Inside Out

It’s a pleasure to offer these excerpts from Inside Out, the journal of the Hanuman Foundation’s prison-ashram project.

The idea behind the project is this: prisons offer remarkable opportunities for inner growth. They are like monasteries, in that regard: you get a cell, and clothes, and food. All your outer needs are provided for, while you’re free to do the inner work.

Towards that end, the project sends yoga teachers into the prisons, provides inmates with literature, answers questions about spiritual practice, and, in general, tries to redefine the opportunities for coming to God even behind steel bars.

The Hanuman Foundation was set up by Ram Dass, the American spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, and Grist for the Mill. The prison-ashram project is one of many activities of the foundation, whose purposes are to further spiritual well-being through education, service, and spiritual training.

Bo Lozoff is the director of the prison-ashram project. He, his wife, Sita, and son, Josh, live in Bahama, N.C.; their home is the project office. Bo travels to different prisons to do workshops and week-end intensives. He also trains those who wish to become teachers. Sita handles much of the correspondence — the project processes about 4,000 letters a year — and office management. Right now, Bo is trying to convince the Federal Bureau of Prisons to endorse an ashram halfway house for federal inmates.

Inside Out is free to all inmates, prison staff and prison yoga instructors. All others who request the magazine are asked to make a contribution to the project. All contributions are tax-deductible and should be sent to The Prison-Ashram Project, Route 1, Box 395, Bahama, N.C. 27503. The first issue of Inside Out was an introduction to the idea of living spiritually in prison; the second (from which we’ve reprinted these excerpts) is a more thorough resource manual of spiritual practices; the third, now being prepared, will be mostly a feedback issue from inmates and staff people.

There is also available a series of nine ninety-minute cassettes which include teachings and practices from Ram Dass, Soma Krishna, Lilias Folan, and Bo Lozoff’s own prison classes. There is also one full tape of music and chanting. Prison Yoga: Cassettes for the Spiritual Journey is designed to help conduct classes in prison as well as be an “instructor” in places where other teachers are not available. Free to groups in prisons, the set is available for a minimum $20 donation from the prison-ashram project.

— Ed.

Too often, here in prison, we tend to think it does not have a positive side. Consequently, we waste all our time and forces in day-dreaming of a tomorrow that will never match our dreams of it. Perhaps it is only natural to hate the place that isolates you from all your accustomed sources of satisfaction, and quite unnatural to develop new sources of satisfaction. In a sense, we are all monks who have not freely chosen monkhood, and therefore do not wear our robes very gracefully. But, in that respect, I imagine there are very few people anywhere who can cheerfully accept the unpleasant circumstances which their actions or karma have brought them. Still less are they able to grab hold of that slim thread of aspiration and attempt to change the very structure of their lives. We all need a belief, I think — any belief — that will enable us to visualize the divine potentiality which is inherently ours. Too often prison takes away all self-esteem while offering no glimpse of a means to build anything to take its place. The con seldom comes to realize that there is something within him that is better than he is.

I have done much wrong in my life, but nothing so wrong as my ignorant refusal to look at God honestly. It has taken me many years to accept a tapasya, but now it is as though my whole past never existed. All the pains, horrors, deprivations, and losses seem almost insignificant before the possibility of somehow seeing into the heart of existence.

Such a challenge — such a possibility — brings hope even to the negative world of prison. For the spirit, or atman, or purusha, can never be bound even when the body is bound. There has been, actually, only one stumbling-block in my life — and that is within me. And every time I make some little victory over despair, or anger, or negativism, I feel that I have stepped beyond the walls of that personal prison; a prison much more oppressive than any of stone and steel.

What I am trying to face up to now is the simple fact that it does not matter what happens to me personally. There is no situation which cannot be used to effect a change in consciousness — the only thing that really matters. Man’s journey to God — what else has meaning?

Jim

First I read many books
and studied very hard
then I did some poses
twisting this way and that way
then I sat very still
and became a lake
then I looked at my nose
crossed my eyes and thought
and nothing much happened
Then I tried doing nothing
and just being what I am
and everything happened . . .

               — Tim Perry
               North Soledad Prison

At Soledad Prison

I wonder how I should begin. Should I say I am happy or sorry to see you all here? Certainly I am not happy to see you in prison. At the same time I am happy to see you interested in Yoga and in making your lives more beautiful.

Some people say if you stand on your head for an hour you are a great Yogi. But I say, even before trying to stand on your head, learn to stand on your feet. Without knowing how to stand on your feet, what’s the use of standing on your head?

