What I'm reading.

The reference. Read chapters 17–19 three times before reading anything else on options.

Dense but pays compound interest. Worth the slog if you want to actually understand vol.

Free on YouTube. Watch at 1.25x. The Q&A is the best part.

A former Goldman/Deutsche trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist measures cortisol and testosterone on a live trading floor (2012). The physiology of risk-taking, made measurable. The case that the body trades before the mind does.

The classic on trading psychology and the discipline of execution (2000). Probabilistic thinking and the pre-decided structure, before either had a neuroscience.

The definitive account of Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies (2019). How a group of mathematicians and code-breakers built the Medallion Fund's ~66% annual returns on hidden-state inference rather than market narrative.

Short, dense, useful. Reread quarterly.

Useful framework, padded book. The four-loop model is the keeper.

Long-form essay; the canonical short answer to the question it asks.

The Backwards Law named and unpacked. Manson credits Watts; the framing is sharper for modern readers.

Gregory Hays translation recommended — the cleanest modern English rendering of the inner citadel.

Letters to Lucilius. Practical Stoicism written by someone trying to use it.

The dichotomy of control, stated and restated. Foundational.

Start here — fifty pages on the imaginative act and how it impresses the subconscious.

The single most useful manual on the law of assumption. Read twice; the second pass lands.

On the moral and creative authority of imagination. Pairs with The Power of Awareness.

Earlier work — sets the theological frame for everything that comes after.

Real-world case studies — readers writing in to describe how the law worked for them.

On the illusion of the separate self. The shortest path into non-duality from a Western reader.

Why the search for security is itself the source of suffering. Holds up.

A clean Western introduction to Zen — historical and practical.

Stephen Mitchell translation recommended — the most readable English version of the canon.

Hundreds of lectures, most under 40 minutes — the "blue shirt" YouTube series. Bible read as inner-anatomy and consciousness.

The body as living scripture — spinal "Jacob's Ladder" and the sacred oil.

Lexicon translating every biblical name and place into states of mind.

Thought as form — consciousness creates reality through rational law.

Strange, dense, useful — especially the chapters on "the pendulum" and the variation of fate.

Hermetic principles. Short. Re-readable.

The foundational text of Kabbalistic mysticism. Dense Aramaic; read through a translation with commentary.

Modern compilation of Kabbalistic source texts in readable English. The cleanest entry point.

The single best meditation manual in print. Stages map cleanly onto observable cognitive states.

Evolutionary-psych framing. Good bridge from secular reader to contemplative practice.

The 700-verse Sanskrit poem embedded in the Mahabharata. The operational core of Karma Yoga and the I-am divine-name layer. Eknath Easwaran or Swami Prabhupada translations recommended for first read.

The canonical Vedantic source for Aham Brahmasmi, Tat Tvam Asi, and the four states of consciousness. S. Radhakrishnan translation with commentary is the standard.

Aurobindo's thousand-page commentary on the Gita (1922). Dense, philosophically rigorous; treats the text as a living manual.

The 1896 New York lectures that introduced Karma Yoga to the Western reader. Action without attachment, plainly stated.

Three years of transcribed dialogues with the 20th-century non-dual teacher (Munagala Venkataramiah, 1955). Self-inquiry made specific.

The Nag Hammadi sayings gospel buried c. 367 CE, recovered 1945. Preserves "the kingdom is within you" in its most direct form. Marvin Meyer translation recommended.

The 14th-century Dominican mystic tried for heresy. The immediate identity of the soul with the divine, in Western vocabulary. Maurice O'C. Walshe translation.

Huxley's 1945 anthology arguing the mystical traditions converge on the same operational claims. The reference for "the traditions agree."

The clearest single-volume survey of the major living traditions, written with sympathy and rigor (1958, rev. 1991).

The Sermon on the Mount read by a teacher trained in both the Hindu and Christian traditions. Pairs cleanly with the Gita.

The Benedictine monk who lived as a sannyasi in an Indian ashram (1982). Christianity and Vedanta read in tandem.

Hemispheric neuroscience reframed — why right-hemisphere primacy matters and what civilization does when it inverts.

Expanded thesis (2021). Long. Worth it.

A neuroanatomist describes losing her left hemisphere in real time. The TED talk is a primer; the book is the depth.

Practical follow-up to My Stroke of Insight — four characters, two hemispheres, daily use.

The empirical study of optimal experience. Older language; the underlying findings hold.

Foundational review. Read this before anything popular about the DMN.

Long. Important. Skim Part I, read Parts II–IV closely.

The reference on sleep and cognition (2017). The chapters on impaired judgment, risk-taking, and emotional regulation under sleep debt read as a catalog of trading failure modes.

The foundational text on the three-state autonomic hierarchy, neuroception, and vagal tone (Norton, 2011). Academic and dense; Deb Dana and Stanley Rosenberg are the accessible on-ramps.

Cellular signaling and the cell membrane as the read-out of belief (2005). Growth vs protection mode at the cellular level.

The landmark sham-surgery trial: real and placebo knee surgeries produced equivalent outcomes. The strongest single placebo result in orthopedics.

Patients told the pill is inert still improve. Foundational for the open-label placebo research line.

PET imaging showing measurable dopamine release in response to inert placebo in Parkinson's patients. Belief observable at the neurotransmitter level.

If you want to actually do the math. Pair with Griffiths for problem sets.

The cleanest argument I know for why classical reality is what it is.

Wheeler's collected reflections, including the participatory anthropic principle. The most quotable physicist on consciousness-as-constitutive.

Long, dense, opinionated. The original case for non-computational consciousness. Pairs with Shadows of the Mind.

A working physicist defending the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. Drier than Penrose, sharper on the mechanics.

The engineer who designed the first commercial microprocessor lays out a consciousness-first ontology with quantum grounding.

Body of peer-reviewed work on coherent light emission from living tissue. Niche but suggestive.

Accessible overview of zero-point field research. Pop-science framing of serious physics.

CTMU. Dense, eccentric, original. Read as one possible frame for self-referential reality.