E S L
The Essential Spiritual Library
§ Comments 2021: Added here and there. I recall revising The Seeker’s Handbook (TSH) when living in Leuven, Belgium, 1999 or so, where I was researching at the Theological Library, and the content here reflects some of those changes. Apparently, I had decided to rename the book Ultimate Quest.
Knowledge and learning is the immortality of the gods.
– Gnostic text from Nag Hammadi
Introductory Talk
§ Ignore the cross-referencing cues such as “see Lexicon” (soon to be published on Nemeta) and “L18” etc.
A Trail of Timeless Clues
Since the spiritual renaissance of the 1960s, thousands of books dealing with every conceivable area of spirituality have been published. Personal growth, religious renewal, occultism and the paranormal, mystical and metaphysical speculation, Oriental theories and techniques, systems of alternative healing, thirty-three flavours of self-actualization — all of it has been treated by countless authors in dozens of variations. This vast and unprecedented exposure leaves the field of independent seeking wide open. The range of options is overwhelming. Insofar as we may still look for orientation in written sources, the question of what to read is daunting.
In any field of knowledge there are primary landmarks for finding one’s way around the territory, and the labyrinth of spiritual inquiry is no exception. In recent times (written 1990), the vast array of options for exploring the maze has led to its being dubbed, derogatorily, the “spiritual supermarket.” We are at risk of losing our way among the overstocked aisles. Given that there is so much to sift through, the perennial quest now assumes a form unlike anything in the past. Where new conditions appear, new approaches are required. The art of pathfinding is now imperative.
What to read first?, and What to read at all? These are the two primary questions, the second being by far the more difficult. I will postpone it momentarily. As for the first, the answer I would propose is the Essential Spiritual Library of fifty books, masterworks of the past and present.
The sacred books and spiritual masterworks of the past are loaded with clues and directions for the quest. No single volume has the ultimate formula for spiritual awakening, but some books have primary and indispensable features. The library of essential reading is a treasure-trove of perennial wisdom. These books can prevent us from losing ourselves in the winding tracks of the labyrinth. They do not compel us to take any particular course through the maze, but like Ariadne’s thread, they help us keep track of where we are going and have gone. Time-tried tools for pathfinding, they commemorate the dominant themes and questions to be encountered, over and over again, throughout the long, ever-variant process of self-reliant seeking. All the threads lead back to the Essential Library because these works define and redefine the large-scale issues of spiritual seeking. They contain the leading clues to an ongoing quest that is ever-changing and different for each of us, yet constant and universal in the riddles and paradoxes it proposes.
As noted in the Introduction, discovering the eternal principles of human spirituality endows the seeker with the confidence of exploring well-marked paths. We feel we are in the silent company of those who know their way around the maze, and we are right. Steeped in their words, supported by a record of their deeds and insights, we gain a strong dose of directive wisdom by sheer osmosis.
Tracking Paradigms
In the following selection, I have carefully chosen the Classics, both Eastern and Western, from among those books that best present original formulations of the great questions inherent to the spiritual striving of humanity. These questions appear in endless variations, but they all exhibit a range of consistent features, informing principles, or paradigms. This term originates in Meta-history (E17) and lately it has been taken up into the popular idiom of New Age thinking (E1.4). A paradigm is a pervasive structure of meaning that inheres in many different questions and issues: for instance, the paradigm of guidance is a primary structure which can be developed into dozens of issues and questions. Rather like a magnet, the paradigm gathers to itself all the material relevant to the meaning it embodies, and focalises the diverse elements in a core-principle. The paradigm of guidance is the root of a few tough quandaries in the New Age. (See, for instance, E15 on the Great White Brotherhood, the supreme organization said to be dedicated to the spiritual guidance of humanity.)
One of the primary tasks of modern pathfinding is to identify paradigms as they arise. This requires the capacity to comprehend the paradigm without either accepting or rejecting it. For instance, we may hear that someone we know has become the disciple of a certain master. Instead of approving or disapproving of this decision, which would be reacting to the implied paradigm, we can attempt to comprehend what the individual is doing by looking into the issue of guidance from various angles and forming pertinent questions about it. Paradigms can be like bombs with delicate fuse devices: they are massively powerful belief systems that are best handled gingerly. Working to identify paradigms in the masterworks of spiritual wisdom, past and present, keeps the act of seeking clear and open-ended, comprehensive and voluntary. The power of belief is exceeded only by the power to choose what one believes.
Different works present the same paradigm in a different way. In the Bhagavad Gita (L6), the paradigm of guidance assumes dramatic form in the long dialogue between Krishna, who represents the master or guru, and Arjuna, the inquiring disciple. The same paradigm appears in a different way in the legend of Parzival (L15) when the wandering knight encounters the old hermit, Trevrizent, who guides him by revealing aspects of Parzival’s own life-story. It shows up in yet another variation, this time in the form of a direct message from author to reader, in Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (in L20). These are just three out of perhaps a dozen variations of that single paradigm, which itself is one out of about forty paradigms covered in the book.
