The pile

Can't seem to power my way through Rob Burbea's Seeing That Frees. I like his insistence that sunyata is a vehicle for freedom, helps you to let go of negative fabrications. I'm reading it slowly.

I'm still podding my way through Megha Majumdar's A Guardian And A Thief. One bad thing after another, but it's also about triumph over all those problems, so far. I fear the ending.

Mary Oliver's Devotions is something I occasionally pick up. Her neo-transcendentalism and love of nature is really grand.

Lama Govinda's Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. He explains how it's quite impossible if you go deeper into it, to be Hindu and Buddhist because the worship is different. Sangharakshita also talked about Hindus who believe Buddhism is just an offshoot, not different. I'm not around that, so it seems far off to me, in time and place. The Gujarati women in my neighborhood don't come at me with that. Only a few speak English, they mostly keep to themselves. 

Just finished a bunch of George O'Connor graphic novels about ancient Greece and Norse mythology, and I continue to read Treasury of Greek Mythology by Donna Jo Napoli and illustrated by Christina Balit.

Also The Long Discourses of the Buddha, the Digha Nikaya, is something I read a few pages from now and then. 

Still chipping away at Gravity's Rainbow. On page 525 of 770. 

For fun today, I started reading: Lopez, Donald S. Jr. (2011), The Tibetan book of the dead : a biography. It talks about the social context of it's popularity in the US. It goes into Joseph Smith and other hidden spiritual books in North America. The account of what happens after death is incomprehensible and poetic, based on weird Tibetan anatomy. People are so curious, they're hoping for something. There's some good history of Tibet, even if it's the rough and ready quality of the book. It seems Walter Evans-Wentz was a bit of a hooey merchant. If he would have just not over reached, he would have been fine, but he makes some extravagant claims.

It's a little discomforting to see that Govinda wasn't really inside or really part of a sangha, and had some meetings with people and proclaimed initiations that don't exist. I think now I'd put him in the category of Alan Watts and Walter Evans-Wentz, sort of outsiders who pretended to be inside, philosophical entertainers. I think Sangharakshita is borderline. No lineage for his sangha. He was offered lineages, though, I think that's different.