The library behind the argument

Books

The Reading List

"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon."
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

How to Use This Page

This is the full reading list behind the site’s argument, organized by theme. Every book here is referenced somewhere in the curriculum. Some are primary sources that generated entire explore pages. Others are single data points that converge with the larger pattern. A few are fiction that transmits what nonfiction can’t.

Start where recognition pulls you. The curriculum doesn’t require reading in order, and neither does the library.

Consciousness and the Substrate

The foundational claim: consciousness is primary, not produced by matter. These books map the territory from different entry points, arriving at the same architecture through engineering, physics, and direct exploration.

  • Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe - The documentation phase. A radio executive’s methodical first-person account of spontaneous out-of-body experiences, recorded with engineering rigor. The book that made the invisible reproducible.

  • Far Journeys by Robert Monroe - The expansion. Monroe encounters non-human intelligences, discovers the loosh energy-harvesting system, and maps territories far beyond the first book. Where the argument gets uncomfortable.

  • Ultimate Journey by Robert Monroe - The synthesis. Monroe reaches the I-There, his total self across all incarnations, and discovers the Aperture where individual consciousness interfaces with the universal.

  • Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov - A mechanical engineer models consciousness as a vibratory system and derives the structure of reality from first principles. Bentov’s diagrams are worth more than most libraries.

  • A Cosmic Book by Itzhak Bentov - Bentov’s posthumous work, extending his pendulum model into cosmology. Published after his death in the 1979 Chicago air disaster.

  • Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm - A quantum physicist argues that reality has an enfolded order beneath the explicate world we perceive. The scientific case for what the Hermeticists called “as above, so below.”

  • The Undivided Universe by David Bohm and Basil Hiley - The technical companion to the implicate order thesis. Bohm’s ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics, completed with Hiley before Bohm’s death.

  • The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot - A synthesis of Bohm’s implicate order and Karl Pribram’s holographic brain theory. Accessible entry point to the idea that reality is a frequency domain decoded by consciousness.

  • Alien Information Theory by Andrew Gallimore - A neurochemist models DMT as a channel selector that tunes the brain to adjacent reality frequencies. The pharmacological case for the substrate.

  • Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - Self-reference, recursion, and strange loops across mathematics, art, and music. The structure of consciousness examined through the lens of formal systems.

  • Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel - Consciousness recognizing itself through its own development. Dense, demanding, and the philosophical backbone of everything the traditions describe as awakening.

The Hermetic Tradition

The operating system. These texts describe the principles that generate reality, from the oldest surviving sources to modern commentaries that make the principles operational.

  • The Kybalion by Three Initiates - Seven principles of Hermetic philosophy, distilled into a slim 1908 volume. The site’s operating manual. Every page on this site uses these principles as working assumptions.

  • Corpus Hermeticum translated by Brian Copenhaver - The primary source texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, dating to the 2nd-3rd centuries CE. The wellspring of Western esoteric philosophy.

  • The Emerald Tablet - The foundational Hermetic text. “As above, so below” in its original context. Multiple translations exist; the principle matters more than the provenance.

  • Le Mystere des Cathedrales by Fulcanelli - The anonymous alchemist’s demonstration that Gothic cathedrals encode the Great Work in stone. Architecture as initiatory text.

  • The Dwellings of the Philosophers by Fulcanelli - Fulcanelli’s second and final work, extending the cathedral analysis to aristocratic mansions. The alchemical argument deepens.

  • The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall - An encyclopedia of ancient wisdom traditions, written when Hall was twenty-seven. The range is staggering. The synthesis holds up a century later.

  • The Secret Destiny of America by Manly P. Hall - Hall’s argument that America was designed as a philosophical experiment by initiates who embedded Hermetic principles in the nation’s founding architecture.

  • Lectures on Ancient Philosophy by Manly P. Hall - Hall’s classroom teachings on the perennial philosophy. More focused and systematic than Secret Teachings, built for practitioners.

  • The Lost Keys of Freemasonry by Manly P. Hall - The initiatory structure beneath Masonic ritual, decoded by someone who understood what the symbols were pointing at.

  • An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner - Steiner’s systematic description of supersensible reality and human evolution through successive planetary stages. The cosmology is vast and internally consistent.

  • How to Know Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner - Steiner’s practical guide to developing the organs of spiritual perception. Less cosmology, more method. The exercises work if you do them.

  • Egregores by Mark Stavish - A concise treatment of thought-forms and group minds, tracing the concept from Hermetic tradition through modern occultism. The mechanism behind institutional persistence.

Psychology and Mythology

The inner architecture mapped through two complementary lenses: Jung’s depth psychology and Campbell’s comparative mythology. Both discovered the same structures independently.

