The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Eckhart Tolle (2004) I read this at the end of December 2012, after being with an ex-girlfriend, and finished it in Hawaii. For the first time, after meditating consistently, I could look my parents in the eyes, and felt like more of a man. Let people … Read more
The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh (1999) Another good book on mindfulness, and while I don’t think it expresses the idea as clearly or as thoroughly as Harris’ Waking Up, it does state it simply: washing the dishes is meditation. As such, so is life — while we are doing whatever we are … Read more
Happiness (2003) A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, Matthieu Ricard “The inability to manage our thoughts proves to be the principal cause of suffering.” Happiness takes us through the basic philosophy of meditation and suffering in Buddhism, the reasons to cultivate this skill, its benefits being researched by western science, and how to … Read more
Letters from a Stoic (c. 65CE) Lucius Annaeus Seneca “Reflect, as I am often wont to tell you, that there is nothing in such topics for us except mental gymnastics.” Letters from a Stoic… Good God, just thinking about the book makes me cringe! This was a few sparse bits of wonderfully refreshing philosophy interspersed … Read more
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements (2010) Sam Kean Here Sam Kean takes us on both an academic, colorful history, and a personal tale of experiences relating the periodic table. I’d recommend this as a good introduction for … Read more
The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (2015) Sam Kean “We crowned ourselves Homo sapiens, the wise ape, but Homo limbus might have been more apt.” For anyone even slightly interested in the brain, which should include all primates, I … Read more
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan “The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” The Demon-Haunted World is nothing shy of a manifesto for science, reason, and wonder. Indeed, the balance (required!) between both healthy skepticism and wonder is Sagan’s introduction to … Read more
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll “Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” –The Duchess Alice in Wonderland! What a shame it took me … Read more
The Time Machine (Wells, H. G., Herbert George) “Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling. All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged … Read more