I don’t think I would have ever volunteered to go into a prison purely on my own, but I went in the first time under the auspices of my school, Naropa University, to teach creative writing. I filled out an application, I think, but the professor, Mary Stewart Kean, did the rest—getting us cleared, getting our schedule and so on set up, transporting us down there. We went into Colorado Territorial, the oldest prison in the state, that still has block, razor-wire topped walls with guard towers.
That’s maybe enough for the average person who has no reason to see what it’s like inside and doesn’t want to know, much less care about the people housed there.
And who are those people, other than felons: they robbed convenience stores, they got into arguments and shot people, they sold fentanyl, they sexually assaulted children, on and on. It’s a very long, very tawdry list.
If you tell someone you’re going into a prison to teach meditation, one possible negative reaction is that you’re “making criminals feel better.” They did something evil and deserve to be punished. Why do they get to feel better?
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:
