Lama Rinzen Mystery Series
About the Lama Rinzen Mystery Series
Winner! Book Fest 2018 Best Visionary Novel
Experience the world with intimacy. This is the Buddha’s teaching.
Experience the world not by knowing it and fitting it into our minds’ preconceptions, but instead by touching it with all our senses.
Our senses are the bodies’ way to discipline the mind into seeing without knowing.
The Six Realms of Buddhism embody this teaching.
The Hell Realm teaches us to walk comfortably with confusion and keep an open mind.
The Hungry Ghost Realm haunts us into understanding we do not really exist. Stop the clinging.
The Animal Realm deepens the body’s lessons as we hone our instincts.
The Human Realm elevates compassion as our greatest instinct of all.
The Realm of the Warring Titans confronts jealousy as an impediment to compassion.
The God Realm questions compassion, inviting us to not settle into as a virtue but to embrace the challenge of its confusion.
Confusion is the mystery. It’s the lesson that we exist not as any one permanent, solitary, and singular being, but as a fragment of energy interacting in a much larger world.
Each Lama Rinzen Mystery tells of the lama’s rebirth into one of these Six Realms.
Each rebirth is not the rebirth of one singular continuous entity, but of a series of actions the lama undertakes to learn.
That’s karma. The lama never escapes the consequences of his or her actions.
In each book an injustice confronts the lama. A crime that must be solved. Unriddling the crime is the lama’s path to learning the realm’s lesson. It requires keeping an open mind.
A mind without knowing is the most intimate experience.

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An Everyday Meditation #2: Thoughts Arise
During our everyday meditation, thoughts arise. These can be the seeds of insight, if only we are aware of them. Some say thoughts during meditation are impediments. This is true, they can be. Thoughts can arise either with our being aware or not being aware of them. To reconsider things, it is not the thought

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Fascism by Madeleine Albright and Thoughts about Trump’s America
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Write Like A Buddha
Writing Like a Buddha is a blog for writers. It includes thoughts, meditations and writing exercises to help authors see the world anew.
In Buddhism, every moment is a rebirth. A step outside of the normal into a burst of reawakening. We call these bardo moments—time in between past and future, between where we’ve been and where we are heading.
That is what we do as writers. Reimagine the ordinary as something new. Writing Like a Buddha is meant to help us experience the world fresh, and not as we already know it. Whether you are a poet or prose writer, a fiction or non-fiction writer, I invite you to engage in the exercises, offer comments, ask questions, and contribute ideas. Let’s create a mindful exchange of tips and practices to benefit us all.