Description

Stanislav Grof – Books of the Dead – Manuals for Living and Dying [1 Scan OCR – 1 PDF]Product Description (Amazon): The “art of dying” and the posthumous journey of the soul have been the subject of extensive literature and visualization in many cultures. “Dying before dying”, or practice in dying, has been sought throughout human history, not just to overcome fear and give help at the moment of death, but actually to transfigure the quality of life. Stanislav Grof considers some of the most striking and important of the works known collectively as the “books of the dead”: the ancient Egyptian funerary texts; the Tibetan Bardo Thodol; Maya and Aztec myths of death and rebirth. And from medieval Europe come the Christian visions of the soul’s journeys, the danses macabres and dialogues with death, and meditational imagery of mortal decay that recalls Tibetan practices.Product Details    * Paperback: 96 pages    * Publisher: Thames & Hudson (June 1994)    * Language: English    * ISBN-10: 0500810419    * ISBN-13: 978-0500810415    * Product Dimensions: 11 x 8 x 0.3 inches Amazon review: Many cultures have produced “Books of the Dead”, manuals read to the deceased to assist them getting underway in their journey in the next life. The most well known are the *Pert em hru* (“The Egyptian Book of the Dead”) and the *Bardo Thödol* (“The Tibetan Book of the Dead”). In this book, Stanislav Grof treats these, and also discusses Books of the Dead from Mayan, Aztec, and Christian traditions. Grof demonstrates the parallels in these texts from different cultures, and then discusses further parallels in his own scientific research on human consciousness. Grof describes these texts as “accurate descriptions of the experiential territories traversed in non-ordinary states of consciousness” (p. 31). The images in part two, “Plates”, and part three, “Themes”, underscore the similarities between culturally remote traditions. Grof succeeds in creating a powerful challenge and raising significant questions: if these images represent interior “places” we can go, then what does that say about how we should be living our lives? In other words, Grof takes the attitude of many of the ancient books of the dead – that the nature of death & the afterlife has implications about how human life should be lived – and with the spin of his own consciousness studies, shows how that premise is still valid in the modern world. This is a visually engaging and deeply thought-provoking book. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Books-Dead-Manuals-Living-Imagination/…