A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment - Hardcover

Carney, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592408613 ISBN 13: 9781592408610

Publisher: Avery, 2015

Synopsis

An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong.
 
When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability.
 
Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died.
 
Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost.
 
Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.

About this title

About the Author:

Scott Carney speaks Hindi and has spent six years living in India. He is a contributing editor at WIRED, and his work has also appeared in Playboy, Mother Jones, Details, Discover, Outside, Fast Company, and Foreign Policy. His first book, The Red Market, won the 2012 Clarion Award for best nonfiction book. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

 

Author’s Note

HOW MUCH SHOULD someone strive to know their own soul?

It is a question I have struggled with for the better part of a decade after an incident that taught me that intensive meditation has the potential to unleash unexpected consequences. From 1998 to 2006, I spent about three years bumping around India, Tibet, and Nepal, first as a student on an abroad program learning about Indian and Tibetan folklore, and later in backpacker hostels on the beaches of Goa and the mountain valleys of Kathmandu. Later, I dropped out of a PhD program in anthropology to lead an abroad program for American students that advertised in glossy brochures with the catchy title “India: From Brahma to Buddha.” I was excited to help guide young people on their journeys in a foreign land.

The highlight of the program was a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the rustic town of Bodh Gaya, the spot where Buddha achieved enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree almost three millennia ago. We studied an introductory program known in Tibetan as lamrim to learn about the karmic cycle of death and rebirth and to cultivate an attitude of compassion for all living things. We were told that this could lead the way to happiness in this life—and perhaps enlightenment in our next.

I began studying Tibetan Buddhism on my first trip to Asia and it had helped me find my own answers to some of life’s big questions. Its focus on mortality made me realize that no matter what we believe happens after death, our time on this earth is precious. Buddhists reflect openly on death and teach that although all life ends in tragedy, the way we use our lives does not have to be meaningless. Every moment has value and meditation is one way to capture life’s fleetingness.

The first seven days of the retreat consisted mainly of breathing exercises and lectures on the Tibetan worldview. On the eighth day, the experience turned dark. The Swiss-German nun who was our instructor told us to imagine that we were decaying corpses and that the bodies of everyone we knew were bags of human shit. The exercise, which is meant to help the students develop psychic tools to use when they eventually face their own death, might sound extreme, but Tibetan meditation can get even more far-out: A practice known as chöd involves meditating over actual decaying corpses in a graveyard.

When the meditations were over, I had a conversation with one of my students—a whip-smart twenty-one-year-old Southern belle named Emily O’Conner (not her real name)—about her experiences.* She said it was the most profoundly moving experience of her life and that “maybe more silence would have been better.”

That night, while the other students chatted enthusiastically in the meditation room, she climbed to the roof of one of the dormitories, wrapped a khadi scarf around her face, and jumped. A student on his way to bed found her facedown on the pavement. According to the coroner’s report, she had died on impact.

I was charged with returning her remains to America. Somewhere along the way, the Indian police gave me her journal. On the eighth day of the retreat, she’d written in flowery, well-constructed cursive, “Contemplating my own death is the key.” Then, a few paragraphs later, “I’m scared that I will have this realization and go crazy.” One of the last things Emily wrote, in the same steady hand, was “I am a Bodhisattva”—an enlightened being that Tibetans aspire to become. She believed she was well along the road to transcendence.

There are many explanations for why Emily, my student, decided to take her own life. Maybe she had misunderstood the meaning of “enlightenment.” Maybe she had underlying mental instabilities that just happened to manifest themselves during intensive meditation. For all I knew, she was a Bodhisattva and continuing on her journey in another realm. However, here on earth I worried that enlightenment might not be all that it promised.

The experience changed my life, turning me toward a career as an investigative journalist. As I recounted in my book The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, my fight to preserve her body with ice and embalming fluid against the inevitability of decay made me consider the subtle line that separates the flesh of a corpse from that of a living person. Without that mysterious animating force that some people might call a soul, our bodies are little more than meat. Out of a living context, that meat is a sort of commodity in the eyes of the world. For the next five or six years, I followed that realization to what, for me, were its logical conclusions. I became a journalist and explored the growing, illegal markets for bodies and body parts.

