Imagining Karma

Imagining Karma
Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2002-11-11
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0520232437

With 'Imagining Karma', Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. The book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of 'family resemblances' and differences across great cultural divides.

Imagining Karma

Imagining Karma
Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2002-11-11
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0520232208

With 'Imagining Karma', Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. The book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of 'family resemblances' and differences across great cultural divides.

Imagining the Course of Life

Imagining the Course of Life
Author: Nancy Eberhardt
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780824829193

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life. Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health.

Instant Karma

Instant Karma
Author: Marissa Meyer
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1250618827

In New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer's young adult contemporary romance, a girl is suddenly gifted with the ability to cast instant karma on those around her – both good and bad. Chronic overachiever Prudence Barnett is always quick to cast judgment on the lazy, rude, and arrogant residents of her coastal town. Her dreams of karmic justice are fulfilled when, after a night out with her friends, she wakes up with the sudden ability to cast instant karma on those around her. Pru giddily makes use of the power, punishing everyone from public vandals to mean gossips, but there is one person on whom her powers consistently backfire: Quint Erickson, her slacker of a lab partner. Quint is annoyingly cute and impressively noble, especially when it comes to his work with the rescue center for local sea animals. When Pru resigns herself to working at the rescue center for extra credit, she begins to uncover truths about baby otters, environmental upheaval, and romantic crossed signals—not necessarily in that order. Her newfound karmic insights reveal how thin the line is between virtue and vanity, generosity and greed . . . love and hate... and fate.

Karma and Reincarnation

Karma and Reincarnation
Author: Barbara Y. Martin
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1954944039

“We have lived an extraordinary series of lives that has led us to our present experience. And the life we are living now will prepare us for lives yet to be lived.” There is life after death, and Barbara Martin has seen it. Now for the first time comes her inspired, firsthand account of the intricate world of spiritual rebirth. The award-winning authors of Change Your Aura, Change Your Life reveal the afterlife in a work based directly on Martin's personal explorations of the world to come and awe-inspiring clairvoyant experience with the spiritual worlds. Both a fully practical handbook to the ins and outs of the karmic cycle and a field guide to the spiritual plane and how reincarnation works. Dive deeper into the mystery of your soul's potential and how to understand your past, present, and future lives from a higher perspective. Uncover your own destiny and what you can do to unravel the mystery of your soul's journey. •Brings together the design of the world beyond and the mechanics of karma •Gives practical guidelines and tools to deal effectively with karmic situations and avoid generating adverse karma •Helps align readers with their spiritual purpose •Shows readers how to face and resolve their karmic troubles •Provides essential keys to spiritual development A true spiritual wonder in a single, fully accessible volume, Karma and Reincarnation is perfect for both those taking their first steps down a spiritual path and longtime spiritual students.

Karma Cola

Karma Cola
Author: Gita Mehta
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2012-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307814637

Beginning in the late '60s, hundreds of thousands of Westerners descended upon India, disciples of a cultural revolution that proclaimed that the magic and mystery missing from their lives was to be found in the East. An Indian writer who has also lived in England and the United States, Gita Mehta was ideally placed to observe the spectacle of European and American "pilgrims" interacting with their hosts. When she finally recorded her razor sharp observations in Karma Cola, the book became an instant classic for describing, in merciless detail, what happens when the traditions of an ancient and longlived society are turned into commodities and sold to those who don't understand them. In the dazzling prose that has become her trademark, Mehta skewers the entire Spectrum of seekers: The Beatles, homeless students, Hollywood rich kids in detox, British guilt-trippers, and more. In doing so, she also reveals the devastating byproducts that the Westerners brought to the villages of rural lndia -- high anxiety and drug addiction among them. Brilliantly irreverent, Karma Cola displays Gita Mehta's gift for weaving old and new, common and bizarre, history and current events into a seamless and colorful narrative that is at once witty, shocking, and poignant.

Imagining Tibet

Imagining Tibet
Author: Thierry Dodin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 0861711912

In the past century, the Western view of Tibet has evolved from an exotic Shangri-la filled with golden idols and the promise of immortality, to a peaceful land with an enlightened society now ravaged by outside aggression. How and why did our perception change? How accurate are our modern conceptions of Tibet? Imagining Tibet is a collection of essays that reveal these Western conceptions. Providing an historical background to the West's ever-changing relationship with Tibet, Donald Lopez, Jeffrey Hopkins, Jamyang Norbu, and other noted scholars explore a variety of topics - from Western perceptions of Tibetan approaches to violence, monastic life, and life as a nation in exile, to representations of Tibet in Western literature, art, environmentalism, and the New Age movement.

Karma Manual

Karma Manual
Author: Jonn Mumford
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1999
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781567184907

Discover the different types of karma and learn how karma is created through simple self-exploration exercises. Dr. Mumford promotes a direct methods for "deep frying" the karmic seeds in a person's being through the Nine-Day Karma Clearing Program.

The Awakened Ones

The Awakened Ones
Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 645
Release: 2012-02-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231527306

While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, Gananath Obeyesekere believes an even richer knowledge is possible through a bold confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, he fearlessly pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding. Throughout his career, Obeyesekere has combined psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. In this book, he begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, he witnesses hundreds of thousands of his past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. He then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space, considering the experience of a female Christian penitent, who stares devotedly at a tiny crucifix only to see the space around it expand to mirror Christ's suffering. Obeyesekere follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and he defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. A career-culminating work, this volume translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Imagining Heaven

Imagining Heaven
Author: Ellen W. Williams
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2024-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1476690456

Over the centuries, humans have conjured images--the stuff of dreams, convictions, and ardent desire--to describe our afterlife. The vision of heaven can appear as simple as a place among the stars or as complex as a universe filled with a multitude of busy souls. Positioned at the intersection of art, religion, and culture, this book sheds new light on human creativity in its portrayal of the afterlife. Beginning with prehistoric burial objects that help with one's heavenly needs, it travels through history to probe ancient texts, examines enigmatic carvings, dissects the meaning of paintings, and discusses contemporary perspectives in film and media. The author demonstrates that humans around the world have always had the capacity to confront the "final frontier" in spirited, hopeful, and beautiful ways.