Don Miguel Ruiz

Peter Coyote

A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

The Four Agreements

Actor Peter Coyote has always managed to embrace the times he has lived in. In the sixties this included the exhilarating highs of breaking the rules of staid, status-conscious America. It also included the material and spiritual wear that a personal and thorough research of drugs can produce. In this memoir, Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture - a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of West Coast communal movements.

A Chronicle

Sleeping Where I Fall

Peter Bebergal

The author places his youthful desire to find God within the cultural context of a search for spirituality through hallucinogens, mysticism, drugs, and popular culture and includes interviews with writers, artists, and psychologists.

A Psychedelic American Boyhood

Too Much to Dream

In a new spiritual biography, which is drawn from a line in an early Bob Dylan song, an ordained practitioner of Zen Buddhism and a politically engaged actor provides intimate portraits of the mentors who helped to shape him into the man he is today.

An Irregular Education

The Rainman's Third Cure

"The rainman gave me two cures And he said, 'Just jump right in.' The one was Texas Medicine And the other was railroad gin. And like a fool I mixed them And they strangled up my mind Now people just get uglier And I have no sense of time." ––Bob Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" The guiding metaphor in Peter Coyote's new spiritual biography is drawn from a line in an early Bob Dylan song. For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love with the competitive, status–seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman's Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, lessons from a man who literally held the power of life and death over others, to government service and international success on stage and screen. Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the 1960's counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be–bop Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised, a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated, an ex game–warden who initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in Martha Graham's company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino Cerruti who made the high–stakes world of haute monde Europe available to him. What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life–long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission–––acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to both the worlds of Love and Power's correlatives of status seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but what he discovers on the inside is actually available to all humans. In this energetic, reflective and intelligent memoir, The Rainman's Third Cure is the way out of the box. The way that works.

• Shares a series of mindfulness techniques and improv exercises with masks to suppress the ego, calm the mind, and allow spontaneous playfulness and spaciousness to arise from your deepest nature • Draws on Buddhist philosophy to describe how and why the exercises work • Woven throughout with a lighthearted parable of an overweight and out-of-work Lone Ranger and Tonto who meet Buddha and experience spiritual awakening Sharing a series of mindfulness techniques and acting exercises that show how malleable the self can be, award-winning actor, narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote reveals how to use masks, meditation, and improvisation to free yourself from fixed ideas of who you think you are and help you release your ego from constant defensive strategizing, calm the mind’s overactivity, and allow spontaneous playfulness to arise out of your deepest nature. Developed through 40 years of research and personal study, Coyote’s synthesis of mask-based improv games and Zen practices is specifically designed to create an ego-suppressed state akin to the mystical experiences of meditation or the spiritual awakenings of psychedelics. After preparatory exercises, seeing yourself in a mask will temporarily displace your familiar self and the spirit of the mask will take over. Likening the liberated state induced by mask work to “Enlightenment-lite,” Coyote draws on Buddhist philosophy to describe how and why the exercises work as well as how to make your newly awakened and confident self part of daily life. In true Zen form, woven throughout the narrative is a lighthearted parable of an out-of-work Lone Ranger and Tonto, who meet Buddha and experience spiritual awakening. Illuminating the lessons of mask work, the transformation of the Lone Ranger mirrors that of the individual pursuing this practice, revealing how you will come to realize that the world is more magical and vaster than you thought possible.

Masks, Meditation, and Improvised Play to Induce Liberated States

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet Buddha

"'Pete's first poetry collection is a knockout. It reveals the same keen intelligence and wry perspective he showed in his 2 memoirs, with an eloquent, unique style that lays bare the universal in the deeply personal. He can add gifted poet to his already impressive resume.'--Bonnie Raitt. 'Peter Coyote's poems are every bit as wonderful as his memoirs, rich and lively, sweet and perplexed, full of sorrow and laughter, love and lovers, soul and bodies, Zen and wild mother nature, truth, hope, disappointment, resurrection; ie, Life with a capital L.'--Anne Lamott"--

Peter Coyote

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