Reviews for Glimpses of Abhidharma

The average rating for Glimpses of Abhidharma based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-04 00:00:00 Stephan Matthies "CAN'T HEAR WITH THE WATERS OF. HITHER AND THITHERING WATERS OF." - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Joyce, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, was prescient. He SAW that one day Newspeak would overrun us, like that babbling reiterative River, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Nowadays we can't hear ourselves THINK in the endless hither and thithering Newspeak of the media. Chogyam Trungpa has a quick antidote. He says: when it seems society has trapped you in a narrow box, just go through the walls! What he meant to say by that, is that the problem is that the inhumanity of the noise around us has petrified our OWN humanity! It's impossible, therefore, to "go through the walls" unless we MELT our rigid shells and become TRULY ALIVE again. And that's a tall order. Newspeak blocks our way. So we start at the beginning. The beginning is Abhidharma - the brain's machine language. Yep - just like in a computer. Except it's not formless and void, like in that Creation story. No, it's the RAW MATERIAL of our thoughts and emotions. But Trungpa reminds us that's ALL it is. And just like before Bill Gates came along with MS-DOS, it's nothing without our brains' organized thoughts. You know what else? When Trungpa, an ordained Tibetan lama, escaped from the Communist Chinese invasion - by the skin of his teeth (read it all in his Born in Tibet) - he had NO exposure to sophisticated Western society. Zilch. Nada. Zero. So he wasn't a soulless semi-nerd like the rest of us. I know, we blame our parents or our conditioning for it all - but, fact is, as he so clearly saw back then as a human outsider - our walls really JUST AIN'T THERE! We're only driven to THINK they are. We CAN be truly ourselves AND be a part of this crazy modern world at the same time... If First, we just LET OURSELVES BE OURSELVES. And Second, if we ORGANIZE our thoughts in a panoptic understanding of where our thoughts originate, and the REASON we think as we do. In other words, MEANING is a precondition of BEING OURSELVES. Know what else? Almost all our books are in the process of slowly melting the walls that separate us from ourselves - and that HURTS. But it's so true, that trite truism - no pain, no gain! When you read, it's having the effect of providing the antidote to media noise. The walls that are melting are really US. Our reading and thinking are RE-HUMANIZING us. On top of that, we are ALL different. RADICALLY Different. You know, the behaviouristic conditioning of the media funnels us into Sameness. Regimes have tried all that in the past. It NEVER WORKS. History proves that endlessly. People actually DO become human again! And they can do that, for starters, by READING. Jacques Derrida even made up a new word for the current attempt at universal conformity, which seems so nefarious but is only one of an endless succession of 'em: DIFFÉRANCE. It's a little joke. Our constant modern conditioning shows us differences between people, but always DEFERS the intrinsic essences and value of those differences. That's what TV does. It makes us all seem bland and the same. We are channeled into meaningless "straight and narrow paths." They're DRYING UP all Value in our lives. But unlike the straight path that leads to the Truth, these paths lead to empty meaninglessness - until we eventually despair of being DIFFERENT. We must see WHY and HOW we're different. So Trungpa restores the value to our differences which our media defers. He shows us that Difference is psychologically embedded in our Lost nature. It's there inside us. We just have to feed it. It's like the old story of the two pets - one nasty and one good. Each one of us has 'em in his or her heart. And we ALL play favourites - that's behaviouristically unavoidable. So which pet gets fed the most in OUR lives? You see, there's no avoiding good and evil. Behaviourism simply tries to saddle us with ugly, unsympathetic pets. Pets of annoyance, pettiness, and dull sameness. So... At the end of the day, which pets have WE fed? Pets of LIFE or pets of DEATH? Think about it. And you may COME TO LIFE AGAIN, in spite of the nasty critters and Newspeak around you. Your books will SHOW YOU THE WAY.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-09-09 00:00:00 Chu Me A book on perception by Trugpa, a Tibetan lama and excellent writer. An ancient dharmic teaching on the five shandhas. Perception broken down into five stages: form/matter; sensation/feeling (simple positive/negative/neutral); perception/discrimination (names); karmic formations (baggage, associations); consciousness (the totality). A wonderful way to begin to look at things differently, literally, more subtly, more slowly. "The whole approach of Buddhism is oriented towards dealing with everyday life situations rather than just meditating in order to achieve enlightenment."