Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was a Soto Zen priest and the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. He was born 1904 in rural Japan, arrived in the United States to teach in 1959, and died of cancer in San Francisco in 1971.

Description: I have read many Buddhist books, and this one is my favorite. In fact, I have read many books (full stop), and this one is my favorite. ZMBM is mystical and otherworldly yet day-to-day ordinary, it is philosophical and technical yet beautifully poetic and literary, it is challenging and demands your best yet is gentle and patient, it is traditional yet modern, it is serious and sincere yet light-hearted and easy, it is simple yet deep, it is Japanese yet American. To summarize : pimp as muhfgn hell. Steven Mitchell included excerpts from ZMBM in his anthological collection of traditional “enlightened” writings called “The Enlightened Mind”, and it’s easy to see why. My perspective is that these words emerge from the still silent heart of genuine spiritual liberation.

Anecdote: Suzuki Roshi was purportedly a small man with a wry and sometimes mischievous sense of humor. Once, while being transported between Zen temples, he reportedly ordered a burger, and then, saying he wasn’t that hungry, switched lunches with his driver (later admitting that it was because he thought the guy was too attached to being a hard-line vegetarian). Suzuki Roshi’s, a Zen master in his own right, described him as “soft and warm on the outside, hard as stone [in his self-discipline] on the inside”.

Potential Turn-Offs: I’ll leave others to try to cook some up. I can’t think of any. Maybe if your iman declared jihad on all religions besides your own? Aside from fundamentalism like that, if you’re into depth, clarity, beauty, and profundity, this is a good book for you.

What I Got out of it: In the twenty years since I first read it, every time I pick up this book and read a chapter or three, I get something out of it that speaks powerfully and directly to what is going on in my life. The relevant information is usually simultaneously simple, obvious, and everyday-decent, and yet also magical, deep, and paradoxical. I have noticed that my favorite books seem to grow deeper as the years go on, and the deeper I get, and ZMBM was the first book I noticed that seemed to be doing this. I look forward to seeing what as yet undiscovered treasures it will hold for me twenty or thirty years from now.

Learn more about Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki

Nisargadatta Maharaj was born in 1897 with the name “Maruti”, and lived a simple uneducated life, as a husband and shopkeeper in the slums of Bombay, until he died in 1981. He is considered by some however to have attained the supreme state of “moksha” (Sanskrit for “enlightenment” or “liberation”), and to be one of the deepest modern masters of the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta (emphasizing direct nondualistic realization of truth).

In the words of Advaita scholar Dr. Robert Powell, “Like the Zen masters of old, Nisargadatta’s style is abrupt, provocative, and immensely profound — cutting to the core and wasting little effort on inessentials. His terse but potent sayings are known for their ability to trigger shifts in consciousness, just by hearing, or even reading them.”

Description: If you really want to not just understand the concept, but actually learn how it feels to disidentify with yourself as a finite human being, and to instead experience yourself as an expressive action of the entire universe, then this is your book. Nisargadatta’s teachings are relentlessly confrontational and cosmically and mind-blowing. They take every preconceived notion that you have, and blow them out of the water, stretching you much wider open than you even could have conceived possible. This book is IT, the end point of the whole journey.

Anecdote: The philosopher Ken Wilber points out that many of the modern enlightened masters may have been spiritually liberated but were not fully integrated, i.e. were unhealthy in certain areas of their life besides spirituality. Nisargadatta is an example of this - from his state of enlightenment and his role as part-time role as a guru to many, he also ran a store that mostly sold leaf-rolled cigarettes, chain smoked, and died of throat cancer.

Potential Turn-Offs: If you are new to spiritual practice, this is probably not the book for you - I recommend building up to it with some other books, teachers, and experiences first. First off, a lot of what Nisargadatta teaches in the book is difficult to conceptually comprehend - it’s anything but common sense. Also, I’ve heard it said that the reason why we aren’t all directly in touch with the deep enlightened spiritual truth of life here and now is that it can be so terrifyingly raw. Reading this book may leave you a believer of that theory.

What I Got out of it: Reading I Am That had me finally understand the mystical experience, not as a concept, but, from the inside, what it actually feels like. I can only handle the intensity of the book in three to fifteen page doses, but, after such a reading, I feel immense, clear, transcendent, and unstainable. It doesn’t get any realer. KABOOM, bitches.

Learn more about I Am That, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Description: A straight up masterpiece. This book is filled with deep, true, authentic Buddhist wisdom, and yet is written in an easy, extraordinarily clear Americanized vernacular. It is a comprehensive introduction for mindfulness meditation practice, filled with clear instructions for the path. The book challenges the reader to go deep and to practice properly, but it also has a simple, patient, humorous, kind, smiling vibe to it. Covers a wide ground, and yet touches on each subject in depth.

