Learning How to Learn (Idries Shah)

Full Title: Learning How to Learn: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition
Major Topic: what constitutes learning
Level: all levels
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Sufi insights into basic human processes such as knowing and learning define very clearly what works and doesn’t work in each of these areas. Read and study carefully and then look at your own life with “new eyes”.

Nothing Special (Charlotte Joko Beck)

Full Title: Nothing Special: Living Zen
Major Topic: Direct awareness, experience without conception or projection.
Level: all levels
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Straightforward account of how to approach one’s life from the perspective of Zen practice. The simplicity of much Zen instruction belies its depth. Look carefully at how these instructions work internally and externally. When we approach practice as something special, we’ve already disconnected from our lives. When we sit, with no special ideas, we create the conditions in which we might just experience things as they are.

Dzogchen Essentials (Marcia Binder Schmidt)

Full Title: Dzogchen Essentials: The Path that Clarifies Confusion
Major Topic: dzogchen, direct awareness
Level: experienced and advanced
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Compilation of short texts that describe various aspects of Dzogchen practice. A good collection for those who have had instruction and training in mahamudra or dzogchen and want to refresh their practice. These instructions are meant as guides to meditation practice and to ways of experiencing our lives all the time. Most of them are relatively straightforward to understand, but the important point is to develop these abilities. This takes patient practice, learning how to live with the coming and going of thoughts and sensations, not reacting to them, but letting them resolve themselves.

Calm Abiding and Special Insight (Geshe Gedun Lodro)

Full Title: Calm Abiding and Special Insight: Achieving Spiritual Transformation Through Meditation
Major Topic:
Level:
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(This is a revised edition of the earlier Walking Through Walls). Gedun Lodro’s approach is similar to Jam-yang-shay-ba’s classic Great Exposition of the Concentrations and Formless Absorptions. See also the teachings in Lati Rinbochay’s Meditative States in Tibetan Buddhism. This text presents a methodical path for developing attention and insight. Quite technical and detailed, focus on the spirit of what is being presented. Rather than try to force your experience to conform to these descriptions, use the advice and guidelines to explore your experience in sitting with the breath and letting thoughts, feelings, and emotions resolve themselves.

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient (Will Johnson)

Full Title: Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfulness
Major Topic:
Level:
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Excellent introduction to how to sit and the importance of awareness of body sensations. Most thoughts are reactions to subtle sensations in the body. The thoughts dissipate attention so that we never experience those sensations. Following the instructions in this book, you will learn to sense the body directly, opening up ways to experience the emotional cores of the patterns that pull us out of presence in our lives.

Peacock in the Poison Grove (Sopa Geshe Lhundub)

Full Title: Peacock in the Poison Grove: Two Buddhist Texts on Training the Mind
Major Topic:
Level:
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Translations of and commentaries on two Kadampa texts, the Wheel-Weapon and the Poison-Destroying Peacock. Mind training involves cultivating a way of approaching and experiencing life that rubs against our ordinary self-centered attitudes. The key point here is to experience the friction, the tension between what is being presented and how we ordinarily view things. When we hold the two together, we see things differently and new possibilities open, internally and externally.

Essential Rumi (Coleman Barks)

Full Title: Essential Rumi
Major Topic: ecstatic spiritual poetry
Level: all levels
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Rumi’s poetry always illuminates and inspires. Ecstatic, loving and devotional in tone, beautiful and inspiring for the heart and mind. Read a stanza or two. Then read it aloud. You will find that it often elicits an emotional response in you, or precipitates a gap in the conceptual mind. In either case, rest in that experience for a moment or two. When read this way, Rumi puts you in touch again and again with aspects of experience that can be known, but cannot be put into words.

As It Is (Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche)

Full Title: As It Is: Volumes 1 and 2
Major Topic: Using traditional practices and methods to know mind nature directly.
Level: all levels
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Urgyen Tulku, even among Tibetans, had a special gift for leading people into the experience of mind and explaining in simple language how to practice deeply. In these two volumes, he describes traditional vajrayana teachings in terms of mind and mind nature. Read a chapter or a few pages carefully and then do some meditation. Experiment with the methods and find the ones that work for you. (Note: It can be hard to find without the ISBN: for Volume 1 is 9627341355; for Volume 2 it is 9627341398)

Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)

Full Title: Denial of Death
Major Topic:
Level:
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Classic discussion of the psychology of the fear of death, including the construction of social reality. Many people have found this detailed discussion highly illuminating, shedding light on many of the problems we create for ourselves when we endeavor to ignore the fact that life has an end. Read this to augment and deepen your practice and reflections on death and impermanence. You may also find this book helpful in questioning the way that we, as social animals, construct a reality and then find ourselves imprisoned by it.

Buddhist Ethics (Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye)

Full Title: Buddhist Ethics (Treasury of Knowledge)
Major Topic: The three vows (individual freedom, awakening being and knowledge holder)
Level: advanced
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Comprehensive summary of ethical systems and ordinations as practiced in the Tibetan tradition for the last thousand years; one chapter of Kongtrul’s encyclopedia of Tibetan Buddhism. This is a reference book, with authoritative presentations of the vows and commitments of the three vows in Tibetan Buddhism (monastic, bodhisattva, and vajrayana).