Dear Family,
In our last newsletter, I wrote about “finding the Kingdom of Heaven in profoundly negative times.” We received a lot of response about that article, but most of it seemed to be agreeing with me about the “negative times,” which was only half the topic. The part about “finding the Kingdom of Heaven” was not just a little fairy tale thrown in to make the reader feel better. It’s really the only thing that can put everything else into proper perspective. The whole point of our lives – and I really mean the whole point, the only point – is to touch the Divine Reality, whatever we may wish to call the Ultimate Truth, Ultimate Intelligence, Ultimate Love, that exists within, around, above, below, and throughout everything else. We can touch It. We can know It directly.
This is not just sweet mystical poetry. It is the only true success that is possible in life. Everything else is vulnerable to hurricanes and earthquakes and politics, or to betrayal and greed and jealousy and decay and corruption and loss. Everything else gets ripped away from us in the end – even our own sight and hearing and the ability to walk, talk, or think clearly. Nothing is complete and lasting, nothing is final, except the transcendent reality that most of us call God.
A prisoner in Corcoran wrote me recently that his life sucks. I wrote him back, “everyone’s life sucks!” The key is learning the Mystic’s Way to move through this world where life generally sucks, learning how to “suffer gracefully,” how to groan good-naturedly like you do when a friend tells you a really bad joke that ends with a great punchline. That’s life on Earth: A bad joke that has a GREAT punchline.
What do I mean by the “bad joke?” Well, there’s cartoonist Gahan Wilson’s classic remark, “Life essentially doesn’t work; that’s why it’s the basis of endless humor.” Or the fact that cooked carrots are better for us than chocolate. Or the old German saying, “Too soon old, too late smart.” Or my brother’s saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Or “nice guys finish last.” Or why the girl you’re in love with says “I just want to be friends.” Or why we lock children up in classrooms day after day and then we complain that they don’t feel a connection to Mother Nature.
Countless ironies could be written to illustrate why it’s accurate to call life a bad joke. Not just the cute stuff, either. Racism and poverty and injustice and fear, children dying, millions starving, all of it – a joke often not funny at all, a joke not in good taste. For countless millions of people, a sick joke, a cruel joke. The joke is Jesus up on the cross in what seems to be total failure, misery, broken idealism, shattered hopes. And then – The Punchline: He comes back three days later and calmly says “Even death is not final in my Father’s Kingdom.” Not death, or blindness or imprisonment or capital punishment or any of the rest. Jesus really did die on that cross. Yet that death wasn’t lasting. Nothing lasts except His Father’s Kingdom.
So what’s the deal about this Great Punchline? Well, the Ultimate Goodness, the Divine Love, that exists within, beyond, above, below and throughout everything else, is SO good, SO wonderful, SO impossibly joyful, that by comparison, even the worst, most horrible suffering we can imagine seems small, trivial. In his book The Great Divorce (the separation between Heaven & Earth), C.S. Lewis uses the imagery of size to make this point.
Standing on the ground of Heaven, he shows a newly arrived soul a tiny crack in the ground near their feet, and says that all of Earth and Hell, all negativity and suffering and problems and ambitions and limitations, all our wars and famines – everything in the world of time and humanity – exists in that tiny little crack in the ground. Life in this tiny crack is compressed and stifling. The ground of Heaven is expansive and unlimited. The greatest joy or worst sorrow in worldly life only takes place in that tiny little crack in the ground of Heaven. Even the death of a newborn baby, the execution of an innocent man, the starvation of millions of people – these things are profoundly negative in that little crack, but that doesn’t make them any bigger. They are part of the compressed world; they are contained entirely in that world. In that crack, we cannot even conceive of the vastness of the Divine Goodness, the Divine Joy.
One moment’s experience of that vastness is millions of times more positive than the negative on Earth is negative! It’s like the size of a planet to the size of a pea. It’s not like a “balance” to it or anything like that. What’s positive is infinite and unceasing, and what’s negative is compressed and constantly changing. Goodness is an enormous mountain, and evil is no more than an annoying mosquito with a life span of a few hours.