  • The Red Book (Liber Novus) by Carl Jung - Jung’s private record of active imagination sessions from 1913 to 1930, unpublished until 2009. The raw material from which analytical psychology emerged. The most important psychological document of the twentieth century.

  • Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung - Jung’s autobiography, dictated near the end of his life. The personal narrative behind the theoretical framework. His account of his own initiatory experiences.

  • Psychology and Alchemy by Carl Jung - Jung’s demonstration that alchemical symbolism maps the individuation process. The bridge between Hermetic tradition and depth psychology.

  • Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung - Jung’s accessible introduction to archetypal psychology, completed just before his death. The entry point for readers new to the collective unconscious.

  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell - The monomyth thesis. Every hero story across every culture follows the same initiatory pattern because the pattern is built into consciousness itself.

  • The Masks of God (4 volumes) by Joseph Campbell - Campbell’s comprehensive mythology, spanning primitive, oriental, occidental, and creative traditions. The full dataset behind the monomyth.

  • The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell - Campbell’s television conversations with Bill Moyers, transcribed. The most accessible gateway to his thinking. “Follow your bliss” originates here.

  • Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell - Campbell’s practical application of mythological thinking to individual life. How to find and follow your personal myth.

  • The Daimon and the Soul of the West by Bernardo Kastrup - Kastrup’s argument that Western civilization has lost contact with the daimonic, the intermediary between human consciousness and the larger intelligence it participates in.

History and Chronology

The record is not what it appears. These books challenge the accepted timeline and reveal patterns in history that the consensus framework cannot accommodate.

  • History: Fiction or Science? (Volumes I-V) by Anatoly Fomenko and Gleb Nosovskiy - The New Chronology thesis. Mathematical and astronomical analysis suggesting the accepted historical timeline contains massive duplications and fabrications. The most disorienting books on this list.

  • How It Was In Reality by Anatoly Fomenko - A condensed presentation of the New Chronology findings, more accessible than the five-volume series.

  • Awaken the Immortal Within by Jason Breshears - Breshears’ synthesis of chronological research, simulation theory, and practical sovereignty. The Phoenix cycle and the 138-year reset pattern.

  • Chronicon by Jason Breshears - Breshears’ detailed timeline reconstruction, cross-referencing hundreds of historical sources against astronomical markers.

  • Time and the Technosphere by Jose Arguelles - Arguelles’ argument that artificial time (the Gregorian calendar, the clock) is a control technology that disconnects humanity from natural temporal rhythms.

  • Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend - The thesis that mythology worldwide encodes precise astronomical knowledge, particularly the precession of the equinoxes. Myth as science transmitted through story.

Gnostic and Mystery Traditions

The ancient report: something is wrong with this reality, and the way out has been mapped. These are the primary sources and scholarly treatments of traditions that diagnosed the control system millennia ago.

  • The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer - The complete library of Gnostic texts discovered in Egypt in 1945. First-person accounts of the archon system, the demiurge, and the divine spark trapped in matter. Primary source material.

  • Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook edited by Marvin Meyer - Primary texts from Greek, Egyptian, and Roman mystery traditions. What initiates actually experienced, in their own words.

  • The Greek Mysteries by C. Kerenyi - Scholarly reconstruction of the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries. What happened in the telesterion and why it transformed everyone who entered.

  • Serpent in the Sky by John Anthony West - West’s presentation of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz’s thesis that Egyptian civilization encoded a complete science of consciousness in its architecture and symbolism.

The Phenomena

The things that aren’t supposed to happen but keep happening. These books take the phenomena seriously without reducing them to comfortable explanations.

  • Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel - Keel’s thesis that UFOs, apparitions, and high strangeness are manifestations of an ultraterrestrial intelligence that has operated alongside humanity throughout recorded history. The book that reframed the entire field.

  • The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel - Keel’s account of the Point Pleasant events of 1966-67. A journalist’s real-time encounter with phenomena that defy every category. Far stranger than the film suggests.

  • The Eighth Tower by John Keel - Keel’s most theoretical work, proposing that a superspectrum of electromagnetic energy generates the phenomena, religious visions, and psychic events from a single source.

  • VALIS by Philip K. Dick - Dick’s semi-autobiographical novel about being struck by a beam of pink light that downloaded information directly into his mind. Fiction that is autobiography that is theology. Listed here and under Fiction because it operates on both registers.

  • Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee - Vallee’s demonstration that modern UFO encounters mirror fairy folklore, religious apparitions, and mythological contact narratives across centuries. The phenomena are consistent; only the interpretive framework changes.

Suppressed Science and Technology

The technologies that worked, the scientists who were silenced, and the physics that was deliberately excluded from the curriculum.

  • My Inventions by Nikola Tesla - Tesla’s autobiography, serialized in 1919. His account of eidetic visualization, the rotating magnetic field discovery, and the vision that preceded every major invention.

