I Read 600 Psychology Books In 4 Years - Here Are My Top 2% - Jordan Thornton

[Thought Art]

@StarStruck Personally, found Rational Cognitive Behavioural psychology along with Peter Ralstons work… which is rooted in Zen to be very powerful. 
 

Positive Psychology

Rational Cognitive Behaviour

Zen/ Spirituality/ Mysticism 

 

I think it’s important to be familiar with the different lenses of psychology. Like, being familiar with Carl Jung, Adlerian Psychology, Freud, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, rational cognitive behavioural psychology, mind body science, and mysticism, etc

Once familiar you realize that 90% of it is bullshit, contextual, relative, partial, etc

Part of the reason to be familiar with the field overall is to dig the nuggets of gold and to feed your contemplation and direct, objective observation/ contemplation of your own psychology. 
 

Recently been reading Peter Ralston… very direct insights that are fundamental. I think you’d have to be a fool not to read all of Ralston’s books. 
 

Part of the design of the universe is to enjoy the mystery and the exploration of these ideas, if you enjoy doing that.

I enjoy 

Peter Ralston

David Richo

Vernon Howard

Gabor Mate

and others

I’m still rather young in my exploration  and embodiment.

Note: thanks for the video share!

Edited May 26, 2023 by Thought Art

[Jacob Morres]

Guys don't read so much 

90% of the work is in action 

[CARDOZZO]

@Jacob Morres Agree.

Thornton videos are great. You can learn a bit and then go all in to the books yourself.

 

[CARDOZZO]

@Leo Gura It’s a lot of books.

That’s the power of obsession ?

[Thought Art]

@Jacob Morres Take action and read The Success Principles by Jack Canfield

 

[Girzo]

Psychology gets insufferably boring after ten books, unless you divert into some really niche issue that interests you, like types of brain damage and corresponding changes in psyche, but it could be said that in my example it's no longer psychology, so maybe psychology is just boring, the end. 

[CARDOZZO]

@r0ckyreed I think audiobooks are the new trend.

Personally, I like to read.

[Leo Gura]

17 minutes ago, CARDOZZO said:

It’s a lot of books.

That’s the power of obsession

I have not read that many books in total. It's just not necessary. In fact it will become counter-productive. You can't actualize that much theory. If you could I would be doing it.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Girzo]

10 minutes ago, CARDOZZO said:

I think audiobooks are the new trend.

I have capped out at 85 audiobooks in a year. It starts to get crazy after crossing that border and reading/listening more. 100 plus I would need to be reading while eating a breakfast and listening to audiobooks while showering. No time to take notes, for sure.

Also now, with AI voices from Microsoft Azure or Elevenlabs every ebook can be made into high-quality audiobook. I don't really need anything better than these AIs.

Back to the topic, this Thornton guy seems very cool, also good recommendations in the video.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Girzo

[CARDOZZO]

@Leo Gura It’s so much theory you can have a burnout.

The only guy I remind that have read +1000 books is Ken Wilber.

 

[eos_nyxia]

1 minute ago, CARDOZZO said:

The only guy I remind that have read +1000 books is Ken Wilber.

Oh, I'm sure there are more of us out there.

Honestly I've probably read 10x that over the course of my lifetime.

......I don't really think of it as a defining personality feature or anything either.

[CARDOZZO]

@eos_nyxia I see a common pattern behind geniuses: They read like crazy.

 

[CARDOZZO]

@Girzo Wow, you seem to love audiobooks.

I’m not used to them but will give a shot in the near future.

[Thought Art]

I have found that lots of reading with little experience or socializing makes you dumb

[CARDOZZO]

@Thought Art Agree.

When talking about Pickup as an example, you can read thousands of books and see 100 videos but if you don’t approach, it’s just theorizing.

Edited May 26, 2023 by CARDOZZO

[Jodistrict]

The problem is that the more information you gather by endlessly reading books, the more you have to let go if you want to awaken.  It keeps you on the hamster wheel.  

[CARDOZZO]

@Jodistrict Agree.

Not-knowing is the first step, paraphrasing Ralston.

[Nilsi]

This is the epitome of whats wrong with modern "psychology."

A healthy psyche is not cultivated in the library. Thats where you go to reflect and strategize, but the bulk of the work happens in the field. 

Every psychology book worth its salt will conclude this in some way or another, which makes this even more ironic.

The same thing happens in university. They tell you all the fancy science and research on "mental health"... while taking your most vital and formative years from you, weakening your spirit and spitting you out with a piece of paper and a crushed soul.

[Reciprocality]

If during your study of a textbook you do anything besides read logical conclusions to information you already possess or read axioms you have yet to intuit for yourself then you engage the realm of pure fantasy and storytelling, and if you are involved in a university then you are expected to predicate/judge real situations later in life under these fantastical constructs, which adds a bias in the mix very few sincere humans can afford.

This is efficient on large scales, and necessary for the perpetuation of the current western political systems as a whole, but intellectually retarded (sorry the strong language if it offends native speakers) on individual basis and the only way in which the modern culture could maintain the ridiculous notion of reducing knowledge to beliefs.

Pure fantasy and storytelling is inherently a narrative for egos, and often a means for power and conquest, though in moderation: dignity and competence, to read 600 fiction books in 4 years is hardly dignified however, but instead to admit insufficiency on the part of character-analysis, to read 600 non-fiction books in 4 years is invariably a naive-realism and a horribly dim one at that, it is to re-imagine Platos forms as real yet self-distributed in the world and to imagine oneself as a partaker in the reality of these forms through pure fantasy. 

 

The human mind does not entertain information as speculative, it invariably creates meaning and opinion by means of the information, it forgets that it does not know what has begun to produce new intuitions, which is the only possible explanation why the academic institutions filled with the brightest minds can after so many hundred of years of evolution be even worse off now than ever before in how it treats the universe as a subject instead of a collection of personal predicates, and that nothing more is required for this delusion than observing one another point in the same general direction so as to confirm whether "stone" for one were "stone" for another.

Edit: I can grant that plausibility of possible experiences is not pure fantasy, it is unrigourosly logical, and rests thereby in between but must certainly be granted as a fair and intellectually integral way of learning new information as were rejected in the first paragraph.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Reciprocality

[CARDOZZO]

3 hours ago, Nilsi said:

A healthy psyche is not cultivated in the library. Thats where you go to reflect and strategize, but the bulk of the work happens in the field. 

 

Balance between theory and direct experience is key.

I think Thornton is just obsessed in a good way.