Anyone ever hear of the band "Hungry Ghosts"

[bif]

They're really slow and moody. A bit like some of Eno's Ambient albums. Very cool if you're into that sort of stuff.

[grannylib]

1. No but my daughter is thinking of naming her band Ghost of French Toast

2. great name for a band

Did you know the hungry ghost realm is one of the six bardos in Tibetan Buddhism?

"One of the main practices where O.M.P.H. is used involves the 6 realms of birth: hells, the realm of hungry ghosts, the animal realm, the human realm, the fighting spirits, and the heavens.
Whether we actually can be reincarnated as a ghost or animal etc is beside the point. This is a set of symbols used here for certain states of mind.


Hell is the condition of despair or of blaming others. While you are doing this, you are stuck. You will not be able to see the things you could do to get out of the problems you are having.

The Pretas, or hungry ghosts, are people who keep grasping for things they can?t ever get. People used to trap monkeys by making a small hole in a coconut and putting some food inside. The monkey would get his hand in then grab the food, and his fist was too big to pull out, but he would not let go of the food. Another example is Wile E. Coyote. If he took half the money he spent at Ajax for jet roller scates and such, and went to Col. Sanders' instead.....

[Dogmudgeon]

4. My own band's name ...

... or at least one of my bands' -- after rejecting "Hungry Ghosts" -- was "The Wish Fulfilling Cows".

I was into the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time. It's actually quite a "cool" book, as holy books go.

By the way, the original English translator, W.Y.Evans-Wentz, deliberately changed the Tibetan color codes to match those in Western and Theosophic occultism then in vogue. Chogyam Trungpa gives a correction in his own translation, which is linguistically more accurate, but less lyrical than WYE-W's.

--bkl

5. I went to Naropa

so I'm familiar with Trungpa. Haven't read his translation of Book of the Dead, but his book Transcending Madness has serious discussion of the hungry ghost realm.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Trungpa's works

I have been sadly negligent in my reading of Trungpa; when I read Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, it came close to being a "diamond thunderbolt" experience. I will have to put him back on the reading list for when I have an income again.

His translation of Book of the Dead (he translated it from spoken Tibetan as "Bardo Thotrol") was much clearer reading, but lacked a lot of Evans-Wentz' poeticism. For instance, "O Nobly Born" (E-W) becomes "Son of Noble Family" (T).

I would put E.J.Gold's version (The American Book of the Dead) between the two in readability, but I would defer to a student of Tibetan Buddhism and folklore about the material.

"Hungry Ghost" is one of those metaphors I'd like to hear more often in English-speaking cultures. It sums up my own experience of affluence and poverty very well.

--bkl

7. great term -- diamond thunderbolt

I was going to say in previous post that Transcending Madness is one of those books you have to be careful reading if you're not prepared, but I couldn't think how to phrase it. "Diamond thunderbolt" hits it exactly. It's not "safe" Buddhism by any means. Sounds like you know what I mean.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. Truth is never safe

The whole history of human spiritual quest bears this out.

Buddhists are regularly portrayed in America as being "drunk on meditation," and Ashoka was one of the most prolific warriors in ancient Asia. Christians come in 39 varieties of lunatic. Moslems split into two warring camps of fanatics on the death of Muhammed and have been fighting ever since. And the sincere spiritual pilgrims are scorned in every era, although it's our good luck that in the West in this day and age, the scorn is mainly limited to editorial columns, skeptics' web pages and John Stossel.

I've heard that Trungpa himself had a lot of problems in life -- alcohol, a tumultuous family life, being caught between cultures. I'm surprised that as many Tibetans, both those living under Chinese control and those who left with the Dalai Lama in the 50s, have done as well as they have. The "School of Hard Knocks" seems to exist in the non-physical world as well.

--bkl

[Westegg]

3. Anything like the Famished Phantoms, out of Troy, NY?

...Just kidding.

[bif]

9. Wow! These guys must be obscure

If nobody here has heard of tthem.