Omid Mazdiyasni, PhD

A book by Omid Mazdiyasni, PhD

One Clear Minute

Zoroastrian Wisdom for Renewing an Ordinary Life

Ancient wisdom, practiced one ordinary minute at a time.

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Cover of One Clear Minute: Zoroastrian Wisdom for Renewing an Ordinary Life by Omid Mazdiyasni, PhD

The Book

Most days do not offer a retreat. They offer a minute.

Waiting for coffee. Sitting in the car before you go in. Standing at the sink with the water running. One Clear Minute is about what can happen there. Drawing on the Gathas of Zarathushtra and the old Zoroastrian conviction that the world is renewed by ordinary choices, it sets that tradition beside the plain work of a modern life: attention, honest speech, good thought carried through into good action. It asks for no retreat and no prior belief. It asks for a minute, taken clearly — and then, tomorrow, another one.

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Inside the Book

  • Attention as a craft

    Attention behaves less like a mood than like a lens. It can be cleaned, aimed, and kept in repair.

  • Good thoughts, good words, good deeds

    The oldest Zoroastrian formula read as a working sequence rather than a slogan — and what it asks of an ordinary Tuesday.

  • Renewal, daily

    Making the world fresh is not one distant event. It is a small, repeated choice, available now.

  • Truth and honest speech

    Asha — truth, order, the way things actually are — begins with saying what is so, first to yourself.

  • The minute you already have

    Practice built for a life with a commute, a job, and other people in it. No retreat required.

  • Coming back

    The point is not staying clear. The point is noticing you have drifted, and returning without drama.

Omid Mazdiyasni

The Author

Omid Mazdiyasni, PhD, is a civil engineer who returned to the Zoroastrian tradition of his childhood in his thirties, by way of meditation, after years as an atheist. He has spent his career building things that have to hold — roads, water systems, public infrastructure — with more than a hundred million dollars of construction under his management.

He holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Irvine, has more than thirty-five peer-reviewed publications, lectures part-time at Cal Poly Pomona, and co-founded an AI company that builds tools for public agencies and utilities. He is a single father of three in Orange County, California. He cuts reed pens and practices Persian calligraphy, badly and happily. His writing comes from that intersection: engineering precision, spiritual practice, and the ongoing work of making this existence fresh.

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  3. Say hello

    A short daily practice, and the best way to reach me. Send a message on Instagram.

    @Zoroastrian.Daily on Instagram