I am always looking for books written by people who were really successful in life and also practice some kind of spirituality involving personal empowerment and one’s own mind -both conscious and subconscious. I am particularly interested in books written by people who have advanced degrees in a STEM field yet also have managed to reconcile a spiritual yearning with a love of science and empiricism.
For example, there is a neurosurgeon named James Doty who wrote a book called “Into The Magic Shop” about how he was taught meditation and creative visualization techniques in his youth which he used to get into medical school and succeed against all odds despite coming from an impoverished family with alcoholic parents who had little education. The techniques he describes in his book are not that different from anything you would find in a New Age guide to the Law of Attraction but my own biases make it seem more believable when coming from an actual neurosurgeon with his own page on the Stanford University faculty website who really did accomplish a lot of things with his life and has real proof of his achievements.
Anna Yusim is a psychiatrist who graduated from Yale and is a lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine who wrote a book called “Fulfilled” about how she teaches similar practices to her patients. Judith Orloff is another genuine board-certified psychiatrist who graduated from UCLA and writes books about being an empath who communes with higher powers and uses intuition in everyday life. Stanislav Grof is another psychiatrist -former research fellow at the Phipps Clinic in Johns Hopkins and Chief of Psychiatric Research at several other universities who wrote books about altered states of consciousness and the scientific basis of mystical experiences.
Claude Poncelet led shamanic workshops and wrote about being a shamanic practitioner who saw no conflict between his spirituality and his love of science -he also held a Ph.D in physics and taught at various universities including Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. Olympia LePoint is a former aerospace engineer who worked at Boeing and helped launch several shuttles at NASA- her book Answers Unleashed talks a lot about Christianity and Oprah-like messages about New Thought but has a lot of advice and exercises similar to other books about magick and the subconscious mind.
It makes it easier to feel confident about pursuing my own occult path and less inhibited by skepticism and blind, this-can’t-possibly-be-real type doubts when I read books about real people who succeeded in life and have advanced degrees in the hard sciences who have developed their own personal spiritual practices and insist that this was a key for their success, especially when their credentials can be easily verified on the websites of the universities from which they graduated. Are there any other authors like this? I’m always on the lookout for books by other authors who meet these criteria.