TheProcess wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 8:09 pm
Would you consider posting some reading recommendations? I could use a little of that nirvana.
Relevant books from my reading list as I've grappled with psychological issues / unhappiness / whatever since 2012, with some sort of descriptor from my reading journal (some are more helpful than others), presented in the order in which I read them.
1) Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert - You're terrible at knowing what you want and even more terrible at knowing what you'll want years from now. Good luck and don't worry about it.
2) The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman - I've read this at least three times. A bit of a survey of other ways of thinking, as opposed to the "positive thinking" self-help group.
3) Siddhartha, Herman Hesse - One of my favorite books of all time. Story of a man seeking enlightenment and his path through life - a German's interpretation of Buddhism.
4) White Fang, Jack London - Classic Alaskan wilderness book. "This was living, though he did not know it. He was realizing his own meaning in the world he was doing that for which he was made ... for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do." "Life is always happy when it is expressing itself." "Life is movement". I think about this whenever I get out of the habit of getting outside amongst the trees. I am ALWAYS happiest when I'm consistently outside and moving.
5) Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand - Don't laugh, but I read this for the first time not as an angsty teenager, but as an angsty 30-something. The one real takeaway for me, given my upbringing was the idea of "the sanction of the victim" - that a person cannot shame you unless you accept their moral code/judgment. It helped me reject an oppressive external moral code that did not align with my values, the juxtaposition of which had caused me many years of grief as I struggled with being "wrong". I went from judging myself "wrong" to judging myself "ok" in the relative blink of an eye. One of the major bricks in my road away from organized religion.
6) East of Eden, John Steinbeck - Possibly my favorite book of all time. I guess the thing I'd highlight here is the idea considered across the book about responsibility and blame for one's choices. Part of being an adult is to have the courage to make difficult choices without full information and to be willing to accept the responsibility and blame for the consequences of those choices.
7) The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts - Perhaps a good quote to summarize the direction of the book would be: "Because consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Because such a loss is in principle the same as death, this means that the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love." Also "[life] all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere."
8) The Big Picture, Sean Carroll - Part of my Buddhistic journey has been a grappling with theism vs atheism or meaning vs nihilism or however you want to frame it. My reading journal notes were previously printed here (scroll to bottom):
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5671&p=179384&hilit ... sm#p179384 the most relevant bit being: "The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life."
9) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon - Delightful book about an (autistic?) kid who goes about trying to solve a dog’s murder and finds out (spoiler alert) about his mother’s infidelity, etc. The most impactful part of the book for me was the idea of this autistic kid needing to find his own space and block out all stimuli to calm himself down. It somehow really made the concept of needing that kind of thing really accessible.
10) Breaking the Spell, Dan Dennett - again along the lines of helping me "get free from the oppression of organized religion." The idea of religion being a meme that itself survives via natural selection. The ideas best adapted to humans are the ones that stick around the longest.
11) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson - a really, really accessible book, possibly the one I would recommend the most as a first read. The main point of which is basically "don't hope for a life without problems. There's no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems." In other words, pick which shit sandwich you will enjoy eating the most.
12) Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl - I don’t agree with everything, but I do agree with the idea that of all things, man is free to decide what he thinks and how he orients himself to his situation.
13)
Beyond Hope, Derrick Jensen - an article on Orion Magazine that is an environmentalism-related article, but this paragraph was something I found to be of more general application: "A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems — you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself — and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself." To me, it correlates with this Buddhist / psychological idea of not living in past memories or future fantasies, but to do what is needed right now.
14) Stranger in the Woods, Michael Finkel - a story about a hermit who lived in the woods in Maine for many years and survived by breaking into lakeside cabins and stealing food. The guy lived totally alone with basically nothing and survived the Maine winters. Stories like this just helped put my social anxieties or my need for introversion into an "ok" space. It helped remove judgment similar to my experience reading Atlas Shrugged and Curious Incident.
15) Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright - A full review here:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5671&p=179384&hilit ... ue#p179384 but as I recall the gist is "why meditation is good for you" and it has an extensive bibliography if you want to follow up on any particulars. This would probably be the second or third book I would recommend, after reading Subtle Art.
16) Mindfulness - An Eight-week plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Mark Williams and Danny Penman - This ... is a very dense and excellent book. It was written by a couple of psychologists and they have a therapy based around mindfulness meditation. There are 8 meditations and each chapter goes into some depth about why that particular meditation would be good. There is just way too much to synthesize. Definitely recommend reading this one. Maybe I'll just post my unabridged reading notes. [edit:posted]
17) 10% Happier, Dan Harris - I'm still reading this one, but it's a story of Dan's journey from panic attack on TV to ... I guess being 10% happier. I'm about half-way through, but this is like a selective autobiography rather than a book about meditation, so it's a pretty quick and easy read with a few good insights so far. Maybe this would be a good book to read after Subtle Art and before Why Buddhism is True.
Update: paragraph on 10% Happier from my reading journal: The big takeaway from this book is this idea that meditation or mindfulness doesn’t make you into a permanently happy lump simply passively watching life pass you by. You can be annoyed; you can see problems. What mindfulness allows you to do is to pause between
seeing the problem and
responding to the problem so that you don’t simply
react to the problem. Once you decide how you want to respond to the problem, planning for it is totally fine, but there comes a point when you must ask yourself “is this [continuing to plan] useful?” Once planning no longer is useful, return to the present moment, rather than continuing to uselessly worry about the future result of this plan you have made. Another way to think about it is that you can be attached to the things that you control - your effort in your plan, but it is useless to be attached to the result that you want, since much of the result is out of your control. The attachment to this future thing outside of your control contributes nothing to you but suffering.
edits: typos and stuff. And can I just say -- deciding to start a reading journal is possibly one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. Sad, but true.
edit 3: added update paragraph