A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment, by Scott Carney
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A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment, by Scott Carney
Read Online and Download A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment, by Scott Carney
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.
A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment, by Scott Carney - Amazon Sales Rank: #563062 in Books
- Brand: Carney, Scott
- Published on: 2015-03-17
- Released on: 2015-03-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.38" h x 1.13" w x 6.38" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment, by Scott Carney Review "By tipping, however briefly, over the edge of spiritual seeking into delusion, [Carney] could not offer better proof that that edge most definitely exists." - Laura Miller, Salon"A powerful investigation into the appeal--and the dangers--of enlightenment . . .It would be easy to dismiss this bizarre soap opera as a simple case of three confused New Agers whose quests got tragically out of hand. Carney, however, is a sympathetic and insightful writer about new religions and their history, and the book yields insights into religious psychology, sociology, and history that go beyond the struggles of his main characters." - Spencer Orey, Pacific Standard"Carney is brilliant at exposing the thin line between healthy religious devotion and obsessive-compulsive strain that can lead to tragedy. But when the reward is transcendence maybe seekers while always be willing to pay the price, or as Carney states, "How much is too much to risk for a chance to pierce the veil of divinity itself?" - Shelf Awareness"Carney's gold nuggets are hard-won, and they glimmer in the pan." - Matthew Remski, Yoga International"Rich reporting and addictive writing turn Death on Diamond Mountain into something of a page-turner" - Tomas Hachard, NPRPraise for Scott Carney
"Carney writes with considerable narrative verve, slamming home the misery of what he has witnessed with passion and visceral detail."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Carney knows how to tell a story."
—Carl Elliott, The Wall Street Journal“A deeply engrossing account of spiritual ambition gone awry. At once illuminating and distressing, it is a riveting plunge into the liminal territory where naïvety, sexuality, and spirituality overlap.”—Mark Epstein, Md, Author of Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and The Trauma of Everyday Life “An engaging and sobering account of a group of Westerners who are prepared to sacrifice everything in their desperate quest for transcendence. A Death on Diamond Mountain illustrates the promises, pitfalls, and deceptions of a young man’s search for Eastern wisdom that starts in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal and ends in a cave in the Arizona desert.”—Stephen Batchelor, Author of Confession of a Buddhist Atheist “The quest for supreme bliss goes spectacularly awry in A Death on Diamond Mountain, Scott Carney’s masterful account of a bizarre tragedy in the Arizona wilderness. A tenacious reporter who writes like a dream, Carney delves deep into the tangled lives of this saga’s key players, whose motives range from pure to venal. The haunting, multilayered story that he comes away with is one that will resonate with anyone who has ever pursued even the smallest measure of spiritual peace.”—Brendan I. Koerner, Author of The Skies Belong to Us “The transmission of Buddhism and spirituality from Asia to foreign lands is prone to misreading, confusion, and, in some cases, very real danger—all of which happened on American soil at Diamond Mountain. Scott Carney’s deftly narrated story is shocking. His should serve as a warning about self-styled, so-called teachers and how their misinterpretation of meditation and yoga techniques is not only unskillful but can result in tragedy.”—Matteo Pistono, Author of Fearless in Tibet and In the Shadow of the Buddha “In a masterful narrative, Scott Carney explores the dark side of our obsession with Eastern religions and philosophies. But in this search for Nirvana, some find insanity. Others find death. Carney takes you on a perverse spiritual journey that ends tragically on an Arizona mountain whose soil has long soaked up the blood of wanderers.”—Trevor Aaronson, Author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism
About the Author Scott Carney speaks Hindi and has spent six years living in India. He is a contributing editor at WIRED, and his work has also appeared in Playboy, Mother Jones, Details, Discover, Outside, Fast Company, and Foreign Policy. His first book, The Red Market, won the 2012 Clarion Award for best nonfiction book. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Author’s Note
HOW MUCH SHOULD someone strive to know their own soul?
It is a question I have struggled with for the better part of a decade after an incident that taught me that intensive meditation has the potential to unleash unexpected consequences. From 1998 to 2006, I spent about three years bumping around India, Tibet, and Nepal, first as a student on an abroad program learning about Indian and Tibetan folklore, and later in backpacker hostels on the beaches of Goa and the mountain valleys of Kathmandu. Later, I dropped out of a PhD program in anthropology to lead an abroad program for American students that advertised in glossy brochures with the catchy title “India: From Brahma to Buddha.” I was excited to help guide young people on their journeys in a foreign land.
The highlight of the program was a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the rustic town of Bodh Gaya, the spot where Buddha achieved enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree almost three millennia ago. We studied an introductory program known in Tibetan as lamrim to learn about the karmic cycle of death and rebirth and to cultivate an attitude of compassion for all living things. We were told that this could lead the way to happiness in this life—and perhaps enlightenment in our next.
I began studying Tibetan Buddhism on my first trip to Asia and it had helped me find my own answers to some of life’s big questions. Its focus on mortality made me realize that no matter what we believe happens after death, our time on this earth is precious. Buddhists reflect openly on death and teach that although all life ends in tragedy, the way we use our lives does not have to be meaningless. Every moment has value and meditation is one way to capture life’s fleetingness.
The first seven days of the retreat consisted mainly of breathing exercises and lectures on the Tibetan worldview. On the eighth day, the experience turned dark. The Swiss-German nun who was our instructor told us to imagine that we were decaying corpses and that the bodies of everyone we knew were bags of human shit. The exercise, which is meant to help the students develop psychic tools to use when they eventually face their own death, might sound extreme, but Tibetan meditation can get even more far-out: A practice known as chöd involves meditating over actual decaying corpses in a graveyard.
