So You Want to Take Your Spirituality up a Notch

You started with yoga and made your way into meditation. The physical benefits are clear to you – a kind of relaxation inside that takes the edge off. That’s its own path. For most people, it’s plenty. But a few notice another door opening, which aims toward a different kind of freedom.

I was 50-something when it opened to me. While I found myself directed into several group experiences, listening to masters talk about their mastery, I also started reading spiritual works, not in any particular order.

This isn’t coursework. It’s reading for pleasure. Don’t expect the books to teach you much. Every once in a while, you might go “Wow.” By reading good spiritual texts, you’re getting used to a specialized vocabulary. It gets easier. Like everything else of wisdom or mastery, repetitions count. And one weird thing is that the book will probably meet you where you are. The notions in these books are so densely packed that the layer you happen to be in will be exposed.

Like everything I publish, this list is personal. I’m not an accredited school, and my syllabus doesn’t conform to a tradition or even make sense to anyone else. I’m listing the books that had an especially strong effect on my spiritual engagement. I only vouch for them from the perspective that they worked for me. I don’t know how or why they paid off, just that they did. I don’t even know what I mean by “worked for me.”

A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle opens up Buddhist notions of suffering and antidotes to suffering with no Buddhist jargon and no prior spiritual training required. This is an extraordinary primer: easy to read, easy to understand, and eye-opening.

The End of Your World – After breaking away from his Zen training, former bicycle racer Adyashanti took the lead for people on the verge. Adya’s purpose is to awaken people to the possibility that they might be awakened. He’s a fire starter.

Bhagavad Gita – The supreme being Krishna instructs his favorite mortal, Arjuna, on the basics of spiritual mastery. This short allegorical tale contains just about everything there is to know, from the metaphysical to the practical, for a neophyte or master traveling down the enlightenment path.

New Testament – Now it’s time to re-read one of the gospels as if you had never heard of Christianity or even Jesus. The story gets going early on, with the Sermon on the Mount. Stop there. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Whoa. What if he means just that? Could the poor in spirit – the losers who don’t believe anything they’ve heard anymore, about achievement, purpose, social ranking, political views – be whom I should emulate? What if I started over, empty? Jesus is more Buddhist than you might think.

Tao Te Ching – This is the book for learning the attitude of emptiness.

The Void – Like the Tao Te Ching, this slim volume by A.H. Almaas describes emptiness, but parses its different appearances in human life, carefully distinguishing the several kinds and what each has to offer.

Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing – The author presents spiritual attainment as a matter-of-fact possibility, while skewering the standard views that modern hucksters spread. It’s the fun version of Chogyam Trungpa’s classic Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.

Freedom from the Known – If you’re suspicious of institutions like I am, J. Krishnamurti’s your guy. Read him one short chapter at a time.

Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali – Beautiful, brief, and stunningly complete. Just a few verses that contain most of what you need to know about how your thoughts might change.

Early Buddhist Discourses – For all that followed him and took on the name Buddhism – the metaphysics, logic, instruction manuals, institutionalization, sectarianism – the first words attributed to the big guy himself can’t be beat. These are brilliant, short, and immediate courses in redirecting your mind and belief system.

Upanishads – The various contemporary Hindu views play off these works of faith, metaphysics, and instruction that open the ideas of oneness and luminescence even to non-practitioners.

The Republic – This time don’t read it as a political tract but as Plato’s allegory describing the divine soul inside you.

Four Quartets – Eliot’s clear-minded entryway into the divine toggles from crystalline abstractions to mundane natural beauty as if effortlessly, like your mind can.