If you’re buried deep in the dungeon of the American prison system, trying to understand how you got there, you can certainly analyze whatever the social system has stacked against you, against your class or race. You can examine what your neighborhood or school was like. You can look at what took place in your family system that predisposed you to something like drugs and violence. There could be a lot of elements in what conditioned how you acted and what set you up to take this fall. However true all that stuff may be, however much all these things could have shaped you, you are in the end stuck with your own actions. Where did your actions begin? They began in your mind.
It has gotten harder to do this job (bringing dharma into prisons) thanks to the ever more complicated restrictions prison systems are putting on mail. Arkansas, for instance, now digitizes all incoming mail at a center in Florida and has apparently banned books and magazines entirely. Texas, probably due to a heavy religious presence in the state, doesn’t ban our material as long as it’s religious. We can send that in directly.
It’s hard to get a purchase on the reality of nearly two million people incarcerated in the U.S. on any given day of the year. It’s an American reality, and if it’s got two million people directly in its grip, how many more people become affected when their brother or father or son (it’s mostly males), their friend or cousin or coworker gets hauled off. There’s a ripple effect on other people that’s got to far surpass two million.
The Buddhist tradition gets regarded as pacifistic. It definitely emphasizes not creating harm–not resorting to aggression in speech or physical violence. But anyone who’s spent real time on the meditation seat knows that aggression often shadows thoughts in some form or another. Over the decades you can see what a refined game it is. Even pretty subtle thoughts can arise purely for the sake of dodging your direct experience and any raw feeling that goes with it. There’s a fundamental aggression in discursive thought habituated to rejecting your own naked experience, and that tendency goes deep.
I remember as a teenager plucking a book off the rack–-something you saw everywhere back in the 70s, almost as ubiquitous as fat James Michener novels. It was called The Prophet. I opened it randomly and felt struck in the face by what it said:
