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March 28, 2024, 06:54:10 PM

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Good books for damaged minds / souls

Started by Kryton, June 09, 2019, 12:37:32 PM

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Kryton

In another thread Twit 2 mention about reading up on Stoicism and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus which I've duly ordered from Amazon. However I'm looking for more books of a similar nature in which I can help calm my cluttered mind and deal with day to day life and all the problems that come with it.

Anything from philosophy to meditation or any kind of positive reading, that's the kind of stuff I'm interested in reading. Things to help me with dealing with my own issues and de-clutter my head and help overcome my mood swings, something to focus on being a better person, that kinda stuff.

Thanks in advance.

grassbath

It's become a bit of a hackneyed thing to bring up (thanks, Joe Rogan), and perhaps the ideological fallback of tiresome pseudo-philosophers with spliff-smoke coming out their drug-ends but Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and the whole school of thought around that stuff, does make me feel oddly hopeful and existentially comforted.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is fiction but made me feel close to God.

rasta-spouse

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is an interesting (and old) read.

Maybe Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning might be of more use in the modern day.

Ray Travez

Quote from: Kryton on June 09, 2019, 12:37:32 PM
something to focus on being a better person

Why bother? ;)

You might like Taoism. You can probably read a lot of it for free online, see if it appeals to you. Alan Watts is another similar writer in that vein- again, there's plenty of free stuff online.

I bought Marcus Aurelius in Oxfam a few weeks back, but I haven't read it yet.

I just got Darryl Bailey's new book. I like the way he expresses things. Again, there's plenty of free stuff on his website. Perhaps he will cure you of a burdensome desire to become a better person ;) * As he expresses it- I'm very much paraphrasing- you can walk into a forest, and the tree isn't trying to become a better tree; the squirrel isn't pondering how to improve his life as a squirrel; the bush isn't thinking, "If I tried a bit harder I could become a mighty oak". It's a kind of strange thinking that only humans seem to be subject to. I found his viewpoint on this very refreshing when I first encountered it.

In terms of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching is quite sparse in style; Chuang Tzu is a riot, and Lieh Tzu consists of quite conventional stories that illustrate a point, if I recall correctly.


*You may be entirely happy with your desire to become a better person, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not suggesting that there is. It's just for me, it was a form of dissatisfaction, and still is to the extent that it remains.