I recently quit my job. I have enough savings to life off for one year. I would like to read a book that is going to change the course of my life. I am 23, male, no mental illness, lead a normal life to date. I want a book that makes me go on some kind of spiritual conquest. My life could go either way at this point. I don't really care what happens. I don't want to meet a grill, I don't want kids or a family. I just want to live. Don't I sound like a hotbed for a spiritual revolution? You could be responsible for that.
I spend my days reading. I'm about to finish a novel. I thought it was Don DeLillo's Underworld, but 80% of the way through I Googled one of the characters and discovered I was actually reading Jennie Fields' Crossing Brooklyn Bridge, a romance novel. I still like it. Romance is fun, but I want a paradigm shift goddamit.
oh shit is that guy still around, man 2017 was a crazy year
Angel Perry
Start with the Greeks
Jose Anderson
start with the mesopotamians fags who skip gilgamesh aint gonna make it
Josiah James
lol
Samuel Morris
that guys like a 100 millionaire cant he afford to hire a personal trainer, im sure the building his luxury condo is in has a gym, i mean wtf
Jordan Parker
This, or
Lincoln James
kill nigs lmao
Xavier Sanchez
This?
Ian Roberts
...
Brody Williams
>pic related
Caleb Long
>I thought it was Don DeLillo's Underworld, but 80% of the way through I Googled one of the characters and discovered I was actually reading Jennie Fields' Crossing Brooklyn Bridge, a romance novel.
Christian Peterson
k
Noah Thomas
Death of forever by Darryl reaney and the secret oral teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist sects. Highly recommend those two books
Jayden Morris
I remember when i was early 20's too, and I even quit my job. Seriously regret that now that I am working myself up the career ladder.
I wonder if this is how the older peeps look at us when we pose these stupid questions to them, going on a spiritual conquest and wanting to change the world.
To user: do what you want to do, but you seriously won't gain anything except the experience of having spend time of your life chasing an empty goal and maybe (that's a big maybe) finding a art ho which shares your beliefs which will dump you later when she figures out that she needs more status and money in her life.
Adrian Watson
It sounds like you are personally repressing the same desire that OP is expressing
Jordan Morales
Plotinus - Enneads
Take the Platopill, friend, you'll never be the same
Jordan Lewis
just do drugs lmao
Luke Wood
Ashtavakra Gita Advaita bodha Deepika Vivekacudamani Atma bodha Kaivalya navaneeta Baghavad Gita Yoga Sutras of patanjali Samkhya karika Guadapada karika Drgdrsyaviveka Brahmasutra Aparoksanubudhi
Aiden Gomez
You seem like you misunderstood
Spirituality isn't supposed to change the world, just yourself.
Bentley Sullivan
Ignore these cynics, OP. They've long since given up.
Anthony Phillips
>I recently quit my job. I have enough savings to life off for one year. I would like to read a book that is going to change the course of my life. I am 23, male, no mental illness >quit my job >want a book to change my life >no mental illness When you're that stupid, it may as well be a mental illness.
Jace Davis
Try just going insane. How much do you have and did you calculate for your spending now? Build a diet of the bare essentials and live in destitute poverty for a while. Your soul will not change without being tested through hardships of the body.
Jace Campbell
>relying on a book to change your life. You're doing it absolutely wrong. A book can only take you so far, you need to get out and do things. travel a bit, do some charity work, build something, learn a new skill.
Ryder Phillips
Most recent thing that came at least close was Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising. It teaches you about Timothy Leary's (legendary psychologist) model of the mind, and gives you some excellent references (most important of all: The Indian practice of Pranayama)
Honestly, as others have hinted at, going "on some kind of spiritual conquest" is going to be a lot more work, and a lot more complicated than just reading the right book, but there you go.
Mason Fisher
This is an online graphic novel about someone in your position. I read it ages ago and it changed my life. I think it's a great way to kill 30 minutes and I hope you enjoy it, OP.
They did bring to light how autistic my post sounds. It's part of Veeky Forums's charm, and I know better than to take it seriously, but it did make me think of the place my post was coming from. It's like I thought there is a pre-packaged pilgrimage, just for me, waiting in a book. Which is absurd. This guy here knows, even if he doesn't understand greentext.
Flannery O'Connor said something like: most people don't have any kind of spiritual revelation unless something violent has happened to them. I understand that, but perhaps given that I have all this time I can at least prepare myself for the worst.
The decision to do this wasn't spur-of-the-moment. All of 2017 was about saving all my money and decreasing all my expenses. Food costs me about $25 a week (not american), and it could be free if I chose to dumpster dive (that's still an option for me, but I've only been jobless for four days now). Thanks for all the serious suggestions. I've started with the Ashtavakra Gita.
Benjamin Wood
Just finished reading. Thank you. Reminds me I have options other than being a vagabond.
Mason Taylor
Read, in this order:
Plato, The last days of of Socrates Plato, The Republic Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy Laozi, Tao Te Ching Borges, History of Eternity Borges, Fervor de Buenos Aires Muhammad, The Holy Koran Ma'mar ibn Rashid, The Expeditions The Bhagavad Gita Shah, The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin The Ramayana Calasso, Ka Ibn al-Farid, Poem of the Sufi way Bataille, Inner Experience Bataille, Erotocism Mishima, Patriotism
If you don't end up going mad, and actually practice what you're learning rather than passively studying it, you should come out the other side on a different level than where you started.
