It's tough to say I'm actively reading it, since I keep stalling and restarting, but I saw you mention you're into mysticism so I thought it worth mentioning that I'm reading Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt by John Anthony West. West was one of the researchers who helped to demonstrate that there seems to have been water erosion around parts of the Sphynx enclosure. His general thesis is that the core belief systems of ancient Egypt are far more comparable and overlapping with systems like hermeticism, esotericism, pythagoreanism, numerology, etc. than mainstream egyptologists and historians are inclined to admit, and that these elements are encoded into the architecture and writing. His seething sideswipes, aimed at the mainstream, imply that their wilful ignorance helps them avoid awkward questions about the relative sophistication of the tech in early Egyptian dynasties compared to the latter ones.

So in general it falls into the bucket of 'Atlantean woo-woo', but on the other hand West never actually goes that far, rather keeping his focus on what he sees as evidence-based examples of overlooked spiritual and architectural practices. From what I've read and seen of the man he was somewhat of a genius, but he has a rambling style full of his own subjective assertions (and as mentioned, he was seething a bit) so it makes it hard to stay focused on what his point is. Hence the stalls and restarts.

Also reading Jewish History, Jewish Religion The Weight Of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak, as linked elsewhere on this board. Insightful.

I haven't actually finished a book for a long time now but I suppose the last one was Against Method by Paul Feyerabend. Absolutely critical reading for those curious about how science got so stupid recently. Essentially, social institutions which present themselves as the most rational and dispassionate paths to knowledge are, due to the very way they work, myopic and insulated against the ability or inclination to discover critical new knowledge. Feyerabend argues this pretty much irrefutably, to my view. So it's about the philosophy and epistemology embedded in 'science' as a concept. I've heard it's best as a companion piece for Kuhn's better-known The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though I haven't read the latter and feel Against Method stands fine on its own. Good for getting insight into epistemology in general, also it has parallels with Serpent in the Sky, since West's view was that he was dealing with an inflexible orthodoxy that had no ability to process new information rationally.

It's tough to say I'm actively reading it, since I keep stalling and restarting, but I saw you mention you're into mysticism so I thought it worth mentioning that I'm reading Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt by John Anthony West. West was one of the researchers who helped to demonstrate that there seems to have been water erosion around parts of the Sphynx enclosure. His general thesis is that the core belief systems of ancient Egypt are far more comparable and overlapping with systems like hermeticism, esotericism, pythagoreanism, numerology, etc. than mainstream egyptologists and historians are inclined to admit, and that these elements are encoded into the archaeology and writing. His seething sideswipes, aimed at the mainstream, imply that their wilful ignorance helps them avoid awkward questions about the relative sophistication of the tech in early Egyptian dynasties compared to the latter ones.

So in general it falls into the bucket of 'Atlantean woo-woo', but on the other hand West never actually goes that far, rather keeping his focus on what he sees as evidence-based examples of overlooked spiritual and architectural practices. From what I've read and seen of the man he was somewhat of a genius, but he has a rambling style full of his own subjective assertions (and as mentioned, he was seething a bit) so it makes it hard to stay focused on what his point is. Hence the stalls and restarts.

Also reading Jewish History, Jewish Religion The Weight Of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak, as linked elsewhere on this board. Insightful.

I haven't actually finished a book for a long time now but I suppose the last one was Against Method by Paul Feyerabend. Absolutely critical reading for those curious about how science got so stupid recently. Essentially, social institutions which present themselves as the most rational and dispassionate paths to knowledge are, due to the very way they work, myopic and insulated against the ability or inclination to discover critical new knowledge. Feyerabend argues this pretty much irrefutably, to my view. So it's about the philosophy and epistemology embedded in 'science' as a concept. I've heard it's best as a companion piece for Kuhn's better-known The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though I haven't read the latter and feel Against Method stands fine on its own. Good for getting insight into epistemology in general, also it has parallels with Serpent in the Sky, since West's view was that he was dealing with an inflexible orthodoxy that had no ability to process new information rationally.