Lapis Magazine

Recommended Reading for the 21st Century

What books might help shape our thinking as we enter the new century? Lapis asked thought leaders for their suggestions.

Charlene Spretnak, author of States of Grace and The Resurgence of the Road

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom by Christiane Northrup, MD
A valuable antidote to the biomechanical model of modern medicine, this book illuminates pathways to health and healing for the richly relational female bodymind. A non-medical companion volume would be the entertainingly physiological Woman by Natalie Angier, a science writer.

Turning Away from Technology: A New Vision for the 21st Century, edited by Stephanie Mills, introduction by Theodore Roszak
Alas, this vital book is burdened with a misleading title: it is not about eschewing all new technology but, rather, about identifying the systematic effects of new technologies and the hypermodern condition they have brought about, such as the globalized economy and global monoculture. The book consists of well-edited insights presented at two conferences by many of the leading eco-political analysts. The final entry is “78 Reasonable Questions to Ask about Any Technology.”

The Great Work: Our Way into the Future by Thomas Berry
One of the great eco-sages of our time, Berry has gathered here a collection of his essays on the ways in which highly industrialized societies can awaken from the “technotrance” and realign their cultures with the bioregions and the delicately balanced Earth Community of all species — before it is too late. The book is strong on deeply pragmatic alternatives, including the recovery of an intimate relationship with the earth itself and all that would flow from such a deliverance.

Andrew Harvey, mystical activist, author of The Return of the Mother

The Life Divine by Aurobindo
This book maps the possible future of humanity, a future that could be the marriage of heaven and earth, and the creation of a wholly new divinized human race.

The Nag Hammadi Library
For all those who think that Christ consciousness is the clue to the transformation of the planet, this book is essential reading because it contains the thoughts of the mystic Jesus, the Jesus censured and for years covered over by the church.

The Gospel of Ramakrishna
This is simply the most moving, revealing, inspiring, and instructive of all depictions in any culture of a great saint and mystic.

Kyriacos Markides, sociologist, author of Riding the Lion

The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas
The most clear, accessible, and brilliantly written overview of Western thought and its inner purpose, from ancient times to the present.

The Marriage of Sense and Soul by Ken Wilber
A grand, breathtaking attempt at the integration of all knowledge and the resolution of the conflict between science and religion that began with Copernicus.

The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
No other book has managed to present — in such a lucid, exalted, and exciting manner — the distilled wisdom of the human race.

Frederick Franck, artist, sculptor, author of The Zen of Seeing

Essence of Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki
This book consists of two lectures he gave to the Imperial Couple after Japan’s surrender. I have taken my copy on fifteen Trans-Pacific and close to a hundred Trans-Atlantic trips. It is so filled with jottings done in the stratosphere that it is not very legible anymore.

The Prologue of St. John’s Gospel
The Prajna Chapter of the Sutra of Hui Neng (Seventh Century)
The Human Face by Emmanuel Levinas
Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
My other choice is not a book, but a folder which contains tearsheets from the above. Of course I know all these by heart, but have to read them again and again because what they have in common is what is deeply hidden between the lines. The skinless sensitivity is painfully familiar.

Thomas Berry, geologian, author of The Dream of the Earth

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme
I suggest this book because of the present deficiency of a functioning cosmology in our society. We have much science, abundant spirituality, plenty of theology but no meaningful interpretation of the universe. The scientists remain totally dedicated to a radical empiricism. Here is a superb scientist who gets beyond an ultimate empiricism. He brings everything together with a rare linguistic skill of expression.

An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field by Terry Tempest Williams
She provides that depth of understanding and feeling mystique for the earth that has long been needed in our society with its attachment to technologies that devastate the earth physically. Our attachment to electronics renders the mind unsuited for the natural wonder of nature that should be there, unfits the soul for the experience of beauty, and enervates the emotions in their capacity for intimacy. This author restores the wonder, the beauty, the intimacy.

Christopher McIntosh, author of The Rosicrucians and The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason

If there is one writer who can give us an inspiring vision for the 21st century and the third millennium it is the poet, literary scholar, and philosopher, Frederick Turner. At the center of Turner’s thought is the quality of beauty, which he believes to be an innate human need that has been neglected by modernity with disastrous consequences. In pursuit of this theme, he ranges in his writings over areas as diverse as poetic meter, neurology, artificial intelligence, architecture, ecology, and economics. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his ideas are presented in five brilliant prose books beginning with Natural Classicism and leading up to the most recent one, Beauty: The Value of Values.

