The Bardo of Waking Life [Paperback]

Richard Grossinger (Author), Mary Stark (Preface), Rob Brezsny (Foreword), Robert Kelly (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2008

An avant garde set of improvisational essays, Richard Grossinger’s The Bardo of Waking Life is a meditation on the Tibetan Buddhist bardo realm which, in popular culture, is viewed as the bridge between lives, the state people enter after death and before rebirth. This book examines waking life and its history and language as if it were a bardo state rather than ultimate reality, and thus seeks a context for life (and dreams), even as it addresses more "mundane issues" including genetic theory, the war in Iraq and George W. Bush's presidency, North Korea, advertising, global warming, Prison Industrial Culture, childhood trauma, even country western music. Written with playfulness and precision, Bardo takes a new, probing approach to all the important questions of creation, destruction, and existence. In these intellectual field notes, Grossinger proves thematically fearless as he crosses quantum mechanics with totemic hexes and draws transcendental insight from the ephemeral space-time we call daily life. If, as Tibetan cosmology holds true, all conditional realms are bardos, then the state we all share is nothing less than the bardo of waking life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Written with playfulness and precision, The Bardo of Waking Life takes a new, probing approach to all the important questions of creation, destruction, and existence.” —Horace Mann Magazine, Fall 2008“The Bardo of Waking Life is the eleven-dimensional consciousness of the Logos … like having a lucid dream with my eyes wide open, the sun at midnight filling up half the sky and the full moon at noon in the other half…. It’s a gift from the future, a magical artifact materialized out of a future dream.”—Rob Brezsny, author of Pronoia Is the Antidote to Paranoia“In this astonishing book, Richard Grossinger takes us on a layered journey of constant revelation, some measure of delight, and fleeting moments of despair, to a planet we dimly recognize for having dreamed it once. In fact, it’s not just a planet but a teeming esoteric realm of conscious existence, the mooring place of a ghostly boat which embarks and disembarks in the sea of our inner life.”—Mary Stark“I see this work as a swelling in the vast conspiracy of alertness that threads through the noise of the world, waking us to this leaf or that galaxy…. I want to praise it by saying it’s Not Even Right—it’s more important than what could ever readily slip into binary evaluations. It can’t be right, any more than a fox crossing the snow in the backyard can be right.”—Robert Kelly“From where I sit, The Bardo of Waking Life is full of the real grief of life’s predicament, all the way to the bone. And it is beautiful, and true, the whole cascade of painful, love-soaked delineations. I have glimpsed that coming unimaginable good, not as a vision or an idea, but as a shock of feeling upon waking from a dream like, ‘Oh my God, THIS is possible.’ And with that, an off-the-chart hope and a terrible fear rose together in me. THIS can happen, and it may not. So how am I to give myself effectively to IT happening? That is my main question.”—Robert Simmons, author of The Book of Stones

About the Author

Since the issuing of Solar Journal: Oecological Sections by Black Sparrow Press in 1970, Richard Grossinger has published some twenty-five books, most of them with his own press, North Atlantic Books/Frog, Ltd., but also titles with Harper, Doubleday, Sierra Club Books, J.P. Tarcher, among others. These have ranged from extremely long explorations of science, culture, and spirituality (The Night Sky, Planet Medicine, Embryogenesis) to memoirs and nonfiction novels (New Moon, Out of Babylon) to experimental prose (Book of the Earth and Sky, Spaces Wild and Tame) and science fiction (Mars: A Science Fiction Vision). Grossinger received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1975 and lives with his wife Lindy Hough in Berkeley, California.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 552 pages
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556437005
• ISBN-13: 978-1556437007
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.5 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #522,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars recommend, June 7, 2008

By 

Nathaniel Miller - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bardo of Waking Life (Paperback)

This book is a poetic description of both the joys and challenges that we find our selves in every waking second. For me this book was in tune and on time. Combining an honest look at everything; himself, mankind, the earth and the whole universe, the author takes us on an amazing journey of interwoven (though sometimes seemingly random) imagery that makes everything dreamlike. For me the best part was that he transformed my inner feeling of "what is the point? if it is all an illusion" to perceiving the wonder that allows anything to exsit at all.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The chronicler of our times., August 16, 2008

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Joy Manne (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bardo of Waking Life (Paperback)

A complex book. a different book. Richard Grossinger is a bard, a minstrel who wanders and wonders over the entire universe and beyond. He is the chronicler of our times. If you want to know where the world is going, read Grossinger. If you want to know where the world would be going, read Grossinger in this book. If your children are in their forties and you do not understand them, read this book. And if you are interested in nature, loath George W Bush, want to think the deepest thoughts, and more, read this book.
Don't expect to read all of it in one go.
Expect to come back to it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great cornucopia of insights, June 3, 2009

By 

Diogenes DogSnack (Redwood City, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Bardo of Waking Life (Paperback)

A fascinating cornucopia of insights into the mysteries of life and living. Grossinger makes great bold leaps of imaginative insight and mostly succeeds at conveying things that most others wouldn't even know how to try to say, things that most of us are only half aware lay within the range of human experience. He's bumping up again and again on the borders of unspeakable mysteries. I found a great deal to ponder here. Some of the transitions are quite jolting and some sections dealing with the Author's personal history seemed a bit out of place in the context of the other non-personal pieces. Sometimes while trying to be self deprecatory, he still seems to be projecting egotism. Sometimes the language is saying something that could be said in one sentence with 50 sentences. And some of the information is off track. I don't know exactly what to make of it as a whole, but many individual sections were striking and thought provoking.