Recommendations are a tricky thing. So I won’t be making them. Instead, I’ll do you a favour and take the very best bits of the very best books I read, so you don’t have to go through all the trouble I did finding them.

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The Encyclopaedia Britannica page on Religious Experience is pretty good.

The most concise summary of what to do with your life you’re likely to find
Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect – Baruch Spinoza

The most concise summary of Chinese philosophy you’re likely to find
Disputers of the Tao – A.C. Graham

How to deal with people and worldly life
Zhuangzi – Zhuangzi

How to manage one of the most difficult aspects of the spiritual path: maintaining mindfulness through the day
Toegye, via Michael Kalton

What they’re up to in China these days
The Path Toward Heaven – Mao Ni

Some emotional and drunken Taoists
Anecdotes from the “Wandering from Convention” phase, out of the Shisuo Xinyu

Directions on Spiritual Training
Abba Dorotheus of Gaza

A Sufi take on things
Dhūl-Nūn al-Miṣrī

“No Religion”, and the two kinds of language: worldly vs. ‘religious’
Buddhadasa

Absolutely stunning selections from Pessoa’s poetry
Fernando de Pessoa

Selections from “Being a Human”, by Charles Foster

Philosophic Mysticism

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein