Books
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Books
Reading List
| Title | Author | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tao Te Ching | Lao Tzu (trans. Sam Torode) | Highlights collected | Wu-wei, water as true goodness, stillness as clarity, non-striving, unlearning as practice; Taoist parallel to non-dual tradition |
| Dreamstate | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected (rich) | Awareness vs. appearance; Brahman/Atman/Maya; spiritual autolysis; focus + intent as co-creative engine; quotidian miracles; vision as animating principle |
| Awake | Angelo Dilullo | Highlights collected (rich, 50+) | Thought mechanism (attention-capture/redirect); resistance-fear as the problem not the object; hidden thought; belief investigation; liberation as total absorption in flow |
| Elon Musk | Ashlee Vance | Highlights collected (very sparse) | 5 fragments; dealership lock-in via maintenance; Musk as "hard to the point of mean"; Fisker/Better Place failures |
| Finite and Infinite Games | James Carse | Highlights collected (rich) | Power vs. strength; finite vs. infinite play; society vs. culture (horizon not boundary); evil as silencing; infinite speech as listening; garden vs. machine |
| Death | Joan Tollifson | Highlights collected (rich, ~60) | No separate persisting things; self-improvement vs. genuine transformation; Here-Now as only ground; self as mental construction; Cocteau's fire; self-hate as cultural disease |
| Liberation Beyond Imagination | Peter Brown | Highlights collected (rich) | Presence always here; approximations vs. actuality; "bullshit" = closing infinite openness; TV show / medium vs. content; inalienable fullness; shortest spiritual path |
| Vasistha's Yoga | Swami Venkatesananda | Highlights collected (sparse, 5 key) | Moksha = abandonment of vāsanās; enquiry as direct looking not analysis; contentment; bondage via invested reality; liberation = pure consciousness |
| Slicing Pie | Mike Moyer | Highlights collected (single fragment) | Dynamic equity model; relevant to SIGNAL advisor equity structuring |
| Corporate Avatars | Disha | Highlights collected (2 fragments) | Indian workplace fiction; communication friction and ambiguous-availability pattern relevant to SIGNAL |
| The Republic | Plato (trans. Jowett) | Highlights collected | Readwise highlights; active inquiry via "log N" annotation system; justice, philosopher's nature, virtue/wisdom |
| The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho | — | On list |
| The Body Keeps Score | Bessel van der Kolk | — | On list; highly relevant to somatic/trauma/neurodivergence |
| You Are the One | Richard Schwartz | — | On list; IFS (Internal Family Systems) — relevant to self/parts work |
| Greatest Salesman in the World | Og Mandino | — | On list |
| On Confidence | The School of Life | Highlights collected (sparse) | Readwise highlights; Bruegel's Dutch Proverbs as confidence frame; anxiety accumulation relevant to SIGNAL |
| School of Life (on relationships or on love) | The School of Life | — | On list |
| Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected | Spiritual autolysis, ego-as-false-self, "Further," Ahab archetype; directly connected to Long Island autolysis practice |
| The Book of Not Knowing | Peter Ralston | Highlights collected | Not-knowing as primary state, cultural conditioning, conceptual-self; deep resonance with SIGNAL's masking thesis |
| Gateless Gatecrashers | Ilona Ciunaite & Elena Nezhinsky | Highlights collected | No-self dialogues; direct looking; feelings as visitors; Liberation Unleashed tradition |
| Ashtavakra Gita | Swami Chinmayananda | Highlights collected | Classical Advaita; lila, vāsanās, ego-as-incompleteness; source of "in the world, not of it" bio phrase |
| What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire | Charles Bukowski | Highlights collected (sparse) | Poetry: lifedance trichotomy, slow time, words like food; Bukowski also cited in Jed Talks #1 |
| The Book of Life | Jiddu Krishnamurti | Highlights collected | Listening without projection, learning vs. accumulation, fear as non-acceptance of what is |
| Seeing That Frees | Rob Burbea | Highlights collected | Buddhist emptiness practice; ways of looking; fabrication; samādhi + analytical insight |
| The Entrepreneur Mind | Kevin Johnson | Highlights collected (very sparse) | "Faster horses" (Ford); Blue Ocean Strategy — both directly apply to SIGNAL |
| Advaitaholics Anonymous II | Shiv Sengupta | Highlights collected | Existential greed, meaning=identity, narrative as optional fiction, identity as shaped space, freedom "free in" not from, truth vs. peace, hollow institutions / you are the substance; Shiv is SIGNAL's proposed philosophical advisor |
| Jed Talks #1 | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected | Dreamstate mechanics; emotional energy; Little Bastard; agapé vs. fear; ego as "how you are not who you are" |
| The Power of Now | Eckhart Tolle | Highlights collected (sparse) | Pain-as-identity: ego invests in pain, sabotages healing; personal note "elijah" |
| System Design Interview – An Insider's Guide | Alex Xu | Highlights collected | NoSQL criteria, master/slave read-write split, caching principle, message queues, sharding; directly applicable to SIGNAL architecture |
| The Undefeated Mind | Alex Lickerman | Highlights collected (fragments) | Resilience and grief; highlights too fragmentary for full synthesis; Buddhist-informed resilience |
| Nature, Man and Woman | Alan W. Watts | Highlights collected (rich) | Taoist unity, wordless contemplation (kuan), figure-ground inseparability, identity-as-difference = felt separation; heavily highlighted |
| Advaitaholics Anonymous | Shiv Sengupta | Highlights collected (rich) | Suffering as muse, spiritual [redacted] deconstructed, presence as balance not arrival, maturity over awakening, responsibility as highest practice, thread of being; first book (AA II already in wiki) |
| The Innovator's Dilemma | Clayton M. Christensen | Highlights collected (sparse) | Incumbents captive to own financial structures; value-network captivity blocks next-wave investment; relevant to Gap Inc. case study and SIGNAL positioning |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Robert M. Pirsig | Highlights collected (sparse) | Single passage on perception maturing with age; Quality as pre-conceptual; craft as attention practice |
| Summary (ExecutiveGrowth) | ExecutiveGrowth Summaries | Highlights collected (fragments) | Two fragment highlights; source book unclear; insufficient context |
| The Glass Bead Game | Hermann Hesse | Highlights collected (rich) | Calling as guilt/obligation; symbol vs. transmission; meditation as wellspring (danger of neglect); vita activa/contemplativa; universality vs. specialism; Tegularius as gifted-loner warning; Maya |
| What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know | Brian Cohen, John Kador | Highlights collected (operational) | Term sheet proactivity; 8 angel questions; investor update structure; unit economics; bilateral due diligence; directly applicable to SIGNAL fundraising |
| Growth Hacker Marketing | Ryan Holiday | Highlights collected (sparse) | Marketing as product-native, not bolt-on; distribution and product strategy are the same; viral-loop framing for SIGNAL |
| Awareness | Anthony De Mello | Highlights collected (rich, 101 highlights) | Programming vs. reality; three types of selfishness; emotional dependence as block to love; awareness as mechanism (not technique); companion to Rediscovering Life |
| Hell Yeah or No | Derek Sivers | Highlights collected | Actions reveal real values; refuse almost everything; deliberate unlearning; identity precedes action; focus as rare competitive advantage |
| ADVAITAHOLICS ANONYMOUS Volume III | Shiv Sengupta | Highlights collected | Culture as living organism; identity as mirage; freedom in/as (not from); suffering makes wise not wisdom; inquiry starts with what |
| Freedom From the Known | Jiddu Krishnamurti | Highlights collected | No outside or inner authority; conditioning reveals itself in conflict; seeing without condemning; virtue for its own sake; complements The Book of Life |
| Depending on No-Thing | Robert Saltzman | Highlights collected | Equanimity already here; pot of gold at end of rainbow trap; liberation as open participation without expectation; no need to be anyone |
| Spiritual Enlightenment | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected (sparse, 4 key) | Enlightenment = there coming here (not visiting); abiding realization vs. states; wrong is not possible; completes McKenna trilogy in wiki |
| The Status Game | Will Storr | Highlights collected (rich) | Status as biological fundamental; three game types (dominance/virtue/success); humiliation as nuclear emotion; social media as status slot machine; groups never just want equality |
| The Lean Startup | Eric Ries | Highlights collected (sparse, 5 annotated) | Dropbox video as MVP; small batches; NPS; innovation accounting / validated learning; Build→Measure→Learn loop |
| Rediscovering Life | Anthony De Mello | Highlights collected (rich) | Attachment as false belief; archer who shoots for nothing; maturity = no blame; emotional dependence drug; true happiness uncaused; companion to Awareness |
| The Way to Love | Anthony De Mello | Highlights collected (rich) | Four false beliefs about happiness; attachment as root of all negative emotion; love = leaving free; four layers of mind-fat (beliefs/ideas/habits/attachments); awareness (not effort) dissolves opposites; companion to Awareness |
| Spiritual Warfare | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected (rich) | Cogito as ego-eating virus; "I Am" as only fact; Human Adulthood vs. Enlightenment; surrender as alignment; deal with universe; spiritual autolysis method; "Further" as talisman; Death Awareness / Memento Mori as universal practice; manifestation vs. prayer; demons as anything occupying progress; actor vs. character; suicidal discontent as fuel for revolution; fear and agapé as root emotions; Book 3 of trilogy |
| How to Live | Derek Sivers | Highlights collected (sparse) | Hope = wanting things different; skip actions/go straight for emotion; wisdom by subtraction; silence as signal; want nothing; defer decisions; problems are beliefs not situations |
| Steppenwolf | Hermann Hesse | Highlights collected | Self-hate = egoism; a thousand selves not two; shattering yields growth + loneliness; learn to laugh; music as embodied action; "ready to die but not to live"; birth/dissolution cosmology |
| Vakya Vritti | Swami Chinmayananda | Highlights collected (sparse, 2 key) | Tat Tvam Asi: witnessing consciousness = essential nature; the Self as mirror (reflects everything, keeps nothing); concentrated Advaita; same commentator as Ashtavakra Gita |
| The Sufis | Idries Shah | Highlights collected (rich) | Assimilation not study; infinite perfectibility through attunement; Rumi's arc; "It is Thee" door parable; cabbage = assumptions; Guide must have no desire for precedence; inebriation mystics |
| Demian | Hermann Hesse | Highlights collected (rich, many favorites) | Living from inner calling; mark of Cain as gift not curse; only vocation is finding oneself; "bird fighting out of the egg"; character = fate; love to find vs. lose self; fear = not at one with oneself |
| Typee | Herman Melville | Highlights collected (single) | Typee tribe's nonverbal eloquence compensates for imperfect oral language; captured as "Evidence #1" on communication spectrum |
| The Entrepreneur's Guide to Getting Your Shit Together | John Carlton | Highlights collected (sparse) | Headline formulas; "balls and chops"; copywriting fundamentals (guarantee/endorsement/proof/credibility); Google AdWords for market pulse |
| The Startup Checklist | David S. Rose | Highlights collected (fragments) | Founder Accord; 20% option pool; ownership vs. control distinction; too fragmentary for full synthesis; pre-seed structural reference |
| Tao Te Ching | Lao Tzu (trans. Sam Torode) | Highlights collected (sparse) | Wu wei; water as true goodness; non-striving; stillness as clarity; purity over perfection; limits of knowledge; Taoist stream companion to Watts |
| Dreamstate | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected (rich) | Awareness vs. appearance; Brahman/Atman/Maya; I Am as only knowable truth; spiritual autolysis writing method; focus + intent as co-creation; vision as animating principle |
| Awake | Angelo DiLullo | Highlights collected (very rich, 50+) | Ego as thought-pattern collection; resistance-fear vs. object of fear; hidden thought beneath resistance; thoughts like a pet; feeling is healing; belief investigation |
| Elon Musk | Ashlee Vance | Highlights collected (very sparse) | Extremely fragmentary; gas-car maintenance lock-in note; leadership style caution; insufficient for synthesis |
| Finite and Infinite Games | James Carse | Highlights collected (rich) | Finite vs. infinite game; power vs. strength; society vs. culture; horizon vs. boundary; narrative vs. explanation; garden vs. machine; artistry as openness to surprise |
| Death | Joan Tollifson | Highlights collected (very rich, 60+) | No separate persisting things; Here-Now as only ground; self-improvement vs. genuine transformation; self as mental construction; impermanence as freedom; meditation as non-suppression |
| Liberation Beyond Imagination | Peter Brown | Highlights collected (rich) | Experience always new; seeing = doing; TV show analogy; approximations vs. actuality; "bullshit" = closing off infinity; inalienable fullness; the medium vs. the content |
| On Liberty | John Stuart Mill | Highlights collected (sparse, 1) | Tyranny of majority; social conformity as deeper unfreedom; grounds SIGNAL's anti-normalization framing for neurodivergent workers |
| This Is It | Alan W. Watts | Highlights collected (rich, 15+) | Ego as pattern of habits; spontaneity paradox; Zen total acceptance; no separate thinker; world as formation not form; process has no external goal; wu-wei as cooperating with nature |
| The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas | Highlights collected (sparse, 2) | Father's courage speech ("first evidence!"); antifragile courage amplified by prohibition; courage as magnified by obstacles |
| Chuang Tzu | Chuang Tzu (Lui / Horwitz trans.) | Highlights collected (very rich) | Empty boat parable; stillness as mirror; Sage in-world-not-of-it; horse parable as neurodivergent metaphor; fame erodes virtue; Tao beyond description; wu-wei applied to success |
| Psycho-Cybernetics | Maxwell Maltz | Highlights collected (sparse, 1) | Self-image as governing mechanism; small adjacent successes recalibrate self-concept; directly applicable to SIGNAL's interpretive validation features |
| On Fear | Jiddu Krishnamurti | Highlights collected (very rich) | Running from fear strengthens it; comparison as root of fear; thought breeds fear and pleasure; observer IS the fear; time as fear's root; pure attention without agenda as resolution |
| Narcissus and Goldmund | Hermann Hesse | Highlights collected (rich) | Mind vs. senses as two valid paths; self-realization as highest concept; art as father-mother union; mystery as mark of greatness; unwritten law over written; dying requires having lived |
| 12 Rules for Life | Jordan B. Peterson | Highlights collected (very sparse, 1 fragment) | "Truth reduces the terrible"; truth as structural variable with civilizational impact; Peterson cited in Tawsif's early Day One arc as early intellectual scaffold |
| Influence | Robert B. Cialdini | Highlights collected (very sparse, 1) | Perceptual contrast: relativity governs perception; all six persuasion principles rest on contrast effects; applies to SIGNAL framing and pitch sequencing |
| Status Anxiety | Alain de Botton | Highlights collected (rich, 30+) | Status as proxy for love; leaking-balloon ego; reference groups and proximity-envy; James's self-esteem equation; Rousseau: wealth relative to desire; five antidotes; status anxiety = price of ambition |
| Total Freedom | Jiddu Krishnamurti | Highlights collected (rich) | I as environmental product; conflict between two falsities; seeking perpetuates problem; awakening intelligence by questioning environment; no method frees; karma as accumulated lack of understanding; devil-and-truth parable |
| Siddhartha | Hermann Hesse | Highlights collected (rich, favorites) | Nothing to learn / wisdom only lived; think-wait-fast as freedom from urgency; searching vs. finding; surrender to flow ends suffering; meditation-as-escape critique; fifth Hesse in vault alongside Steppenwolf, Glass Bead Game, Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian |
| Mathematica | David Bessis | Highlights collected (very rich) | Math as inner adventure in consciousness; mental image construction before understanding; fear of error = fear of truth; Grothendieck's probe method; writing as research process; quiet intuition voice vs. shame voice; colorblindness parable as neurodivergent metaphor; synesthesia as cognitive tool |
| Who Am I? | Swami Sarvapriyananda | Highlights collected (sparse, 1 key) | Turiya defined: Self beyond waking/dreaming/sleeping; invisible, ungaspable, essence of I-sense, nondual peace; concentrated Mandukya Upanishad; companion to Vakya Vritti and Ashtavakra Gita |
| Jed Talks #3 | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected (rich, many favorites) | Two Taos: adulthood vs. enlightenment; pattern sensing (with/against as the one decision); suffering as misalignment signal; inner black hole; spiritual DNA; co-creative dreamstate; water parables (fana in Taoist form) |
| The Finders | Jeffery Martin | Highlights collected (sparse, 2 key) | Narrative-Self quieting → Fundamental Wellbeing; anxiety/stress/depression evaporate; Narrative-Self as constructed self-referential network; empirical research on awakening across traditions |
| Anything You Want | Derek Sivers | Highlights collected (moderate) | No plan survives customer contact; thrill existing customers first; start by sharing what you have; target the 1%; scarcity = bad service; be what you want to be not have; invisible jury test; Tao of business |
| Play | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected (moderate, favorites) | With or against as the only real choice; questioning apparent reality; no objective knowledge; surrender as freedom from hope/desire/expectation; allowing vs. doing; actor without role = zero; I control nothing yet am in perfect control |
| Waking Up | Sam Harris | Highlights collected (very sparse, vocabulary/names) | Mostly annotation-style: Dzogchen, Gurdjieff, Trungpa Rinpoche, Ösel Tendzin, Osho tracked; psychedelics + human sacrifice note; secular spiritual framing |
| Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha | Daniel M. Ingram | Highlights collected (rich, many favorites) | Advanced noting: turn on hindrances as objects; three fundamental reactions (attraction/aversion/ignorance); present-method goals vs. future-result goals; suffering contains its own solution; intimacy vs. transcendence trade-off; "you can't do anything other than what happens"; cross-tradition map |
| Painting the Sidewalk With Water | Joan Tollifson | Highlights collected (very rich) | "Story of me" movie; seeking-me is also a movie; no one in control (not character/thought/awareness/unicity); impermanence so complete no-thing forms; hope as mirage chasing mirage; taking delivery as ego mechanism; emptiness is inescapable; meditation for future result = suffering again; second Tollifson book in vault (alongside Death) |
| Nothing to Grasp | Joan Tollifson | Highlights collected (very rich) | Wave trying to survive as successful wave; bare perceiving vs. mental movie; grasping as the only problem; awareness as the great dissolver; enlightenment ≠ all problems fixed; selling water by the banks of the river; third Tollifson book in vault |
| The Book of Understanding | OSHO | Highlights collected (rich) | Totality of action as source of joy (not content); witnessing as balance; brain (natural) vs. mind (socialized construct); self-consciousness as ego performance; technology + consciousness gap; three kinds of knowing (mind/heart/being) |
| A Master's Secret Whispers | Kapil Gupta | Highlights collected (single) | "Man feels inferior because he lives from the standpoint of his personality" — personality-as-standpoint as complete diagnosis; Kapil Gupta as Tawsif's primary teacher in 2023–2024 |
| Jed Talks #2 | Jed McKenna | Highlights collected (rich) | Map/analogy: use and discard; brain vision vs. eye vision; co-creative black box (total self-opacity); transformation not acquisition; suffering as misalignment signal; truth-bomb cluster (no-belief/no-self/I Am/cogito); false self as pyramid scheme; spiritual autolysis via pen/paper |
| The Pathless Path | Paul Millerd | Highlights collected (moderate, 4 favorites) | Leaving the default path; aspiration vs. ambition (Callard); arrival fallacy; security as ego-enclosure; existential openings (loss & wonderment); finding work you want to keep doing; direct parallel to Tawsif's corporate→consulting+founding transition. Twitter threads (Apr 2024) document real-time reading companionship with a Twitter friend and Paul Millerd — Tawsif's synthesis: the book connects to "Adulthood and the Integrated state that my son talked about," with the falcon/cow destiny metaphor as core takeaway.
Unresolved Blind Spots
2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/Status Anxiety.md): SIGNAL's invisible-badge problem;
2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/Status Anxiety.md): SIGNAL's invisible-badge problem;
2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/Status Anxiety.md): SIGNAL's invisible-badge problem;
2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/Status Anxiety.md): SIGNAL's invisible-badge problem;
2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/The Book of Not Knowing.md): "Any valid inquiry begins with not-knowing, or else it merely serves to confirm what is already known." Culture is total conditioning: we look out from our assumptions, making them invisible.
2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/Status Anxiety.md): SIGNAL's invisible-badge problem;
2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/Who Am I.md): invisible, untransactable, beyond thought;