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Spiritually profound works of fiction

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf - Someone mentioned Joyce earlier, but I've always found him (except for The Dubliners) to be too much of a wank. The modernist movement was about the search for spirituality by exploring consciousness through writing.

Love Virginia Woolf.

Cien años de soledad (100 Years of Solitude) by Gabrial García Márquez.

Rayuela (Hopscotch) by Julio Cortázar [He has the BEST short stories, but the English translations are pathetic]

The "boom" writers of Latin America will rock you. :)

Did I mention Virginia Woolf? :D
 
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God Emperor of Dune
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+1

Hermann Hesse
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Yup

Finnegans Wake
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Lulz

With some reservation, I recommend both Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and Aleister Crowley's Diary of a Drug Fiend. While the latter may be more romantic than genuinely 'spiritual,' it offers a poignant, stirring, and surprisingly well-written glimpse of early twentieth-century drug culture through the eyes of a singular addict, allowing convenient segue into deeper insight for those to whom the book would personally appeal (whom I imagine abound throughout these fora and within this very thread). The novel is also noteworthy for its exposition of Thelemic principles throughout the story, the end of which finds the narrator housed in a barely fictionalized version of Crowley's Sicilian Abbey.
 
Anything by Philip K. Dick

Especially singling out VALIS and Ubik which both blew my mind in their own way.
 
George Orwell, 1984. The way of Energy Master Lam Kam Chuen. Tibetan book of living and dying.... the ones listed sound great, I'll have to look them up cheers mate. Oh, and Fred Alan Wolf books.
 
Mr Wobble said:
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Hermann Hesse yet (unless they have and I missed it).

I particularly liked Journey to the East, but they're all good.
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Agreed. Hesse is amazing. Somerset Maugham: The Razor's Edge. Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus, the Plague, and the Journals. Someone above mentioned Crime and Punishment; I'd agree. But my top vote for spiritually profound, and accessible modern classic would be Franny and Zooey (Salinger was studying Zen intensely when he wrote this book.) Life-changing. <3
 
ellessdee said:
I liked Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Def an interesting read.
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What's interesting about this book is the tone being really straight-forward and narrated so that the concepts are explicitly told about the nature of society, yet still being a work of fiction. I'm not crazy about how straight-forward it is, but it really is a great book out of the simplistic essence of our material being,



I personally like THX 1138, a film by George Lucas

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When I was 17 I bought 300 grams of dextromethorphan online in powder form, and use it in recreation pretty much every week, sometimes taking so much I became paralyzed for hours unable to do anything or comprehend what was going on around me.

One night while I was high, THX 1138 ran on the air on the Sci-fi channel 3:30 am, and I was not in a state to understand a movie, nor do simple functions like lowering the volume on my TV or going to the bathroom. When I began watching my cognitive incapacitation led me to believe that I was part of the movie in itself. However, knowing the movie THX 1138 and how ridiculously sterile to the human audience it is, with little consideration for the viewer, became one of the most confusing journey's in my life.

The reason why THX1138 is so important because since then have adopted a Pavlovian mandate by which I cannot watch this movie sober. Not only do I have to be high, I have to be non-functional when it comes to a simple activity. The movie THX 1138 was almost like it was purposed for me that one night the first time I watched it. The movie itself is an incredible feat making me feel as an active participant through its clandestine, removed perspective. Before I watch it, I must preset the DVD inside my Xbox and have it on pause at beginning of movie because I won't be able to use electronics. I've watched the film 12 times now, and I still don't know what the hell is going on.
 
my first post-study fiction read is a third run through the old favourite "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance". flying through it, haven't read it in several years, i remember pausing after every other line back when i first read it more than 10 years ago.
interestingly i am finding myself in many of the pages. much of my logic and cleverness (if i have any) seems directly lifted from these pages. i had no idea how influential it has been to me until now.
 
ellessdee said:
I liked Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Def an interesting read.
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Co-signed, although it dragged by the end.

My contributions:

Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet

Also co-sign the Herman Hesse and Philip K. Dick suggestions. Cool youtube clip for Dick fans: Matrix.