Even as I pursued criminals across international lines, I often drifted back to the question of why my student took her life. For me, it was more difficult to understand how a technique that was supposed to make someone a more compassionate person could have such a tragic result.

The death of a second meditator, Ian Thorson, this time in the mountains of Arizona, made me suspect that there was an unspoken mystery at the heart of these transformational techniques. There was no doubt that his death and Emily’s were rare events—perhaps even within the statistical norms for suicide or murder in a given population. But there were eerie similarities.

Was there something in the teachings that drives some people to madness? Could silence itself be damaging? Or was it something about the way Westerners think about Eastern spirituality that makes us particularly susceptible to grandiose expectations? When not tempered, perhaps that search for something greater than ourselves is enough to push some people past a breaking point.

I began my investigation expecting to uncover a hidden dark side of meditation and yoga that gets swept under the rug. People who adhere to Eastern teachings might be inclined to explain away negative events as the fault of the individual and not of the techniques. To some degree, that is what I found. But I also found something stranger. Maybe instead of thinking of spiritual practices as something in and of themselves good or bad, it is more fruitful to think of them as potentially powerful.

Whatever gets unlocked in the meditation chamber, a prayer hall, or a yoga studio is certainly deeply personal, physical, psychological, and subject to the grand sweep of history. There is also something about it that is transcendent, and essential to who we are as humans.

Prologue

The Cave

CHRISTIE MCNALLY’S HAIR hung down in greasy unwashed cords as she scanned the retreat valley with her tired brown eyes. The searing yellow flashlight beams hadn’t cut across the tract for at least a week, but that didn’t mean their pursuit was over. A month earlier, devotees had bowed at her feet and laid garlands of flowers on her throne. Now guards patrolled the property line, wary of any attempt she might make to reassert control of her flock. Her white robes, long since soiled, were packed away in one of the watertight Rubbermaid tubs that they’d stashed beneath the cave they now occupied.

There were still a few of their loyal Buddhist followers out there somewhere. She’d written a message to them in a bubbly girlish scrawl. Her struggle had a place in the grand sweep of history of the landscape. They’d been expelled from their own slice of Eden and hounded so that she and her husband, Ian Thorson, had “started to feel this terrible sense of being hunted, like a wild rabbit, or perhaps like an Apache of long ago.” It was an apt metaphor. A hundred and fifty years earlier, Indians armed with rifles and stolen ammunition squatted on a ridge not far from here. They watched the valley as Union soldiers refreshed their canteens at Bear Spring and waited for the perfect moment to strike. As the soldiers quenched their thirst, the reports of Apache rifles echoed off the canyon walls. Two bullets found their mark. The privates bled out within minutes; their blue uniforms turned purple and the ground soaked up their blood as greedily as it did their spilled canteens. The lieutenant survived to record their passing in a report to his commanding officer at Fort Bowie, whose low adobe walls stood only a quarter mile away.

The murders were just another step in the tit-for-tat violence that culminated in seventy-five years of barbarism known by the victors as the Indian Wars. Vestiges of that violence remained when McNally helped raise money to buy the valley in 2008 and rechristen it Diamond Mountain. Bear Spring silted over and stopped flowing only a few months after the Buddhists arrived. Some locals thought it was a sign.

When they moved here, McNally and Thorson saw the cave as a spiritual refuge in the tradition of the great Himalayan masters. Their plan was as elegant as it was treacherous: They would occupy the cave until they achieved enlightenment. They didn’t expect that they might die trying.

Ian Thorson was thin now. Too thin, really. The knife wounds in his sides and shoulders had healed cleanly, but now a fresh bruise swept across his forehead. He’d been delirious for some time, and in his frustration he’d smashed his head with a piece of hardened plastic. It wasn’t his fault that the situation didn’t make sense anymore. She worried about him hurting himself further. Then again, he was so close to greatness.

McNally knew that when he looked up from the mattress they’d hauled up to their mountain cave, he wouldn’t see the guileless face of the girl who grew up outside of Los Angeles: the product of an affair between her father and his secretary. Nor would he identify the outline of the woman with whom he’d helped build Diamond Mountain University into a major site for Tibetan Buddhist meditation. It was not the woman with whom he’d spent countless hours perfecting the intricate postures of couples yoga, where they would use each other’s weight to push their bodies into impossible configurations. She certainly wasn’t the ex-wife of his first guru and spiritual teacher, Geshe Michael Roach, who was still jealously stewing over their controversial split. No. When he gazed out of the dimming aperture of the cave, he would see an angel made of clear white light. Christie McNally was his lover and his lama, the enlightened being who had seen the nature of emptiness directly, who had married him and taken his tortured soul from a base understanding of the world to the cusp of his own transformation.