Anecdote: It is my experience that neither Bhante G (as he is known)’s other books nor his live lectures are quite as piercingly clear and smooth as this book is. Relevant here are the rumors that MiPE was ghost-co-written with an American professional writer.

Potential Turn-Offs: Don’t read this book if … ummmm …. if you don’t like being happy? Honestly, I can’t really think of any negatives to it. This book rökkz harder than John Bonham flying a F-35 JSF (while wearing Iron Man’s battlesuit).

What I Got out of it: I’ve been sitting meditation for twenty years and teaching it for five, and much of my grounding in the practice has come out of this book. Any meditation practitioner I know who is looking to deepen their understanding of the practice has gotten value from their engagement with this book. It’s everything you wish your mom had taught you about meditation practice. Anytime I pick up and re-read a little bit of it, I feel soothed, clarified, and a feeling of the worthwhileness of being aware, intentional, and alive.

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Growth Potential: 1) When we confuse magical or mythical forms of spirituality with trans-rational and experiential understandings of consciousness, we will often delude ourselves into thinking we are deepening our spiritual development when we are really deepening our delusion and fooling ourselves. By learning to differentiate between them, we can both recognize truly deep spiritual teaching and let go of pre-rational myths that hamper our spiritual growth. 2) We can learn to work with understand the responses that people at different levels of development will predictably exhibit, giving us greater ease and power in our social relations. 3) We can use these ideas to understand how seemingly disparate ideas and theorists actually compliment one another in describing the whole human condition. This synthesis allows us to integrate all of human knowledge into a coherent whole, even when the various teachers claim that they have the one and only or most important truths.

Pop Potential: Ken Wilber is transforming the academic and cultural landscape, bringing together many of the worlds most prestigious and prodigious teachers to his Integral Institute, including actors, politicians, entertainers, and authors. His work will be a central part of the new foundation for the future social and international organizations of the 21st century.

“Get Real” Potential: Many of the people whose work he both integrates and criticizes find his analysis arrogant and dominating. Ken is a very intellectual guy, and many suggest that he privileges thinking over feeling and intuition. Since his work is conceptual and covers pretty much the whole of the Human knowledge project, it is often so abstract that people accuse him of missing the trees for the forest. He himself admits this, and points out that the map he is creating is not the territory - and that if you remember it is a map, it is an incredibly valuable one.

What I Got out of it: This book gave words and structure to a whole series of experiences around consciousness and mind that had been a source of deep internal conflict. As I learned and applied his distinctions to my experience, the various pieces settled into place and my mind cleared, giving me powerful insights. My work, my relationships, my internal experience became simpler, while my capacity to impact others increased dramatically. Most of all, it made my experiences of consciousness, rationality, and emotions work together as a coherent whole.

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Growth Potential: I was a failure as a meditator. Satsang with Pamela was my entree to accessing the peaceful core beyond the mind’s chatter.

Pop Potential: Pam’s students run the gamut from teenagers to homemakers to people who have spent many years in sincere spiritual study. Her approach to nondualism is so simple, one need never read a single Vedic text to experience the state the rishis spoke of. If you think Vedic is something you hope not to catch, and rishis sound like something delicious, you’re still in great shape to find peace with Pamela.

“Get Real” Potential: Pam’s very sweet, giggly-girl personality could be off-putting to some (it isn’t to me).

What I Got out of it: Ultimately satsang was not “mental” enough for me, and I went on to a more hands-on inquiry practice, but I would not have gotten there without the tacit encouragement of this gentle teacher, who lovingly showed me that I needn’t believe everything I think.

Learn more about Satsang with Pamela Wilson

The absence of any visual signs of decay in the dead body of Paramahansa Yogananda offers the most extraordinary case in our experience…. No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death…. No indication of mold was visible on his skin, and no visible drying up took place in the bodily tissues. This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one…. No odor of decay emanated from his body at any time…

“Get Real” Potential: This is his real life, hence ‘Autobiography!’ Now I don’t think I will be staring any tigers in the eye and feeling a sense of overall peace and connection to it’s spirit any time soon, but there are many valuable stories that have opened me to new ways of taking the higher path in my life and of trusting my intuition.
What I Got out of it: A wonderful insight to the life of a man who has touched the lives of millions and inspired self-realization on a global level. I enjoyed the stories from a personal level as both entertainment as well as a tool to watch how he lives his life with ‘the highest good’ and the teachings of his Guru guiding him. It is a ‘good feeling’ book and I got a good feeling from it!

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