A friend of mine is really, really getting into vague spirituality — Zen, meditation, oneness with nature, all that jazz — and I've had a series of conversations with her that make me feel like we're barreling towards a potentially friendship-damaging impasse. It's incredibly important to her that I understand that she believes there to be an underlying, driving force to all things, one which we can only see and understand when we step away from the world, and our lives, and clear our minds. The phrase "this world is a distraction" has come up several times, and my idle entertaining of the concept only really goes so far. At a certain point, you either have to believe that something exists when there is no evidence that it might, or you stick to what you know to be real. The problem I'm running into is that she seems to believe that this thing that I don't think is real, is more real than reality. But, well, that's not entirely important, I suppose, to the purposes of this thread.
Any of you happen to know of a decent book or pondering on spirituality, preferably without religious basis? As in, some interesting musing on the possibilities of the spiritual world? I kind of want to look into it, to see how far we can go with this ridiculous idea before it just becomes a matter of "Well, I don't believe that this thing exists."
My previous forays into spirituality have always been at the urging of others, and have always been profoundly empty and irritatingly vague. I read some of Thich Nhat Hanh's The Miracle of Mindfulness, but it's pretty firmly rooted into Buddhism, and if you don't really believe that the cosmic system works like the Buddhists think it does, it's pretty useless. I'd heard good things about Alan Watts as well, but I still need to look into it.
When I was in the hospital, my old boss from the thrift store gave me this book from the 70's called Journey to Ixtlan, which, even with the sweet tang of morphine running through my veins, was not able to present a single coherent thought without either contradicting it a few pages later or barreling balls-deep into flowery, meaningless, vaguely optimistic spiritual rhetoric.
I suspect it's all like that, because it's mostly just people guessing as to how the universe might secretly work. Obviously, that seems indulgent and useless, but I'd still like to entertain the concept for the sake of my friendship.
So, yeah, any book recommendations would be appreciated.