The Enlightenment Trap: Obsession, Madness and Death on Diamond Mountain

"A powerful investigation into the appeal - and the danger - of enlightenment" The Pacific Standard

In 2012, 38-year-old Ian Thorson's search for spiritual transcendence ended in tragedy on a remote Arizona mountaintop. His wife, a woman anointed as a goddess by an eccentric Buddhist community, held him in her arms as he slowly died from dehydration and dysentery. For Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, Thorson's death was just the most recent iter...