The Books That’ve Most Influenced My Thinking
A viewer recently asked me the above question, so here's five key reads
A viewer recently asked me about the books that have most influenced my thinking and understanding of the world. It’s a good question, this, as while we can’t get our worldview entirely from books, great books do offer philosophical grounding and new frames of understanding.
So, while my worldview, like everyone else’s, is a blend of environmental response, contemplation, and personal/spiritual experience — and my thoughts expressed on the channels are a mix of these and my own spontaneous takes in the moment — the below offer a basic overview of the key books that’ve shaped my thinking.
Crisis of the Modern World - Rene Guenon
I first came across this text many years ago while craving a sense of personal and cultural direction in my spiritual life. I have a background in nonduality, so I’d explored Advaita Vedanta for quite some time, and found that, despite the deep spiritual insights, it lacked a cohesive understanding of applied spirituality in the ‘real world’.
In essence, the contemplation was all good, but it wasn’t answering the complexities of man, culture and civilisation. One could say here; ‘Well, it’s not meant to’, but I noticed quite quickly that those who’d utter this would be quite stringent when it came to the liberal shibboleths of the age, as well as when some major event occurred (George Floyd, Covid, etc), practitioners, even teachers would be more than eager to impose their spiritual understanding on world events in these instances.
I could see the spiritual teaching was pure, yet it was evident it lacked structure. Teachers would offer high-level esoteric insights to folks who’d just walked through the door. I tried to ignore this, but began to see that I was embracing a teaching divorced from Tradition. Spiritual realisation was possible, but it was coccooned in a rootless, self-centred, individualistic frame. Just like modernity itself.
Long story short, I adopted an interest in masculine initiation ceremonies, which led me to the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell, and then into perennialists via Aldous Huxley, and then onto the gold mine, René Guénon.
I immediately chimed in with Guénon when I read Crisis of the Modern World (Crisis from hereon). He explained the issues I’d experienced in the spiritual world to a tee — fragmented teachings without eldership, a democratised, flattened material society without hierarchy, and from that moment on, Traditionalism became a core theme in my worldview.
It became evident that, while maintaining a spiritual life was vital, it had to resonate with something deeper than the individual. The true purpose of the spiritual life was realisation, yes, but realisation with a sense of respect and responsibility to the world around us.
Perhaps I’d always been temperamentally ‘conservative’, so this spoke to me deeply, and rhymed with the interest in comparative mythology and initiation that I’d picked up from Campbell.
If you’re interested in exploring Guénon, I would urge you to start with Crisis, but do bear in mind that this isn’t feel-good spirituality; it’s profound metaphysics, and Guénon is a cutting and meticulous diagnostician of our age. There is deep beauty and spiritual truth in his work, but it’s not for the casual reader.
Crisis is the ideal place to start, as Guénon is a notoriously complex writer—impenetrable in some of his longer works. Yet, while Crisis is in this grouping, it is the most immediately readable of his works. Guénon’s work is powerful stuff, and if you go with him, he’ll flip your worldview on its head.
*For those looking for a gentler intro into Guenon, Julius Evola wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘Rene Guenon: A Teacher for Modern Times’ — it’s short and only a few quid.
2. Iron John - Robert Bly
Regular viewers of the channels will no doubt be aware I have an interest in masculine initiation and firmly believe a civilisation renews itself when men are initiated into their own tradition. One could say this is a blend of Traditionalist, Christian, and masculine initiatory thought.
Needless to say, I adopted these views after finding myself deeply lost in my early years and felt the sting of isolation, confusion and instability myself. Worse still, I saw others bearing worse afflictions and witnessed friends and a family member get mixed up in drugs, face severe mental health challenges, and a few die.
Naturally, this had a lasting impression and left me with a seemingly unanswerable question: In the modern world, with all our technology, convenience and advancements, why do so many people seem so lost? Especially the men?
I don’t wish to imply every person in modernity feels this way; it’s obvious many are content enough, yet simultaneously it’s clear we have a men’s health crisis, suicide being the biggest killer of men in most Western countries, while ‘mental health’ and ‘ADHD’ complaints seem ubiquitous.