Another author I would like to recommend is the British esoteric writer who appears under the name of Ramsey Dukes. His writings are full of marvelous wit, insight, and quirky observation. There is no one else like him writing in the esoteric scene today. His latest collection of essays is called What I Did in My Holidays — a typically tongue-in-cheek title. It ranges from the millennium to artificial intelligence and from sexuality to the Aeon of Horus.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, author of The Dream Assembly and Spiritual Intimacy

A Psychology for the Third Millennium: The Evolving Self by Shikson Michaeli
Describes the direction to which we are growing.

The New American Spirituality by Elizabeth Lesser
The best cookbook for the current American person pursuing spirit.

John Welwood, psychologist, author of Journey of the Heart and Love and Awakening

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior and Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala by Chögyam Trungpa
These two books, by one of the most original and provocative modern teachers of Buddhism, discuss the essential connection between a spiritual practice that helps us meet life fully and the great work of creating an enlightened society.

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön
This book provides highly useful teachings on how to remain present, awake, and helpful to oneself and others under the most difficult of circumstances — when things fall apart — which is likely to be a more common occurrence for people in the 21st century.

Theodore Roszak, author of The Voice of the Earth and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein

The Fitness of the Environment by Lawrence Henderson
This was the first effort by a respected biologist to define what we would now call “complexity” in nature. Written in 1913, it significantly modifies Darwin by placing life on earth within the framework of a cosmos that was curiously “ready” to receive life.

Flight from Chaos by Harlow Shapley
Shapley, next to Hubble the most important astronomer of the twentieth century, was the first cosmologer to grasp the overall hierarchical order of an evolving universe. Writing in 1930, he opened the search for principles that would account for the ordered complexity of nature from the sub-atomic to the galactic level.

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis
In the Gaia Hypothesis, Lovelock and Margulis laid the foundations for an organic and holistic understanding of life that credits the earth with a creative and adaptive intelligence. Here, Margulis went on to prove the radically symbiotic character to evolution.

The Next Development in Man by L.L. Whyte
The non-science book that did the most to launch these themes into mainstream culture, written in 1948.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities

The Gifts of the Jews by Thomas Cahill
An overview of how we became western, conscience-driven, and linear.

King Remembered: The Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Flip Schulke and Penelope McPhee
A great reminder of the ongoing need for social justice.

The First World War by John Keegan
Reminds us of the horrors of the past so we can avoid recommitting them in a new millennium.

Robert Muller, former assistant secretary general, the United Nations

Frontiers of the 21st Century, Prelude to the New Millennium, edited by Howard Didsbury
Twenty-three premium essays on the world’s future, selected by the World Future Society. Essays include “The Global Impact of Information Technology” by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, John W. McDonald.

Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism by David C. Korten
This follow-up to Korten’s best-seller, When Corporations Rule the World, is an absolute must read for the millennium. An earth-shaking book showing us the way to mindful responsibility for the course of human and planetary evolution or face his startling conclusions: the prospect of our own extinction as a failed evolutionary experiment.

Terry Tempest Williams, writer on nature, author of Unspoken Hunger

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
If we are to understand that our health as a species is intrinsically tied to the health of the land, Aldo Leopold is our mentor. Written in 1949, I believe it is one of America’s sacred texts regarding “land health,” the ability of the land for self-renewal. Never has this book been more relevant, particularly the closing essay, “The Land Ethic.”

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
I want to carry these poems into the next century, because Miss Dickinson reminds me of the beauty of language, the necessity of poetry, and how it opens our hearts to the spiritual correspondence between our interior and exterior landscapes.

The Complete Collection of Peterson Field Guides to Natural History
A complete set will be essential for each one of us to have and to study as we maintain a biological literacy, to know the names of things, to understand who we live among, and to extend our notion of community to include rocks, rivers, wildflowers, trees, insects, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals. The degree of our awareness is the degree of our aliveness. These field guides are a delight, opening up the wonders of the natural world.