  • The Problem of Increasing Human Energy by Nikola Tesla - Tesla’s 1900 article in Century Magazine laying out his vision for wireless energy transmission and the technological liberation of humanity. The blueprint that was buried.

  • Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney - The definitive Tesla biography. The full story of what he built, what was suppressed, and why the twentieth century went the way it did instead.

  • Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer - A complementary biography drawing on different archival sources. Between Cheney and Seifer, the complete Tesla picture emerges.

  • Reality Transurfing (Steps I-V) by Vadim Zeland - A Russian quantum physicist’s model of reality as a space of variations navigated by intention and reduced reflection. The practical manual for shifting between reality tracks.

  • The Giza Power Plant by Christopher Dunn - A master machinist’s analysis of the Great Pyramid as a precision-engineered energy device. Dunn reads the engineering tolerances that archaeologists can’t.

  • The Body Electric by Robert Becker and Gary Selden - A researcher’s documentation of bioelectrical healing mechanisms that were systematically suppressed by the medical establishment. The science of regeneration that should have changed medicine.

The Instrument

The human body as receiver, transmitter, and transformer. These books map the energetic architecture that the consensus framework denies exists.

  • The Kundalini Experience by Lee Sannella - A psychiatrist’s clinical study of kundalini phenomena, distinguishing spiritual emergency from psychosis. The medical case for taking the energy body seriously.

  • Light Emerging by Barbara Brennan - A former NASA physicist’s detailed mapping of the human energy field based on decades of direct perception. Technical precision applied to subtle anatomy.

  • Wheels of Life by Anodea Judith - A systematic treatment of the chakra system integrating Western psychology with Eastern energy anatomy. The best single-volume introduction to the instrument’s architecture.

  • Eastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea Judith - Judith’s deeper integration of chakra theory with developmental psychology. Each energy center mapped to specific psychological developmental stages.

  • Life After Life by Raymond Moody - The book that named the near-death experience. Moody’s collection of clinical accounts from patients who died and returned, reporting consistent features across cases.

  • Consciousness Beyond Life by Pim van Lommel - A cardiologist’s prospective study of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest patients. The most methodologically rigorous NDE research published.

  • Evidence of the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long - Long’s analysis of over 1,300 NDEs from the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation database. Statistical patterns that are difficult to explain as hallucination.

  • Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander - A neurosurgeon’s account of his own NDE during a week-long coma from bacterial meningitis. Significant because Alexander’s neocortex was completely shut down, eliminating the standard neurological explanations.

  • The Serpent Power by Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe) - The foundational Western translation of tantric kundalini texts. Dense, scholarly, and still the most complete treatment of the subtle body from primary Sanskrit sources.

  • DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman - A psychiatrist’s clinical study of DMT at the University of New Mexico. The first government-approved psychedelic research in decades. Subjects consistently reported contact with intelligent entities.

Sovereignty and Awakening

The endgame: individual sovereignty, restored capacity, and the practical architecture of liberation. These books describe what it looks like when someone actually gets free.

  • The Stellar Man by John Baines - A Chilean Hermeticist’s uncompromising manual for developing a permanent “I” capable of surviving biological death. Not gentle. Not reassuring. Possibly the most important book on this list for anyone who wants to do the work.

  • The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg - A 1997 prediction of how information technology would undermine nation-state control and return sovereignty to individuals. Written by establishment insiders who saw the pattern.

  • Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson - Wilson’s practical workbook for reprogramming your own nervous system using Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model. Exercises included. The humor is the delivery mechanism for serious technology.

  • The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - A satirical conspiracy epic that is also a manual for detecting and resisting reality tunnels. Fiction that trains pattern recognition while inoculating against paranoia.

  • The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa (John Yates) - A neuroscientist-meditator’s stage-by-stage manual for developing concentration and insight. The most technically precise meditation instruction available in English.

Fiction as Transmission

Some things can only be said in story. These novels encode transmissions that nonfiction can’t deliver, because the pattern has to be experienced, not explained.

  • The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength. Lewis imagines Earth as a quarantined planet cut off from cosmic community by a bent ruler. Written in the 1940s, the trilogy’s cosmology tracks remarkably with the Gnostic archive discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

  • VALIS by Philip K. Dick - Dick’s fictionalized account of his 2-3-74 experience: a beam of pink light that transmitted information directly into his consciousness. The novel’s theology is built from Gnostic sources Dick didn’t know he was channeling.

  • The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin - A civilization discovers that its reality is subject to chaotic interference from external forces. The Dark Forest hypothesis as cosmological horror. The best fictional treatment of what it means to exist in a managed reality.

  • The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - Listed under Sovereignty as well because it functions as both. The novel trains you to hold multiple contradictory reality tunnels simultaneously, which is the skill the entire curriculum is building toward.