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Title details for A Death on Diamond Mountain by Scott Carney - Available

A Death on Diamond Mountain

A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment

by Scott Carney
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 17, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780698186293

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780698186293
      • File size: 1150 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      January 15, 2015
      A diffuse tale of spiritual misadventure.A supposed holy man, camped with cultish followers in a remote corner of Arizona, dallies with a student/colleague. In a Clinton-esque twist, he maintains that he has not had sex with her, a mortal, but with the goddess she embodies and thus remains celibate. The student/goddess leaves him to take up with a coreligionist. The two leave the community for exile in the nearby mountains, where he dies of exposure. That's just the barest outline of a tale that becomes stranger with each added detail. Heavily reported in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and other outlets, the story was yet another in a long list of cautionary examples about the dangers of cults. Bringing little new to the account and underemphasizing the guru's outlier status in the topography of Buddhism in the West, Carney (The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, 2011) adds value mostly in his considerations of what motivates people to yield to the will of potentially dangerous leaders: "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." It's a potentially fruitful path, but Carney stumbles around on it, the narrative becoming a loosely connected set of observations on how meditation works and how weird true believers can be. One has the sense that the author set out to write a kind of rejoinder to Into the Wild, but the result lacks Jon Krakauer's sense of insight into what drives people in their quest of something beyond.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      October 15, 2014
      Hearing about the death of 38-year-old Ian Thorson, who succumbed to dehydration and dysentery on an Arizona mountaintop while practicing Buddhist meditation, journalist/anthropologist Carney began investigating the connection between prolonged meditation and mental instability. Carney, who speaks Hindi, lived in India for six years and knows the territory.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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