do you know of any good fun reads that are similar to the wilder book? Or even some autobiographies of people who are on a similar path to finding the inner peace of the inner self?
thanks
Neil
Hi Neil,
A great book is “Autobiography of a yogi” by Paramahamsa yogananda. It is a spiritual classic. Available freely online
http://www.crystalclarity.com/yogananda/
- Near
there is the gospel of sri ramakrishna and while reading it you get the same buzz and motivation and amazing insights like when you read the ones mentioned above.
http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/gospel/introduction/introduction_frame.htm
namaste
Ananda
Hi Tubeseeker:
Four “personal journey” predecessors to the Secrets of Wilder are Siddartha, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and the Celestine Prophesy.
While none of these go as far as the Secrets of Wilder in terms of actual practices and mapping the process of human spiritual transformation, they do provide helpful frameworks of spiritual knowledge and good inspiration.
Also check out Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East by BT Spalding, a rousting series of spiritual adventures written nearly a century ago.
The Secrets of Wilder is intended to be a step forward in spiritual fiction, an attempt to bring this kind of writing closer to the actual practices and experiences on the journey. Time will tell if it succeeds. I hope we will see more story telling of this type in the future.
Autobiography of a Yogi and the Gospel of Ramakrishna are terrific spiritual books – the first for inspiration and the second for a detailed chronicle of the journey itself. However, I would put both of these in a different class than the books mentioned above, since neither is a novel (though perhaps embellished a bit), and both are presented from the point of view of traditional Indian spiritual culture. Nothing wrong with that. Two others in this category are Swami Rama’s Living with the Himalayan Masters, and Muktananda’s Play of Consciousness.
For more spiritual stories and biographies, see here:
http://www.aypsite.org/booklist11.html
and here:
http://www.aypsite.org/booklist10.html
All the best!
The guru is in you.
thanks for the replies.
yogani, the first five books you mentioned, I have read the first four and have the autobiography of a yogi waiting for me to read. I will look into some of the other suggestions on this thread. Sometimes the heavy stuff gets to be too much so I like the fun reads. I will read the wilder book again as well as the peaceful warrior.
thanks again
Neil
Whereas ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ is not fiction as we understand it, he certainly reports miracles that I certainly don’t take literally, though he may have believed in them himself.
That said, I have to hand it to Paramhansa Yogananda that he’s a very skillful writer in the, what shall we say, the popular spiritual adventure genre (and I don’t mean ‘popular’ in a pejorative way, whether it’s for writing or music or any other art-form). The book is a fun read!
david,
isnt the he you are reffering to a she?
Neil
Oh no, Paramhansa Yogananda was a man. Don’t let the long hair fool you. 
Moderator note: Topic moved for better placement
I currently read an interesting book that is, in some ways, comparable to the books already mentioned. It’s “Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master” by Irina Tweedie.
It’s quite a long read (about 1000 pages) and some parts of the book turned out to be a little repetitive and monotonous. Others were extremely interesting to me, though. Especially those that depicted the conversations between Irina and her teacher.
What I found very interesting was that Irina didn’t have to do any practices or meditations in order to attain self-realization. All her guru required from her in the beginning was to stay with him for about a year (after that he sent her back to London, where she came from, for some time).
The way her guru treated her could somehow be considered very harsh but apparently that seemed to be part of the the teaching-system he was referring to. He also mentioned that he himself was treated the same way by his guru for many years.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0963457454/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top