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Author: Scott Carney Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 069818629X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.
Author: Scott Carney Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 069818629X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.
Author: Frank Ostaseski Publisher: Flatiron Books ISBN: 1250074665 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
The cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project and pioneer behind the compassionate care movement shares an inspiring exploration of the lessons dying has to offer about living a fulfilling life. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight, helping us to discover what matters most. Life and death are a package deal. They cannot be pulled apart and we cannot truly live unless we are aware of death. The Five Invitations is an exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves. As a renowned teacher of compassionate caregiving and the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, Frank Ostaseski has sat on the precipice of death with more than a thousand people. In The Five Invitations, he distills the lessons gleaned over the course of his career, offering an evocative and stirring guide that points to a radical path to transformation. The Five Invitations: -Don’t Wait -Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing -Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience -Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things -Cultivate Don’t Know Mind These Five Invitations show us how to wake up fully to our lives. They can be understood as best practices for anyone coping with loss or navigating any sort of transition or crisis; they guide us toward appreciating life’s preciousness. Awareness of death can be a valuable companion on the road to living well, forging a rich and meaningful life, and letting go of regret. The Five Invitations is a powerful and inspiring exploration of the essential wisdom dying has to impart to all of us.
Author: Matthew Ingram Publisher: Watkins Media Limited ISBN: 1912248794 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
What have the hippies ever done for us? Matthew Ingram explores the relationship between the summer of love and wellness, medicine, and health. The counterculture of the Sixties and the Seventies is remembered chiefly for music, fashion, art, feminism, computing, black power, cultural revolt and the New Left. But an until-now unexplored, yet no less important aspect -- both in its core identity and in terms of its ongoing significance and impact -- is its relationship with health. In this popular and illuminating cultural history of the relationship between health and the counterculture, Matthew Ingram connects the dots between the beats, yoga, meditation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, Eastern philosophy, sex, and veganism, showing how the hippies still have a lot to teach us about our wellbeing.
Author: Sallie Tisdale Publisher: Gallery Books ISBN: 1501182188 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CRITICS’ TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR “In its loving, fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live” (The New York Times). Former NEA fellow and Pushcart Prize-winning writer Sallie Tisdale offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, yet practical perspective on death and dying in Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them). Informed by her many years working as a nurse, with more than a decade in palliative care, Tisdale provides a frank, direct, and compassionate meditation on the inevitable. From the sublime (the faint sound of Mozart as you take your last breath) to the ridiculous (lessons on how to close the sagging jaw of a corpse), Tisdale leads us through the peaks and troughs of death with a calm, wise, and humorous hand. Advice for Future Corpses is more than a how-to manual or a spiritual bible: it is a graceful compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes based on the deaths Tisdale has witnessed in her work and life, as well as stories from cultures, traditions, and literature around the world. Tisdale explores all the heartbreaking, beautiful, terrifying, confusing, absurd, and even joyful experiences that accompany the work of dying, including: A Good Death: What does it mean to die “a good death”? Can there be more than one kind of good death? What can I do to make my death, or the deaths of my loved ones, good? Communication: What to say and not to say, what to ask, and when, from the dying, loved ones, doctors, and more. Last Months, Weeks, Days, and Hours: What you might expect, physically and emotionally, including the limitations, freedoms, pain, and joy of this unique time. Bodies: What happens to a body after death? What options are available to me after my death, and how do I choose—and make sure my wishes are followed? Grief: “Grief is the story that must be told over and over...Grief is the breath after the last one.” Beautifully written and compulsively readable, Advice for Future Corpses offers the resources and reassurance that we all need for planning the ends of our lives, and is essential reading for future corpses everywhere. “Sallie Tisdale’s elegantly understated new book pretends to be a user’s guide when in fact it’s a profound meditation” (David Shields, bestselling author of Reality Hunger).
Author: Andrew Holecek Publisher: Shambhala Publications ISBN: 1559394080 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own death or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we, spiritually or practically? In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek presents a wide array of resources to help the reader address this unfinished business. Part One shows how to prepare one's mind and how to help others, before, during, and after death. The author explains how spiritual preparation for death can completely transform our relationship to the end of life, dissolving our fear and helping us to feel open and receptive to letting go in the dying process. Daily meditation practices, the stages of dying and how to work with them, and after-death experiences are all detailed in ways that will be particularly helpful for those with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan approaches to conscious dying. Part Two addresses the practical issues that surround death. Experts in grief, hospice, the funeral business, and the medical and legal issues of death contribute chapters to prepare the reader for every practical concern, including advance directives, green funerals, the signs of death, warnings about the funeral industry, the stages of grief, and practical care for the dying. Part Three contains heart-advice from twenty of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist masters now teaching in the West. These brief interviews provide words of solace and wisdom to guide the dying and their caregivers during this challenging time. Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death.
