Tibetan Book Of The Dead

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is full of instructions from the Buddhist perspective about how to manage a skillful passage into the next life. But one of the best ways to prepare for death, according to Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, is to live a good life. Here are a few suggestions on how to prepare for the "final voyage," culled from Thurman's commentaries on the Book of the Dead: * Become informed.

Would the Tibetan Book of the Dead by any other name be as popular? That's one question that Francesca Fremantle's thoughtful and intricate "Luminous Emptiness" brings to mind. The real title for what we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the less melodic "The Great Liberation Through Hearing During the Bardo."

Death, in Western culture, comes in an instant and signals the end of things: cessation of pain; swift release from disease; a slip into oblivion; a flat line on the oscilloscope. But to the Buddhists of Tibet, for whom dying is an art, a science and the ultimate test of an individual's courage and compassion, death is a much more complicated process.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is full of instructions from the Buddhist perspective about how to manage a skillful passage into the next life. But one of the best ways to prepare for death, according to Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, is to live a good life. Here are a few suggestions on how to prepare for the "final voyage," culled from Thurman's commentaries on the Book of the Dead: * Become informed.

Would the Tibetan Book of the Dead by any other name be as popular? That's one question that Francesca Fremantle's thoughtful and intricate "Luminous Emptiness" brings to mind. The real title for what we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the less melodic "The Great Liberation Through Hearing During the Bardo."

THE Bardo Thodol, known to us as "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," is a religious book like no other: Whereas the holy writings of the Abrahamic faiths teach their adherents how to live, "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" instructs its readers on how to die.

While mainstream, mind-bending blockbusters such as "Inception" light Hollywood's fire, French art-house bad boy Gaspar Noé throws down his own gauntlet with the spectacular head trip "Enter the Void. " The Argentina-born Noé last divided filmgoers with the assaultive and gimmicky "Irréversible," notorious for a one-shot rape scene that lasted eight minutes. Where that movie's pummeling sensibility felt cheap, though, this one works you over in order to stretch you out. Probing the fuzzy, synaptic turbulence of drug culture and life-after-death — "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" is referenced early on, while Stanley Kubrick and Kenneth Anger get visual shout-outs — "Enter the Void" displays a dizzying virtuosity with the cinema of altered states.

The homecoming of Metropolitan Opera soprano Deborah Voigt will be among highlights of Pacific Symphony's 1999-2000 season, which opens and closes with major choral works at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Voigt, who grew up in Anaheim Hills and attended Cal State Fullerton, will sing Strauss' Four Last Songs and arias from three Verdi operas Jan. 7-8. She has not sung in Orange County since 1993, when she was Leonora in Verdi's "Il trovatore" for Opera Pacific.

Railing in recent years against "political correctness," critics of academe have charged that the core humanities curriculum has been distorted by the multiplication of courses tailored to minority agendas. But how much distortion has actually taken place? Skeptics have long charged that the evidence was more anecdotal than otherwise. Fortunately, a report written by Clifford Adelman and released last week by the U.S. Department of Education goes well beyond the anecdotal.

Colin Thubron, the acclaimed British travel writer, has ventured through Russia, China and Central Asia. With restrained, spare prose, Thubron is a versatile painter of place, capturing the look and the language of locales. His "To a Mountain in Tibet" reads more like an elegy than a traditional story of travels. His trek takes him toward the "lonely peak" of Mt. Kailash, considered by Tibetans to be the holiest mountain in their highly elevated desert. Following an itinerary through a remote section of western Nepal, passing tiny, impoverished villages, on foot and by Jeep, ordinarily would offer a firm framework for his story.

Death, in Western culture, comes in an instant and signals the end of things: cessation of pain; swift release from disease; a slip into oblivion; a flat line on the oscilloscope. But to the Buddhists of Tibet, for whom dying is an art, a science and the ultimate test of an individual's courage and compassion, death is a much more complicated process.

French filmmaker Gaspar Noé makes the kind of movies that require warnings. His brutal 2002 revenge drama, "Irréversible," arrived in theaters in England and Canada with a written alert about the possible side effects of a strobe-like sequence: "Some people may experience loss of consciousness or epileptic seizures when exposed to certain light effects or flashes of light. " The writer-director's 1998 debut feature, "I Stand Alone" — about a sociopathic butcher with incest and murder on the brain — carries an even less subtle warning.

As an architect, I'm always interested in earthquakes and the academic level of just knowing how forces work. All our experiences with earthquakes are that they move laterally, but this one hopped--which is why a lot of things didn't fall off shelves. In some parts of the city, it's like it was as much vertical as it was horizontal. When I came back, my desk had been hopping up and down and I could see where the paint was (damaged). Also, just to see the fatigue on some of the buildings.