When the meditations were over, I had a conversation with one of my students—a whip-smart twenty-one-year-old Southern belle named Emily O’Conner (not her real name)—about her experiences.* She said it was the most profoundly moving experience of her life and that “maybe more silence would have been better.”
That night, while the other students chatted enthusiastically in the meditation room, she climbed to the roof of one of the dormitories, wrapped a khadi scarf around her face, and jumped. A student on his way to bed found her facedown on the pavement. According to the coroner’s report, she had died on impact.
I was charged with returning her remains to America. Somewhere along the way, the Indian police gave me her journal. On the eighth day of the retreat, she’d written in flowery, well-constructed cursive, “Contemplating my own death is the key.” Then, a few paragraphs later, “I’m scared that I will have this realization and go crazy.” One of the last things Emily wrote, in the same steady hand, was “I am a Bodhisattva”—an enlightened being that Tibetans aspire to become. She believed she was well along the road to transcendence.
There are many explanations for why Emily, my student, decided to take her own life. Maybe she had misunderstood the meaning of “enlightenment.” Maybe she had underlying mental instabilities that just happened to manifest themselves during intensive meditation. For all I knew, she was a Bodhisattva and continuing on her journey in another realm. However, here on earth I worried that enlightenment might not be all that it promised.
The experience changed my life, turning me toward a career as an investigative journalist. As I recounted in my book The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, my fight to preserve her body with ice and embalming fluid against the inevitability of decay made me consider the subtle line that separates the flesh of a corpse from that of a living person. Without that mysterious animating force that some people might call a soul, our bodies are little more than meat. Out of a living context, that meat is a sort of commodity in the eyes of the world. For the next five or six years, I followed that realization to what, for me, were its logical conclusions. I became a journalist and explored the growing, illegal markets for bodies and body parts.
Even as I pursued criminals across international lines, I often drifted back to the question of why my student took her life. For me, it was more difficult to understand how a technique that was supposed to make someone a more compassionate person could have such a tragic result.
The death of a second meditator, Ian Thorson, this time in the mountains of Arizona, made me suspect that there was an unspoken mystery at the heart of these transformational techniques. There was no doubt that his death and Emily’s were rare events—perhaps even within the statistical norms for suicide or murder in a given population. But there were eerie similarities.
Was there something in the teachings that drives some people to madness? Could silence itself be damaging? Or was it something about the way Westerners think about Eastern spirituality that makes us particularly susceptible to grandiose expectations? When not tempered, perhaps that search for something greater than ourselves is enough to push some people past a breaking point.
I began my investigation expecting to uncover a hidden dark side of meditation and yoga that gets swept under the rug. People who adhere to Eastern teachings might be inclined to explain away negative events as the fault of the individual and not of the techniques. To some degree, that is what I found. But I also found something stranger. Maybe instead of thinking of spiritual practices as something in and of themselves good or bad, it is more fruitful to think of them as potentially powerful.
Whatever gets unlocked in the meditation chamber, a prayer hall, or a yoga studio is certainly deeply personal, physical, psychological, and subject to the grand sweep of history. There is also something about it that is transcendent, and essential to who we are as humans.
Prologue
The Cave
CHRISTIE MCNALLY’S HAIR hung down in greasy unwashed cords as she scanned the retreat valley with her tired brown eyes. The searing yellow flashlight beams hadn’t cut across the tract for at least a week, but that didn’t mean their pursuit was over. A month earlier, devotees had bowed at her feet and laid garlands of flowers on her throne. Now guards patrolled the property line, wary of any attempt she might make to reassert control of her flock. Her white robes, long since soiled, were packed away in one of the watertight Rubbermaid tubs that they’d stashed beneath the cave they now occupied.
There were still a few of their loyal Buddhist followers out there somewhere. She’d written a message to them in a bubbly girlish scrawl. Her struggle had a place in the grand sweep of history of the landscape. They’d been expelled from their own slice of Eden and hounded so that she and her husband, Ian Thorson, had “started to feel this terrible sense of being hunted, like a wild rabbit, or perhaps like an Apache of long ago.” It was an apt metaphor. A hundred and fifty years earlier, Indians armed with rifles and stolen ammunition squatted on a ridge not far from here. They watched the valley as Union soldiers refreshed their canteens at Bear Spring and waited for the perfect moment to strike. As the soldiers quenched their thirst, the reports of Apache rifles echoed off the canyon walls. Two bullets found their mark. The privates bled out within minutes; their blue uniforms turned purple and the ground soaked up their blood as greedily as it did their spilled canteens. The lieutenant survived to record their passing in a report to his commanding officer at Fort Bowie, whose low adobe walls stood only a quarter mile away.
The murders were just another step in the tit-for-tat violence that culminated in seventy-five years of barbarism known by the victors as the Indian Wars. Vestiges of that violence remained when McNally helped raise money to buy the valley in 2008 and rechristen it Diamond Mountain. Bear Spring silted over and stopped flowing only a few months after the Buddhists arrived. Some locals thought it was a sign.
When they moved here, McNally and Thorson saw the cave as a spiritual refuge in the tradition of the great Himalayan masters. Their plan was as elegant as it was treacherous: They would occupy the cave until they achieved enlightenment. They didn’t expect that they might die trying.
Ian Thorson was thin now. Too thin, really. The knife wounds in his sides and shoulders had healed cleanly, but now a fresh bruise swept across his forehead. He’d been delirious for some time, and in his frustration he’d smashed his head with a piece of hardened plastic. It wasn’t his fault that the situation didn’t make sense anymore. She worried about him hurting himself further. Then again, he was so close to greatness.
