What are you reading right now?

[GrandmasterP]

Via a recommendation on here...

Edwin John Dingle's

My Life in Tibet

First published in 1911 my copy is an Indian edition of 2004 from that fascinating firm Pilgrims Publishing of Varanasi, they do lots of Tibetan Lore reprints.

First impressions, I intuit that Dingle is making a lot of it up to suit his readership.

Good yarns so far though.

Edited January 6, 2013 by GrandmasterP

[GrandmasterP]

Finished it. Amazing book and a fascinating chap indeed.

He retired age 40 to California having made his pile from publishing maps in China then emerged from retirement in 1927 to found Mentalphysics, made another pile from that and had Frank Lloyd Wright design a centre for him. That's now the Joshua Tree Retreat Centre where they still host mentalphysics gigs although the centre itself is eclectic and no longer wholly owned by the mentalphysics set.

The book I have is an obvious reverse engineering job designed ro lend kudos to his mentalphysics lectures and embryo movement.

Good stuff, very much of its time with lots of odious racism in the early chapters, Aryan nonsense and all sorts but the Tibet chapters are good fun

Looks like that book was the source for Lobsang Rampa's fictions according to a quick Google trawl.

The Theosophists published it for a few editions out of India too so it's likely my copy is a photo litho of one of the Theosophist versions .

Well worth reading if you like that sort of thing.

[GreytoWhite]

The Scar

[konchog uma]

The Sun Of Wisdom: Teachings on the Noble Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso

haven't cracked it yet, just checked it out of a library yesterday

 

The Way of the Bodhisattva (bodhicharyavatara) by Shantideva transl. by Padmakara Translation Group

been reading this for a while.. a beautiful poem about the activities of a person on the bodhisattva's path. Not my favorite translation of it but i was just struck by this and wanted to quote:

 

"likewise since it is a group of fingers

a hand itself is not a single entity

and so it is with fingers, made of joints

and joints themselves consist of many parts

 

these parts themselves will break down into atoms

and atoms will divide according to direction

these fragments too will also fall to nothing

thus atoms are like empty space - they have no real existance

 

all form therefore is like a dream

and who will be attached to it, who thus investigates?

the body, in this way, has no existence

what is male, therefore, and what is female"

 

i am always struck by how close the observations of the buddha and meditative mystics of that order are to the declarations of modern particle and quantum physics.

 

Clarifying the Natural State: A Principle Guidance Manual for the Practice of Mahamudra by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal transl. by Erik Pema Kunsang (I guess its out of print now because i got my copy before they were $250.. yikes! only getting around to reading it now tho)

dakpo tashi namgyal wrote the definitive book on mahamudra, called "Mahamudra: The Moonlight", an epic tome about how to sit and do nothing lol. This is a manual for practice geared less towards the philosophy and view of mahamudra and more towards how to actually sit and realize the natural state.

[GrandmasterP]

Just started on Rankin's The Suburban Book of the Dead.

[Jetsun]

I'm reading "Mind in Comfort and Ease" by the Dalai Lama, which is a book of the Dalai Lama's teachings on Dzogchen

and "A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life" by Santideva, translated by Alan Wallace, I have read previous versions but I prefer this one already as it is presented in a much more straightforward way and has both the Sanskrit and Tibetan interpretations where appropriate.

[Birch]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Sufi-Lighthouse-Illuminating-ebook/dp/B001AFBU5I/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1358120608&sr=1-1

 

Really great book!

Edited January 14, 2013 by -K-

[zerostao]

Love Medicine

louise erdrich

one of 9 required books for a class i am taking this semester

[JustARandomPanda]

Currently reading

 

1. Nagarjuna's Guide to the Bodhisattva Path

 

2. Confucius Analects

 

3. Zhu Xi's Reading of The Analects: Canon, Commentary and the Classical Tradition

 

 

 

[GrandmasterP]

Armageddon the Musical

Robert Rankin

Almost finished the canon, four books to go.

[Flolfolil]

Naked Lunch

 

Great read for anyone who wants to practice maintaining equanimity in the face of...horrifyingness lol

 

i would say caution for the faint of heart, but i think the reason it was written was to shock such people so maybe they should take the gamble and give it a read

[konchog uma]

ooohlala exciting, i was perusing my favorite bookstore the other day and found two first editions: Jolan Chang's "The Tao of Love and Sex" and "The Tao of the Loving Couple: True Liberation Through the Tao" from 1977 and '83

[Tibetan_Ice]

Ground, Path, and Fruition -Teachings 0f Tsoknyi Rinpoche on Mind And Mind Essence

by Tony Duff

[ralis]

Does most everyone here only read spiritual books? How about great novels or even some Shakespeare?

[Flolfolil]

Does most everyone here only read spiritual books? How about great novels or even some Shakespeare?

 

hey my last post is a novel with nothing to do with spirituality i just described it in spiritually relevant context

[Aetherous]

My next book is "A Tale of Two Cities"...usually don't do fiction, but some are worth reading...

[Birch]

Does most everyone here only read spiritual books? How about great novels or even some Shakespeare?

It's been a while. I look at them in the store and it's just like I don't care. Which is a good enough reason to go do. Thanks Ralis

[ralis]

My next book is "A Tale of Two Cities"...usually don't do fiction, but some are worth reading...

 

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'.

[zerostao]

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'.

just like now

[thelerner]

'The Next Decade, Where we've Been and Where We're Going' by George Friedman. Author of The Next 100 Years. He's got a Freakonomics style of analysis with a historic background. Analysis with a combination of social and economic forces, looking for trends with gratuitously few filters.

 

An interesting book to read, then reread in 10 years to see if he was right. I was reading another book of this genre a few months ago, it was interesting because it was written after 9/11, maybe a year later. Very insightful, the author was right. You kinda want to get into a time machine and throw the book at Bush and take off.

[GrandmasterP]

Armageddon the Musical

Robert Rankin

Almost finished the canon, four books to go.

Well that was certainly the oddest Rankin I've read so far, very funny though.

The sequel to it 'Armaggedon the Musical' was surreal, but lots of laugh out louds.

 

His ' Necrophenia' on the go now, so far so good.

Edited January 24, 2013 by GrandmasterP

[Taomeow]

Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation,

by Peter Levenda

[Taomeow]

How is this book? It sounds interesting.

 

I just started, and started with the taoist section at that, which is in the middle. What disappointed me at first was that it is very short, and immediately I spotted some yin-yang confusion therein (though having one of the "Western experts" as its source... ) and thought, oh no, I should have stayed with Levenda's books on the subjects where he knows more than I do. (I believe he has a few that are a must read for anyone ISO un-brainwashing and a clearer picture of our world.) But then, within that short section, I found information that I was looking for high and low for a number of years -- well, not information as such, but a crucial clue to a bit of taoist knowledge for which I had no source and no explanation, only the practical applications which convinced me it's an important bit. So now, due to this one short section, I understand one important cosmic process that I didn't understand before. It was like an unexpected present.

 

For the rest of it, I'll go back to the beginning now and report eventually on my impressions

[Birch]

Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation,

by Peter Levenda

 

I just read it! And while reading it I thought of your post about Drumvalo.

[Taomeow]

I just read it! And while reading it I thought of your post about Drumvalo.

Cool! Beat me to it, huh?