Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche & Joseph Lyons, Phuntsok Choling, Ward, Colorado
Recently a long-time student of the Mindfulness Peace Project died in his bed in Colorado Springs. Our relationship with him went back 20 or more years when he first showed up in our Buddhist group at Fremont Correctional Facility.
He had an interest in Buddhism and aspiration toward it for much of his adult life, which was not an ordinary one compared to most of us. He got a Julliard musical education in the early 1960s, as well as a degree in music theory from Queens College in New York. His trajectory landed him in conductor-training, and he eventually conducted many orchestras and choirs, including a symphony performing at Carnegie Hall.
The 60s revolution prompted him to walk away from the symphony world just as he had begun to establish himself as a director of note. Instead he took up synthesizers and keyboards of various sorts, training himself in their technology of the time, and performing concerts as “Dr. Space,” in an exploratory and imaginative mode.
This also merged him into computer programming, and eventually he decided to focus on making languages computers could use for music, which led to establishing some computer companies and brought him to Silicon Valley for a time in the 70s. He even worked at Esalen creating multi-media performances with children.
Having moved to Colorado, he became very involved local schools and public projects for the arts that earned him awards. He also faltered into a sex offense that got him 24 years in prison, where we met him.
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: