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Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and MeSnagging.org In association with Amazon.co.ukOnline Shop | Property Guides | Kitchen & Home | Garden Tools | Power Tools | Consumer Electronics Get the Snagging Checklist Here!  List Price: £9.99 Price: £1.51 You Save: £8.48 (85%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Dewey Decimal Number: 293.3442 EAN: 9781904095637 ISBN: 1904095631 Label: Short Books, London Manufacturer: Short Books, London Number Of Pages: 188 Publication Date: January 08, 2004 Publisher: Short Books, London Studio: Short Books, London Related Items:
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 Rating:  - Funny, powerful and recommendedPeter Conradi's Going Buddhist is a stimulating, often funny account of one man's encounter with Buddhism. Conradi was a friend, confidant and biographer of Iris Murdoch. His dialogue with Murdoch frames the narrative of this essay. A slim book, it is quick to read but endures longer in reflection. The account has significantly more value as an autobiographical discourse than an introduction to Buddhism. Nevertheless it effectively serves the novice interested to glimpse the principles and imperfections of the Western Buddhist. Rating:  - Informative and beguilingPeter Conradi began to explore Buddhism when terrifying panic attacks started to take over his life. As he points out early on in Going Buddhist, these claustrophobic free-floating terrors are hardly uncommon in the West, and nor is it uncommon to set off on a spiritual search at times of acute psychological distress. So what follows is an impressionistic view of an intensely personal journey, quirky, humorous and irreverent, but also a deeply serious look at issues that can affect us all. Conradi's spiritual search is a highly western one. Despite many references to the eastern masters he has learnt from over the years, the ideas and insights he returns to again and again are, rather unexpectedly for me, those of his friend, novelist and academic Iris Murdoch. It's not all remembered conversations and anecdotes though - Conradi's introduction to the basics of Buddhism, its history and its geography is an elegant masterpiece of clarity. For me, Conradi's main strength is a very personal description of his struggles with meditation - struggles that will feel very familiar to so many people. It is this combining of the personal with the general that makes the book so beguiling. To Conradi it is part of the human condition to feel alone, anxious, depressed and fearful of death, and equally clear that anyone can benefit from meditation. Again and again he returns to the practice of meditation. How to sit and what to sit on, whether it's okay to blow your nose, why meditation might actually make a difference to yourself and the world, and, every now and then, a glimpse of the pure joy that Conradi describes so eloquently. Although the publisher's name would suggest that Going Buddhist is a short and simple read, I didn't really experience it like that. Conradi structures his book around a series of traditional drawings, illustrating a story of a boy and an ox. The drawings are circular and so is Conradi's story - beginning and ending inevitably with the words of Iris Murdoch. But it didn't actually feel formally structured. Conradi's ideas, thoughts and stories whirl around, whack you around the head and repeat themselves like the rampaging elephant or tree full of monkeys that characterise the mind's behaviour during meditation practice for so many of us. This isn't a criticism though. If Conradi's book has us following tangents, achieving calm, losing it again but feeling it's worth staying on the journey, then I'd say he's done a terrific job in conveying how it actually feels to go Buddhist.  Try searching the Internet for "Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me" or Ebay for "Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me". You might also be interested in the following great products:
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