McNally knew that when he looked up from the mattress they’d hauled up to their mountain cave, he wouldn’t see the guileless face of the girl who grew up outside of Los Angeles: the product of an affair between her father and his secretary. Nor would he identify the outline of the woman with whom he’d helped build Diamond Mountain University into a major site for Tibetan Buddhist meditation. It was not the woman with whom he’d spent countless hours perfecting the intricate postures of couples yoga, where they would use each other’s weight to push their bodies into impossible configurations. She certainly wasn’t the ex-wife of his first guru and spiritual teacher, Geshe Michael Roach, who was still jealously stewing over their controversial split. No. When he gazed out of the dimming aperture of the cave, he would see an angel made of clear white light. Christie McNally was his lover and his lama, the enlightened being who had seen the nature of emptiness directly, who had married him and taken his tortured soul from a base understanding of the world to the cusp of his own transformation.
She was also his only hope for making it out of here alive.
Even if he could stand, the cave was barely tall enough for Thorson to be on his feet without craning his six-foot frame. During daytime, a small sliver of light filtered in through a hole in the roof where the rocks formed a cleft. It was stuffed with all the things they had thought they would need to survive a long haul. There were bags of basmati rice, bolts of clothing and cold-weather gear, flashlights and jars of Italian seasoning. A small ritual instrument hung from a hook in the rock ceiling. It was tuned like a Jamaican steel drum and helped ease them into meditation. They had propane, and Costco brand baby wipes, duct tape, Tibetan incense, a filtration device, and heavy black plastic bags full of junk. The only thing they didn’t have was what they needed most: water.
Thick with poisonous snakes, mountain lions, and prickly cactus, the Chiricahua Mountains of Southeast Arizona are prone to landslides and are unforgiving to outsiders. Leaving the cave was an ordeal that left them exhausted and panting for breath. Since they’d arrived a month ago, the temperature on the mountainside had been unpredictable. One day it would be hot enough to melt the soles of their hiking boots, the next a freak snowstorm might coat the rocks, yucca, and scrub oak with a fine layer of ice. Scorching desert winds whisked away what was left of their moisture.
Despite the lashing from the cold, they thought a recent ice storm was a blessing in disguise. It might have saved them from dehydration. When he still had some strength, Thorson arranged a tarp to collect the runoff from the melt and funnel it into a water jug that was long since dry. They drank from the impromptu reservoir, and the dirty container of water sat on the cave floor, bristling with twigs.
It wasn’t long until Ian began to feel sick. His guts cramped and he began to shiver with fever. He donned three sweaters and crept beneath a blanket to beat the fever back, but it wasn’t enough. His face turned from ghost white to a deep shade of purple.
They had three things that might help stave off the sickness. First, of course, there was the power of prayer. They’d carved Tibetan words into a rock to sanctify the space and purify their spiritual path. Though meaningless in themselves, the syllables om ah hung in Tibetan invoked a powerful connection to their guru, which the holy texts said would restore their body, speech, and mind as well as balance the wheels of energy in their body, called chakras. Next to the carving was a course book devoted to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. On its cover the bare-chested goddess clutched the severed head of an adversary and wore a skirt made of dismembered limbs. Kali is a fierce protector of her devotees, but she is known to take her payment in blood. Near the ritual accouterments was one more option: a sort of escape hatch if all else failed. Sheathed in orange plastic, the Satellite PersOnal Tracker, or SPOT, locator beacon was capable of sending out two prearranged distress calls. If Christie pressed the button marked HELP, their GPS coordinates would arc toward a geostationary satellite and into the in-boxes of their friends and family. A second button on the device, marked S.O.S., would summon the sheriff’s department.
Christie stroked Ian’s hair and it occurred to her that the illness could also be a lesson. Would he come back from the threshold of life and death with profound insight? Or would the journey kill him? Perhaps there was more to his illness than met the eye. It was entirely possible that he had been cursed by powerful black magic. She considered the tools arrayed in front of her. A protection mantra. The goddess Kali. An emergency beacon.
It was a test of faith informed by the fact that almost a decade earlier her teacher Michael Roach took her as a sexual consort and later as his wife. Roach was not the first white man to travel to India and come back claiming to be enlightened, but he looked the part better than any of his predecessors. Roach bestowed Christie with the Tibetan title of lama and ever since, hundreds of devotees bent at her feet. For them it meant she was a living goddess—a sort of messiah for a new breed of Buddhism that had only just gained a foothold in America.
Now that they were on the run, Lama Christie McNally had to decide whether she would try to heal Thorson with her godlike powers or leave the responsibility to an outsider who would never understand that the path to enlightenment is not always straightforward. Or safe.
As Lama Christie’s finger hovered over the button on the emergency beacon, the stakes were higher than just life or death. Their very souls were on the line.
Part 1
The First Bodhisattva
A Buddhist Parable
TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO on the sun-drenched plains of India, a man who would eventually be known as the Buddha had a choice to make. He was thirty-five years old and had spent the last six years meeting with the wisest sages in the land, searching in vain for ultimate truth. Now he sat with his legs crossed, underneath a giant fig tree, with one hand resting in his lap. With the tip of his finger he made a slight impression in the dusty soil. After a lifetime of meditation, starvation, and pilgrimages to venerated spiritual masters, he had achieved something that no one else before him ever had.
This was the moment of enlightenment.
A second before this, he had no answers to life’s big questions. Why do good people die? Why is the world full of sickness and disease? Why do people suffer? But his realization put the universe in order.
Now he understood that every action that had ever taken place was intimately linked in a never-ending chain of causes and effects. Every living thing had countless lives. Good deeds in past lives brought good fortune in this life. Bad ones could bring disaster. The chain of action and reaction could take many lifetimes to play out; such was the law of karma. It determined everything in the past and the future.
Hindus already knew something of karma. But for them it was different: It was a tool used to justify a hierarchical caste system. Good actions in this life might mean a better rebirth. Ultimately, powerful people used their high position in life as a justification for their closeness to God. The people below them deserved their lot. What Buddha saw was more profound. A person could purify his karma and one day even escape from its clutches altogether. His movement rejected the caste system of the people who came before him and charted a new course.
