3 Bestselling Books to Ignite Your Spiritual Journey
By: Jason Henry
Tags: Self Improvement, Life, Spirituality, Books, Self

Photo by Radu Marcusu on Unsplash

Friendship with God

Neale Donald Walsch had a conversation with God in the Spring of 1992. That conversation would spawn a collection of books, starting with the Conversations with God books one to three.

But the book Friendship with God takes the fundamentals of all three books and wraps it in a neat bow of how to have a healthy relationship with God and therefore how to have a healthy relationship with the world.

A whopping 84% of the world is religious but if they were anything like me, they have destructive notions about who God is and therefore who they are, since they probably subscribe to the notion that they were created by their deity.

It may sound ridiculous that in this day and age, some average guy would have a conversation with a deity. But his questions are the burning questions we’ve all had throughout our lives. This book will shake up your belief system without telling you to change your belief system.

Oddly enough, it was my former pastor who gave me a copy to read. You may not subscribe to a religion but this book will still challenge things you believe or just take for granted.

The answers therein not only make sense, they challenge one to really consider how one lives, how one treats others and how one treats oneself.

Forever bookmarked: Hands down, chapter eight is my favorite part of the book. Walsch and God talk about finding happiness within and the three “love enders.”

The conversation flows so naturally; it’s just like talking to a friend. You start on a topic, you go a bit tangential, someone brings it back to focus and then by the end everything you’ve spoken about worked together to get to the conclusion.

A New Earth

I could’ve gone for The Power of Now, which might be the book I prefer, but A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is, in my opinion, more accessible to one beginning their spiritual journey.

I read The Power of Now first and while I am extremely grateful that I did, it didn’t resonate with me at all. I thought the book was a scam and anyone who raved about it was stupid or being paid to lie about how good it was.

Had I read A New Earth first maybe I wouldn’t have felt that way.

Tolle extols the importance of the present moment but makes it very practical. For the uninitiated mind, it probably will not see the importance of the present moment. Everything that matters is in the future and everything that makes the future matter is based in the past. The Now is just a means to the end.

As a matter of fact, your mind definitely won’t see it and the book illustrates just how the mind operates to prevent you from seeing reality. It’s like an expose on just how governed by fear and other people’s thoughts you are.

But it also highlights who you really are: pure consciousness.

This too is a nebulous concept but if you stick with the writings of this book, you won’t regret it.

Forever bookmarked: In chapter seven, there’s a section titled, “The Ego and the Present Moment.”

Tolle defines “ego” as a negative relationship with the present moment and challenges one to choose between having a positive relationship with Now or a negative relationship with Now.

When it was broken down into those two choices, it seems so absurd to resist the present moment. While it may have things that I don’t enjoy, hating on it will never make it any better.

The Choice

The Choice is a novel by Og Mandino who is famous for his 1968 bestseller, The Greatest Salesman in the World.

I found this book in my house one day. The cover looked like termites navigated a pair of scissors over it. It was neatly beaten up, if that makes sense. And every time I read it, the book disintegrates a little bit more.

I don’t know if it belonged to my parents or grandparents and I almost didn’t read it because I was expecting something about God and talking points that were along the lines of The Greatest Salesman. Given the title I figured I knew what the moral of the story would be.

So basically I read it so I could prove that I was right. I wasn’t expecting much substance. “Remember, you always have a choice on how to live.” That’s the type of thing I was expecting.

Was I right? Yes, but I when I finished the book, I remember thinking three things:

1. I felt that,

2. I didn’t expect that, and

3. If I had read this when I was a teenager I would’ve been so much better off.

It’s a quick read and a great story about a man choosing his destiny with a message that a younger, more fatalistic me needed.

When you are a kid, you don’t have much autonomy. Maybe you don’t have any at all. Your life is decided for you and when you get into the world, you have damn near every responsibility to deal with all of a sudden.

You’re pretty certain you don’t have the mental constitution to even deal with half of these issues.

Then you have choices to make which will define you and your life from that point forward. It’s scary stuff. What if you make the wrong choice? What if you steer yourself into misery?

This novel is about those choices and more, but the moral is something I did not see coming. Truth be told, the previous two books touch on the same topic, but this book spirals into it in a way I didn’t anticipate.

Forever bookmarked: Chapter nineteen and twenty. I won’t speak on it because it’ll ruin it.