The Search for Truth

The Search for the Meaning of Life has two key features.

First, no one can tell you directly or even directly what it is. You have to figure it out for yourself.

Second, your path will be different from anyone else’s. You cannot follow someone else’s path because there really isn’t a path per se, everyone stumbled on their way there, getting lost many times.

For this reason, I cannot guarantee that any of these books will show you the way. They will, however, give you clues. They will make you think in a different way, perceive in a different way.

I can say with some assurance that if you seek long enough and hard enough you will find the Truth. Then you can begin the task of knocking on the door to be opened.

Chinese Philosophy

Sufism

  • The Masnavi, Jalaluddin Rumi
  • The Conference of the Birds, Farid ud-Din Attar
  • The Gift, Hafiz
  • The Sufis, Idries Shah
  • The Wisdom of the Idiots, Idries Shah
  • Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff
  • The Fourth Way, P.D. Ouspensky

The Fourth Way

  • In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky
  • The Fourth Way, P. D. Ouspensky
  • Teachings of Gurdjieff: a Pupil’s Journal, C. S. Nott
  • Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann
  • The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, P. D. Ouspensky
  • The Harmonious Circle, James Webb
  • Gurdjieff: the Anatomy of a Myth, James Moore
  • Idiots in Paris, J.G. Bennett and Elizabeth Bennett
  • Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium, Paul Beekman Taylor
  • Gurdjieff’s America: Mediating the Miraculous, Paul Beekman Taylor
  • Gurdjieffian Confessions: a Self Remembered, James Moore
  • G. I. Gurdjieff: a New Life, Paul Beekman Taylor

Philosophy

  • Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • The Outsider, Colin Wilson
  • Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard
  • The Inferno, Henri Barbusse
  • Mind at the End of it’s Tether, H.G. Wells
  • The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, Jean-Paul Sartre

Literature

  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
  • The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
  • A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  • Walden, Henry David Thoreau
  • Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  • The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
  • Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
  • Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
  • Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  • 1984, George Orwell
  • Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
  • Islam, Karen Armstrong

Religious Texts