With 'Imagining Karma', Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. The book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of 'family resemblances' and differences across great cultural divides.

With 'Imagining Karma', Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. The book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of 'family resemblances' and differences across great cultural divides.

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life. Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health.

In the past century, the Western view of Tibet has evolved from an exotic Shangri-la filled with golden idols and the promise of immortality, to a peaceful land with an enlightened society now ravaged by outside aggression. How and why did our perception change? How accurate are our modern conceptions of Tibet? Imagining Tibet is a collection of essays that reveal these Western conceptions. Providing an historical background to the West's ever-changing relationship with Tibet, Donald Lopez, Jeffrey Hopkins, Jamyang Norbu, and other noted scholars explore a variety of topics - from Western perceptions of Tibetan approaches to violence, monastic life, and life as a nation in exile, to representations of Tibet in Western literature, art, environmentalism, and the New Age movement.

“We have lived an extraordinary series of lives that has led us to our present experience. And the life we are living now will prepare us for lives yet to be lived.” There is life after death, and Barbara Martin has seen it. Now for the first time comes her inspired, firsthand account of the intricate world of spiritual rebirth. The award-winning authors of Change Your Aura, Change Your Life reveal the afterlife in a work based directly on Martin's personal explorations of the world to come and awe-inspiring clairvoyant experience with the spiritual worlds. Both a fully practical handbook to the ins and outs of the karmic cycle and a field guide to the spiritual plane and how reincarnation works. Dive deeper into the mystery of your soul's potential and how to understand your past, present, and future lives from a higher perspective. Uncover your own destiny and what you can do to unravel the mystery of your soul's journey. •Brings together the design of the world beyond and the mechanics of karma •Gives practical guidelines and tools to deal effectively with karmic situations and avoid generating adverse karma •Helps align readers with their spiritual purpose •Shows readers how to face and resolve their karmic troubles •Provides essential keys to spiritual development A true spiritual wonder in a single, fully accessible volume, Karma and Reincarnation is perfect for both those taking their first steps down a spiritual path and longtime spiritual students.

Beginning in the late '60s, hundreds of thousands of Westerners descended upon India, disciples of a cultural revolution that proclaimed that the magic and mystery missing from their lives was to be found in the East. An Indian writer who has also lived in England and the United States, Gita Mehta was ideally placed to observe the spectacle of European and American "pilgrims" interacting with their hosts. When she finally recorded her razor sharp observations in Karma Cola, the book became an instant classic for describing, in merciless detail, what happens when the traditions of an ancient and longlived society are turned into commodities and sold to those who don't understand them. In the dazzling prose that has become her trademark, Mehta skewers the entire Spectrum of seekers: The Beatles, homeless students, Hollywood rich kids in detox, British guilt-trippers, and more. In doing so, she also reveals the devastating byproducts that the Westerners brought to the villages of rural lndia -- high anxiety and drug addiction among them. Brilliantly irreverent, Karma Cola displays Gita Mehta's gift for weaving old and new, common and bizarre, history and current events into a seamless and colorful narrative that is at once witty, shocking, and poignant.

After the gifted high school athlete has a tragic accident leaving him a paraplegic he travels to India to study with a wise man in the Himalayas hoping to train his mind to control his body. He makes a profound spiritual journey that changes his life.

Discover the different types of karma and learn how karma is created through simple self-exploration exercises. Dr. Mumford promotes a direct methods for "deep frying" the karmic seeds in a person's being through the Nine-Day Karma Clearing Program.

The guiding thread of this book is the distinction McGinn draws a distinction between perception and imagination, showing what the differences are, arguing that imagination is a sui generis mental faculty. His overall claim is that imagination pervades our mental life, obeys its own distinctive principles, and merits much more attention.

While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, Gananath Obeyesekere believes an even richer knowledge is possible through a bold confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, he fearlessly pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding. Throughout his career, Obeyesekere has combined psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. In this book, he begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, he witnesses hundreds of thousands of his past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. He then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space, considering the experience of a female Christian penitent, who stares devotedly at a tiny crucifix only to see the space around it expand to mirror Christ's suffering. Obeyesekere follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and he defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. A career-culminating work, this volume translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.