10 books like The Divine Romance

This book can help you to awaken to a deeper level of conscious awareness.

The Four Agreements are powerful tools for personal growth that can help you break free from limiting beliefs and negative patterns. They are simple, yet profound, and can be applied to every aspect of your life. This book teaches you how to cultivate inner peace, be intentional about what you say and do, and create more meaningful relationships.

This is one of the two books that defined the entire era of hippies and flower children in the sixties and seventies. (The other is The Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand.)

The first part of the book is a highly readable first-person account of how Richard Alpert, Harvard psychologist, went to India, met his guru, and became Ram Dass. The next section has hundreds of cryptic sayings in artistic depictions on brown paper.

These are drawn from Eastern traditions and challenge your notions of what is ‘real’. The third and final section is a series of essays on topics like happiness, yoga, transmuting energy, and so on.

In my own book, The Buddha in the Classroom, I tell the story of my fortuitous and life-changing first encounter with this book, while in my first year of college. Foreshadowing my career as a teacher of eastern philosophy, it lit the fire of my ongoing interest in Zen and had a profound impact on my personal journey into meditation. I sensed that the ironic title held some precious secret. I would discover, within its pages, the magic that happens when we learn to lean into the unknown, rather than fight against it. Indeed, the search for assuredness in life only seems to perpetuate the angst that is at the root of all the anxiety that characterizes the human condition... at least for many of us! Through letting go, we become more free.

This modern classic presents the essential teachings of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki.

Through a series of informal talks, Suzuki introduces the basics of Zen practice, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a beginner's mind. Suzuki is considered one of the big Zen masters from the US. He was not teaching Steve Jobs, as many think, however. But he was related to that person, Kobun Roshi.

As a trainer to many programming students, this book reminded me about the power of being a beginner, able to ask questions freely, and ready to make mistakes. It also makes me think often about being "senior" and how it negatively affects my own learning.

In the end, I started to see my own mistakes and those of my trainees as opportunities to either learn or teach.

Baba Muktananda is surely the most entertaining – dare I say, “cool” — of all the great gurus. This book, a collection of Satsang, or Q&A sessions, with the Siddha Yoga Guru, is a very easy-going, unpretentious discussion of the most important things about finding yourself. As the title promises, you are not a finite being; you are infinite. It’s very convincing.

If I only had one book I could bring on a deserted island, The Great Work of Your Life, would be that book. It focuses on what is known in the Hindu tradition as one’s “dharma” or our soul’s unique duty or mission we are called to endeavor. Using The Bhagavad Gita—an epic Hindu folktale as an analogy, TGWOYL follows the lives of culturally known (Beethoven, Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Susan B Anthony) and everyday characters from the author’s life, as an exploration of what it means (and requires) to live one’s dharma in the world. We all know the heroic and courageous sacrifices these well-known icons made, but often we don’t know that they too were faced with paralyzing doubt, setbacks, inner criticism, and a sense of purposelessness amidst their remarkable lives. The book brings these larger-than-life characters down to earth and in essence says, if they could… show more.

I don’t think that I am different from the majority when I say that for most of my life, the idea of “discipline” wasn’t that attractive to me. I wanted freedom. But in this book, as well as all her other books, the Siddha meditation master Gurumayi Chidvilasnanada convinced me that the means to a perfect existence must come through discipline. You cannot find yourself if you do not first sort yourself out. The goal isn’t recklessness; it’s improvisation within defined constraints. That’s where the magic happens. Gurumayi is one of the clearest thinkers and writers that I have ever come across. More importantly, everything she writes is infused with love.

I stumbled onto the audiobook for this when I was commuting an hour and forty-five minutes one way. It was so powerful and deep that I ended up listening to it a second time. Tagore’s spiritual wisdom spans all the major religions. He talks about Christianity as passionately and profoundly as he talks about Buddhism or Hinduism and his wisdom resonates deeply at the core of who you are. 

Feel bullied by thoughts, emotions, anxieties? Find yourself wallowing in past regrets or resentments, or projecting into a foreboding future? Eknath Easwaran shows how damaging thought patterns result in giving away the present - the only time we’re ever guaranteed, feeding a self-absorption that exacerbates our suffering. Easwaran explains the age-old spiritual tool known as mantra, demonstrating the ways we can use it to transform our pain. Using a sacred word as a pivot from negativity trains the brain to focus instead on the positivity we know as God. I found myself deeply grateful to Easwaran during the endless wait as my daughter-in-law struggled through the excruciatingly long and perilous delivery of my grandson. “Oh Sacred Heart…” kept me afloat and held us all in the palm of God’s hand.

One can’t put together a yoga memoir list without including this classic. So much has been written about it (including that it was George Harrison’s favorite book) but I’ll add my two cents, which is that this memoir helps one believe that there’s a greater force, source, being, or something out there orchestrating some of the uncanny stuff we meet up with in our lives. Yogananda was a revered spiritual teacher, but he was also a human being. When he couldn’t be with his mother at her death, he writes that the “Intervening Hand” arranged his absence because his presence would have been too painful to bear, a profound sharing that helped me face my own guilt about a similar experience. His story is wild, crazy, and so unbelievable that it makes you believe.