Emerson

'Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down... I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away... Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.' Thus Douglas Harding describes his first experience of headlessness, or no self. First published in 1961, this is a classic work which conveys the experience that mystics of all times have tried to put words to.

The legendary British actor Terence Stamp reads the book that he says 'changed his life'. This is an exploration of our existence and a journey towards enlightenment. In what the author calls 'the fine print' at the start of the book, David Carse wrote: 'There are many books out there that will help you to live a better life, become a better person, and evolve and grow to realise your potential as a spiritual being. This is not one of them....'

As we open up to life and love and each other, as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain, too; not only life's ecstasy, but also its agony. Healing doesn't always feel good or comfortable or even "spiritual", for we are inevitably forced to confront our shadows, fears, and deepest longings - those secret parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed "negative" and unworthy of our love.

Sometimes illumination occurs spontaneously or, as Ram Dass experienced, in a cosmic moment of the heart opening. More commonly, it happens when we remove the dust from the mirror of our spiritual heart with daily practice - to see beyond the illusion of our transient thoughts and emotions to the vast and luminous landscape of our true nature.

The Bhagavad Gita is a gem so precious in India's spiritual treasury that many regard it not as a volume of sacred verse, but as a living manifestation of the Divine. In the summer of 1974, inside a balmy Boulder, Colorado, warehouse that served as a main hall of a fledgling Naropa Institute, some say a minor miracle occured: The reawakening of the Gita's living presence, as it unfolded in a series of wisdom teachings led by Ram Dass.

It is now 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, 30,000-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recognize three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long.