So the entire Yoga and, in fact, life itself, teaches us to stand on our feet. Don’t think that this is the only “correctional institution.” It makes me laugh to hear it referred to like that. Can you tell me one place where you are not corrected? From birth to death you are constantly corrected.

So in this sense we are all in some kind of prison. Living in the body itself is a prison. As souls we are limited in these bodies, whereas as spirit we could reach much farther. Why should we be limited in this way? Because we have certain truths to learn by living in the body — how to regulate and discipline our lives and use them well.

With this understanding you will want to correct or treat yourself. A prison is not a place of punishment or ordeal, a place of penance. In a way, I should say you are even fortunate to have a place like this. Why? Because you are protected from any unnecessary disturbances. You’re provided with food, lodging, medical care, seclusion, everything — giving you the opportunity to make use of this time to correct yourself. You can see it that way.

So make use of this opportunity. Don’t send out undesirable thoughts of hatred or resentment. In many institutions there is tension between the authorities and inmates. There is no need for it. Suffering is to be accepted. “If I didn’t need this experience, nobody could bring it to me. These people are only instruments.”

swami satchidananda

Cut The Cords

Why tie the infinite soul to a bony post of flesh? Let go! Cut the cords of flesh consciousness, attachments to the body, hunger, pleasure, pain, and bodily and mental involvements. Relax. Loosen the soul from the grip of the body. Let not the heaving breath remind you of physical bars. Sit still in breathless silence, expecting every minute to make the dash for freedom into the Infinite. Love not your earthly prison.

Free mind from body with a keen-edged knife of stillness. Cut loose your consciousness from the body. Use it no more as an excuse to accept limitations. Turn away your consciousness from the binding body-post. Rush your consciousness beyond the body, sweeping through the minds, hearts, and souls of others. Switch on your light in all lives. Feel that you are the One Life that shines in all creation.

— Yogananda

The Armor Of St. Patrick

           I Establish Myself Today In:
The Power of God to guide me.
The Might of God to uphold me.
The wisdom of God to teach me.
The Eye of God to watch over me.
The Ear of God to hear me.
The Word of God to speak for me.
The Hand of God to protect me.
The Way of God to lie before me.
The Shield of God to shelter me.
The Host of God to defend me.
Christ with me, Christ before me.
Christ behind me, Christ within me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me.
Christ at my right, Christ at my left.
Christ in breadth, in length, in height.
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me.
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks to me.
Christ in the eye of every man who sees me.
Christ in the ear of every man who hears me.

An Interview With Ram Dass

Q: Power is one of the prime factors of existence in prison life. Someone is always trying to climb over someone else’s body. How can you work consciously within this power structure? Also how can you transcend the power structure?

A: Prison is a power hierarchy in which it is defined who has power over whom, not only in the gross ways in which guards have power over inmates, but also how inmates have power over one another in minor ways. The way in which this power is reflected is in privileges and goods, in terms of space and control of space. All of these commodities are in demand or are usable as power objects only so long as everybody wants them — that is, a pile of sand is hardly a legitimate commodity to barter over power. How involved you will get in the power struggles within the prison is a function of how much you are attached to the goods, services, commodities and privileges that are up for grabs. For example, if one of the privileges is a quiet space physically, you may get into a great power struggle for that object; however, if you could imagine having worked on yourself until you have a quiet space within, you could then live with less of a need for an external quiet space. This frees you from being involved in the power struggle for that particular commodity — that quiet space. But you cannot totally deny your attachments or your needs or your desires, although some of them may fall away as you have a deeper spiritual understanding of who you are.

When you understand that all of your life experiences are useful in awakening you, then you have a very good handle on power structures. Then, whether you get a privilege or don’t get it, it’s all grist for the mill of awakening and not getting the privilege can serve as a fire for your purification.

Now none of this means that you should become necessarily just a passive scapegoat for other people’s power trips. You can assert power in relationships and get your fair share of things — the secret of it is to be non-attached to your actions, so that you do them out of the fairness of the situation, and not because you are lost in feelings of righteousness. If you win, fine; and if you don’t — well, that’s the way it is — and you work with it either way, even though you worked as hard as you could to win.

