100 Books Like Through Forests of Every Color

This was my second foray into fascination with what I knew I didn’t understand but desperately sought to. The way this book is written is the method to the understanding it represents. It invites a practitioner to stay with it to receive its gifts and makes for an enduring companion. This book has traveled with me through decades. Each time I read it, it mirrors for me the depth of understanding that is current and what there is to look forward to.

We need to learn from our ancestors. Taizan Maezumi Roshi (1931-1995), was one of the first Japanese Zen masters to bring Zen to the West and founding abbot of the Zen Center of Los Angeles and Zen Mountain Center in Idyllwild, California. This inspiring collection of teachings explore zazen and Zen koans, how to appreciate your life as the life of the Buddha, and the essential matter of life and death. As Maezumi Roshi says, this book is a companion to "be intimate with your life."

Like a Zen koan or a Jewish folk tale, One God Clapping presents a series of stories, each containing a moment of revelation that is never simple or contrived. This book is a bold experiment in the integration of Eastern and Western ways of looking at and living in the world.

I love this book because it’s all about love, the kind that lies behind everything, even tragedy and devastation. Rumi says that ultimate love IS devastation, and it’s the doorway to freedom. This is my favorite book of Rumi poetry, translated by Coleman Barks.

Many of the short poems are surprising, like Zen koans. But unlike Zen, Rumi is full of love for the ultimate and eternal, the birth and death of all things. And he’s not always “enlightened.” He forgets just like the rest of us and then yearns for a reunion. He’s the most poignantly human of all the mystical poets.

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.

This book is sort of an alternate take of On the Road. Cody Pomeroy here is Dean Moriarty, this book is his legend, and instead of unravelling it all in a chronological spiel it's the koans and page-long dreams of remembrance, some of the richest extended prose he ever made.

The writing is true to the soul and heart of the continent and it captures the electric twentieth century.

He wanted to roll up all his books together, standardize the names, and call it The Duluoz Legend. When I read him now I think of all those words as a part of it. There are so many pieces and places to dive into, but if you're ready for the deep stuff then get digging into this golden loam and be glad.

The late great Alan Watts was the master of reminding us not to take reality – or ourselves – at face value. His prose manages to be simple and profound at the same time and he always has his feet on the earth. I could recommend any of his books but this is the one with which I began. No one else can ever tell me who or what I am. My experience of the world is always subjective, whatever science says; and the best way to see accurately is to get to know myself.

I’ve read the 52 stories in this book repeatedly, and each time—despite their familiarity—they seem fresh and new. They put a smile on my face and make my heart sing. This is due, in no small part, to how great a storyteller Lex Hixon is.

I love his artful weaving of deep wisdom into each tale of the intimate relationship between master and disciple and his descriptions of that blessèd moment when the disciple himself or herself becomes a master. I’ve long been fascinated by the question: What really happens during spiritual awakening, aka enlightenment? This book explores this question and at least hints at some sublimely satisfying answers. 

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.

I’ve heard Gary Snyder speak three times. He can be tersely observational, deadly serious, puckishly whimsical, or well-deep mythic, sometimes all at once. All of this is true of Mountains and Rivers Without End, a volume of poems where Snyder does in poetry what Japanese artists did in their landscapes.

Here you will find a series of varied Zen-inspired meditations and Native-American-inspired folktales that draw from his Beat friends, his “Dharma teachers,” and “hosts of poets and writers, scientists, scholars, craftspersons, river-and-mountains people, fields-and-orchards people, and streets-and-buildings people.”

If you care about imagination and nature and freedom, then this book is a must read, one I return to periodically.