RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART in NYC
Presents:
The Tibetan Book of the Dead Book Club
Part I: Addiction and Attachments with Dr. Gabor Maté
In conversation with Bardo curator Dr. Ramon Prats
Wednesday, July 7 at 7 p.m.
$20/$18 for RMA members
Enlightenment is only open to those who have succeeded in ridding themselves of all attachments. Otherwise, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, we are condemned to be reborn on the wheel of suffering (samsara). What is an attachment in medical terms? What is the line between addiction and attachment.
The Hungarian born physician Gabor Maté is a bestselling author in Canada, with all of his four books published in the U.S. and in over fifteen languages on five continents. His four books explore issues of human development, attachment relationships, the mind/body unity in health and illness, and the vexing and pervasive issue of addictions in our highly driven culture. They include Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It; When The Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers; and, most recently, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. The latter has garnered many accolades and was the winner of the Hubert Evans Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. A former palliative care director, for the past twelve years Dr. Maté has worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, notorious as North America’s most concentrated area of drug use. He has been the physician at Onsite, the detox facility associated with North America’s only supervised injection site. Many of his patients suffer from mental illness, drug addiction and HIV, or all three. Dr. Maté has had regular medical columns in The Vancouver Sun and the national Globe and Mail.
TICKET INCLUDES ADMISSION TO THE EXHIBITION.
CLICK HERE for more information or to purchase tickets.
CLICK HERE to learn more about In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
‘Enlightenment is only open to those who have succeeded in ridding themselves of all attachments.’
Except for the attachment to enlightenment I presume. This logical contradiction in Buddhist philosophy has always puzzled me and left me somewhat cold.
*All* attachments, including in particular attachments to enlightenment. Why the presumption? If you think it’s a logical contradiction perhaps you would prefer theodicy. Life is not just somewhat cold. It’s full of suffering. It ends in death. Get used to it and/or find a way beyond death’s seemingly inevitable recurrence.
I like this site. I’m from Philly and don’t think I’ll be in New York July 7, but if I am, who knows? I got the Tibetan Book of the Dead 40 years ago and read it as a Second Lieutenant going off to war in Vietnam.
This past year, I “hung out” at the Ram Dass Library at Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY, thinking of those late ’60s and my first encounter with a higher consciousness.
Could your site be calling out to me to ascend even higher?
Thanks,
michael j
Conshohocken, PA USA
Having an enlightened attitude is neither being attached to an outcome or detached from feeling. It’s probing compassionate curiosity that’s not stuck on identity or personal fulfillment. This healing is fledgling, fearsome and full-filling. It’s presence stripped of accoutrements. Don’t get hung up on enlightenment. Deepen your presence. The blossoms will appear as the ideas fall away.