The best books exploring the spiritual path as an alternative to institutional religion

Bestselling author Sebastian Junger is known for reporting on dangerous and demanding occupations and for embedding with American soldiers in Afghanistan as a war correspondent. But his most recent book describes his encounter with perhaps the most deadly situation he has ever faced.

A burst aneurysm lands him in the emergency room, and while fighting for his life, Junger becomes aware that his father—who had died eight years ago—is “communicating” to him that everything will be all right. The appealing slant is that Junger, raised by his physicist father as an atheist and materialist, has to try to make sense of a near-death experience.

In a recent interview by the New York Times, Junger is asked how the NDE changed the way he thinks about death and God. “It never crossed my mind to start believing in God,” Junger responds. "But what did happen was I was like, maybe we don’t understand the universe on a fundamental level.”

What follows is an in-depth exploration of the literature on NDEs and the quantum science that appears to back it up.

You may know Rainn Wilson as the actor who played goofy Dwight Schrute on The Office. But he’s also a gifted writer with much spiritual wisdom to share. In this book, he brings his loopy comic appeal to the serious business of explaining why most institutional religions fail to scratch the spiritual itch. And why one putative answer to the anomie and mounting depression sweeping younger generations around the world is to undertake a “spiritual revolution.”

While effortlessly invoking the universal appeal of genuine spirituality, Wilson makes you laugh out loud along the way. Who else could convince you that their own spiritual growth was spurred not by the universalist Bahai Faith in which he was raised but by those linchpins of ‘70s TV culture, Kung Fu (starring David Carradine as “Grasshopper”) and the original Star Trek (in syndication, with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy)?

He uses these unlikely shows as templates for striking “a judicious balance” between inner spiritual practice and helping others, “between the inner quest and the outer mission, self-care and self-sacrifice for the better good.” In the process, Wilson takes on the simplistic skepticism of professional atheists like Daniel Dennett but also expresses admiration for seekers who choose atheism over a hypocritical institutional religion.

He critiques what he calls “ayahuasca tourism”—seeking out psychedelic shortcuts to mystical experience—unless they embrace ways of helping the community, as well.

Finally, he somewhat optimistically proposes a new spiritual community based on principles of love and cosmic energy, with no clergy and no dogma, and a focus on music and the arts—although he’s wise enough not to recommend himself as its founder.

Born to British parents in India, Harvey was raised a Christian but has since extensively practiced and studied other traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism, and has written about them all in some depth. He now teaches what he calls “Sacred Activism,” describing it as “the union of a profound spiritual and mystical knowledge, understanding, and compassion, peace and energy, with focused, wise, radical action in the world.”

His teaching of the Direct Path draws on the spiritual practices of several religions to help create an individualized practice not reliant on any one of those established traditions. In this book, Harvey writes about the current era, describing it as extremely dangerous and creative. He believes that a new humanity is emerging through this period of agony and terror. This new humanity, he suggests, will be in direct and unmediated contact with the Divine, free from the divisiveness, body hatred, and bias toward transcendence that mar all inherited patriarchal religions.

As a result, this new humanity will be able to inhabit time, the body, and the earth with ecstatic consciousness and a passionate, radical sense of responsibility toward all living things.

Renowned for brilliant visionary novels like Brave New World and Island, Huxley also wrote one of the most insightful books about the underlying truth running through the great mystics of the world’s spiritual traditions.

By quoting mostly from the mystics of both East and West themselves rather than the Bible, Huxley focused on the common essence of the experience of divine union. Along with many unsung Christian mystics, he also quotes from Eastern masters and sacred scriptures, including Rumi, Lao Tzu, Shankara, and from scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and the Upanishads, by way of showing that the universal Reality both transcends and is embodied in individual traditions. 

When psychologist Matthew McKay’s son, Jordan, was killed by bike thieves at age 23, McKay learned how to channel him from the other side, as recounted in his touching book Seeking Jordan. In this later book, Jordan communicates in vivid detail the stages he went through after he died.

In what amounts to a modern-day secular Book of the Dead, McKay/Jordan describes how to navigate each stage without a body, how we learn and grow in the spirit world, and how to release anxiety about the end of life and instead view it as another stage of our ongoing consciousness.

Most notably, he reveals that there is no institutional or doctrinal “religion” on the other side and that the driving force of continued consciousness is love and a willingness to keep learning and growing spiritually.