Once a paradigm is identified, its variations become endlessly revealing. With each permutation, a new course of action may arise. Arjuna responds to the transpersonal perspective of Krishna in one way, Parzival reacts in another way to the unexpected revelations about his own life. Tracking paradigms is never merely an intellectual exercise. When it is done with true absorption — that is, with at least the kind of empathic involvement one experiences by responding to the issues dramatized in a really good movie — this exercise discloses the deep structure of our belief systems, and our actions will change as our beliefs are exposed and questioned. Paradigms are master tools for moral reckoning. They illuminate our options in life, all along the way. For instance, the story of Faust (L18) presents a variation on the paradigm of guidance in which power over the human condition is sought by resorting to the guidance of a satanic being. Yet Faust is miraculously able to turn around this crisis of potential enslavement and the death of his soul, as shown by his experiences in Part Two of the great drama, where he redeems himself in the Underworld — redemption being another key paradigm, a prominent motif of Western spirituality. Once the knack is acquired, tracking paradigms through the masterworks of the past can be an enormous aid to living the quest. Like a picture worth a thousand words, every paradigm is worth a thousand choices.
Groundwork
Everything presented in Part One of Ultimate Quest is groundwork. Familiarity with these works will support the seeker in venturing into all other fields, since the themes, principles, and practices covered here will be encountered in countless variations, though not always in obvious or well explained ways, wherever questions of spiritual growth are concerned. All the selections have proven to be of enduring value, above and beyond other works of a trendy, ready-access type, which are now legion. They are not necessarily the easiest books to get to know, but they are the most essential to clarification, primarily because these books help us understand what we’re really looking for in the name of “spirituality.” Given sufficient time and care to be absorbed, they can save us a great deal of confusion and distraction. They are the most rewarding in the long run — and in many cases, the most entertaining.
By contrast, the placebos of pop occultism and quick-fix metaphysics, while often as effective as an advertising jingle, are not likely to produce long term results or trustworthy orientation. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince (L31), wrote: “To live is to be slowly born…. Illumination is vision suddenly granted at the end of a long and gradual preparation.” In our time, the craving for instant transformation belies an essential failure to see life as an ongoing process of transformation which becomes all the more engaging when we can appreciate how it spreads out in time, how it demonstrates continuity. All the experiential wisdom collected in the Essential Library contributes to long-term perspective. These books foster continuity.
Criteria and Design
As noted in the Introduction, the designated sacred texts of collective religions, such as the Christian Bible and the Mohammedan Koran, are not included in this collection. Mass-scale belief-systems discourage free inquiry. In some cases they may even brand alternative seeking as heresy, a dangerous digression from the orthodox way. Precisely speaking, collective religions are not paths of spirituality at all, they are more like programs of behavior modification. In some cultures, in some countries around the world, these are the only choices available. In other words, there is no choice involved in the spread of collective religion. Most people are born into their faith — a strange concept, considering that faith is something deeply inborn to the human being, so we might imagine it to emerge from within rather than be imposed from without. Race, geographical locale, language, local culture and parental influence largely determine what an individual will believe in religious matters. In most cases, indoctrination starts in infancy. Except in the rarest of cases, children will believe what they are told to believe. For millions around the world, independent seeking never gets off the ground.
Selections in the first category, Eastern Spirituality, are nonetheless drawn from the realm of collective religion: the Analects of Confucius (L4) belong to an orthodox system, and both the Upanishads (L5) and the Bhagavad Gita (L6) are classics of Hinduism, a mass-scale religion of some 750 million members. True enough, but Confucianism is an ethical system rather than a metaphysically structured religion, and the two Hindu classics contain spiritual principles which can stand wholly independent of their cultural origins. By contrast, the so-called “teachings” of Jesus — commandments to love one’s enemies and resist not evil, for instance — are invalid outside the ideological framework of redemption which supports them.
Buddhism is a special case. Despite its vast number of adherents world-wide, it is not a collective religion along the lines of Christianity and Islam. Rather, it is an ethical philosophy, essentially agnostic or non-deific. Moreover, esoteric rather than mainstream Buddhism is represented in the selections here. As will be explained in more detail in Essay 2, alternative paths exist within each of the “wide-band” traditional religions. Sufism is an alternative path within Islam, and Zen is an alternative path within Buddhism. Selections 8, 9 and 10 belong to such marginal or esoteric paths. Selection 7, the Heart and Diamond Sutras, does belong to mainstream Buddhism, but these two particular scriptures represent a unique instance of the sophisticated approaches known as non-attainment and self-liberation, two principles which are not widely represented in the many hundreds of traditional Buddhist texts.
§ My reasons for making Buddhism an exception were valid at that time. They can be viewed differently with reference to the radical takedown I propose in Dog Zen.