She was also his only hope for making it out of here alive.

Even if he could stand, the cave was barely tall enough for Thorson to be on his feet without craning his six-foot frame. During daytime, a small sliver of light filtered in through a hole in the roof where the rocks formed a cleft. It was stuffed with all the things they had thought they would need to survive a long haul. There were bags of basmati rice, bolts of clothing and cold-weather gear, flashlights and jars of Italian seasoning. A small ritual instrument hung from a hook in the rock ceiling. It was tuned like a Jamaican steel drum and helped ease them into meditation. They had propane, and Costco brand baby wipes, duct tape, Tibetan incense, a filtration device, and heavy black plastic bags full of junk. The only thing they didn’t have was what they needed most: water.

Thick with poisonous snakes, mountain lions, and prickly cactus, the Chiricahua Mountains of Southeast Arizona are prone to landslides and are unforgiving to outsiders. Leaving the cave was an ordeal that left them exhausted and panting for breath. Since they’d arrived a month ago, the temperature on the mountainside had been unpredictable. One day it would be hot enough to melt the soles of their hiking boots, the next a freak snowstorm might coat the rocks, yucca, and scrub oak with a fine layer of ice. Scorching desert winds whisked away what was left of their moisture.

Despite the lashing from the cold, they thought a recent ice storm was a blessing in disguise. It might have saved them from dehydration. When he still had some strength, Thorson arranged a tarp to collect the runoff from the melt and funnel it into a water jug that was long since dry. They drank from the impromptu reservoir, and the dirty container of water sat on the cave floor, bristling with twigs.

It wasn’t long until Ian began to feel sick. His guts cramped and he began to shiver with fever. He donned three sweaters and crept beneath a blanket to beat the fever back, but it wasn’t enough. His face turned from ghost white to a deep shade of purple.

They had three things that might help stave off the sickness. First, of course, there was the power of prayer. They’d carved Tibetan words into a rock to sanctify the space and purify their spiritual path. Though meaningless in themselves, the syllables om ah hung in Tibetan invoked a powerful connection to their guru, which the holy texts said would restore their body, speech, and mind as well as balance the wheels of energy in their body, called chakras. Next to the carving was a course book devoted to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. On its cover the bare-chested goddess clutched the severed head of an adversary and wore a skirt made of dismembered limbs. Kali is a fierce protector of her devotees, but she is known to take her payment in blood. Near the ritual accouterments was one more option: a sort of escape hatch if all else failed. Sheathed in orange plastic, the Satellite PersOnal Tracker, or SPOT, locator beacon was capable of sending out two prearranged distress calls. If Christie pressed the button marked HELP, their GPS coordinates would arc toward a geostationary satellite and into the in-boxes of their friends and family. A second button on the device, marked S.O.S., would summon the sheriff’s department.

Christie stroked Ian’s hair and it occurred to her that the illness could also be a lesson. Would he come back from the threshold of life and death with profound insight? Or would the journey kill him? Perhaps there was more to his illness than met the eye. It was entirely possible that he had been cursed by powerful black magic. She considered the tools arrayed in front of her. A protection mantra. The goddess Kali. An emergency beacon.

It was a test of faith informed by the fact that almost a decade earlier her teacher Michael Roach took her as a sexual consort and later as his wife. Roach was not the first white man to travel to India and come back claiming to be enlightened, but he looked the part better than any of his predecessors. Roach bestowed Christie with the Tibetan title of lama and ever since, hundreds of devotees bent at her feet. For them it meant she was a living goddess—a sort of messiah for a new breed of Buddhism that had only just gained a foothold in America.

Now that they were on the run, Lama Christie McNally had to decide whether she would try to heal Thorson with her godlike powers or leave the responsibility to an outsider who would never understand that the path to enlightenment is not always straightforward. Or safe.

As Lama Christie’s fi...

About this edition

• Publisher: Avery
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1592408613
• ISBN 13: 9781592408610
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304