So again that's kind of wonderful but also a little cautionary - because if you're only watching pro wrestling, it might be a surprise when you get there. Strong Tibetan Buddhists tend to see Tibetan deities. So if you're a strong Christian, you'll see saints, and you'll see Jesus and so on. So that seems like kind of an admonition that we should watch what our minds do.Īnd then also one of the intriguing ideas is that whatever your symbolic system is here, that's what you'll think when you go beyond. So whatever habits or neuroses, or pleasures, or mythologies that you indulge in here will be sort of exaggeratedly large.

And then when you die, that tether gets cut, and your mind is sort of supersized. In the Buddhist tradition, one of the ideas is that your mind and body in this realm kind of work together to dampen the mind's wild qualities. If you dwell on that conundrum that we talked about earlier, that's almost by definition a spiritual question - we're here, it seems pretty wonderful, it's gonna end, how should we behave. On whether there are religious themes in the book So how do you, in this world, live joyfully and productively in the face of those two truths? And then all along, we sort of know that everything is conditional. I essentially gave up, because I couldn't stand it any longer.We seem to be born to love. I got so fed up with it, that I skimmed it here and there, and then skipped to the end, and then that was it. It seemed to be going nowhere for interminably long periods, where I felt like I was stuck in the Bardo with them, and couldn't wait to get out. When I read a book I want a story that gets me interested, that leads somewhere and I want to know what happens next, this was the opposite.

And they would go on and on about very silly things that I didn't care about. Not many debut novelists get this kind of adulation and attention. It spent two weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and has been the subject of numerous hot takes, think pieces, and other literary essays. He wrote the characters and what they said in such a way, that it was hard for me to like them or identify with any of them. Lincoln in the Bardo, the novel by George Saunders, has become one of those books everyone is talking about. They would know they were coffins and in seeing their bodies decay, if they were not totally stupid in real life, they would know that they were dead. They seemed to say such stupid things, and if they lived life on earth, which they did, then they would definitely know that their decaying bodies were not in 'sick boxes.' They would be able to identify the boxes as coffins. The format was very difficult, for one thing, but also, I couldn't find myself caring about any of the characters, or what they had to say. The format was very difficult, for one thing, but also, I couldn't find myself caring about any of the characters, or what they had …more I hated this book.

Lincoln i bardo