Sedona Vortexes (with Yassir Lester, Chelsea Devantez and Jamie Loftus)

Do you struggle with overcoming negative patterns of thought and emotion? In Becoming Supernatural, Joe Dispenza explains how you can break free from these destructive thought-feeling patterns by using meditation and visualization to create a new reality and manifest your dreams. He calls this “becoming supernatural” because using the power of your thoughts alone to transform your physical reality will appear to the average person as beyond human.

Joe Dispenza is a chiropractor, author, and self-help speaker with research interests in epigenetics, quantum physics, and neuroscience. Dispenza draws on this eclectic knowledge base to outline a powerful plan for personal transformation.

In this guide, we’ll explain Dispenza’s premise that our experiences are determined by deeply-embedded patterns of thought and emotion that can trap us in vicious cycles of negativity. As we explain Dispenza’s methods for overcoming these patterns, we’ll discuss related scientific research and explore the relationship between his ideas and certain Hindu and Buddhist concepts.

Do you have the power to shape your own future? Popular yogi and spiritual guide, Sadhguru argues that you do—if you correctly understand the concept of karma. In Karma, Sadhguru demystifies this ancient concept, explaining that it’s not an external system of reward and punishment, as many believe; rather, it’s a way of living rooted in your actions, thoughts, and emotions.

In this guide, we’ll begin by explaining Sadhguru’s definition of karma before elaborating on the four types of karma and how they impact you. Finally, we’ll explain what you can do with karma and offer practical strategies for those who wish to release themselves from the cycle of karma altogether. Since Sadhguru discusses karma largely based on his experience as a yogi, we'll also put karma in the context of its philosophical and religious traditions and examine his assertions from a scientific perspective.

The Alchemist is a story of transformation. But rather than transforming lead into gold, Paulo Coelho teaches us, through the story of a shepherd boy who has the courage to follow his dreams, the power of transformation for our lives.

Coelho is a Brazilian novelist who has published over 30 literary works, from the 1980s to the present. In 1986 he walked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage road and had a spiritual awakening that inspired the direction of his work going forward. To date, The Alchemist, published in 1988, is Coelho’s best-known work, and it was an international bestseller.

In this guide, we’ll summarize the story of the shepherd boy and the alchemical lessons he learns, and we’ll compare some of the ideas to other philosophical and spiritual traditions and beliefs, such as Vedantic philosophy, Sufism, and the law of attraction.

Salt is one of the cheapest, most commonplace items: It sells for less than a loaf of bread, and during winter, we scatter it liberally on roads and sidewalks. However, there was once a time when salt was considered rare and valuable. In Salt, Mark Kurlansky argues that throughout much of human history, salt was a precious commodity—one that significantly shaped civilizations.

In this guide, we’ll present Kurlansky’s history of salt, describing the role it played in nourishing our ancestors, driving innovation, building empires—and even provoking rebellions. You’ll learn why salting food isn’t just about improving its flavor, why salt harvesting causes sinkholes, and how salt played an important role in several independence movements. Throughout this guide, we’ll supplement Kurlansky’s history of salt with relevant concepts in chemistry, food science, and geology. We’ll also update the book’s ideas with recent research on how we harvest and use salt today.

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari uses concepts from biology, history, and economics to tell the story of us, Homo sapiens. We start 2.5 million years ago, when Sapiens make their historical entrance, and end in the future, when the creation of an artificially created superhuman race may mark the end of the Sapiens species. Along the way, we learn how our ability to create imagined realities led to our dominance over other species. We watch as the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, imperialism, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution change our species in lasting, and not always positive, ways.

Ultimately, we’re left with one question: As we design our future, who do we want to become? Asking the right questions may be more important than finding the right answers. Read this summary to explore our history as a species—in doing so, you’ll see today’s world in an entirely new way.