[Buddha-l] Query on Non-Local Consciousness

[curt]

Cool! Everything I've ever heard about him (Culianu) - and what I've 
read by him - indicates that he was a fascinating character, and 
apparently a very good teacher. Are you familiar with the book about his 
murder - "Eros, Magic and the Murder of Professor Culianu"? There is a 
fascinating, and rather disturbing, article by the books author here:
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9209/culianu.html

It starts out :
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ON THE LAST MORNING OF HIS LIFE, a charismatic University of Chicago 
Divinity School professor named Ioan Culianu taught a class on 
gnosticism, the study of secret mystic sects. One of his graduate 
students, Alexander Arguelles, was presenting a paper to the faculty for 
the first time that day. "I was nervous. He said, it's nothing to fear, 
just a rite of passage," Arguelles recounts. "He patted me on the back 
and smiled." Arguelles stops. "I'Il never forget that smile."

Two hours later Culianu was dead of a single .25-caliber bullet wound to 
the back of the head. His execution-style murder in a campus bathroom 
stunned the school, terrified students, and stumped the Chicago police 
and the FBI. Now, after sixteen months, the crime looks more and more 
like what Culianu's friends suspected it was all along: the first 
political assassination of a professor on American soil.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of the things I really like about Culianu's writing is he really 
zeros in on fundamental questions - and then he zooms back out and tries 
to place those fundamental questions in the broadest possible 
perspective. It can be positively vertigo inducing! I think that every 
scholar of any religion could benefit from the roller coaster ride that 
he provides in "Out of this World".

- Curt

Franz Metcalf wrote:
> Curt,
>
> Thanks for the reminder of Ioan's work. I'll look back into it.
>
> Incidentally, I knew Ioan. He was a young, brilliant, and genuinely 
> fun junior professor at the Divinity School at the University of 
> Chicago when I was there. While the facts, last I heard, are not 
> completely known, he is likely the only academic ever to be 
> assassinated for his politics in the United States. Happened right in 
> Swift Hall on an otherwise lovely Spring day. Swift Hall is almost all 
> gray stone, creamy white paint, and gothic wood paneling, but for 
> weeks students placed the most colorful flowers in the hall outside 
> his office door.
>
> I hope that last detail counts as Buddhist content.
>
> Franz
>
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