A Random Mix of Books that Impacted my Life Greatly
- The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff
- The Principia Discordia, by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill
- Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain
- The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine
- Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
- How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrel Huff
- The audio lecture Zen Clues, by Alan Watts
- Still the Mind, by Alan Watts
- The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot
- The Contemplative Life, by Joel S. Goldsmith
- A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
- This Is It, by Alan Watts
The single biggest shifts of consciousness in my life were triggered by these books:
-In high school, reading Walden, it *really dawned on me* for the first time that the Republican, Protestant, way I'd been raised wasn't the Only Way. This was earth-shattering. I lived in a kind of a daze for a couple months afterwards, just processing and absorbing and observing life from a completely new perspective.
-A year or so later I read The Tao of Pooh, and had a similar, smaller, shift. The Tao of Pooh is a wonderful, very simple, introduction to the fundamentally different Taoist way of seeing the world, about as big a departure from the Republican Protestant way as you can get.
-The Principia Discordia was foisted off on me by a 'friend' in about '95. lol. My own copy is almost worn to pieces, now. The Principia is the 'bible' of a religion that's posing as a joke. Discordians follow Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos. The whole point of It All is to follow the principle of creative chaos and order, and eschew destructive chaos and order where possible, and to have a Real Good Time while doing it. Amen, or something.
-All the Alan Watts stuff is of most recent date.
He explains with the most elegant clarity the ideas of Zen. He makes clear the idea of oneness with the Universe, and the idea that we don't have any goal to reach, we have nowhere to go, because we are already Here, Now.
Hail Eris ;)