Author: Charles A. O'Connor Publisher: New Acdemia+ORM ISBN: 1955835268 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 385
Book Description
A compelling analysis of how World War I spurred the rise of atheism and the subsequent effect on Western theology, philosophy, literature, and art. The catastrophic Great War left humanity in a world no longer trustworthy and reassuring but seemingly meaningless and indifferent. Instead of redressing humanity’s cosmic alienation, postwar Western culture abandoned its concern for cosmic meaning, lost its confidence in human reason, and enabled the scientific worldview of neo-Darwinian materialism to emerge and eventually dominate the Western mind. According to the proponents of that worldview, science is the only source of genuine truth, nature is the product of a blind evolutionary process, and reality at bottom is just physics and chemistry. Thus, God is dead and continued belief in a transcendently purposeful universe is intellectually indefensible and either disingenuous or delusional. By turning away from the eternal questions about the nature of reality, Western culture effectively ceded unwarranted credibility and prominence to neo-Darwinian materialism, including its recently strident New Atheism. “O’Connor revisits the 20th century’s journey from Nietzsche’s declaration of the ‘death of God’ to the rise of materialism as the dominant worldview of western intelligentsia. We live in a world that has largely expelled both mind and meaning from the citadels of serious intellectual pursuit, and O’Connor’s book is a fascinating and scholarly expedition into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of that troubling development.” —Carter Phipps, author of Evolutionaries “I found this topic to be top-rate. The book is well researched and conceived, nicely narrated and analyzed, and an original body of inquiry into a challenging, fascinating intellectual tradition.” —Ronald M. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of American History, Georgetown University
Author: Andrew Krivak Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 1466893818 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
This gorgeously written memoir, A Long Retreat, tells the story of one man's search for his religious calling-a search that led him to the Dominican Republic and Central Europe, to Moscow and the South Bronx, and finally into married life with a woman whose search for God coincided with his own. In 1990 Andrew Krivak-poet, yacht rigger, ocean lifeguard, student of the classics-entered the Society of Jesus. The heart of Jesuit training is the Long Retreat, thirty days of silence and prayer in which the Jesuit novice reflects on the Gospels and tests his desire for the priesthood. For Krivak, eight years of Jesuit formation turned out to be a long retreat in its own right, as he tested all his desires-for poetry, for travel, for independence, for love-against the pledge to do all "for the greater glory of God." And in this deeply affecting book the long retreat becomes a pattern for our own spiritual lives, enabling us to embrace our desire for solitude and perspective in our own circumstances, the way Krivak has in his new life as a husband, father, and writer. The search for God is finally the search for oneself, St. Augustine wrote. Krivak's story pushes past the awful stories of scandal in the Catholic Church to reveal why a modern, forward-looking man would yearn to be a priest. Unlike those stories, it has an happy ending-one in which we can recognize ourselves.
Author: Rachel Harris Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 9780805064513 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Offers a collection of guided meditations exploring forgiveness, gratitude, intuition, healing, patience, relaxation, and self-acceptance.
Author: Colleen Hoover Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1476715939 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of It Starts with Us, It Ends with Us, and All Your Perfects. Sometimes two people have to fall apart to realize just how much they belong together. As Layken and Will’s emotion-packed story continues, a stunning and unforeseen revelation about Will’s past leaves them questioning everything that they thought they knew about each other. With the foundation of their relationship at risk, they must decide whether they are willing to fight for a future together, or to retreat back into solitude and heartache. How far does Will have to go to prove to Layken his love for her will last forever? It will require something truly extraordinary to keep this couple together, and the decisions they make and the answers they find will change not only their lives, but the lives of everyone around them.
Author: Scott Carney
Author: Scott Carney
Author: Frank Ostaseski
Author: Matthew Ingram
Author: Sallie Tisdale
Author: Andrew Holecek
Author: Charles A. O'Connor
Author: Andrew Krivak
Author: Pierre Wazem
Author: Rachel Harris
Author: Colleen Hoover