Book Club
Wisdom Is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life by Robert Thurman

Of course, everyone makes a fuss about finding “happiness” or “joy,” but few make a virtue out of “fun.” ~ Robert Thurman, Wisdom Is Bliss  

Bob Thurman shows us how we can lead a fun and fulfilling life of purpose and meaning that’s never boring. How is that possible? Because the Buddha-scientist discovered that “reality itself is bliss.” 

……I aim to show you how you can come to understand that reality is fun—the playful joy of your life when you’re in touch with your own deepest reality. That understanding will enable you to feel it through and through, in your mind, and in your flesh and in your bones. It will lead you step-by-step to discover what the Buddha discovered—that there is an ultimate reality, a  reliable reality, a durable reality, a diamond-like reality, indestructible. Engaging in that reality is fun, even super-fun, and you can find it yourself. You know it, can feel it, can be it. And the neat thing is that you can be confident you will find it, because you are it, you are in it, as it,  already. In fact, there is no other way to reach your super-fun buddha-nature as something else: you have to see-it-know-it-feel-it-be-it as you, yourself, must have always been, in reality.

And what about the Four Friendly Fun Facts that the Buddha-scientist discovered?  

….the four noble truths are not a religious credo or prescription for conversion but a clear-cut psychotherapeutic protocol for pragmatic, psychosomatic therapy, designed to lead people out of suffering to enjoy the nirvanic reality of the world. 

Preeminent scholar Robert Thurman, in a distillation of decades of research, writing and lived experience, has finally and officially redeemed the scientific education of the Buddha from its rigid classification as religion. 

Please join us to explore this concise presentation of the super education that “should be the core curriculum of all our liberal educating universities, 100 percent.”

Reading Schedule

Week 1: 

The Buddha Path xi-14

Week 2: 

SCIENCE: Realistic View, Realistic Motivation 15-52

Week 3: 

ETHICS: Realistic Speech, Realistic Evolutionary Action 53-92

Week 4: 

ETHICS: Realistic Livelihood, Realistic Creative Effort 93-129

Week 5: 

MENTAL: Realistic Mindfulness, Realistic Samadhi 131-179

Week 6: 

Consolation Prize: 181-193

Additional Materials

Please purchase the book Wisdom Is Bliss by Robert Thurman, before the course begins, and  complete the Week 1 reading prior to our first online meeting. 

Andrew Harvey interviews Bob Thurman about his latest book, Wisdom Is Bliss

Robert Thurman, Wisdom Is Bliss – Destination Unlimited with Victor

About the Facilitator

Janna Weiss currently practices acupuncture and teaches mind science in New York City. She holds a PhD from the University of Texas Austin in Biological Sciences – Botany (ethnobotany). Janna is also a human rights activist and blogger, for peace, for Tibet, and for the rights of people with developmental and psychosocial disabilities, or those perceived to be so. Janna began studying Tibetan Buddhism with Dharma Friends of Israel in 2005.