Reading Habits

My reading habits have been a little bit better these past few months. As a child I really did enjoy reading a lot of books about dinosaurs and space. For some reason kids tend to gravitate towards things like that and I was no different. In school there were a lot of books that I was required to read. I don’t think I enjoyed them as much as I could have had they not been mandatory.

Nowadays I tend to read more spiritual and psychological type of books. Human nature has always fascinated me. Why do people do what they do?

The books I read try to bring science and spirituality together. I believe science can buttress certain spiritual teachings without losing it’s grip on reality. Like Einstein said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Deepak Chopra is an interesting author I enjoy reading. He’s kind of this new agey type author but he brings science into his readings to solidify his arguments. Those who are are more about "what" than "why" may not enjoy his books but it's good to keep an open mind. I had no idea how popular he was until I saw him in a recent microsoft commercial.

Since I'm into psychology and spirituality there is an interesting book about reincarnation and past lives. Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss is a fascinating read. When I mention things like that people scoff or laugh and think it's some crazy new age bullshit but keeping an open mind is vital in bettering yourself. Dr Weiss is a psychotherapist who graduated from Columbia University and Yale Medical School so he's no sloutch. Brian was a skeptic but he used hypnotherapy in his sessions with his patients to help get over past trauma. He would use regression therapy to help them remember past events and tried to piece together what was going on in the mind of his patients. In regression therapy he would ask the patient to go back to the time when the problem started allowing the subconscious to come to surface. He was surprised one day when a women described events that appeared to be from an earlier time period. Being a skeptic Dr Weiss simply thought it was a vivid imagination until hundreds of other patients kept describing similiar instances of being in past lives. There is a case where a man had painful migraines his entire life and went into a regression therapy session. He apparently was a World War 2 soldier who was shot in the head and killed in a past life. Imagination? Maybe. The interesting thing is after a few sessions he no longer had these painful migraines. Migraines that have been with him his entire life vanished. There are therapeutic benefits to this therapy even you don't believe in it. There are hundreds of similar cases like these but it's interesting for me to read about things that aren't in the main stream. Just because CNN doesn't cover it doesn't mean it's not out there and just becaue you don't believe something is true doesn't mean it's not.

Some other basic books are Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and How To Think Like
Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael Gelb. Some of the book talks about Da Vinci as a person but a majority of the book discusses exercises that can be used to bring out your own “inner genius.” One example is to attempt to write with both hands at once or using a mirror and write everything backwards. Although at times I found the book boring there were lots of creative exercises that are meant to strengthen your critical thinking skills.

In general I’m proud of the fact that I enjoy reading at times but I still am not like others who enjoy reading for hours on end. After about an hour of reading my mind gets bored and needs to do something else. Right now I'm reading DMT The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, M.D. It's about this drug that can induce near death experiences and tries to explain the biology behind spiritual experiences. If you've never read anything else about the mind or spirituality, don't bother reading this book. It'll scare the shit out of you.