Never got much into sci-fi aside from Dick. I respect Heinlein, Herbert, Gibson, RAW, etc. but their work never grabbed me. The word I always felt was circuitous.
 
Don't have much to contribute in way of new material, but I gotta say MDAO, His Dark Materials touched me like no other media before or since. I thought the message, despite Pullman's blatant advocacy of atheism, was more along the lines of 'You are in control'.
I also loved the sense of constant transcendance, of taboos and ideas and even realities.
More than anything, I guess this story just helped me accept that there isn't just one solid and real place for me to be, and that there is no fated destiny or will. There's only what you make.

I guess I could bump with the book A Tale of Despereaux though. It's a kid book, and fairly simple, but it speaks volumes to me about interpersonal relationships and perspective. That's spiritual kinda, for me at least, because it's the area of life that I don't understand well.
 
AminoAcid said:
Journey to the East
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Amen. This is about the most epic adventure story ever written, and each new place Song Wukong and his companions pass through, they uncover some sort of interesting ethical, societal, or philosophical lesson. The real treasure they bring back is the wealth of experiences they have along the way, i.e. the journey itself, rather than just a bundle of old sutras.

I don't know why the Tale of Genji gets credit for the world's first novel; Journey to the East is one coherent work with a beginning, middle, and end, while the Tale of Genji is a rambling compilation of chick lit.

KamMoye said:
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet

Also co-sign the Herman Hesse and Philip K. Dick suggestions. Cool youtube clip for Dick fans: Matrix.

Never got much into sci-fi aside from Dick. I respect Heinlein, Herbert, Gibson, RAW, etc. but their work never grabbed me. The word I always felt was circuitous.
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Funny you should say this. Philip K. Dick always gave me a very different (and better, IMO) feeling than most, especially most hard-boiled, English language sci-fi. Finally one day I put my finger on it: Dick's underlying worldview is like the movie Rashomon -- we each inhabit our own private universe, and it's hard to ever know what we can trust and how much (if any) of our private worlds are shared with others. In other words, Dick celebrates the subjective experience. In contrast, I find that most sci-fi of high repute tends to highlight the shared common human experience, and invites the reader to be more objective in assessing his/her place in the world.

Tangentially, I like the work of Kim Stanley Robinson for a similar reason. While much sci-fi of high merit tends to push a libertarian or even anarchist political vision, Robinson dares to push a progressivist agenda without coming off as hokey.

All of Paulo Coelho's work is pretty profound. His main characters all undergo massive changes in their sense of place in the world, that I think to some extent can carry over to the reader. That's real writing talent, if you ask me.

!!4iV4HF9R34g said:
I gotta say MDAO, His Dark Materials touched me like no other media before or since. I thought the message, despite Pullman's blatant advocacy of atheism, was more along the lines of 'You are in control'.
I also loved the sense of constant transcendance, of taboos and ideas and even realities.
More than anything, I guess this story just helped me accept that there isn't just one solid and real place for me to be, and that there is no fated destiny or will. There's only what you make.
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The Northern Lights / The Golden Compass (the first book) was excellent. Just like the Matrix, there was no need for a trilogy -- volume one should have stood alone as a complete work. I find Pullman's imagination sputtered a bit when he described his imagined worlds in books 2 and 3.

What irks me on a thematic level about His Dark Materials is that his message (which you so accurately put) is actually Hermetic, and belonging to other Western occult and mystery traditions. Pullman seems to be suggesting that these systems of belief are compatible with what goes by the label of atheism today, and I don't think that's accurate at all.
 
But what about the themes introduced in the later books? You're right when you say the quality of writing took a downhill turn after Northern Lights, but that was the hook. I don't think Pullman cared so much about the story as the ideas unfortunately, and it showed. Nonetheless, we'd have never explored the concepts of the freedom from death or the revelations of love as an agent of change. If we had only kept the first book, it would have been a typical story introducing metaphysics, rather than a work on the challenges you find out exist when you acquire wisdom.
 
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