221–230 of 539 posts
I think the only book I can recall having a direct impact on my conscious awareness was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle[0]. The book is very easy to read and quite enjoyable with everything that it includes. I definitely recommend to check it out. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenme...
_The Mind Illuminated_ Hasn't changed my life yet but it might (found it three days ago out on hoopla.com). I say this as someone who has given meditation practice a good college try (more than a year at a time of daily practice) on a couple of occasions. Most books say just keep going and you will eventually fart pixie dust. This book says you can reach advanced practice in under a year BUT requires a consistent one…
First and foremost: The Bible. Not the watered down "everybody goes to heaven" theology that most people subscribe to, but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do. Secondarily, this book saved my life in the sense that it helped me understand my depression, a clinical depression so deep that my psychologist had never seen such a thing previously: Get Out of Y…
> but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do. Can you expand? Did you create this approach yourself or just read the Bible directly?
Kurt Vonnegut probably had the biggest impact on me. Mother Night and Timequake in particular. Two quotes I use all the time: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." And "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
I know it's trite to say it, but in my early 20s reading Atlas Shrugged helped me regain my bearings. And, no, it did not turn me into Peter Thiel.
There are set of popular books that turn people ready for it into assholes. They also have value if they don’t do that to you and you apply a certain skepticism to them, but still often a risk.
Dune. Specifically the parts about how a human can choose their reaction to an external event. And the ability to overcome fear. Man's Search For Meaning. Again, overcoming the worst situations and finding joy anywhere. How to Practice. Understanding what you are feeling and why you are feeling it. Emotional Intelligence. How the amygdala sends signals to the brain, why it does that, and how to recognize your negativ…
How to Practice and Emotional Intelligence are rather generic book titles. Do you mind providing the author names as well?
There has only been three books so far that have changed my life- 1. "Sei Somoy" (Those Times) by Sunil Ganguly. It is a novel about the past of Bengalis. The Bengali Reneissance, its central characters, progress, the conflict- all are beautifully depicted. I had no collective identity as a person before. And disliked whatever I had. This book made me feel really good about my identity. Suddenly, I was more confident…
I have a hard time with this. Earlier i used stuff like imdb and goodreads to determine and then i realized i don't like more than half of what i consume. Later i started asking what my friends liked, and consumed as per their recommendations, had a similar experience but this time around whenever i didn't like something, i complained to my friend and we had long discussions about it sometimes spanning multiple days. i found this approach better even if it sometimes meant consuming the trend of the week. After doing that for an year or two i started doing to consume/save-for-later anything that remotely looked interesting. These days I'm still following that approach. i still come across a lot of cheap makes but i think these help me to judge what's good and what's not. I mostly bring up this argument as i strongly believe "best" is subjective And going by all time classics or other people's recommendations you may miss out a chance to discover for yourself what is truly best for you. This was a straw man argument. Ignore it if it doesn't apply to you. But i'm curious on how you determine what makes "highest kind" and "best" before consuming it.
> "Mastery" by Leonard Gordon
I couldn't find this book.
Time and time again I made up my mind to focus, but it wasn't until I read this book that I actually did it.
It's written in the same concise format as The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and it's just as dense with insights. I would encourage anyone to spend just 5 min reading the first few pages of Book Two here: https://aimeeknight.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/the-war-of-a...