Published
The Tibetan Book of the Dead Book Club
This isn’t your average book club. Beginning with this special two-part program and opening reception, the Tibetan Book of the Dead Book Club will draw comparisons between the ancient text and modern-day perspectives on mortality.
Break open the Tibetan Book of the Dead with Buddhist scholar Ramon Prats and professor Terry Williams to take on a goliath of a topic: teenage suicide. Committing suicide while in a state of mental distress has serious karmic implications in Buddhist practice and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States. Terry Williams, author of the book Teenage Suicide Notes, evaluates the states of mind of the young people in rural and urban contexts and across lines of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation who have committed suicide or contemplated doing harm to themselves. Can Tibetan Buddhist traditions offer a helpful perspective?
A series of seven sessions exploring this seminal guide to the afterlife from seven different vantage points: Each week Dr. Ramon Prats, curator of the Bardo exhibition and distinguished translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into Spanish, will engage with an expert from a different discipline: a neuroscientist, a dream analyst, an Egyptologist etc to explore how this text, born out of one ancient culture, can be applied to our present.
July 7Addiction and Attachments with Dr. Gabor Maté
July 14 The Near-Death Experience with Prof. Lee W. Bailey
July 21The Analysis of Dreams with psychoanalyst Morgan Stebbins
July 28The Death of Death with Rabbi Neil Gillman
August 11The Egyptian Book of the Dead with curator Edward Bleiberg
August 18Channeling the Dead with Medium Jesse Bravo
August 25How to Die with Roshi Enkyo O’Hara