The Buddhist on Death Row

The Buddhist on Death Row
Author: David Sheff
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0008395454

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, an extraordinary story of redemption in the darkest of places.

Yours for Eternity

Yours for Eternity
Author: Damien Echols
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101634839

New York Times bestselling author Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis reveal their intimate and affecting letters, written while Echols was wrongfully imprisoned on death row. An explosive bestseller, Life After Death turned a national spotlight on Damien Echols, who was just eighteen when he was wrongly condemned to death. But one of the most remarkable parts of his story still remained untold. After seeing a documentary about the “West Memphis Three,” Lorri Davis—a New Yorkbased landscape architect—wrote him a letter, beginning a thirteen-year correspondence that witnessed their marriage while Echols was still on death row and culminated in Echols’ release in 2011. Sharing their private letters, Yours for Eternity is a must-read for the legions who followed the case as well as anyone who appreciates an extraordinary love story.

High Magick

High Magick
Author: Damien Echols
Publisher: Sounds True
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1683641353

“Magick is not a path for followers; it is a path for questioners, seekers, and anyone who has trouble settling for dogma and pre-formulated answers. Magick is for those who feel the desire to peel away the surface of reality and see what lies beneath. Like various persecuted forms of mysticism, magick promotes direct contact with the source of creation.” —Damien Echols Discover a Powerful Practice for Transforming Yourself and Your Reality At age 18, Damien Echols was sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. “I spent my years in prison training to be a true magician,” he recalls. “I used magick—the practice of reshaping reality through our intention and will—to stave off incredible pain, despair, and isolation. But the most amazing feat of all that practice and study was to manifest my freedom.” With High Magick, this bestselling author shares his first teaching book on the powerful spiritual techniques that helped him survive and transcend his ordeal on death row. Though our culture has consigned “magic” to fiction, stage illusions, or superstitions about dark practices, the magick Damien learned is an ancient Western tradition equal the Eastern practices of Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga in its wisdom and transformative power. Here he brings you an engaging and highly accessible guide for bringing magick into your own life, including: • What is High Magick? Damien clears away the stigma and reveals the history and core teachings of this extraordinary art. • The Four-Fold Breath—a foundational meditation practice to train your mind and body to channel subtle energies. • The Middle Pillar—how to bring divine energy into the central channel of your body for empowerment and healing. • The Qabalistic Cross—a centering technique to help you stay balanced and protected regardless of circumstances. • The Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram—powerful practices for banishing negative energies and invoking energy to manifest your goals. • Working with angelic beings and other spiritual allies to support your practice. • Creating thoughtforms to assist you in your ongoing magickal development. • Guidance for overcoming your doubts, enhancing your visualization skills, creating talismans, practicing magick ethically, and much more. “Magick is a journey,” writes Damien. “It’s a continuously unfolding path that has no end. You can study and practice magick for the rest of your life and you will still never learn everything that it has to teach you.” If you’re ready to discover your untapped potential for co-creating your reality with the energy of the divine, then join this extraordinary teacher to begin your training in High Magick.

Karma and Punishment

Karma and Punishment
Author: Adam J. Lyons
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021
Genre: Capital punishment
ISBN: 9780674260153

A groundbreaking study of prison religion, Karma and Punishment introduces a form of chaplaincy rooted in the Buddhist concept of doctrinal admonition. Through research and fieldwork, Adam Lyons uncovers a dimension of Buddhist modernism that developed as Japan's religious organizations carved out a niche as defenders of society by fighting crime.

The Wheel of Death

The Wheel of Death
Author: Philip Kapleau
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1135029547

Originally published in 1972, this anthology examines death through the eyes of great Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu and Western masters. Instructions and specific rites are set forth to enable people to guide the mind of the dying through death and the Intermediate stage which follows. The sections of Rebirth and Karma deal succinctly with these complex and often mis-understood doctrines.

The Enchanted

The Enchanted
Author: Rene Denfeld
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2014-03-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062285521

“The Enchanted wrapped its beautiful and terrible fingers around me from the first page and refused to let go after the last. A wondrous book that finds transcendence in the most unlikely of places. . . . So dark yet so exquisite.” — Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus An astonishing and redemptive novel for readers of Alice Sebold and Toni Morrison, told from the point of view of a convict whose magical interpretations of prison life allow him to find absolute joy while isolated from the rest of humanity and a female investigator who experiences her own personal salvation in her work as a death penalty investigator. This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it but I do. The enchanted place is a high security prison and is relayed through the eyes of an inmate on death row who escapes his surroundings by immersing himself in books, and by re-imagining the world that surrounds him. Instead of focusing on the cloudy medical vines that snake across the floor, empty and waiting for the warden’s finger to press the red buttons, our narrator sees golden horses as they run deep under the earth, heat flowing like molten metal from their backs. A woman and fallen priest haunt the prison halls--an unnamed female investigator only known as the Lady who is known for discovering information relating to soon-to-be executed inmates’ backgrounds that can be used to overturn their sentences. She is put on the case of a man named York and as she digs into his past, the experience brings up ghosts of her own and threatens to destroy everything that she has come to know about the enchanted place. The Enchanted is a magical novel about redemption, the humanity that can lie within what is monstrous, and the human capacity to transcend and survive.

A Death on Diamond Mountain

A Death on Diamond Mountain
Author: Scott Carney
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-03-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 069818629X

An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.

Grist for the Mill

Grist for the Mill
Author: Ram Dass
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2014-02-11
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 0062235923

From the bestselling author of Be Here Now. “A challenging and enlightening collection of speeches and lectures by Ram Dass on his spiritual journey.” —Spirituality & Practice From Ram Dass, one of America’s most beloved spiritual figures and bestselling author of Be Here Now and Be Love Now, comes this timeless classic about the experience of being and the risks and rewards of our spiritual path. Originally published in 1976, Grist for the Mill offers a deep spiritual journey of self-discovery, and a universal understanding of what it means to “be” and to grow as human beings. The book is fully revised with a new introduction. As Ram Dass puts it, “When the faith is strong enough it is sufficient just to be. It’s a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It’s a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.” Praise for Ram Dass “One of our greatest teachers.” —Deepak Chopra “There’s no way to overestimate the role of Ram Dass.” —Marianne Willliamson “May Ram Dass inspire others to find their own path of true love, compassion, and joyful service.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

The Buddha in Jail

The Buddha in Jail
Author: Cuong Lu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781949017137

52 vignettes contain stories and teachings about Cuong Lu's six years as a prison chaplain in the Netherlands.

Southland

Southland
Author: Nina Revoyr
Publisher: Akashic Books
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2003-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1936070480

Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. —Winner of a 2004 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Award in Literature —Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award —Nominated for an Edgar Award The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel . . . But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page. —Los Angeles Times Jackie Ishida’s grandfather had a store in Watts where four boys were killed during the riots in 1965, a mystery she attempts to solve. —New York Times Book Review, included in “Where Noir Lives in the City of Angels” Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four black teenagers were killed in the store he ran during the Watts Riots of 1965—and that the murders were never solved or reported. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, she tries to piece together the story of the boys’ deaths. In the process, Jackie unearths the long-held secrets of her family’s history—and her own. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.