My aim isn’t to be disrespectful by putting these conditions in quote marks. I’m fully aware that people are suffering out there. But I was never convinced this suffering was solely due to some modernist, psychological condition. Just as is the case with the ‘toxic masculinity’ drive from the mainstream, I can see what people mean by these conditions. I’m sure it’s unpleasant. However, the underlying factors always seemed so much greater than modernity allows.
Part of me assumes we embrace these conditions, which seem to increase in number year-on-year, because they offer quick explanations (and don’t we love a quick solution in modernity) to multifaceted and multidimensional challenges. It goes without saying, I’m not a doctor, and these are only my opinions, but I often found that when we’re given a ‘solution’ to our ailments, it becomes a sort of existential balm: “My life didn’t work out the way it should have because of my depression.” “My life is ruined because of my ADHD!”
As I say, I’m sure these are real problems and part of the puzzle, but I oftentimes assume these conditions give us short-term relief while blocking our long-term growth.
It’s a spiritual truism that many of our challenges aren’t random conditions that will forever ail you; they’re a variation of crosses to bear that teach us valuable spiritual lessons, insights into the sensitivity and smallness of man in the universe, and perhaps at times, opportunities to overcome, rather than be burdened by darkness within.
I began thinking such things after reading Robert Bly’s Iron John, a much softer read than Crisis, but full of deep insights into the spiritual and emotional maturation of the male. In Iron John, Bly utilises the German folk tale Eisen Hans (Iron John), giving a symbolic reading of the tale that forms both a critique (and an explanation) of modernity, as well as a guidebook on how a man finds his feet spiritually and personally.
Iron John is a must-read for any man eager to understand himself beyond labels and conditions—again, that’s not to dismiss these conditions, we all deal with what we must in life—it’s to understand we have deeper dimensions within than psychological models.
3. The New Man — Thomas Merton
In truth, there are a hundred books I can put here, as this is a work of Christian mysticism, and while there are thousands of works of this kind, they all speak to the same indefinable spiritual essence.
I chose Merton’s The New Man as it’s very readable, and Merton is a more modern mystic, making the themes more accessible for the contemporary reader.
Needless to say, I found this book very helpful in transitioning from Eastern mysticism to Western. Merton actually had a long-term correspondence with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, exhibiting a Traditionalist skill in understanding how differing traditions respond uniquely to sacred order.
I should be clear, though, Merton writes in terms of pure spirituality. This is not dogmatic, political or Traditionalist. However, if you’re interested in exploring Christian mysticism that bit deeper, Merton is a good place to start.
Personally, I read a lot of Merton when embracing Christianity as the mainstream church can be a touch dry these days, that or ideologically possessed, so he was a welcome remedy.
4. Transformation - Robert A. Johnson
This work is one of the more recent books I’ve read, and it combines the essence of Iron John with a Western spiritual/cultural spin.
I’ve mentioned it a lot in recent videos, so apologies if you’ve heard this before, but in Transformation, Johnson charts the conscious development of the male soul through three key states of consciousness, each symbolised by a notable literary figure.
Two-dimensional consciousness is represented by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, an idealistic, naive and buffoon-like ‘knight errant’ in medieval Spain. For Johnson, this symbolises the man who doesn’t think too deeply. This means he’s blissfully unaware of the true challenges of life, existing in a sort of comatose bliss; however, damned to always run into a wall (or worse) he doesn’t see coming.
Three-dimensional consciousness is represented by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is where the vast majority of moderns reside, in the ‘to be or not to be’ dimension—uncertainty and instability mark this state of consciousness.
Here, man is intelligent, sharp, but unsure of himself. Full of drive and passion, yet confused as to where to articulate his energies.
One can see how, when living in this state, man is challenged to either accept the insecurity of the age, or run into the cocoon of ideology—and how modern man has done this, with it acting as a sort of all-consuming blanket explaining every facet of experience, from politics, to social phenomena, to religion.