This knowledge was power. And now the Buddha had options.
There was a way out of karma’s straitjacket. Now that he had attained the ultimate knowledge of cause and effect he could leave the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth and enter Nirvana. If he did that, he would cease to exist; his body would simply melt away. In the ultimate truth, the world didn’t really exist. For the people he left behind, it would seem as if he vanished from this world forever and entered a paradise where all of his actions were his own. He would be one with the universe. It was a pleasant thought and a just reward for a lifetime of struggle and concentration.
But there was another option. He could choose to live in the world and guide other souls to enlightenment. Staying would mean never stepping through the door to Nirvana until every other living being was enlightened. It could take all eternity.
No one knows how long it took him to make his decision. But Tibetans believe that he stayed. His realization made him a buddha—an enlightened being—but his choice also made him the first Bodhisattva: a word coined to describe the people committed to staying. Since then, there have been other Bodhisattvas and buddhas. Other people have attained similar realizations and instead stepped through Nirvana’s threshold. All of them owe something to the Buddha’s choice.
When the Buddha finished his meditation he uncrossed his legs and started walking to the place where he would give his first speech to a crowd of curious ascetics. The place he left became known as Bodh Gaya, which in the Hindi of today means “where Buddha went.” He went on to lecture on the law of karma. And his lessons would found one of the world’s most enduring religions.
1.
Enlightening America
When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the world, and the Dharma will come to the land of the Red Man.
—A common misquote of Padmasambhava, eighth century
MOST OF WHAT we know about the Buddha’s life was first passed down as part of an oral tradition from teacher to student. It wasn’t until four hundred years after his death, in the first century BC, that monks in Sri Lanka first wrote down the collected knowledge of the Buddha on palm leaves. Inked in the now almost forgotten language of Pali, the early canon is esoteric but is the best window we have into the life and times of the Buddha. Written down by monks with their own agenda for a unified Buddhism, the stories tell something about the Buddha’s life, but they also tell us something about the storytellers. Later, as the texts went on to inform the political and cultural landscape of Asia, Buddhism carried the accumulated weight of history along with it. Each age had its own Buddhism, every ruler, scholar, emperor, and scribe adding their own perspective and twist on the ancient knowledge. The Buddhism of today is no different.
The very first reports of Tibet by Westerners mused that the monks’ crimson robes were a relic from a lost sect of Catholicism. In 1507, Amerigo Vespucci, the man who discovered the coast of North America and for whom two continents are named, drew up a world map that plunked a Christian cross on the Tibetan Plateau. It was an early reference to the mythical Himalayan kingdom of Shangri-la, which Vespucci surmised was the home of Prester John, a Christian king purportedly descended from one of the three Magi who blessed Jesus. When Buddhism made it to America in the nineteenth century, it came to us through the lens of British and Russian colonialists who sent back curious texts, and images of deities floating on lotus petals. At the time, America was still reeling from the fallout of the cataclysmic Civil War. The unprecedented carnage shook many people’s faith in God, and challenged their Protestant roots. New religious movements swept the land. Shakers and Mormons founded centers in the Northeast and West. Evangelicals predicted the coming of the apocalypse. And occult mystic societies rose in popularity. Buddhism and Hinduism added color to the mix of new religious ideas. Far from its point of origin, early American Buddhists filled in the gaps of their knowledge of the Eastern faith with their own Christian tenets. Like many faiths that cross over to new cultures, the result was something of a hodgepodge.
Now, several hundred years into the relationship, yoga mats, meditation cushions, and prayer beads have become the twenty-first-century hallmark of American spirituality. We play loosely with concepts and think of Nirvana as a synonym for Heaven, and Bodhisattvas as an analogue to angels. In doing so, we conflate two very different histories and religious traditions. The confusion leads to a dangerous conclusion: Buddhism teaches that it is possible to achieve Nirvana in one lifetime, and for some people with a Christian background who rush into Buddhism, it can seem like Heaven could be a place on earth. And no area of Asia is as romanticized as the once forbidden kingdom of Tibet.
Almost irrespective of the actual spiritual practices of the Himalayan Plateau, the West’s faddish envy of all things Tibetan has spawned movies, spiritual studios, charity rock concerts, and bestselling books that range from dense philosophical texts to self-help guides and methods to Buddha-fy your business. It seems as if almost everyone has tried out a spiritual practice that originated in Asia, either through a yoga class, quiet meditation, or just repeating the syllable om to calm down. Today there are at least eighteen hundred Tibetan Buddhist centers around the United States and Europe. A further eighteen million people in North America practice some sort of yoga in gyms, private studios, and public spaces.
For many, the East is an antidote for Western anomie: a holistic counterpoint to our chaotic lives. We don stretchy pants, roll up yoga mats, and hit the meditation cushion on the same day that we argue about our cell phone bill with someone in an Indian call center. Still, we look to Asian wisdom in order to center ourselves, decompress, and block off time to ruminate on life’s bigger questions. We trust that the teachings are authentic, and are the key to some hidden truth.
What we forget is that the techniques we practice today in superheated yoga studios and air-conditioned halls originated in foreign feudal times that would be unrecognizable to our modern eyes. They come from eras when princely states went to war over small points of honor, priests dictated social policy, and it was considered perfectly ordinary to send away an eight-year-old child to live out his life in a monastery. For people brought up in a mostly Christian environment it is deceptively easy to scoff at the preponderance of molestation scandals and liturgical hypocrisy in the Church, but far more difficult to see the same flaws in a tradition that they are less intimately familiar with. Many people are only vaguely aware of the long history of preposterous god men and false gurus whose philosophies have been laughed out of India, only to find success in America and Europe.