That’s why, when some of us directly experience that mountain, or “Promised Land,” as Dr. Martin Luther King called it, there is nothing – NOTHING – in the tiny world of the mosquito that ever holds much fear for us again. Dr. King knew he was going to be assassinated, and it didn’t change his mission at all, because even assassination is trivial after seeing what he saw. Once we have seen the Larger Reality, it is SO much larger than the compressed world of all our hopes and fears, it holds no power over us anymore. Pontius Pilate screams at Jesus, “Don’t you know I can crucify you or set you free??,” and Jesus replies calmly, “You have no power over me at all.”
Don’t you want that to be true for you?
And so He gives us instruction: Don’t focus all your time and energy, hopes and dreams, on the world that does not last. Focus instead on what does last. It may be very frustrating to want to touch that Divine Reality when it just doesn’t seem to be happening. For some reason, that’s part of the bad joke – God doesn’t necessarily reveal Himself the moment we say “Okay, I’m ready!” So when our patience wears thin, whether that takes a day or fifty years, we tend to give up and go back to focusing our main energies on the stuff that does not last. We think, “I’m just going to be a realist from now on! Enough of all this spiritual crap. It doesn’t work!”
But is it realistic to look for our keys under the streetlamp because it’s brighter there than in the dark alley where we actually dropped them? Dark or not, even if it takes all night, the alley is the only place we have a chance of finding the keys. It doesn’t matter how light the street is under that lamp, they will not be found where they do not exist. Our joy, our peace, will not be found in the mundane world even if we become the wealthiest or most powerful person in the world, or head of the world’s largest charity, or the new Gandhi who brings peace to the Middle East. The eternal will not be found in the mundane. The absolute will not be found in the relative.
So I certainly did not intend for the last newsletter to simply lay out all the misery, point out how the world is falling apart at the seams, and leave it at that. There is a Treasure awaiting each and every one of us, closer than our own breath. We’re getting sick and tired of the Bad Joke within and around us, but it is vitally important not to lose faith in the Great Punchline. We have an opportunity to live in this world but not of it, as Jesus advised. We have an opportunity to respect and deal responsibly with the problems and limitations of this worldly life, without being run into the ground by them. And that’s the only value of separating “worldly” and “Divine,” or as Jesus put it, “Mammon” and “God.”
There is a point when we cease to see or talk about “two worlds” at all. Remember, Jesus said “When thine eye be single, thy body will be full of Light.” When we awaken fully to the Big Truth, there are not two worlds at all; there is Spirit alone, no second thing. The mundane world is realized as a mysterious, shifting embodiment of the Divine. In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis points out that once we arrive in Heaven, we look back at our lives and see that we were never anywhere other than Heaven. The whole thing – our tragedies, betrayals, depression, suffering – was all like a mosquito bite in the beautiful realm of God. Not just the future, but even our history changes when our vision clears and we see what life has really been about.
We experience this in little ways all the time. You have a little car wreck that ruins your day and pisses you off, cursing your bad luck, but then later that week you fall in love, and when your lover asks you about the car wreck you say, “Oh it was nothing.” And you really mean it, when you think of it from such a positive state as being in love. Well, imagine being in God’s Infinite, Unceasing Love! The past thirty years of imprisonment for a crime I didn’t commit? Oh, it was nothing! My wife running off with my best friend? Oh, it was nothing. Being diagnosed HIV+ and Hep C+? Nothing. The world falling apart at the seams and about to destroy itself? Nothing.
So let’s not let the world’s ills make us completely lose sight of the Positive, of the Great Punchline. If we make it a high enough priority, we have an opportunity to walk through this valley of the shadow of death with a rod and staff that profoundly comfort us, that empower us. We can be in the world of bad news and decay, but not of it. We must function in this world, it is our sacred duty. We’re supposed to help and comfort and solve problems and make peace and feed our families and all the rest. But we do not belong to any of that. We belong solely to God. None of that can harm whom we really are, it can only affect the material world, it can only affect the part of us that is physical and temporary. That’s why Jesus said that what is born of flesh must die of flesh, and we need to be born again in Spirit to find our eternal nature. It’s right here, always waiting for us to awaken to it.
My deepest Christmas wish for you all is to discover even a shred of your Bigger Nature. A shred of that is bigger than this whole world with all its hurricanes and earthquakes and planes and bombs. Until you experience it for yourself, hold firmly to your faith in the experiences and advice from the sages and saints who have directly experienced it. As one of my favorite elders, Father Murray Rogers, has put it, “Faith is not the most important thing; it is the only thing.” This is not just wishful thinking or using religion as a crutch to help us cope with hard times. This is the only thing that really matters.
