Everything that one reads leaves an imprint on one consciousness, on one’s thinking. We are more impressionable than we realise, so one must think carefully when one is not reading the true Magnus Opus, which is oneself. As I see it, it is a choice is between ‘New Age’ light dusting coffee table psychology or serious heavyweights like Carl Gustav Jung, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Carl Rogers, Wilhelm Reich, Alice Miller, David Smail, Fritz Pearls, Rollo May, Otto Rank, Bessel Van Der Kolk, Mavis Klein, Boris Sidis, Erich Fromm, Klaus Grawe, and others.
I suggest avoiding the pre-packaged philosophies of Hayes House or the entrepreneurial course-style material of self-help, motivational addicted to light Tony Robbins-style California super extrovert nonsense or the criminal ‘New Age’ gurus like Osho and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (the Indian snake charmers) and instead delve into the minds of true giants like Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Jean-Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich von Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Michel de Montaigne, David Hume, Max Stirner, Mikhail Bakunin, Ayn Rand, Michael Tsarion, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Aldhous Huxley, Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Singer, Arther Schopenheur, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Benedictus Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, Georg Groddeck, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Alexander Lowen, Gabriel Marcel, Owen Barfield, Terence McKenna.
Include the likes of scientific bigwigs such as Roger Penrose, Richard Dawkins, David Bohm, Brian Greene, Richard Feynman, Steven Hawking, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Nikolai Tesla, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Sagan, Rupert Sheldrake.
Not forgetting to swim with the mystics, artists and poets like John Keats, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Herman Hesse, Philip Larkin, M. C. Escher, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Cocteau, Victor Hugo, Waldo Emerson, Howard Sasportas, Liz Greene, Bill Tierney, Noel Tyl, Robert Hand or brave Historians like Anthony C. Sutton, Naomi Klein, Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, John Anthony West or the futuristic minds of Arthur C. Clarke and Bucky Fuller.
As is necessary, the unsavoury and more Orwellian rooted thinkers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bentham, JS Mill, Marx, Pavlov, BF Skinner, JB Watson, B. Russell, Francis Fukuyama, Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, Klaus Schwab, Benjamin Disraeli and Aleister Crowley must also be examined.
And when you have done all that, or some of that, don’t read a thing for at least a year. One learns so much more in one’s own presence.
PhilosophyPsychology
