Modern scholars of Buddhist moral thinking have presented these ideas in a number of different ways. Gowans’ book is a fair and balanced discussion of what Indian Buddhist moral philosophers had to say about ethics and the different ways in which recent scholars have interpreted their claims.

This was the first book I ever read that changed my life. It came along at a time when I felt I was missing something. I didn’t know a lot about Buddhism at the time, and therefore didn’t recognize that what I was feeling was a universal phenomenon and that the Noble Eightfold Path was a secular template for contentment. I have read many other Buddhist books since then, but none of them have spoken to me like this one did. I have a notebook that contains entire passages of Buddhism Plain and Simple, and regularly refer back to those passages today.

Buddhist philosophers try to construct rational defenses of those claims about the nature of ourselves and the world that are central to the Buddhist project. So clarity about how we obtain knowledge is important to Buddhist thinkers. In this book Stoltz presents some of the fruits of their efforts, the epistemological theories of the tradition. What I most like about this book is the clarity with which Stoltz connects Buddhist theorizing about knowledge with trends in more recent western epistemology, bringing out both important overlaps and significant discontinuities. 

Batchelor’s book rocked the Buddhist world. He stripped away the mysticism and institutional superstructure which, over the centuries, has turned Buddhism into an organized religion.

Bachelor presented Buddhism not as something to believe in but as a down to earth practice available to anyone seeking on their own to relieve the stresses and anxieties of modern life. His work, coming out of the Buddhist community (Batchelor started off as a Buddhist monk), provided further evidence of the common approach to practical, personal liberation explored in my own work based on comparing Pyrrhonism and early Buddhism. 

I think this is probably one of the most interesting, albeit lesser-known, books about the modern Stoic revival. Modern Stoicism is a dynamic movement that comprises many different voices and potential applications of the philosophy.

I love how this varied collection of essays, under the skillful editorial eyes of Greg Sadler and Leah Goldrick, has us thinking one minute about how Stoicism and mindfulness can intertwine and the next about what a Stoic would make of Jordan Peterson, all the while never losing sight of the power of the philosophy for personal transformation.

I highly recommend this book, a comprehensive ‘snapshot’ of all the different ways Stoicism can enrich our personal and collective lives. 

Follow Eden on a journey into all the fecundity of darkness—into the body, nature, silence, world challenges. She is an amazing guide to a shadow side of the Buddhist practice that I have not seen elsewhere. She shows how these neglected aspects of ourselves are actually a path to awakening and healing. It’s a pretty remarkable and unusual book and it just came out!