Book: What book changed your life for the better and has influence in your life?

[LightSun]

What book changed your life for the better and has influence in your life? Why is it such a profound book for you? How has it impacted your life and changed your behavior? Why is it so wise and what have you learned from it?

 

[LightSun]

"Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents." Epictetus

“What an astonishing thing a book is. One glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs." Carl Sagan

"Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species." Carl Sagan

 

[Obfuscate]

something or other by e.e. cummings (been too many years to recall which) and ariel by sylvia plath... found them as a kid and decieded that i could do that... flashforward to highschool and i gave it a try... i think on the road by kerouac is worth a mention, because everytime i've read it, i left to live in a new state... lotr/hobbit by tolkien and the dune series by frank herbert are notable because i compare anything else in their genres to them... the bible perhaps because it was such a large part of my upbringing... it is hard to say what has had the largest impact... the myth of mental illness (among others) by szasz pushed me to solve my own problems...fuck if i know...

 

[LightSun]

50 Spiritual Classics

1. Muhammad Asad The Road To Mecca (1954)

2. St Augustine Confessions (400)

3. Richard Bach Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

4. Black Elk Black Elk Speaks (1932)

5. Richard Maurice Bucke Cosmic Consciousness (1901)

6. Fritjof Capra The Tao of Physics (1976)

7. Carlos Castaneda Journey to Ixtlan (1972)

8. GK Chesterton St Francis of Assisi (1922)

9. Pema Chödrön The Places That Scare You (2001)

10. Chuang Tzu The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)

11. Ram Dass Be Here Now (1971)

12. Epictetus The Enchiridion (1st century)

13. Mohandas Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)

14. Al-Ghazzali The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)

15. Kahlil Gibran The Prophet (1923)

16. GI Gurdjieff Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)

17. Dag Hammarskjold Markings (1963)

18. Abraham Joshua Heschel The Sabbath (1951)

19. Herman Hesse Siddartha (1922)

20. Aldous Huxley The Doors of Perception (1954)

21. William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

22. Carl Gustav Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)

23. Margery Kempe The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)

24. J Krishnamurti Think On These Things (1964)

25. CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters (1942)

26. Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)

27. Daniel C Matt The Essential Kabbalah (1994)

28. Dan Millman The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)

29. W Somerset Maugham The Razor's Edge (1944)

30. Thich Nhat Hanh The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)

31. Michael Newton Journey of Souls (1994)

32. John O'Donohue Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)

33. Robert M Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

34. James Redfield The Celestine Prophecy (1994)

35. Miguel Ruiz The Four Agreements (1997)

36. Helen Schucman & William Thetford A Course in Miracles (1976)

37. Idries Shah The Way of the Sufi (1968)

38. Starhawk The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)

39. Shunryu Suzuki Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)

40. Emanuel Swedenborg Heaven and Hell (1758)

41. Teresa of Avila Interior Castle (1570)

42. Mother Teresa A Simple Path (1994)

43. Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1998)

44. Chögyam Trungpa Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)

45. Neale Donald Walsch Conversations With God (1998)

46. Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)

47. Simone Weil Waiting For God (1979)

48. Ken Wilber A Theory of Everything (2000)

49. Paramahansa Yogananda Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)

50. Gary Zukav The Seat of the Soul (1990)"

source: The best spiritual books - Tom Butler-Bowdon

 

[LightSun]

"A few books to share that have been some positive influence. Please others please do share those specifically pivotal readings which did make some impact upon you.

(1). Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (1995).

(2). Feeling Good by David D. Burns, M.D. (1980). [Cognitive Discipline of your mind]

(3). Frames of mind: Theory of Multiple Intelligences. by Howard Gardner (1983/1993).

(4). A New Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis, PhD. & Robert A. Harper PhD. (1961, 1975). ([Rational-Emotive, basically similar to Cognitive Disciplinary mind set]

(5). Please Understand Me by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates (1984). [MBTI also known Myers-Briggs Typology Index]

(6). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy by Dr. Albert Ellis (1962). ([Rational-Emotive, basically similar to Cognitive Disciplinary mind set]

(7). The Seven Sacred Spiritual laws of Success by Deepak Chopra (1994).

(8). 365 Days of Walking the Red Road: The Native American Path to Leading a Spiritual Life Every Day by Terri Jean (2003).

(9). World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts (Of International Religious Foundation (1991)."

 

[anticlimatic]