PRACTICE:
Practicing the Presence of God
Excerpted from Deep & Simple, by Bo Lozoff. For information on ordering this book, go here.What would you do, how do you think you'd behave, if you could see God or feel God with you right now -- literally, physically, right here? The Sacred One. The Holy. Right here, right now.
At the very least, you'd probably feel hushed, humbled and grateful. Every complaint would vanish from your mind. Your actions would probably be unselfish. If somebody offended you, you'd likely forgive them. Out of respect, you'd take good care of yourself. If you had to stand up against corruption or evil, you'd courageously do the right thing, because you would see that God knows, and God guides you, even when things seem horrible, scary or sad. God's sacred presence would bring you peace and comfort, even if you were dying of AIDS, or losing your job, or being executed by the state.
Well, the scriptures of every religion tell us it's literally true -- God is here with us at every moment. They also assure us that by Grace, each one of us can actually experience God directly; we can know God first-hand -- what I call touching the Sacred.
This experience was the way of life in most Native American faiths. Walking Buffalo, a Stoney Indian, said, “we see the Great Spirit’s work in everything: sun, moon, trees, wind, and mountains. Sometimes we approached him through these things. From this we have a true belief in the Supreme Being.”
The actual experience may be a ways off for most of us, but we can practice this presence of God to develop an awareness and lifestyle more in keeping with how holy everything really is. Try it yourself and see the difference it makes in your life.
The Practice
- Remind yourself dozens or even hundreds of times throughout the day, God is here, right now. The Holy Father, the Divine Mother, the Messiah, is with me. Everything I think, do or say is in the presence of a loving God. Nothing is unimportant. No one is meaningless. Everything counts. I want to act accordingly.
- Recognize that the same is true for everyone else, whether they know it or not. Even when you’re struggling with another person, remember that God is here, watching and loving us both. So respect the conflict without wasting energy rejecting it, like "this shouldn't be happening." God knows what is important for us to experience. God knows.
That’s it. Simple, huh?
The presence of God can be practiced anywhere, anytime, because nothing is excluded. Look around you right now. You're on hallowed ground. God is here. Our spiritual journey is not to make anything more holy, but only to drop every barrier, every addiction, every bit of pettiness, gossip, greed, pride, and delusion, which blocks us from seeing how holy everything already is. Practicing the presence of God is a very appropriate thing to do.
LETTERS
Dear Bo and Sita,
My name is K. I am a 47 year old white inmate doing 35 years of 4 counts of arson. I believe I am a really fucked up person. I’m writing this letter to the both of you, hoping you all might be able to help me get my life turned around.
I have addictions to alcohol, profanity, and pornography. I have broken all but one of the Ten Commandments. I have never killed anyone yet, even though I’ve been very violent and stabbed people. I am out of control. I really want help, there has got to be hope for me. I want to get my life right with God and have Jesus as the Lord of my life so I can be saved and go to heaven one day. I want to be a better person, but I can’t seem to make myself repent of my bad ways.
I look back on the terrible things I’ve done and I really don’t understand why I did them. I was not a good son to my mother and father. I stole money from them and lied to them both. I broke their hearts over and over, and my mother loved me very much. Since I was in prison, we never got to have that one talk that would have resolved everything. I have lied to, stole from, and hurt just about everyone I have ever known.
Most of all I want to find out why I’ve done many of these things, because I really don’t know why. My mother and father both loved me, and did a good job teaching me right from wrong. I have been in prison since 1993. Both my parents passed away in 1997.
Well I hope you can make sense of my problems and write me back with some help. I need help and encouragement. At least I’m where I need to be. I am 47 and I don’t stand to get out till around 2028, I will be 70 at that time.
Please put me in your prayers. I have opened up my heart and told you more than even my sister knows about me. I need somebody on my side. I need somebody I can count on. Please write back.
Sincerely, K
Dear K,
I can’t tell you exactly why you did all the terrible things you did. You may never be able to fully answer that question, and I’m not sure it’s so important to answer it anyway. It seems more important to get clear with yourself on your deepest beliefs of right and wrong, and then find ways to live by those beliefs. If you don’t, you’ll always hate yourself and hate your life.
