A death on Diamond Mountain shows the danger of religious fanaticism

A friend gave me Scott Carney’s book, The Enlightenment Trap: Obsession, Madness and Death on Diamond Mountain. My previous posts about the book are here, here, here, and here.

The book is interesting, but if it wasn’t a gift, I probably wouldn’t have read it. Once I’d started it, I wanted to see what the death on Diamond Mountain was all about, since that is described in a final chapter.

Lama Christie McNally and Ian Thorson were heavily involved with Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University — a strange blend of Tibetan Buddhism and Roach’s own beliefs.

McNally was involved romantically with Roach, if that’s the right word for their relationship, until they had a falling-out. She then had a close relationship with Thorson which centered on their quest for spiritual development through some decidedly unorthodox methods. Eventually they were married.

In the “Death on a Mountainside” chapter, Carney describes how McNally and Thorson found a cave high up on the Diamond Mountain property where Roach had established a meditation center.

The cave was just tall enough for Ian to extend his full six-foot, one-inch frame. There was room for them to drag a futon inside and create a habitable, if cramped, living space. They found a second small cleft in the rock, hidden behind a scraggy live oak about fifty feet below. They used it to store extra supplies. All told, they believed it was a suitable spot for a plan that was as elegant as it was dangerous. They would occupy the cave until they achieved enlightenment.

Previously, McNally had stabbed Thorson. In the cave, she wrote about this, wanting to explain to her followers that the stabbing was a spiritual event.

My Love was learning how to deal with being in a relationship with someone who had a lot more power than him. At the beginning it was difficult, and he broke down on occasion. It was all divine play to me, really, but these breakdowns were devastating for my poor husband. Because after all, I am also his Lama. So we prayed to everyone we could think of for help, including Kali. [Hindu goddess of time, death, and destruction]

Kali, she implied, answered their prayers. They weren’t engaged in combat; rather, the stabbing was a final act of catharsis that expunged the remnants of Ian’s violent nature. The violence was actually a great miracle. His karma ripened as the goddess Kali, in the guise of Christie, stabbed him three times. He emerged a better and more peaceful person.

The sacrifice of his body was an indication of his total surrender to his lama’s authority. It was after the event that Christie learned to see Ian as her own divine teacher.

In the cave, Christie McNally fell ill. She was too sick to get up from the futon. But this too was viewed through a twisted spiritual lens.

Though Akasha had given them a water filter for this sort of emergency, the couple refused to use it. After all, water was the stuff of life, and purifying the water with their minds — even in the face of Christie’s sickness — seemed well within their capabilities. Whether it was dysentery, an amoeba, or some other bug, the sickness took on a significance beyond the mundane… It was her karma to be sick, and his to bring her back.

McNally did recover. But then Ian Thorson felt the same symptoms she had, which Carney ascribes to dehydration.

On the twentieth, Ian was pale and worn. His parched lips cracked, and dry bits of skin flaked off. It was frustrating, and Ian had no one else to blame for his predicament but himself. Sickness was a symbol of his own failure, and he knew that the only way to recover was to overcome whatever karma had caused the illness.

…It wasn’t his fault that nothing made sense anymore. The laws of karma are never straightforward. Christie knew that the cause of illness isn’t ever linear. Bacteria might deliver a fever, but the set of conditions that allowed the bugs to colonize his body descended from his earlier deeds. Karmic sickness was as dangerous to their mission as bodily disease. In their cosmology, sickness is not always a bad thing. Karmic seeds can ripen only once, so every pain that Ian suffered helped purify negative things in his past.

They had an electronic device used by backpackers and others who need a way to contact authorities if they need help. But McNally didn’t use it.

When he fell unconscious, the responsibility to bring her husband back to health rested solely on Christie’s shoulders. Her choice was to use the SPOT beacon and accept that fate was out of their control, or help purify her husband’s karma and pull the sickness out by the root.

…Dysentery was an unforgiving mistress; over the course of two long and brutal days, the bacteria ripped its own path through Ian’s digestive system. The stench of filth must have filled up the dank cave. His physical resources depleted, he hovered on the verge of life and death.

On the morning of April 22, 2012, Ian did not wake up. Christie’s prayers hadn’t worked, and consequences pierced her reality. She could still make out the slow rattle of his breathing and worried that perhaps now he was beyond her powers. At six a.m. she activated the SPOT beacon and sent out a prerecorded message that indicated her GPS coordinates to her friends and family. The signal pinged a satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the earth and ricocheted it down to an emergency service in Houston.

…McNally screamed at the rescuers to save him, even though his corpse was all that was left. In the sheriff’s report, a ranger recorded her saying, “T thought they could bring him back.” McNally did not want to be separated from his body, and fought the police and mortician with fists and tears when they tried to take it into custody.

An autopsy eventually attributed Thorson’s death to dehydration. His corpse weighted only one hundred pounds.

Religious fanaticism can be dangerous to your physical and mental health, that’s for sure. Sadly, Thorson and McNally realized this too late.