Even so, the East seems to offer something that is absent in the West: methods that join physical practice with spiritual searching. Yoga, meditation, chakra breathing, and chanting are powerful physical and mental exercises that can have a profound effect on health and well-being. On their own they are neither good nor bad, but like a drug that could save someone’s life when administered by a doctor, they also have the potential for great harm. The traditions that are taught at home come from all across Asia and span multiple millennia, and yet we absorb them as if they were a unified whole, mixing together elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and any other seemingly distant “Eastern” faith. The way we reassemble the spiritual practices of the East says a lot more about contemporary America than it does about their point of origin.
No concept out of Asia has as much power to capture our attention as “enlightenment.” The English word derives from a time of great intellectual flourishing when Europeans challenged superstition and faith with rationality and scientific thought. It was made possible after the Greek and Roman scholars of the Renaissance rediscovered ancient texts in the archives of Byzantium. The Renaissance reinvented Europe, the Enlightenment refined it. Scholars in Europe translated the forgotten works and rediscovered knowledge that was thought lost. These textual explorers uncovered an abundance of literature as well as forgotten technologies like cement and optics. A technological and social revolution followed. The word for “enlightenment” in Sanskrit—bodhi—suggests an intrinsic knowledge of the world. Native to both Hinduism and Buddhism, its focus is on radically changing the self, not an aspiration to transform a whole continent. Yet the word we use in English brings with it the possibility of a renaissance.
In Tibet and India, bodhi is an ideal to strive toward but likely never achieve. It is a sort of perfection of the soul, mind, and body, where every action is precise and meaningful. For Tibetans, the focus is on the process. For whatever reason, Americans search for inner peace like they are competing in a sporting event. Here, enlightenment is the goal, and the reward is Heaven, or becoming a Bodhisattva.
For those unfamiliar with the term, in Tibetan Buddhism, Bodhisattva indicates an enlightened being who has understood the true meaning of existence so thoroughly that they have the ability to leave the ethereal plane and enter Nirvana. In doing so, the being acquires almost infinite powers over the material world. The Bodhisattva, however, chooses to stay in the world and help all sentient beings achieve the same realizations.*
It’s no surprise that expectations Westerners have when undertaking meditation are often too grand. From a young age we in the West are steeped in tales of superheroes and Jedi who achieve great feats because of both their innate specialness and intensive study. We hear stories of levitating yogis, the power of chakras, tai chi and badass Shaolin monks, and quietly think to ourselves that maybe anything is possible.
Some of these stories have at least some basis in fact. The Dalai Lama’s own creation story was practically made for cinema. In 1933, the thirteenth Dalai Lama died in Lhasa and the reins of power fell to a regent, whose most important task was to comb the country for the recently deceased leader’s reincarnation. After a prophetic dream, the search team found a young boy named Tenzin Gyatso in the remote Amdo province of Tibet. The monks presented the child with a tray of the previous Dalai Lama’s possessions among a sea of red herrings. To the delight of the search party, the boy picked out his predecessor’s glasses, yelling out, “It’s mine. It’s mine.”
He was quickly brought to Lhasa, raised as a Buddhist monk, and anointed the spiritual ruler of a country. The story was vividly brought to life in the Academy Award–nominated Kundun and with Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet, but also frequently in pulp fare.
For almost a hundred years it’s been impossible to grow up without coming across near-constant reiterations in the mass media of Tibet’s spiritual properties. Hollywood has capitalized on all things Tibetan since Frank Capra’s 1937 adaptation of the novel Lost Horizon. In the film that came out of the book, a few adventurous World War I aviators crash near the mystical valley of Shangri-la. The inhabitants never age and protect the lost secrets of an ancient civilization. In other literature, merely showing up in Lhasa or an inaccessible monastery can inexplicably confer great powers. After Professor Moriarty killed off Sherlock Holmes in a climactic battle, Arthur Conan Doyle brought him back to life in his next book by explaining that Holmes had merely been traveling in Lhasa and Tibet for a few years. The trip enhanced his already formidable powers of deduction. In 1986, after the success of Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy played a vital role in protecting an enlightened child against demonic occult forces. His travels in The Golden Child took him from Los Angeles to Kathmandu. When Christopher Nolan rebooted the Batman franchise in the first film, Batman Begins, he sends Bruce Wayne on a trip across a Tibetan ice field. The young superhero found a magical blue lotus on his way to a mountaintop monastery where monks trained him in martial arts.
George Lucas took great pains to see that Tibet would even influence our perception of interstellar space—the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi speak in high-speed Tibetan, and Yoda’s philosophy and mannerisms are modeled on the Dalai Lama’s. Luke Skywalker is perhaps the most archetypical hero who ever came out of Hollywood. Raised on a farm, the future Jedi had no idea that he was one of the sole conduits of the Force left in the universe. Through training with various robed recluses, he becomes the master of his own destiny and liberator of billions of souls. Two decades later, Keanu Reeves reinhabited the Chosen One spot in the blockbuster film The Matrix. Inspired in part by Tibetan Buddhist worldview, his character, Neo, learns that the universe he perceives is a computer-generated illusion; the actual world is a postapocalyptic nightmare. With a bit of concentration he learns that he can alter the physical laws of the environment around him, learn kung fu, and, yes, save the world. The role made Hollywood sense; six years earlier Reeves actually starred as the enlightened one in the film Little Buddha.
Eastern faiths seem to offer two diametrically opposed promises. The first is that it is possible to dissolve our overheated individualism through daily meditative practices, mindfulness, and contemplation. The second promise is that cultivating selflessness confers new abilities that, if anything, only add to an individual’s mystique.
