The best books to inspire your spiritual path

This book changed my life. It showed me it was possible, and OK, to be a literary-minded youth and still embark on a spiritual journey that could lead who knew where. I have read it numerous times and am still caught every time by the gorgeous, clear, poetic writing and the spell-binding storytelling. I love the author’s reckoning with the hidden wisdom of his childhood in India and how far from that he strayed during his youth in England but then managed to reengage with it at a very deep level.

That opened up a profound journey into spirituality for him, recounted and observed by an acute literary sensibility and deep, informed intelligence. What it did for him, his book did for me, too. (The fact that Harvey later disavowed the guru he followed only intensifies the beauty of this critical phase of his journey.)

I go back to this again and again. Morinaga’s hilarious and frank take on his blundering attempts to stumble into Zen is irresistible.

The way he tracks his own arrogance, stubbornness, and misunderstandings as he tries to stand up to his austere master, by turns humiliated and scolded, then drinking up any faint praise, and just occasionally starting to open to the down-to-earth, kind but stern guidance his teacher is actually offering—all make for a book I love again and again, and don’t want to put down any time I pick it up. (I use it in Zen teaching frequently.)  And how he finally enters a deep, enlightened friendship with his master still moves me every time. It’s a timeless gem for me.

OK, true; I prefer the first two-thirds when Augustine is still unconverted and far from saintly and could do without the pieties of the end. Yes, Augustine is responsible for making the doctrine of “original sin” part of the Western cultural inheritance—but still, what a journey.

The honesty, humility, and candor about his lusts, addictions, pride, and resistance to personal growth; the vivid evocations of life in Roman north Africa in the fourth century; and the home truths about uninformed arrogance; and the final surrender that allows grace to flow in, by whatever name—all make this a timeless and moving account of the real possibilities of human development that I drink up and cherish, even if it is steeped in an alien theology. 

I find this far and away the most readable and compelling account of what neuroscience has to say about the changes meditation can bring about in brain function and morphology. I love that it’s so well written and organized in a way my layperson’s non-scientist brain can happily track. So, this is the go-to handbook for a scientific take on Buddhist practice.

It presents all the juiciest material this meditator would like to know while succinctly summarizing the parts that might go over my head. A perfect introduction—and more than introduction. It comes with a feeling of deeply compassionate understanding of human nature, probably from Hanson’s years in practice and clinical psychology. 

Ah, it's still the best book on awakening! Despite its sublime title, this book is actually mostly about the ecstasy, with its multiple instances of “awakening porn”—alluring accounts of how someone, seemingly out of nowhere, while quietly washing the dishes or watering the garden, suddenly underwent a radical shift in perception and experience that opened up a whole new world.

Often, they say they don’t know how to speak of it, yet somehow do, in ways that send ripples and goosebumps through the body and skin of this reader. Handled with the deep kindness of Kornfield’s wise heart, they are never repetitive, always fresh, and collectively steer us through the author’s extensive commentary to understand what it would mean not just to awaken but to live an ever-deepening path of awakening.