Book Recommendations
 

Hello everyone. I like to ask if you guys have some recommendations for any book(s) that can be helpful for someone just beginning to learn more about Buddhism that I can get for a friend who suffers from depression and romantic obsessions. Thank you. :)

Buddhism for Dummies.... Excellent starting place :smile:

Thanks Sky, I think this might be perfectly appropriate. =D

Yes Buddhism for dummies!

I don't really see Buddhism as a religion or path, I see it as a good pointing towards truth or things we can learn about ourselves and life. I would recommend one read about these "truths" from different perspectives to get a truer sense of what is being pointed at.

Like:
Journey of Souls by Michael Newton
The Awakening of Intelligence by Jiddu Krishnamurti
White Fire by Mooji (Zen)
A Separate Reality by Casteneda
The Way of Zen by Alan Watts
Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton

Or just watch these movies:

Billy jack 1971 Tom Laughlin
Hair (1979) John Savage, Treat Williams.
Little Buddha - Keanu Reeves, Bridget Fonda
Defending Your Life (2001) Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep
Thunderheart 1992 Val Kilmer

All of these movies deal with making choices that change what we are.

😀 your welcome. It does have a silly name but it's a very good beginners book.

Speaking of Books with silly names, The Complete Idiot's Guide to World Religions by Brandon Toropov is great. Has a great section on Buddhism.

Thanks Rain! I have read some of those books and seen some of those movies as well. Good suggestions. =D

Truth of who you are, what reality is and what life is are certainly the goal but all we can really do to become directly conscious of it is to examine the truth of the self we think we are, the mind that identifies as a self and the reality we create thru ignorance. Breaking down the mind-self is something we can do, see and expose but it’s hard and it doesn’t offer anything in its place which makes it even harder. Most books only offer something else to identify with, and that’s the reality of it. Following a path, at best shows us that.
I recommend “The book of not knowing” by Peter Ralston. It’s about breaking down the Self-mind which is the source of realty as we see it. What’s left in its place is not truth. What’s left is a state of not knowing, an open state which no book can fill.

That's what they can become yes. Lots of egotistical people in the religion and spirituality biz, The point of those books is not to worship or identify with them. In fact, once you get what they are pointing to, you have to abandon them. The books that point to freedom become objects of bondage if one clings to them or stays stuck in them. They are asking you to discover or realize something about yourself. once you do that, the books become pointless for you and have zero value for you and in fact, if continued to be used by you, prevent unconditioned, unattached freedom in the moment.

But then everything I have read or heard and understood exists within me as knowledge forever. So that's an odd thing. There is a type of knowledge that allows us to change and "be here now empty and free" but this knowledge is very different from other conceptual knowledge that imprisons us within its concepts and thoughts.

Krishnamurti claimed using logic these types of knowing have different sources. There is one type of knowledge from the brain and thought and another from a source outside the brain and body. He argued since the whole experience or relationship with thought and the brain changes when this thing is seen and realized, it's source cannot be within the brain.

The brain and it's thought is conditioned, programmed, habitual, reactionary, unconscious memories and motivations, low self awareness, full of conflict, and negative emotions. So can something within all of that emerge and change the entire thing? We have one brain, not two. So what becomes aware of the whole of it and transcends it all? And in this transcending the whole structure of it changes.

This points to a lot of stated stuff from books. We have a body, we are not the body. We have thoughts, we are not thoughts, we have conditioning believing we are this or that, we are not this conditioning. We are awareness and we create our experience by what we identify with. In a sense, we create "what we are" moment to moment, because we project outward, what we are identifying with within.

These are all good questions. In the book I recommended we can at any moment become directly conscious of the truth of all this. What I can do is see the nature of me as I am, a self created by the mind. The book is about that and it really opened my eyes to how much I don’t know which in turn opens me up to what is already there hidden by it all.
Thanks for you response