10 Books

Rick recommends

~ Ten Books that Will Not Waste Your Time ~

Like old James Bond Movies, books may be slow, but they tend to live on. And like an old-time cannonball, they can damage the defensive constructions we have created and break us through into another way of seeing and being in the world. I want to share books that have opened me, books that are not commodities, and books that demand second, third, and ongoing reading. This is important. When someone says “It’s a best seller’ that means that it is a successful commodity, which almost guarantees that no one has read it seriously. Very few people actually read or read meditatively; people read for entertainment, or to fill some down time on an airplane, or to try and get something that they do not have, but few are those who acknowledge what might be at stake in serious reading.

Reading a book once is a form of consumption. Living with an author’s blood, sweat, and soul demands patience and repeated visits. This allows one to move deeply into actual dialogue with an “other,” the intimate exchange that is more risky, sexy, and transforming than consumptive reading, a meditation that opens us to the possible. So here is an eclectic list: not the “best books,” not the “only books,” but books, “old and new,” that I promise will not waste your time and may even challenge you at the core. I will renew this list every season to allow other lights to be seen.

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Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (1913). Nowhere else have I seen the call and purpose of beauty so forcefully articulated — not beauty as ornamental or extraneous, but as the fundamental transforming force in nature and the world that we can pay attention to or not.

 

Jacob Needleman, Why Can’t We Be Good?  Professor Needleman brings the history of philosophy into the walkaday world. He neither pontificates not abstracts, but takes on the most pressing questions of what it means to be human as he walks with Socrates and on through Gurdjieff in a constant and thoughtful conversation.

 

Herman Hesse, Journey to the East. For my money, the most lasting and profound of Hesse’s works.  This is a narrative of a “failed quest,” and if you stay with it, it brings your capacity for delusion to light.

 

Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot. We actually know who wrote this amazing work, but out of respect we will remain with “anonymous.’ This tome is a profound voyage through the Major Arcana of the Tarot from an esoteric Christian perspective. It details the intricacies of the spiritual path through a Western perspective and is a good antidote to custard pie Eastern visions that never bother to ask (or answer) the question, “Why are we here in this state anyway?”

 

Liz Greene, Astrology of Fate. There are so many really bad books on astrology out there, but this one remains classically helpful; not only for its understanding and depiction of astrological archetypes, but as a mythopoetic primer, an introduction to Western mythology, and depth psychological (i.e. Jungian) guide to transformation.

 

Confucius, The Analects. Neglected “wisdom of old,” probably because it cannot be turned into an easy narrative; Confucius walked with his students as Aristotle did, but his focus is deeply rooted in how are we to live together. The fundamental Confucian concepts — humaneness, filial piety, Dao, and, ritual awareness — deserve reflection, for they are sorely lacking or misunderstood in contemporary cultures, east and west.

 

James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology. Written in the prime of his life, before his work was “how to-ed” by others, Hillman makes the significant break from Jung by daring to call the archetypes what they actually might be, “Gods.” Hillman’s vision of an animated polytheistic psyche opens the door to the poetic and dramatic as the true purveyors of depth reality. If there was one book on the human mind that I would take with me on my exile to the Moon, this would be it.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance and Other Essays. I am tempted to add Whitman and Thoreau here, but Emerson was first: a good reminder to trust oneself, live in the present, and to dare move beyond the graven images of tired traditionalism. Moreover, Emerson did not only wax abstractly, but took on the basic realities of human life: friendship, compensation, fate, and freedom.

 

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.  An anthropological meditation on vocation comparing the “gift economy” to the “utilitarian economy.” A mature reflection on how to follow one’s calling while living inn the realm of Caesar.

 

Frederick Smith, The Self Possessed.  The definitive book on Spirit Possession in India, written by a contemporary scholar of Sanskrit. I put this academic work on the list because it powerfully challenges prevailing notions of the self — that we are one solid immovable identity — and opens our eyes to creative ways that people have to negotiate illness and health.