David Shi, president of Furman University, author of The Simple Life

Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future by Neil Postman
Postman reveals how much our modern technocracy can benefit from the rational skepticism and humane values of the eighteenth century philosophies — Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson, etc.

Ptolemy Tompkins, author of Paradise Fever

Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield
Paints a picture of the universe as an arena for the evolution of human consciousness more convincingly than any other book I know.

Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth by Henry Corbin
Despite his difficulty, Corbin feeds the increasing hunger for a genuine visionary geography, bringing material from traditions where such geographies were genuine living realities rather than weak abstractions.

Forgotten Truth by Huston Smith
The central ideas of the world’s primordial wisdom heritage, summarized without sacrificing their subtlety, humanity, or urgency.

J.P. Harpignies, co-producer of The Bioneers Conference, author of Double Helix Hubris and Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
To go somewhere desirable, it helps to know how we got here: this is the definitive analysis of the deep dynamics of prehistory that shaped our world — agriculture, writing, political structures, diseases, how and why they developed and spread where they did.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
For a world increasingly dominated by the megalopolis, here’s an ultimate hallucinatory journey through the dreaming psyche of the urban idea.

Island by Aldous Huxley
Not great literature, but it is his last book, the utopian counterpoint to Brave New World, that reminds us of the glorious life-affirming ambitions that birthed the modern counterculture.

Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine, program director of Schumacher College

The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
This is a story of spiritual and political struggle. The book is inspiring, instructive and challenging. Mahatma Gandhi tells the difficulties and delights of his life honestly and with humor. The book is published by Navajivan Publishing House, Amhedabad 380 014, India. There may be an American Edition of this book.

Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
In the world of giantism and obsessive economic growth, this book reminds the reader of the value and profoundness of the small, simple, local and non-violent way of being. The book brings economics and ethics together, particularly the chapter on Buddhist economics.

The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry
Industrialism has disconnected western society from its roots in the land. But without the land there is no life. This book, in its deepest analysis, brings forward the home truths without which humanity has no future.

Huston Smith, author, scholar of world religions

The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The best introduction to the greatest metaphysical and religious thinker of our century.

Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism by Anonymous
Misleading title and not for everyone, this book will make profound thinkers gasp on almost every page for the profundity of its insights.

Robert Bly, poet, author of The Sibling Society

Revolt of the Masses by Ortega Y. Gasset
The first and still the toughest book about the collapse of cultural standards we see all around us.

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes
The grandest book ever written on Shakespeare. It‘s past Harold Bloom.

Avicenna and The Visionary Recital by Henri Corbin
These are outstanding ideas from the spiritual life of Persia.

Douglas Sloan, professor of the history of education, Teachers’ College, Columbia University

Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield
This seminal, still all-too-unknown treatment of objective imagination in the context of the evolution of consciousness holds far-reaching potential for the transformation of science, art, and religion and a meaningful future evolution of the earth.

The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature by Henri Bortoft
With radical implications for ecology, cognitive science, education, and ethics, this explication of Goethe’s scientific method demonstrates the possibility of a genuine science of qualities — a science in which life, growth, development, meaning, and consciousness are no longer peripheral but central to our knowledge of nature and of the human being.

The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner
First written in 1894, a truly postmodern work before its time, this book lays the foundation, desperately needed as we face the coming centuries, for a truly human ethic grounded in genuine knowledge of the spirit and full freedom in the spirit.

Joscelyn Godwin, teacher, and author of The Theosophical Enlightenment

The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach
Something to work on for the next hundred years.

Balthus by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola
What a joy to look at the paintings of a man who has resolutely defied the Century of Ugly Art!

Atma-Darshan: At the Ultimate by Sri Atmananda
An aphoristic masterpiece by the Tamil policeman and sage that saves one from taking this cosmic joke too seriously.

Kathleen Raine, poet, founder of Temenos Academy

The Bible

The Bhagavad Gita

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

David Yeadon, travel writer, artist, author of Lost Worlds: Exploring the Earth’s Remote Places

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
A masterpiece of tone and content. At first appearing to be a rather artless, journal-like recitation of a potpourri of travel experiences and exploration in the middle east and the ancient Byzantine empire, this cutting-edge book is actually, according to one admirer, “a brilliantly wrought expression of a thoroughly modernist sensibility, a portrait of an accidental, but highly perceptive man, adrift between frontiers.”