I have chosen the works that have most deeply and most enduringly influenced my adventures in pathfinding, and I have done so without concern for a fair cultural distribution. Among the Eastern classics are none from the ancient Persian tradition, for instance. In fact, the ten entries are almost evenly divided between Chinese and Hindu-Tibetan sources. Chronologically, they represent a time span from about 2750 BCE (assuming one mythical date for the discovery of the I Ching hexagrams) down to 1200 CE, the era of Long Chen Pa, a Tibetan sage. Ultimately, chronology has little to do with the timeless impact of these teachings. The Eastern classics can be dated, but they can never become dated.
It will be noted immediately that the essential works of the second category, Western Spirituality, are all recognized to be great works of literature, rather than religious documents per se. The reasons for these choices will be explained in the preface to that category.
Category three, entitled Background, presents sixteen books chosen for their bearing on the modern spiritual movement which has unfolded since 1900. They elaborate the latest variations of many paradigms, such as ancient wisdom (L 30, The Candle of Vision; L34, The Perennial Philosophy), (L24, The Varieties of Religious Experience) and (L33, The Autobiography of a Yogi). Now that a whole new cultural, even global, movement is emerging out of their efforts, it is extremely useful to refer back to them now and again. As far as I know, they are still the best resources we have, clear and reliable, outlasting the sensational allure of many current lights. Æ’s The Candle of Vision (L30), written in 1935, still excels any contemporary account of awakening the third eye.
§ I revised the list in the library, so there may be inconsistencies in references.
Cross-referencing to the Essential Library is indicated by a simple notation already in use: L followed by the book number. L23 = Cosmic Consciousness by Maurice Bucke. The listing throughout all four categories is chronological. From L25 on, dates given for works not originally written in English are for the year the translated version appeared. For Eastern and Western selections, I have occasionally suggested a translation. This is indicated in brackets, following the review of the work.
Some terms defined in the Lexicon are used in the brief reviews of the Essential Library, but to avoid cluttering, these are not always cross-referenced to the Lexicon by italics. Occasionally, the summary book review will include a cross-reference to an Essay, indicated by E and its number: E16 refers to the Ten-Minute Essay on Magic, E26 to Shamanism, etc.
Let’s recall that meandering in the labyrinth is not an aimless jaunt, but a deliberate technique in the art of pathfinding. The leading themes, clues and motifs to be found in the fifty books of the Essential Library are spread along all sorts of fascinating trails. The review of L30, The Candle of Vision, alludes to geomancy and this clue leads directly to the Ten-Minute Essay on that subject or, if you are so inclined, to geomancy in the Lexicon, with its cross-references to the canon sacred architecture. E12 Geomancy > sacred sites > Glastonbury > Grail Mystery > L15 Parzival, is one of a dozen possible trails of association. Geomancy > Gaia > etheric web > nature mysticism > E25 Romanticism, is yet another. However, if you are looking up sacred architecture and your eye happens to wander across the page to sacred prostitution, you may find yourself lured down an entirely different trail in the maze. Nothing excels the factor of spontaneous discovery (see serendipity in the Lexicon), but it takes true stealth to keep the mind open to the most subtle and alluring clues.
§ This version released in 2021 with minimal editing and some comments. JLL
Typical view of the Grand Beguinage (Groot Begijnhof), a Unesco Heritage site in Louvain, Belgium, about 20 miles east of Brussels. The word means “great retreat, large convent.”
ESL Complete List (revised in Leuven, differs from 1991 edition)
Eastern
1. I Ching
2. Tao Te Ching
3. Chuang Tzu
4. Analects of Confucius
5. Upanishads
6. The Bhavagad Gita
7. Buddhist Sutras
8. Tibetan Book of the Dead
9. The Zen Teachings of Huang Po
10. The Jewel Ship of Long Chen PaWestern
11. The Epic of Gilgamesh
*Error 28m of the introductory talk: read Robert Temple, not Robert Powell, an Atrosophist who investigated the astronomical context of the Grail Legend and wrote a monograph on the sidereal zodiac.
12. The Symposium and Phaedrus – Plato
13. Marcus Aurelius
14. The Golden Ass
15. Parzival
16. Tristan and Isolde
17. The Kalevala
18. Faust – note added.
19. The Hermetica
20. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
21. Walden
22. Popul VuhBackground
23. Cosmic Consciousness
24. The Varieties of Religious Experience
25. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
26. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
27. Black Elk Speaks – Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions preferred
28. Magic and Mystery in Tibet
29. Modern Man in Search of a Soul
30. The Candle of Vision
31. The Little Prince
32. Slavery and Freedom
33. The Autobiography of a Yogi
34. The Perennial Philosophy
35. Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
36. The Journey to the East
37. The Murder of Christ
38. Love in the Western WorldBreakthrough
39. Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (replaces Elizabeth Haich, Initiation)
40. Psychotherapy East and West
41. The Morning of the Magicians
42. The Psychedelic Experience
43. Understanding Media
44. The Teachings of Don Juan
45. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain
46. The Crack in the Cosmic Egg
47. Joy’s Way
48. The Aquarian Conspiracy
49. The Chalice and the Blade
Note: 51m 40s: I say book 49, I mean 50, the last in the ESL collection.
50. Voices of the First Day