In 2012, Ian Thorson was found dead in a cave in Arizona. He and his wife had been kicked out of a silent Buddhist retreat that was supposed to last three years, but they decided to finish out the time alone in the desert and that extreme quest for spiritual enlightenment eventually killed him.

Scott Carney tells that story in his new book, A Death on Diamond Mountain. Carney tells NPR's Rachel Martin that he was drawn to Ian Thorson's story because it felt eerily familiar. Back in 2006, he was leading a program for American students in India. They learned about Buddhism, practiced meditation, and one day, they undertook a particularly dark exercise: It involved imagining themselves as decaying corpses.

Afterwards, one of his brightest students told him it was the most profound experience of her life. That night, she described herself in her journal as a "bodhisattva," just before jumping to her death from the roof of the retreat center. "And this, to me, was this horrifying experience," Carney says. "How could something that is so wonderful, how could go so terribly wrong? I spent the next six years collecting journals of other people who'd had similar experiences. And then when I found out about Ian Thorson's death in 2012, I knew that I wanted to tell the story of spiritual sickness through his eyes."

On Ian Thorson

He was this really good-looking, athletic Stanford graduate and this is when the economy was booming, and almost everyone who went there had the immediate option to get a high-paying job, maybe start a company and get rich. Ian wasn't like that. He wanted to answer the big questions of life, why are we here, and he traveled the world. He went to Turkey, and then on to India and Tibet, and he found this man named Geshe Michael Roach, who was an up and coming Buddhist teacher and an American. And the great thing about Michael Roach was that he could explain the complex Buddhist ideas in just plain English.

On the evolution of Michael Roach

Michael Roach is a very controversial figure in Tibetan Buddhism ... he's an American who, in the early '90s and late 1980s, his teacher told him to go work in the diamond industry in New York City, and use the money he made buying and selling diamonds to fund the monastery. It's a very weird Buddhist lesson, but a diamond is an important symbol in Tibetan Buddhism.

And this is in some ways where he finds the break with Tibetan Buddhism. He believes in something where the world as we all see it, he teaches is an illusion, and that the world as it really exists in an ultimate reality is what you create. It's a manifestation of your own mind. And if you can just change the way you perceive something, the material world will change. And he has several books some of them were bestsellers teaching people that they could get rich if they had great karma.

On how Thorson was drawn to Roach

Michael Roach promised to teach tantra, and tantra is how you can achieve enlightenment in this lifetime. And Ian, more than anything else, wanted to grasp the fundamental clockwork of the universe and Michael Roach said he held the keys to that.

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