Infinite Life
Awakening to Bliss Within
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
One of Time magazine's 25 Most Influential People in America writes about taking responsibility for our own happiness and our actions.
Robert Thurman is America's most popular and charismatic Buddhist. His first book, Inner Revolution, is an international bestseller and his lectures sell out to thousands.
Infinite Life demonstrates that our every action has infinite consequences for ourselves and others, here and now and after we are gone. He introduces the Seven Paths to reconstructing body and mind carefully in order to reduce the negative consequences and cultivate the positive. In his powerful, pragmatic style, Thurman delivers life-changing lessons on virtues and emotions through the lens of Buddhist practices and ways of thinking. He invites us to take responsibility for our actions and their consequences while we revel in the knowledge that our lives are truly infinite. Infinite Life is the ultimate guidebook to understanding our place in the universe and realizing how we can personally succeed while helping others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One day more than 40 years ago, when Thurman was a 21-year-old novice monk (the first Western Tibetan Buddhist monk), he had a physical experience that showed him how the idea of reincarnation, so vast and impossible to verify, can transform our lives right here and now. In his follow-up to Inner Revolution, the Columbia University professor describes how he was walking down a road in New Jersey, sent by his Tibetan teacher to buy milk for tea, when he suddenly experienced the lifting or release of a familiar "push-pressure" around his tail bone. "The pressure gone, I immediately saw that I had always been feeling as if I were being pushed along from behind toward my destination, not only to the grocery store on Route 9 but to my destiny in life, my future in general." Taking stock, he realized that under all of his ordinary thoughts, he had been pondering the Buddhist understanding of the "beginninglessness" of life. Here, in a guide that can be read through as daring thought experiment or delved into as a workbook, Thurman seeks to impart a sense of the inner freedom, the literal lightening up, that becomes possible as we begin to understand that we are all participants in an "infinite life." Thurman explores related transcendent virtues: wisdom, generosity, justice, patience, creativity, contemplation and making art in the service of others. He offers meditations but always returns to the larger truth that true enlightenment true awakening to the infinite is never an escape from life but a state of awareness and compassion for other living beings. Among the riches offered here is the insight that we do not become faceless blobs as we realize our selflessness and the infinite nature of our lives but true individualists. Liberated from a fear of death and isolation, confident that we are in a long-term relationship with life that can never be severed, we can begin to help ourselves and others to happiness.
