JOSEPH LYONS, 1945-2025

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.

So he fell from a lively, productive, respected, and artistic work life to the level of a prisoner, but if there’s any value to such a thing, it will make you face yourself and deal with things you should have worked through a long time before.

We supported his practice, and he took refuge vows in a ceremony we held there with (I believe) Judith Simmer-Brown. He got the name Changchup Choga, “Enlightenment Dharma Joy.” When he got moved around the system, I for a time corresponded with him, and then he showed back up again in the Fremont group and became one of its mainstays. He was able to teach in the education programs in prison and even led the inmate choir at Fremont. Finally, about 5-6 years ago, he was released, and I stayed in touch with him while he relocated to Colorado Springs.

He had always wanted a spiritual teacher, and looking at his limited circumstances for money and travel, and his now advancing age, I recommended Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, who lives and teaches in Colorado. Joseph was able to get online and do their initial year of preliminary courses just as COVID hit. He then went through it all again, but he simply lost any easy ability to travel, and there was no meeting with Rinpoche’s sangha until COVID had receded.

I got permission for Joseph to come and receive that summer’s empowerment at Phuntsok Choling in Ward, what proved to be a very elaborate and thorough Padmasambhava abhisheka. I went down to Colorado Springs, picked him up, and brought him up into the mountains. We got terribly lost and also nearly killed by a speeding car that just barely missed us, but somehow survived it all unscratched, and got there after the empowerment had begun. Fortunately, they let us in, and Joseph got to receive the guru’s blessings.

Later in the afternoon, he met the guru personally in a warm and lovely moment with Kongtrul Rinpoche. That’s all we could manage–that one day–but a day of consequence for Joseph. He took on a Padmasambhava guru yoga practice, in addition to the Vajrasattva and Medicine Buddha sadhanas he did daily without fail, ones he had found in books while in prison.

Unfortunately, over the last three years, Joseph got hit with a long series of illnesses that included Parkinson’s, as well as eye cataracts, and a crippling sequence of strokes that inhibited his ability to read and made movement and speaking difficult. He went through all these hardships with as much cheerfulness as you could expect anyone to have, but he had become over the last months bed-ridden and finally died.

I went to the halfway house where he’d been living. He was a good friend to the people there, and I was able to do a Buddhist funeral ceremony for him. People expressed their loss and how they will miss him. He managed to be a jolly spirit and did turn all his many difficult experiences into spiritual path, while making contact with the guru and receiving blessings despite many obstacles. He was a person who went through some crushing difficulties, a long prison sentence, hard self-examination, and battering illness, but kept his sense of humor and sense of path through it all and made his suffering into awakening.