Anthony Sanders
Those are just things you read and mostly garbage.
Carson Gomez
yeah hes our leader now
Bentley Lee
>you only have one revolution to fight >and it's in your head has anything more obnoxious and rage inducing ever been said? Tell that to all the people dying under dictatorships.
Ian Campbell
Tao te ching.
Zachary Campbell
>>you only have one revolution to fight >>and it's in your head
it's not that obnoxious
Connor Jenkins
Of Human Bondage by Maugham I promise you
Lincoln Reyes
It's the most first world problem bullshit I've ever heard. It's like going up to a starving person and going "oh, wow, how do you stay so thin? I keep trying to diet but I just love pizza too much!"
Oh, the motherland is burning your farms to manufacture a famine and your friends and family are dying? The revolution is in your head! You're the only one holding you back!
That's called justifiable murder in the court of law.
Robert Foster
yes hedonists believe they deserve safe spaces and comfort just because they were born from their moms spreading their lags before their dads
Carson Gomez
Don Quixote faggot. Learn what it means to be a man. Well, at least in a "do what I say not what I do" type of way.
Ryan Thomas
Being a hypocrite is part of being a man?
Henry Torres
You have quotation mark-blinders, kid? The glorious Don SAYS exactly what it is to be a man.
Justin Perez
Start doing magic.
Noah Garcia
Be Here Now - Ram Dass
Asher Evans
If you want western stuff read Meister Eckhart and the Cloud of Unknowing. Very good, don't forget spirituality isn't just eastern stuff.
Read "The Ego and His Own," then "Stirner's Critics," then "The False Principle of Our Education." You will not regret it.
Mason Johnson
Underworld would melt your eyes and you wouldn't understand a page of what you read. The prose is dense and there is no plot.
Avoid.
Ian Hughes
If it must be just one book, it must be this
I mean this OP if your post isnt bait. Fiction will not be constructive enough, and self-help books may not grab you
This is the only way
Samuel Hill
Every individual possesses a limited realm of curiosity. Walk into a library and know that no one person has a purpose that will intimately acquaint them with the infinity of ideas potentially offered; what you have just done here is that very thing, asking for recommendations from a website of blank faces with as much a diversity of purposes and proclivities as there are creative possibilities in a library. It's folly.
Walk your own path. Read the humanities, read some classic literature, read some British romanticism, read some philosophy; follow your instincts and make sure you eradicate all boundaries.
The Joyce novel I threw aside last month your life might've depended on. The whatever tome you threw aside last year I might've read 16 times because my life depended on it. The idea is to not give a fuck just go til you die
Nicholas Sullivan
I only managed the Bhagavad Gita out of all of those and that did enough for me desu
Austin Rivera
What is this world of hatred and strife and war and hatred and strife and war. Is it, perchance, a world of hatred and strife and war and of hatred and strife and war. The answer is YES it fucking well is and I want out. I want the underground of life where I am now, the underground of life. But where is this you may ask and how can I get there. Well, if you are working then walk Out straight away, get on a bus and go home and say fuck you employer and be quick with my last pay cheque. Say fuck to giving notice, if you can’t walk out just like that then you won’t be able to hack the underground. Then get yourself a garret to starve in and sign on the dole. Be prepared for being fucked around for weeks and months before you see any money, especially if you walked out on your job. Now say to yourself I’m finished with all that shit. So that’s about the equivalent of dipping your big toe into the waters of the underground before wading in. Now stuff your central nervous system with hallucinogens listening to Beethoven’s Ninth/The Cure/just about anything at full blast for months. Buy a second-hand aquarium and set it up in your garret, it doesn’t matter if the glass is cracked you’re going to use it for growing psilocybin cubensis mushrooms. When the weather gets warmer start sowing the marijuana seeds. Think of yourself as being on the run from the law, or forever one step ahead of the posse, or the landlord of a brothel. You’re not “living” any more, you’re “holding out”. Then find an artform in which to work, start drawing in pen and ink, buy a battered typewriter. Become reclusive, don’t shave, grow a beard, keep your hair unkempt, throw things on the floor, keep chickens in your room. Recite “Property is theft” ten times a day or until it seems obvious. Read books like Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground”, Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London”, Raoul Vaneigem’s “The Revolution of Everyday Life” and Miyamoto Musashi’s “A Book of Five Rings. Swot up on your Burroughs, Beckett, Celine, Kerousc, Coctesu, Rimbaud, Hesse, Poe, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Nietzsche, Joyce, Stein. That’s a decent start, now the water’s up to your waist and the tide seems to be taking you further away from the shore and “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin” seems strangely subversive. Now read “Desert Island BIFF” just to make absolutely sure you don’t turn into a jerk. At this stage there are two directions you can go in – back to your parents’ home and beg to be taken back in because you’ve found the big wide world too harsh, or onward. Or the former followed by the latter if you need a breathing space. Now get stuck into Crowley, read “Magick” and “The Magical Record of the Beast 666”. Read the works of Austin Osman Spare and start casting sigils. Spend more on incense than clothes. Give money to bums though you can't afford to...
Nathaniel James
>keep chickens in your room Gold, I wanna meet the guy who does this post sounds like it was written by the protagonist of Bukowski's Barfly