Marxism is perhaps the most obvious culprit here, but there are many iterations of ideology across the political spectrum. Even the red pill itself becomes ideological the further one travels into it.
Johnson doesn’t leave us dangling in despair, however, as he guides us through to fourth-dimensional consciousness, as symbolised by Goethe’s Faust. It’s important to note here that Goethe’s Faust is a reworking of the original tale (the original Faust famously makes a deal with the devil and pays the ultimate price), in which Faust is ultimately redeemed.
Faust’s redemption isn’t a heroic overcoming, but more in his relentless striving upward. He rejects empty pleasure, grows beyond selfish desire, and eventually turns his will toward creative, outward-facing work rather than inward indulgence.
In essence, Faust, like modern man, finds his sins come from blindness and restlessness, not a deliberate embrace of evil, and over time, he matures spiritually and reaches the fourth dimension.
Alongside this, he finds the gist of forgiveness via Gretchen, who represents the complementary path: innocence purified through suffering, repentance, and surrender to grace. Her forgiveness and intercession embody the “Eternal Feminine” that draws the soul Godward. Together, the message is simple: not perfection but striving, repentance, and mercy save—love ultimately lifts what effort alone cannot.
We must remember that Faust, just like modern man, scorns the spiritual in favour of worldly knowledge and acclaim—the message being not to jettison all worldly knowledge, but recognise that forces are at play beyond us at all times.
I may have made this journey sound simple, and I should be clear: it is not. Personally, most of my life has been lived like Hamlet, I imagine it has for us all, yet there have been moments of true realisation before, in the language of Johnson, returning to three-dimensional consciousness to be ‘boiled’ in the struggles of life once more until the natural maturity can be truly realised.
5. The Abolition of Man - C.S. Lewis
I was wracking my brain on which book to end on; there are many political and philosophical works I could include here: Chesterton, Scruton, Evola, etc., yet I opted for Lewis’ The Abolition of Man as it ties together Traditionalism (not that Lewis was a Traditionalist), politics and culture quite nicely.
I had a chat with Nick Dixon not too long back, when he referenced this work. It awakened in me a realisation that Lewis did speak of the ‘Tao’ (borrowing a phrase from Chinese philosophy) in this work. It was a long while ago I read it, but it was highly formative when I did.
The book begins rather simply, offering an insight into the syllabus of an English public school, yet in typical Lewis fashion, he uses this simple, even mundane beginning to launch himself into a powerful critique of modern ideology (and pseudo-morality) that students are indoctrinated into.
If it was that bad back in his day, eh?
Anyhow, the essence of Lewis’ argument is that moderns are trained to think in subjective moral terms, which seemingly offers more ‘freedom’, yet in time destroys the very reference points of truth, beauty and virtue (the ‘abolition’ of man) themselves. In essence, Lewis makes the classically religious argument that truth isn’t relative but Absolute. There is a predefined standard working throughout the universe that we must adhere to orient ourselves spiritually, aethetically and morally. This central structure is, of course, the Logos.
I dare say we can all understand Lewis in an instinctive sense, given the state of the modern West today, as we’ve witnessed firsthand what happens when an individual, or a society, drifts from the Absolute. We don’t find freedom (or don’t find it for long) on this path, but chaos. We lose all ability to make value judgments as ‘value’ is, according to the modern materialists, subjective. Ergo, ‘judgement’ is nothing but mere snobbery masquerading as taste in the softer view, or the cultural force that enacts ‘symbolic violence’ on the ‘oppressed’ who need ‘liberating’, according to the harder-edged Marxists and post-structuralists.
One can see why Lewis made this argument; his point here predicts the exact moral, artistic and social degeneration we’ve witnessed in the West.
Of course, the solution is to return to the ‘Tao’, or Logos (Christ) in the Western language, yet this isn’t as simple as going to Church and becoming a Christian, whatever that means these days. It’s about reawakening to Absolute order and finding the true avenues that nourish the soul, orient us culturally and spiritually, and allow us to find our feet in a turbulent age.
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