This is because, unlike many Western faiths, philosophy in the East is often interlinked with rigorous physical and mental practices that are carefully honed to change the self. While different traditions emphasize one aspect or practice over another, yoga, meditation, Qigong, martial arts, and any number of other activities have gained traction around the world not only because they are exotic, but because they work. Practitioners are not whittling away their time on aimless spiritual quests, they really do transform. Countless peer-reviewed studies show that regular meditation has a wide variety of positive effects. People whose brains are addled by attention deficit disorder find focus, the disaffected find empathy, and most people who practice yoga for even a short time report increased energy levels and an overall sense of well-being. Rigorous scientific studies that attribute improvements in cardiovascular health to meditation date back to the 1980s. Even the U.S. government has come on board when it teaches yoga and meditation in prisons to decrease inmate violence. Many insurance plans will dole out payments for acupuncturists and Reiki healers.
The trend is so pervasive that now it’s common to find mindfulness in corporate boardrooms. Executives in Silicon Valley extol the virtues of focused meditation to help employees resolve disputes and become better managers. Mindful workers use their time better and report overall higher feelings of job satisfaction. The techniques help keep people in the moment and eliminate mental clutter. Physical practices build strength and balance—all good things.
The promise of enlightenment is a great leap forward from even these benefits. It’s not about incremental improvements. Enlightenment happens in an instant, with a clear line demarcating the person before from the one after. As if transformed by the grace of God, suddenly the enlightenee realizes the true nature of reality, and the knowledge plants the person forever on a new plane of understanding. The mundane world is an illusion. After the first realization, various traditions teach that the enlightenment seeker progresses through a series of different eye-opening experiences until they reach the ultimate final state—call it Buddhahood, or Nirvana, Moksha, or some other type of transcendence. Whatever it is, enlightenment is also an experience. It is a sort of knowledge that is deeply personal and resists any sort of outside verification. That such a transformation is even possible requires a leap of faith. It resists scientific scrutiny and undercuts the very notion of a material world.
If we assume that it exists, then the actual state of enlightenment poses an interesting problem. What are people supposed to do with the rest of their time on earth once they’ve gained the ultimate knowledge of the nature of reality? Revered gurus who teach that status and power are meaningless in the ultimate reality nonetheless still have to muck about in the mundane world. They gather followers, build institutions, and dispense knowledge from lofty thrones. Is it hypocrisy when enlightenment simply reproduces familiar hierarchies? How does a Buddha remain in the world but not of it?
Still, we strive for a spiritual essence because we often feel that we are missing out on a vital part of ourselves. A person can live within the expected parameters of society, get married, raise a child or two, work forty hours a week plus overtime, and fully fund a retirement plan, only to discover at the end of their days that they failed to do anything meaningful with the years they had. There is no silver bullet for happiness, and living as a cog in a great machine of industrial global capitalism hasn’t kept humanity’s insomniacs from looking up at the stars and wondering what it all was for.
Humankind has probably always wondered about things greater than itself. “Who am I?” and “What is the meaning of life?” are perhaps the most fundamental questions we can ask. Enlightenment promises answers through mystical experiences and self-examination. Spiritual manuals penned and developed across dozens of different traditions offer specific practices that aim to form the body and mind into vessels for transformation. Training regimens take on many forms and can focus on extreme asceticism, or physical rigors that seem absurd. Or even dangerous.
It is as if the extremes are meant to reform a person from the ground up. Life, it turns out, is a preexisting condition. No matter how rigorous the technique, every person starts the spiritual searching from his or her own point in space and time. If every journey is different, what does that mean about the nature of transcendence?
Westerners, and perhaps Americans especially, have a conflicted relationship with danger. On one hand our heroes are entrepreneurs and adventurers who risk everything. We relish stories of the businessman who spends his last hundred dollars on a suit so he can pitch a great idea that secures a wealthy investor. We admire the mountaineer who puts it all on the line for a chance to summit an unclimbable peak. But when risk takers fail in their pursuits, we cluck our tongues and nod knowingly about their hubris. Failure, and perhaps even death, may be the wrong yardstick to evaluate a person’s journey.
Ian Thorson was well known only briefly in Buddhist circles, and more so for the unusual circumstances around his death than for any of the actions in his life. Looked at from one perspective, his plunge toward enlightenment is an obvious case of madness. Yet lurking in the shadows of the cave where he died are clues about the idiosyncratic reasons Americans have adapted Eastern mysticism to their own ends. More important, Thorson’s own self-sacrifice begs the question, How much is too much to risk for a chance to pierce the veil of divinity itself?
2.
The Box
I am the clown.
I sit poised opposite my interviewer. We both wear suits.
He glances from the hair in my eyes to my resume.
I smile hopefully, I just brushed my teeth.
I ask, “do you have any openings for rock stars?”
—Ian Thorson, “The Clown”
KAY THORSON IS a spry and agile woman in her sixties, and her hair burns a fierce red. She still lives in a two-floor apartment on an outcast spit of land between Manhattan and Queens known as Roosevelt Island. The only pedestrian connections from here to the rest of the city are a single subway stop on the F train and a gondola that floats above the East River to Midtown. Like all islands, Roosevelt Island is a culture unto itself—in this case, one that has the odd air of a preplanned ski town that sprang up too quickly. Before the New York State Development Corporation took it over to create a bedroom community, it was a peripheral dumping ground for municipal projects. Known as Welfare Island until 1971, it has variously been the home of inmates, mental patients, a smallpox hospital, a single church, and a stately Gothic lighthouse. A lone diner called Trellis still serves some of the cheapest burgers and sweet potato fries in the city, and is the only restaurant of note. Islanders claim they have the best views in New York as just about everyone who lives here can angle for a vista of the river. This is where Ian grew up: in the city, but not of it.
