[Note: extracted from a much longer exchange with Steve Dyer.]
Let me do for myself something like what I suggested you might do: list a few books that have made a big difference in my own odyssey of self-discovery or that speak as an alternative to things I found limiting in various ways. Some of these I would no longer use, and some of them I still use virtually every day of my life. Here, they are presented without indication of which is which, and in no particular order.
The works of Carlos Castaneda.
The books of Ram Dass.
The Road Less Traveled, by Scott Peck (I didn't like his
other stuff).
Any book by Joseph Campbell.
Loneliness, by Clark Moustakis.
The Last Barrier, by Reshad Feild.
The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Yogananda.
The Bond of Power, by Joseph Chilton Pearce.
The Play of Consciousness, by Muktananda.
The Diaries of Anias Nin, and all her novels.
The Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tsu.
Hanta Yo, by Ruth Beebe Hill.
The Mahabharata.
The stories and novels of Paul Bowles.
The stories of Flannery O'Connor.
The stories of Jane Bowles.
The Sufis, by Indries Shah.
Homo Ludens, by Jan Huizinga.
The Geography of the Imagination, by Guy Davenport.
Feeling Good, by David Burns.
The Invisible Way, by Reshad Feild.
West with the Night, by Beryl Markham.
The novels of Jean Rhys.
Everything of Laurens van der Post.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintencance, by Robert Prisig.
The Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Fully Alive, by Roy Laurens.
The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness, by George Morgan.
All of Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and Dante.
Well, enough of that.
No inferences are to be drawn from what isn't here, btw. I'm sure I
couldn't have lived fully without Dylan Thomas or Emily Dickinson,
for example. But these are a few main entries in the list of
(mostly not self-help) books that meet the test of having shown me
how to be me. If they show others how to be them, well and good;
if they don't, still they're pretty decent reads and will keep your
mind either on or off your problems.
