100 books like The Perennial Philosophy

Siddhartha is a profound exploration of spirituality, self-discovery, and the pursuit of meaning in life.

It encourages readers to seek their own paths, embrace the present moment, and develop a deep sense of interconnectedness with the world around them. The books protagonist Siddhartha encounters various forms of suffering throughout his journey, and he comes to recognize the necessity and inevitability of pain and hardship in life.

The novel teaches that true wisdom and growth can arise from embracing and accepting suffering rather than trying to escape or avoid it.

This book transformed my understanding of human cognition. I love how Daniel Kahneman delves into the dual systems that drive our thoughts—intuitive and deliberate.

This book helped me recognize cognitive biases and informed how I develop AI technologies that align with human behavior. It reinforced the importance of designing AI that complements our natural thinking patterns.

This book offers an interesting perspective on the potential biological basis for religious experiences and beliefs, supported by scientific research.

Even without a background in neuroscience or psychology, I still found it to be a fully understandable book, well-written but not overly complicated. In the modern era where we need to provide a logical basis and justification, it adds to the overall endeavor to bridge science and spirituality.

While I can’t say this book has many practical tips, it has deepened my perspective on the subject of spirituality, allowing me to better comprehend and visualize physical correlates of certain esoteric experiences.

While a delightful and heartwarming children's book, its meaning is profound, speaking to our underlying interconnectedness.

Jim Carrey has been known to have gone through personal spiritual transformations and it resonates in this book. We can get quite deep and detailed when it comes to the spiritual subject but its true nature is simple.

I’ve always known of the wave and ocean metaphor but seeing it personified adds a beneficial facet to my cognitive visualization, helping me better foster senses of empathy and compassion for others. Its illustrations and playful writing are comical and uplifting, aligning with how I perceive Jim Carrey.

For a very quick read, it instills lasting feelings of harmony. 

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… show more.

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… show more.

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… show more.

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. 

This book is a classic in the philosophy of religion. The great Scottish philosopher, and noted skeptic, David Hume, did not dare publish this book during his lifetime. He gave careful instructions to have it published after his death, and so it was first published in 1779. More than two centuries later, philosophers are still debating the merits of Hume’s arguments. What makes this book so great is that Hume does not straw man his opponents’ arguments. Instead, the characters in Hume’s dialogue state the traditional arguments for the existence of God extremely well. Only then, after they have stated the arguments so well, does Hume’s protagonist, Philo, proceed to attack those arguments with the objections for which he is now legendary.  

This classic book hooked me on page one. Björn Kurtén’s curiosity soon becomes your curiosity and before long you are thinking like a paleontologist. It may be an old book, but the author’s thinking remains modern. Indeed, a recent review of cave bear research suggests that our knowledge of these animals hasn’t changed all that much since Kurtén’s day. I love old geology books. Beautifully written, they enable you to discover, imagine, and ultimately to care about an animal that exists only as a pile of bones. This book proved to be very influential.