In addition to living by your deeper beliefs, which will make yourself happier, you have another important thing to address: living in a way that begins to “repent” for the many ways you have hurt innocent people. The solution to that is to live a life of compassion and service to others. Again, if you don’t, you will never find any peace or happiness. Once you have hurt people, it is not enough to just get your own life together. You must pay back somehow. And service is the way we do that. You need to actually structure your life around how much you can help others, even while you are in prison.
I notice you have received my book, Deep & Simple
(go here for information on this book). In that book, I talk a lot about “communion and community.” Go back and read, study, and WORK with that book. You need to go inward toward communion with God, and outward in service to others as a way of serving God. I cannot become a regular pen-pal because I am hardly in the office these days, and we get about a hundred letters a day. But ALL my books are written as the answer to your letter, K. They are all like long, personal letters from me, passing on the best advice from the best people who ever lived. There is no easier way to do this. I can offer you prayers and blessings and good wishes, but no one can hold your hand as you struggle to become a classic spiritual seeker and servant of God. You have all the power you need to do it; you have to LIVE the books, not just read them.Don’t expect your life to change if you are not actively changing your life, see what I mean?
Love, Bo
Dear Bo and Sita,
I wish to thank you for sending me your book, Were All Doing Time, and Just Another Spiritual Book.
I started learning about meditation from a Retreat I attended in 1980. I also went to an Ashram in Pennsylvania and a Retreat at Ball State University in Indiana in 1989, the year my son was born.
I am in Prison for molesting my son, who after spending a week with his mother came home and acted out sexually.
I think I did what I did because my father molested me and my older sister and my younger brother.
But I got a sentence of 18 years in Prison for what I did, and sometimes I really wish I would have killed my father for what he did to me because now I have to forget about my son who I love more than anything in this world and I have not seen him in 7 years he is now 16 years old. He was born on February 22, 1989. I seen him being born and was the first to hold him.
Words can never describe the agonizing sorrow, pain, and emptiness my tragic loss has brought. My Life will never be the same. I have loved him more than Life itself and his love I will Cherish forever, even if I never get to see him again. His love, touch, kiss, smile, heart, and his beautiful ways will forever be in my heart and mind.
I know nothing about him, he is in a foster home someplace, I don’t even know where. His mother never wanted him so he stayed with me his whole life.
Well anyway this has been a very hard letter for me to write.
I still have 19 months, six days before I get released, and I don’t know where to go or if I should try to go back to my home town or some other place. I have lost everything I had, even my house that I only owed $6,300 on.
I do want to see my son but there is a court order that I am not to contact him and they terminated my parental rights in 1999. When I tried to get a court order to be able to visit with him I was taken back to court and told I could not see him and that the Judge ordered a No contact order until he turns 18 years of age and he said it would be left up to him if he wanted to see me or not.
The whole time I have been locked up none of my family has come to see me. I still write to my aunt and uncle who live in Florida. They are Christian and tried to come and see me but I got moved.
Well I am going to go for now. I send you my prayers and love,
B
Dear B,
The situation with your son is a sad one, but since he is fifteen already and the court has ordered no contact until he is at least eighteen – and the fact that you don’t even get out until he is about seventeen – looks like the best thing for you to do is to take advantage of this opportunity to figure out a life plan for yourself so that when the time comes that you could try to re-introduce yourself to him as an adult, you’ve got a decent, respectable life to show him.
Trust God’s timing in this. It wouldn’t be good for you to get all tangled up in contacting him before you even build some kind of life for yourself. Do one challenging thing at a time. For now, that is to create a workable life for yourself. Focus on that. You’ll have your son’s whole adult life to try to find and contact him and heal the relationship between you. That is not your first order of business. First order of business is to use every resource available to you to create a parole plan that will enable you to move on with your life.
My advice is to begin that process now, with the help of your prison counselors, plus state vocational rehab people you can contact, any pre-release programs available to you, preparation for hitting the streets, finding a job and so forth. Get busy on it so that when nineteen months rolls around you’re stepping into a well-prepared role that you can feel confident about. Then you’ll have been out about a year-plus when your son turns eighteen. That’s perfect if you’re doing well by that time.
I know that obsessing about your son and your loss is easier in a way than dealing with the realities of creating a new life, but trust me on this: Take the right steps and be patient. It’ll pay off.
Love, Bo
Hello Bo, Sita and HKF Friends,
I NEED SERIOUS SPIRITUAL HELP NOW!!! I’m in the box.
