Spiritual Domicile

Where to Start

If you are new to contemplative reading, four short, accessible works will give you a year of substance:

Stoic & Practical Philosophy

• Epictetus — Discourses & Enchiridion — the classroom transcripts of a former slave teaching freedom. Discourses · Enchiridion
• Cicero — On Duties (De Officiis) — what a citizen owes to family, friends, and the republic. Project Gutenberg
• Boethius — The Consolation of Philosophy — written in prison while awaiting execution. The night the wheel of fortune turned. Project Gutenberg

Christian Contemplative Tradition

• Augustine — Confessions — the West's first spiritual autobiography. A man arguing with God in the second person. Project Gutenberg
• Brother Lawrence — The Practice of the Presence of God — a kitchen monk's conversations on living awake to the sacred in dishwashing. Project Gutenberg
• Teresa of Ávila — Interior Castle — the soul as a structure of seven inner rooms. CCEL
• The Cloud of Unknowing — anonymous 14th-century English mystical text on the via negativa. CCEL

Eastern & Comparative

• The Bhagavad Gita — a battlefield dialogue on duty, devotion, and the nature of the self. Edwin Arnold translation
• Tao Te Ching — Laozi — eighty-one short poems on the way that cannot be named. Project Gutenberg
• The Dhammapada — the Buddha's pithiest teachings, organized by theme. Project Gutenberg
• Rumi — Selected Poems — Sufi mystical poetry on union, longing, and the absence that is presence.

Cosmology & the Long View

For the seeker who wants the universe in their hands as data, not metaphor.

• Carl Sagan — Cosmos — secular liturgy for the scientific age. The Voyager Golden Record's prose companion.
• NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day — one annotated image, daily, since 1995. apod.nasa.gov
• The Pale Blue Dot — Sagan's reflection on the Voyager 1 photograph. The Planetary Society

On Loss, Grief, and Mortality

• C.S. Lewis — A Grief Observed — the journal he kept after his wife died. Anger, then theology, then a hard-won peace.
• Atul Gawande — Being Mortal — a surgeon's account of how modern medicine fails the dying, and what could change.

Living Sources — Always Open

A Reading Method

The seekers I know who read deeply do this:

1. One book at a time, slowly. Five pages of Marcus Aurelius read carefully are worth a hundred read quickly.
2. Read with a pen. Underline, dog-ear, scribble in the margin. Argue with the author. Mark what made you stop.
3. Keep a commonplace book. Copy the sentences you don't want to forget into a notebook you reread.
4. Re-read. The best books say more on the third visit than they did on the first.
5. Talk about what you read. Find one other person. A reading partner is worth ten more books.

If you would like a reading partner, the Reading Groups are how I do this with others.