Hungry Ghosts: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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The Hungry Ghosts" is a gem of a novel centered around an uncommon theme for English literature: making personal concessions to correct the transgressions of others. Selvadurai takes his readers on a tense journey of forgiveness and family ties, juxtaposing how two different cultures, Canadian and Sri Lankan, approach these two notions in very different ways. In both the family and the country, old sins and hatreds are neither forgotten nor forgiven and, instead, spin into a cycle of recrimination and violence. While members of the family and citizens of the country might try to flee relatives or emigrate from Sri Lanka, they bring their sorrows with them.

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein: Summary and reviews Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein: Summary and reviews

In Buddhism, hungry ghosts are often seen as a metaphor for those individuals who are following a path of incorrect desire, who suffer from spiritual emptiness, who cannot see the impossibility of correcting what has already happened or who form an unnatural attachment to the past. Hungry ghosts are also sometimes used as a metaphor for drug addiction. I want to be not money-driven and find my purpose in life which will allow me to calm my hunger feeling.Not the world, not what’s outside of us, but what we hold inside traps us. We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.”

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with

I am so happy that this book lived up to my expectations. I’m going to already preface the review by saying it’s beautiful, just in case some of you don’t read the whole review. Music gives me a sense of self-sufficiency and nourishment. I don’t need anyone or anything. I bathe in it as in amniotic fluid; it surrounds and protects me. It’s also stable, ever-available and something I can control - that is, I can reach for it whenever I want. I can also choose music that reflects my mood, or if I want, helps to soothe it…music-seeking offers excitement and tension that I can immediately resolve and a reward I can immediately attain - unlike other tensions in my life and other desired rewards. Music is a source of beauty and meaning outside myself that I can claim as my own without exploring how, in my life, I keep from directly experiencing those qualities. Addiction, in this sense, is the lazy man’s path to transcendence.” The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit. ... The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue. The prejudice is evident in the contradiction that some harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco) are legal while others, less harmful in some ways, are contraband. This has less to do with the innate danger of the drugs than with which populations are publicly identified with using the drugs. The white and wealthier the population, the more acceptable is the substance. And profit. If you have fear, prejudice, and ignorance, there will be profit.”This book was quite an emotional ride for me, as were the other two books I have read by this author. It is dense, thought-provoking, and cathartic literature without much effort needed from the reader to be so. Definitely one of the best books I have read in 2013. More broadly, though, it's an exploration of the workings of karma, of how the sins of our past supposedly follow us through this and future lives unless we make amends. The book is well-written and offers suspense, mystery and romance, but the Buddhist parables woven into the narrative were problematic. this book is well written technically and the premise initially intriguing. but then the sense of fatalistic doom crept in and stayed till the very end. This started out ok but got progressively worse and worse. By the final third the characters and their actions had become completely illogical, unsympathetic and, overall, irritating. Michael's reaction to discovering Shivan's past makes no sense whatsoever, and Shivan's whining that he is trying to make things "good again" between himself and Michael is completely negated by the terrible way he treats Michael. The book seemed to completely lose its focus, lagging excessively, and went, strangely, from lucid storytelling to a disjointed retelling of events. Weird and disappointing. Methods for gaining self-knowledge and self-mastery through conscious awareness strengthen the mind’s capacity to act as its own impartial observer. Among the simplest and most skilful of the meditative techniques taught in many spiritual traditions is the disciplined practice of what Buddhists call ‘bare attention’. Nietzsche called Buddha ‘that profound physiologist’ and his teachings less a religion than a ‘kind of hygiene’...’ Many of our automatic brain processes have to do with either wanting something or not wanting something else – very much the way a small child’s mental life functions. We are forever desiring or longing, or judging and rejecting. Mental hygiene consists of noticing the ebb and flow of all those automatic grasping or rejecting impulses without being hooked by then. Bare attention is directed not only toward what’s happening on the outside, but also to what’s taking place on the inside.