Kay Thorson sits at her kitchen table flanked by three-foot lilies in glass vases. Behind her are shelves full of the sorts of abstract modernist sculpture that took hold of the art world in the 1980s. They are clay, marble, wood, and metal. Most are glazed white with pale colors filling in flattened spaces and highlighting ridged edges. They resist interpretation but give off a sense of uneasiness, like they want to change into something else. Of late, she has been going through a creative period and makes her way to a workshop fifty-five miles up the Hudson River. She spends what little money she has on art supplies, rare wood, and marble. If circumstances had been different, Ian might have been an artist too.
It’s been almost a year since Ian died, and Kay has never stopped searching for answers. Though he moved out more than a decade earlier, papers and videotapes of his poke out conspicuously from the shelves, evidence of her search for clues that explain his drive toward spiritual matters.
Growing up, the Thorsons didn’t talk much about religion. But if you press her, Kay will mumble something about being Episcopalian and change the subject. It’s not quite the truth, of course. The Thorsons learned long ago that not everyone was comfortable around Jews. In 1938, Ruth Karplus was on vacation in Prague when the Nazis spread south and east on their murderous quest for territory and racial purity. Her cousins would die in Treblinka while Ruth came to New York aboard an American transport ship. Ruth, like her daughter, had flaming red hair and the sort of deep brown eyes that men find irresistible. Soon she was married to a prominent surgeon. She brought a love of skiing back with her from Austria and she went on to have a successful career as a designer of winter fashions—importing some of the first stretchable material for winter sports. The family cherished athletics, and Kay grew up not only skiing but also surfing off the coasts of Long Island and, later, California. So while their Jewish history remained locked in their past, they found connection to the world around them through nature.
“For us, water was important,” says Kay as she grabs a heavy stack of photos and flashes through faded family vacations. In them Ian smiles broadly, with curly black hair and a stocky, muscular physique. In one of them he’s a teenager standing next to his kid sister, Alexandra. They’re both in wet suits, holding surfboards.
Both siblings attended the storied Trinity School, which was founded in 1709, making it the oldest educational institution of its kind in the city. John McEnroe, Humphrey Bogart, Oliver Stone, and Truman Capote all spent time at Trinity, as do endless legions of kids born to Wall Street plutocrats. Already blessed with wealth and social capital, students from here tend to go on to Ivy League colleges and after that land high-paying jobs that might allow them to send their own children to Trinity, which as of 2013 charged an annual tuition of $39,000.
Ian’s teacher Bill Zavatsky, a poet, journalist, and eventual winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, wanted to instill a writing instinct in his pupils, and graded his classes by the sheer volume of work they could produce—merely counting the pages.
It was a habit that stuck. From then onward, Ian always had a pen in his hand and filled countless volumes with his impressions of the world. He wrote on napkins and notebooks, in letters to his family, friends, and numerous girlfriends. His notes move between English, Spanish, French, and German, over all of which he had some command. Sometimes, when he edged into sensitive material, he suddenly switched languages as if to hamper his biographer. There are school papers and countless poems, videotapes, and 3.5-inch floppy disks. He painstakingly kept receipts and documented the minutiae of his life with the intent to one day write a book. Before he left Roosevelt Island for the last time, he gave the box of his writings and memorabilia to his mother and instructed her to throw it all away. His cumulative work meant nothing to him anymore, but it is telling that he didn’t dump the archive himself. His handwriting deteriorates from neat youthful high school scrawls into what became almost incomprehensible scribbles in his later years. It is as if, for him, the goal of writing became less about communication and more about inner struggle.
The box sat on a shelf amid similar boxes of papers, bills, and art projects until after Ian climbed the gravel slope of an Arizona mountain and installed himself in a cave. Months later, Kay took it down from its perch and laid pieces of it out on her office desk. Wielding a pair of scissors, she began to cut up the documents she didn’t like—excising names and e-mail addresses, painful memories and unwanted people. She spent hours, or maybe days, on the effort, but there always was more paper than she could ever get through. The resulting archive is incomplete. Some papers are comically mangled with L-shaped sections that remove the name of her former husband, or a particularly worrisome ex-girlfriend, whose names and details miraculously survive on the next document. Kay wiped her hard drive of ten years of e-mails from her son, and seemed particularly attentive to anything that mentioned drugs or sex. Especially in the early years of the archive, he wrote about both subjects copiously. It wasn’t until months after I met her that Kay could see the box for what it was: a window into the transformation of Ian’s psychology as he moved from an ambitious young man into someone increasingly consumed by spiritual wanderlust. Only then was I invited into her life to search through the records. Over the next year and a half, Kay would stay in near-constant contact.
Kay pushes the box across the table toward me and offers to go through its contents together. “You need me,” she says. “No one else can read his writing.” It was not exactly true. On his good days whole pages are effortless, but more often than not, interpreting the scrawls feels like reading a foreign language. In a way, going through Ian’s materials is a way for Kay to understand her son’s decisions and to order the chaos he left behind.
One document that stands out above all others to explain Ian’s draw toward meditation is one of the earliest in the box, from when he was only eleven years old. A sort of diploma, it is a numbered certificate stating that Ian had completed four courses of Silva Mind Control, a meditation technique that grew out of the 1940s blending of psychological methods and hypnosis, and eventually blended into the New Age spirituality of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. It was later renamed the Silva Life System and the Silva Method, perhaps to sound a little less ominous. Designed to give children and adults control over their bodies and minds, the Silva Method combines visualizations with hand gestures and mental exercises. Silva advises his students to meditate every day. The routines train the mind to overcome its inherent weaknesses and to reach particular goals by subverting the link between cause and effect. According to the Silva worldview, problems in the world don’t stem from external factors but from individual perception.
The Silva Method teaches that if you can visualize your problems in a different way, then you can defeat them. To lose weight, you imagine a thinner version of yourself and project that image onto a mental screen. To cure a headache, you set an intention to make it go away and then count backward, all the while imagining the pain leaving your body. For children scared of monsters under the bed, the Silva Method posits that demons can be managed by visualizing the giant monsters shrinking down until they fit into the palm of a child’s hand. Who’s going to be scared of a pint-size boogeyman? Another lesson, dubbed the three-finger method, teaches a student to press the middle finger, thumb, and index finger together while setting an intention and visualizing a specific goal.