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
The writer loses himself in mysteries of the Australian Aboriginal culture and its earth-birthing legends in which “the whole world is wrapped in songs of creation.” These songs must be re-sung on endless “walkabout” odysseys by each tribesperson as his personal contribution to the earth’s perpetuation, and the description of his experiences on “the fringe of these great myths” is utterly enticing and spirit-lifting.

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
A touchstone of one of the most seductive descriptions of a personal inner journey wrapped in rich externalities. I’ve found this book in stores from Kingston, Jamaica to Kathmandu, invariably in the used section and well-marked by previous readers and I suggest you savor it slowly, mark it too, and pass it on to someone you love…

Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, author of The Pregnant Virgin

Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
One of the most clarifying, robust, finger-on-the-pulse books I have ever read. At the beginning of the millennium, it is a powerful stimulus for change in our individual lives.

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
If you read this book with all your senses truly alert, your perception of life will be forever slightly changed.

Bill McKibben, environmentalist, author of The End of Nature

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
It’s the Walden of our time, an incredibly gritty and funny plea to reestablish contact with the actual earth.

Home Economics by Wendell Berry
Essays from the writer residing furthest from our Kingdom of Irony, they remind us what sanity actually involves.

Suzi Gablik, artist, author of The Re-enchantment of Art

Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Materialism, The Global Economy, and Other Earthly Whereabouts by Chellis Glendinning
This shamanic journey into the imperialist mindset brings together gritty and little-known information with a wonderful and unique style of writing that merges the masculine and the feminine. Powerful, at times, shocking; the best book I’ve read in a decade.

Jay Kinney, former editor of Gnosis magazine, co-author of Hidden Wisdom

The rationale behind my three choices is that the best preparation for the future is a good understanding of the past and present. With that in mind, I recommend the following:

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit manages to skewer perennial scams and pretensions with creations like the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company and the nearly virtual frontier City of Eden, which bear uncanny resemblance to the present economic landscape of Internet IPOs and get-rich-quick spam.

Mystical Languages of Unsaying by Michael A. Sells
This is not exactly an easy book, but it’s masterful dissection of how great mystics capture the paradoxical experience of union with the absolute in their often puzzling writings helps bridge the centuries and gives some hope for our own futures.

The Man Who Knew Too Much by Dick Russell
Much more than just another book about the Kennedy assassination, this 824-page volume reveals the behind-the-scenes world of intelligence operatives whose rarely acknowledged impact on our lives is likely to be as significant in the 21st century as it was in 1963.

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman
If we could appreciate Hillman’s basic proposals for a poetic way of life, we would be released from the crazed habits of acting out that feed our self-destruction and keep our spirituality naive.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Suzuki offers the cleanest, clearest approach to Zen I know of — a means for emptying ourselves of all the idols, especially the close and subtle ones, that keep us from living courageously and openly.

Women in Praise of the Sacred edited by Jane Hirshfield
This collection of women’s spiritual writing from many cultures and periods austerely and lovingly gives us the voice of woman, which we will need as our source of deep soul to counter runaway technology and ambitious spirituality.

Charmaine Crockett, human rights activist, feminist, and author

Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, edited by Glora Anzaldua
This book is like coming home to a house filled of wondrous women whose fingertips are on fire. If there is a collection of criticism, poetry, folktales and essays that speaks of and to a community of women, this is it!

Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu by Brian Walker
We always remember how to add two plus two but pearls of truth we easily forget in the angst of modern day life. This small gem of a book consisting of eighty-one lessons beckons us back to our cosmic home, where Lao Tzu guides us to magnificent enclaves of heavenly light.

The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents From the Bible to the Present, edited by Micheline R. Ishay
A comprehensive historical and contemporary collection of movements, influential leaders, ethics and political documents, this book has it all! It’s the handy guide to jolt our memories in the next century and will be sure to inspire us to lead the way for a holistic human rights revolution.

David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
A shaman’s eye view of our capacity to live at one with life and its mysteries.

What is Life? by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
A beautifully written and illustrated exploration into the history and nature of life by two respected scientists with the courage to step beyond the bounds of scientific reductionism.

The Universe Story: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry
A tale of the greatest of all journeys that calls us to find meaning and purpose beyond the limits of a science that denies the spirit and a theology that denies reason.