I try to read as widely as I can, so I have long made a practice of reading any book that anyone recommends to me on the condition that they read a book that I recommend to them. So let me know what you think I should be reading.Finding what to read is an interesting exercise, I have found people online like Andrew Baker and Landon whose work I have got value reading from, I sometimes ask friends for specific recommendations, I also like reading works from friends, my friend Dan wrote a novel and I found it fascinating to read what Dan wrote. I find Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic ressonance applicable here, where he posits and has results supporting the idea that learning something the first time is alwasy the hardest as it is repeated it becomes easier for subsequent people even if there are no direct links, so reading something that no one else has read is likely harder than reading something that lots have people have read and this might be why it is a good idea for an author to give away book at certain times, as it is important for some people to read your book as it can help to make lots of people read your books. It was infact through Rupert Sheldrake that I first heard of David Bentley Hart whose work I particularly admire and yet I think they have quite different sensibilities. I find it an interesting topic as to how we come to read certain books.
So I like Landon's idea that you recommend one to him and he'll recommend one to you. So whjy did I recommend the Autobiography of a Yogi?
The first and most obvious reason is that it had a big effect upon me. I realise this isn't always the best reason to recommend something to someone else, but all books that i would recommend first off I have to think of as a book of value. So this is the starting point.
Some of the reasons that this book appealed to me won't apply to Landon, I had a need for this book, I did not have a religious or spiritual upbringing and even now I am not really part of religious community. I'd say that I had a spiritual hunger that this book helped satisfy. While I had read religious books before and found them appealing the reason that this was different is that it gave me a much more concrete sense of the immanence of God. Yogananda died in the late 50s so he was not that far from me in time, he spent a good deal of his life in the USA so there was also not much of a cultural abyss between us either and he expresses a closeness and intimacy of God, of God being always with him not an abstraction or as something that is hidden from our minds and the world.
Landon is far more steeped in religious cultural than I was, so won't have the hunger that i experienced, however as a religious person a good religious book can be appreciated. But there is another aspect of this that I think is important at this time and that is around the whole question of what is religion, now again I think Landon has a pretty sophisticated appreciation of this but I think culturally we don't. We tend to think of religion as a set of beliefs that we choose to hold and this feels very modern to me, whereas particularly for pagan culture religion was an intrinsic part of how the world was actually experienced, now it is a much more individual thing with a greater element of choice. But then we have the issue if God is one why is religion not so? We live in a time where we can be immediately aware of people in different continents, we can even have a face to face conversation with them via technology. I think what this means is that if we belong to one religion we have to have something of a framework as to how our religious view fits into the framework of other religions, of course within the Christian world we have had a similar issue between various denominations. One obvious way through this that has a certain simplistic appeal is to think our religion is correct and the others are all wrong. The trouble with this is that an external part anti-pathetic to religion a reasonable secular atheist will hear the various denunciations and agree with them all and be happy in their belief that they're all wrong. DBH's book The Experience of God, is a better way forward and shows how the major Theistic traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism all share basically a common conception of God and a conception that interestingly isn't the one generally argued against by Atheist materialists.
The Autobiography of a Yogi is a good book in terms of inter religious framework is because firstly Yogananda has dealt with this question specifically in his "The Science of Religion" but also because he as an Indian Yogi came to the US and addressed and interacted with American's directly, he wrote the book in English primarily for a US audience.
Reading Autobiography of a Yogi, eventually lead to me getting initiated into Kriya Yoga practice, so it's not of strictly intellectual interest to me, it is particularly good though that their is a tradition published material in this tradition, Yogananda's brother disciple Satyananda wrote 4 biographies of Kriya Yoga masters featured in Yogananda's book, the lineage was continued in India by Hariharananda who wrote works on Kriya Yoga and the current master Prajnananda has written a number of biographies and books on the teachings.
Lastly I have just read an essay by Landon on the relation of G K Chesterton to David Hume's thought largely on the subject of Miracles. This is an aspect I am very curious about for Landon's response because many miracles are related here, I certainly await his response with interest.
