25 books like Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

This was the absolute best book I have ever read that explains the spiritual path.

I love that this book is so balanced and whole. Jack Kornfield helped me understand spiritual growth early in my journey through simple but sophisticated psychology and deep nondual philosophy and experience.

He covers everything clearly, with amazing stories and a fantastic writing style that I found inspiring, challenging, and comforting all at once.

This book opened my mind to the possibility of spiritual superpowers and the wealth of wisdom that lives in the ancient spiritual traditions of the world.

A little on the dense side, this amazing book blew my mind as I felt like I was transported in time to study at the feet of great masters. I was amazed by stories of miracles and incredible gifts of consciousness that had otherwise seemed only the stuff of movies and fiction.

The images were so compelling to me that I could not stop reading it. It felt like a course in deep metaphysics. And it was all a way of sharing the life story of a master teacher I truly admire and want to know everything about.

I have to say, on top of all this, it felt familiar, easy, and like a beautiful world to immerse in.

This book connected me with the concept of the soul and spirit so vividly and personally.

Written as a story, I found every page was a pleasure to read and an extraordinary discovery of life after death, life between life, and the possibility of Spirit Guides. I read this when these things were new to me, and Dr. Weiss’s writing was so simple, clear, and easy to envision.

It felt like a spiritual experience to me when I read this book. I never looked at relationships or myself the same after this book.

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon gives the viewer a window into a piece of Native American culture in 1920s Oklahoma as well as the inner workings of the brand-new FBI under its narcissistic and despotic head J. Edgar Hoover.

For me, the heart of the story is the Osage people and their struggle to prosper in the face of racism, corruption, and murder. That’s not to say that Grann doesn’t do a brilliant job with the FBI investigation into the killings. 

Buffalo Bill made a movie on the rez about Indians? Geronimo had a Cadillac? Indian rhythms are all over 20th-century classical music? Philip Deloria has a knack for showing us how Indian people usually defy what the media says they are—they turn up in funny places, do remarkable things, and achieve extraordinary results. Many of the Indians in this book aren’t found on the reservation, a reminder that Native people have traveled far and wide to do astonishing things when the spirit of adventure calls.

For more than eighty years, the Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg did a bit of just about everything. He joined a warrior society as a boy, fought against Custer and Crook in the Indian Wars, rode as an army scout, served as a tribal judge, converted to Christianity, and had to divorce one of his two wives (a heartrending scene!) before his new religion would accept him. His story is told by Thomas Marquis, a Cheyenne agency physician, who translated Wooden Leg’s story from sign language since they didn’t speak each other’s mother tongue. This is one of the best accounts of how Plains Indian men negotiated the challenge of transitioning from traditional ways to life on the reservation.

Thankfully, not all Indian stories are written or recounted by men. Irene Stewart, born at the base of Canyon de Chelly in 1907, grew up in the shadow of her father, a medicine man who had her kidnapped and taken against her will to boarding school. She survived three of those schools, including Haskell Institute, where she learned to bob her hair, studied home economics, and later became a Presbyterian. But this is no simple tale of assimilation. Like many of her schoolmates, she remained attached to tribal ways and remained true to Navajo tradition even while transforming herself for the world beyond the rez. 

The spiritual worldview so beautifully rendered in Black Elk Speaks reflects the landscape of the North American Great Plains.

The Four Winds emanate from the cardinal points of the compass, and above is Father Sky and below is Mother Earth all united in one Great Spirit. The spiritual worldview of the Ojibwa reflects the landscape of the woodlands surrounding the Great Lakes. It’s an animate, shape-shifting world of the Trickster/Culture Hero Nanabushu and Wendigo, the cannibal spirit of the hard and lean winter months.

In this magical-realist novel, Louise Erdrich, a writer of Ojibwa ancestry, weaves together the star-crossed lives of her fictional characters with the fluid human and animal (and animal-human) characters of the traditional Ojibwa worldview. Erdrich thus breathes new life into the Old World of the North Woods and brings that Old World to bear on the New. 

This book was my first portal into the North American Plains-Indian worldview.

It is a powerful narrative of a profoundly spiritual visionary that “has become a North American bible of all tribes,” writes Vine Deloria in his Introduction to the 1979 Bison Books edition.

“So important has this book become that one cannot today attend a meeting on Indian religion and hear a series of Indian speakers without recalling the exact parts of the book that lie behind contemporary efforts to inspire and clarify those beliefs that are ‘truly Indian.’”

It has also become the genre exemplar of American Indian spiritual narratives—autobiography as the armature on which to sculpt a spiritual worldview. Black Elk fought against George Armstrong Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn alongside his cousin the great Crazy Horse, and he was a leader of the Ghost Dance which ended tragically in the massacre of Wounded Knee.

His life story in Black Elk Speaks ends when Black Elk was only twenty-seven years old. He would live another sixty years. The Sixth Grandfather completes his biography.

Black Elk successfully made his way into the utterly new White man’s world, performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Europe and converting to Catholicism and becoming a deacon. Toward the end of his life, Black Elk renounced Catholicism and with a providential encounter with the poet John G. Neihardt, he found the person in whom he could entrust his great vision, which he had never truly forsaken.

He spoke in Lakota, his son Ben translated, and Neihardt’s daughters Enid and Hilda transcribed his narrative in shorthand. The Neihardt daughters’ typescripts are published here in full and clearly show that the poet’s contribution was only to distill the essence of Black Elk’s tale in vivid and concise prose, not to intrude… show more.