The ritual gesture serves to create a bridge between the mind and body. In India symbolic hand gestures like this are called mudras. At later levels, the Silva Method proposes that eventually the accentuated power of the mind can lead to astral travel and remote healing of the sick. José Silva, who founded the method, says that these are the very same techniques that allowed Jesus to walk on water and lay on hands. Like that of many self-made holy men, Silva’s background is a testament to both his entrepreneurial spirit and his openness to the unknown. Born in Laredo, Texas, in 1914 to Mexican immigrants, he had no formal education, but worked away his youth as an apprentice in an electrical repair shop. A tinkerer, he was fond of inventing new devices. Eventually his business grew and he widened his interests in experimentation to religion, psychology, and parapsychology, creating his method as he went along. In time he credited his own story of pluck and success to his mind’s own powerful capabilities. With dedication he taught that anyone with the right mind-set can develop superpowers and succeed in business, love, and life.
The Silva course materials didn’t make it through Ian’s mother’s document purge, but a corresponding coloring book that Ian’s sister, Alexandra, filled out while taking the same course several years later survived. Her yellow, pink, and red Crayola drawings carefully fill in the pale cartoon characters with halos of energy around their heads in sudden bursts of waxy color.
Where to Download A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment, by Scott Carney
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful. Fascinating and well balanced By AudreyLM I remember reading the 2008 NYTimes story about Christy McNally and Michael Roach emerging from their three years of retreat and living 15 feet apart at all times. I remember thinking "this won't end well." I followed the tragedy at Diamond Mountain and was eager to get this book (had it on my wish list on Audible till it was available last week). Scott Carney has done a fine job of telling three stories (Christy McNally, Michael Roach and Ian Thorson) with balance and compassion when it would have been easy to take a sensationalistic approach. Not only that but the history of Tibetan Buddhism and its emergence in the west and also the history of the Diamond Mountain terrain and legacy were well researched and well written. It would have been great to get more perspective from Christy McNally but she seems to have vanished. Hopefully she is healing and getting the help she needs.Excellent read (and excellent listen).
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful. superb book By MV Scott Carney may be the only person who could have taken on the true breadth of this story. In 2006 a student in a meditation group Carney was supervising in Bodh Gaya jumped from the building's roof to her death. The search for why this happened seems to have led Carney to write what has to be the definitive book about what goes awry with Eastern religious practice in the West. It's all here... and it's riveting.So many of us were shocked to discover that the Tibetan Buddhism being taught online and in yoga studios in New York and around the world a few years ago wasn't authentic and was evolving from a cult of personalty into a true cult. It didn't start out that way - what happened?This book is beautifully written, thoughtfully layered, never boring, there's fantastic depth to Scott Carney's research. The story unfurls so smoothly, Carney weaves together some surprising Buddhist history and the introduction of Eastern mysticism into the West with a compassionate, fair and thoroughly analytical telling of the tragic unravelling of this group.Anyone who's ever thought about quiting a job to meditate full time, going to India to be in retreat, or who's just wondered what happens when you meditate too much and make up you own rules, needs to read this. It turns out there's a reason the old ways exist, we race to the highest levels of practice at our peril.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful. Spiritual materialism or material spirituality? By Spinozist I am a 57 year old guy and having grown up in the 70s, 80s and 90s, I have been exposed to plenty of spiritual truth seeking paths. Perhaps "God is Dead",but Nietzsche never told us that the search for him never ceases.I couldn't put Scott Carney's book down, having discovered the subject through of those shows on TV. I googled the subject and saw the author post a clip alone in the cave where the death occurred. He seemed intelligent and subtle in his thinking. The book confirmed this.First he knows how to write a page turner. Second the topic is really, well, the only topic. What might spiritual enlightenment look like? Is it even possible in this world? Are they all charlatans, or precursors of what is not yet understood? Can God or whatever one chooses to call the ultimate reality, be reached in any way while on earth?I am a very rational sceptic. My hero is Spinoza. And yet the author strikes the right balance even for me between skewering the business of spirituality and the very real desire of people like you and me to develop a closeness to something spiritual.It seems Michael Roach may have made some less than optimal decisions, especially in the speed in which Lama Christie and Ian Thorson were asked to leave the retreat. But has he been a genuine seeker of spiritual truth? It seems that he has radically reinterpreted Tibetan Buddhism for modern Americans and other materialistic cultures, like the Chinese. He seems to have jettisoned his claim to support from the Dalai Lama, but from the viewpoint of history, perhaps he has his place. The book itself is more negative in its judgement of Michael Roach and the claims of spiritual witchcraft at the end of the book were laughable and made me actually develop sympathy for Michael Roach. The danger of this book is of course that it needs to sensationalize the danger of the teachings in order to create a more exciting book. Personally I find American obsession with Tantra and the speed of Enlightenment sort of deluded, ridiculous and materialistic. But it sure is probably appealing to many.The book doesn't just tell the story of the protagonists, but also gives a background to all the spiritual truth seeking movements in the US. Some of this background acts like chapter long footnotes that slow the pace down but deepen the meaning of these events, like the history of Geronimo and the Cochise in Arizona.As we sit armchair internet shopping, watching our saved shows on our DVR, reading about the latest Kardashian moments, or even the latest Putin, Isis or Republican/Democrat cat fighting, are we really going to judge people that take a 3 year vow of silence and inward contemplation? Really? Are WE that perfect?This is a special book and a gripping one for any of us that have searched for God in America.
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A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment, by Scott Carney
