Perfect Brilliant Stillness discussion

Any read the book "Perfect Brilliant Stillness" by David Carse?

My mother is big into these types of books recently, and recommended I read it. I did so and it was a lot better than I expected. You first have to get over the way he writes, because he does not refer to much using the ego, or possessiveness, and is very non-western in his thinking. It is something of an enlightment guru style read, but there are many great ideas in it.

What is life? What is existence? What is I? These are questions we all struggle with at times. For Carse, he had a revelatory moment in a rainforest where his sense of self went away, and he was left with a kind of clean existence, beyond the normal concerns we have.

I was raised christian/buddhist by my father and mother, so some of his idea really reasonated. Anyone want to have a discusion about some of these their own journey into existentialism?

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Originally Posted by UlyssesE

Any read the book "Perfect Brilliant Stillness" by David Carse?

My mother is big into these types of books recently, and recommended I read it. I did so and it was a lot better than I expected. You first have to get over the way he writes, because he does not refer to much using the ego, or possessiveness, and is very non-western in his thinking. It is something of an enlightment guru style read, but there are many great ideas in it.

What is life? What is existence? What is I? These are questions we all struggle with at times. For Carse, he had a revelatory moment in a rainforest where his sense of self went away, and he was left with a kind of clean existence, beyond the normal concerns we have.

I was raised christian/buddhist by my father and mother, so some of his idea really reasonated. Anyone want to have a discusion about some of these their own journey into existentialism?

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Most of my life has been spent in a direct or indirect pursuit of the moment you describe, a moment where the self disappears and is replaced by what has been called the great emptiness in certain Buddhist traditions. I was first awakened to this possibility as a young teenager by books like "Siddhartha," and by others that were popular at the time like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "Zen and the Art of Archery." I would later spend years studying Eastern philosophies, and in particular be drawn to Buddhism, as I still am. Hermann Hesse is one great example of a Western writer influenced greatly by these traditions. W. Somerset-Maugham was another. It's an enormous discussion that can be approached from many angles.

I haven't read the book but it sounds worth reading. I wanted to contribute because I've just been reading about the dictum 'speech is silver and silence is golden' and I came across the idea that noise is in fact time whereas silence is eternity, which seems to me to be relevant to this thread somehow...of course Hamlet's famous last words are, "the rest is silence"

I haven't read the book, but it sounds like an interesting discussion. I'll see if I can find it tomorrow at Myopic Books.

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Originally Posted by russellb

I haven't read the book but it sounds worth reading. I wanted to contribute because I've just been reading about the dictum 'speech is silver and silence is golden' and I came across the idea that noise is in fact time whereas silence is eternity, which seems to me to be relevant to this thread somehow...of course Hamlet's famous last words are, "the rest is silence"

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Silence is eternity. I dig this, thanks, brother.