Looking around, people seem no more complicated than wind-up toys. Take one human being molded by experiences during childhood (when everything has significance beyond appropriate measure), fill them full of fundamental assumptions and beliefs, then set them loose on the world. They will act with nearly complete predictability. And why? Because we do not know ourselves. We do not understand or comprehend that we distort what we perceive as reality. We have so little control over the most basic ways we view the world. One person sees a landscape of relationships, a reality circumscribed by familiar faces. Another person sees a world filled with pain and deprivation, where people exist to inflict pain or have pain inflicted upon them. A third person perceives other people with indifference and exists in harmony with the natural world. The same goes for what people expect out of life. Many people have low expectations for themselves and for life, and many times this seems caused by an unrealistic understanding of life. I try to take the world as it is, and find my value in it. It requires an attitude of openness and compromise because if you set out to impose your view on the world you will find nothing but disappointment.
I think you might like the writings of Chogyam Trungpa.
I think you might like the book In Search of the Miraculous.
I will check out both of these suggestions. I thank you both very much.