What I’d like to do with the help of HKF, ZEN mountain monastery, and my sister (If I can contact her), as well as with my counselor and facility chaplain, is this: go into the box ad-seg status for a period of 8 months for spiritual-mental-academical sabbatical. Let me explain: The NEW YEAR (’05) is 4 months away as you know. My release date is Aug ’06 (100% Time) Late ‘05/ early ’06 (85 % Time which is common in this state).
Well either way, two things:
1. I’m not ready (and this frightens me)
2. I’m getting out soon enough. And I’ve got to be honest with you. Outside of selling porn, lustful masturbation etc., I’ve been having very bad thoughts which are moving towards evil, which were simply angry thoughts at one time.
I understand my actions put me here, I claimed responsibility for my actions, and I don’t wish to ever harm anyone, or do anything to return to this Hell. YET I’ve been doing nothing but planning the pain, torment, torture, suffering of those who did me wrong. This is not good.
But I can’t verbalize this no matter how kindly because it would mean trouble for me, no doubt about it. So I’ve only to turn to myself and those outside these walls who’ve helped me keep it together for all these years.
So in case I don’t get to write before I begin implanting my plan for my mind- and-soul-cleansing sabbatical, please do the following if you will: If a Deacon L contacts HKF, please advise him on the spiritual level, that I should be allowed Non Disciplinary Ad-seg (lone, solitary admin. Segregation) with my spiritual-educational Books and necessities to stave boredom, monotony etc., therefore creating a positive balance.
I sincerely intend to accomplish in 8 months what I should have in 8 years of this hell, thus giving myself the power and ability of my mind to pursue the positive means to live a productive life.
Bo, I won’t kid myself or you. My mind has grown weak. I can’t be in population now, I’m not strong enough. I’ve been reading We’re All Doing Time again. It’s become my pillow, both figuratively and actually. It’s shown me so simply how simple it is… I just have to want it, now I actually really do in my heart, mind and soul. So if you can help me I’d greatly appreciate it. I’ll do my best to get back to you all and keep you abreast, as well as what I need more specifically.
Until next contact, wishing you all a healthy, happy, spiritual, productive life. With love respect and appreciation,
Love, R
Dear R,
Listen, little brother, spending eight months in non-punitive ad-seg may work out fine or not, but it is certainly not the only key to getting over your fantasies of harming people and getting revenge. You can do that RIGHT NOW. No excuses, no bullshit, nothing complicated. You tell yourself right now that ANY THOUGHT of revenge or violence is crazy and unacceptable, and you stick to that view from this day forward no matter how many times the ideas start to pop into your head.
I get the feeling you have allowed yourself a lot of fantasizing in your life - mostly sexual. But fantasizing is never “free.” It affects our minds. Now you’re paying the price for not having been disciplined about the fantasies you would allow your mind to come up with, expand, develop, play with, etc. All you need to do is to begin developing self-discipline, and you can do that either in solitary or in population, because your great adversary is none other than your own undisciplined mind, which is with you in either place.
One of my teachers said if you catch thoughts in the “seed” stage, it’s not so hard to replace them with mantra, breath, prayer, etc. But if you allow them to “flower” before you try to replace them, then it’s almost impossible.
“Flowering” means letting yourself play with those thoughts AT ALL. The moment one of those thoughts enters your mind, you just say “no, can’t go there,” and use some specific method (mine is the mantra “ram,” pronounced “romm”) to occupy the mind to the exclusion of that thought. The Buddha reminded us, we can only focus on one thing at a time. We may have to do the method a thousand times in an hour, but we have the power to do that. You have the power to overcome this habit of fantasizing, and you need to do it with no excuses and no special needs like a solitary cell, etc. You don’t have to wait a moment longer to do this, R. Start right now. Remember, God helps those who help themselves.
NO EXCUSES.
Love, Bo
A Little Good News is a publication of the Human Kindness Foundation, which is non-profit and tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code. Donations and bequests are welcomed and are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. All money goes directly to support HKF’s work, helping us to continue producing and distributing free materials to prisoners and others, and sponsoring Bo Lozoff’s free lectures & workshops and the other projects of the Foundation. © 1997, Human Kindness Foundation
Human Kindness Foundation, PO Box 61619, Durham, NC 27715; (919) 304-2220