You have to make decisions along the way as to how much it is worth investing in any particular power struggle. What you really want to do is go to God, and anything that isn’t going to get you to God, you don’t even want to be involved in. So you may give up the extra smoke, the extra television, the extra privilege in the yard, the extra food, or the special privilege, because it doesn’t really matter — because that privilege isn’t going to liberate you. And you get to the point where you just take what comes, working only for those privileges that are really functional in your spiritual work, working for those without attachment, but with total involvement.

As your meditations become deeper and you are quieter, you connect with a place within yourself that is neither in prison nor is not in prison. You will be able to appreciate the entire predicament of any power situation. And this quietness of mind will in truth give you more power.

One of the secrets of living within a very tense power struggle is the ability to keep a certain detached humor about your own predicament — not a cynical humor and not a humor of defense, but a cosmic humor of seeing the delight in the dance of life. You will also find that the whole heaviness of power relationships is lessened if you do not get emotionally lost in the power struggles, if you can see the essence or soul beyond the power trip in another being. You are only able to see that in another human being when you can see it in yourself. That is why again and again we emphasize meditation as a vehicle for finding your own deeper spiritual identity.

A secret of power relationships is non-reactivity; that is, not jumping into a reaction for every action of another. Your ability to not react immediately, and get lost in an immediate reaction, is helped considerably by the use of mantra. For example, when somebody swears at you, instead of reacting to their swearing immediately, you withdraw momentarily inside into your mantra and it allows you an instant in which to see the entire predicament you’re stuck in, including perhaps, the fact that it is that individual’s frustration that is causing them to lash out. For when you can see that someone else’s anger and frustration is their karmic predicament, and only if you get caught in an instant reaction does it become yours — you learn how not to buy everything. In that space you can see that if you react immediately, you might make the situation worse, while if you can allow at least a moment of quietness before your reaction, perhaps you can redirect the whole tone of the situation into a more positive and productive one. It is that moment of inner silence which you can develop — at first only at moments now and then — but ultimately — that moment is every moment and you sit quietly and gently at rest within your being.

There is the story of the Buddha and two young disciples whose father was very irritated because he had wanted them to go into his business. He came to the Buddha, and screamed at great length; swore at him for some thirty or forty minutes. The Buddha sat quietly. When the man had finished, the Buddha said, “Sir, in your home, when someone brings a gift and you do not accept it, what happens?” The man said, “Well, then they must take back the gift and keep it themselves.” Buddha said, “Well, I do not accept your gift.” That is, the Buddha did not accept the anger of the man; he left the anger with the man for he himself did not collect it by reacting. That is the secret of the quiet mind.

For example, let us say that you are living with someone who is angry and frustrated and constantly provoking, and attempting to irritate you. The first 1,000 times you get lost in reaction. You just can’t stand it and you yell back or you beat up on them or you tear up their stuff or you get furious, and the adrenalin pumps through you — for the first 1,000 times. And each time after you’ve done it, you say, “Oh shit, I got lost in it; I blew it again; I forgot; I got caught in reacting; he got to me.” But the winner is not necessarily the person who has the last word, but the person who retains his peace and his closeness to God. So each time you forget, when you remember, you say, “Oh, I blew it, well, next time maybe I’ll do better,” and there will be another opportunity, and another and another. Maybe one in twenty times you will be able to stay quiet through the provocation — and when the arrow comes, you will be able to send back, if not love, at least neutrality. When you’re really good at this game, you will be able to convert the person’s negative energy, not to neutral energy but even to positive energy for both your use and his. Then you’ll be able to take someone’s anger and send it back to them as love. Take the same energy they send in spitting words of venom, take the negativity out of it, offer it up, convert it, and see that possibly they are frightened, pained, frustrated individuals who are angry, not at you, but at their situation — and that you’re just the object that’s most available on which they can vent their spleen.

So the process of learning how to not react is done through constant repetitive confrontation with an irritant, with something that will elicit that reaction until finally you have learned how to let it go through you just as if you were a porous sieve or a piece of cheesecloth, and water just pours right through you. The anger will go through; there will be no place in you it can hang its hat. The sticky thing in you is your model of who you think you are. But if you think of yourself as a soul going to God, then other people’s criticism either of your personality or of your body has no real effect on you. For example, I am bald; when people laugh at my baldness, that’s their problem, because I am not identified with being bald.

When you really get good at this game, and you really are getting on with your spiritual work, you are looking for every source of energy in the universe to work with. When somebody yells at you or comes on to you, they are giving you their energy and when you know how to work with that, it is like a gift. Ultimately, you can use the electricity from the light bulbs. You use it all in order to give you more and more force, or more and more spiritual energy, shakti, which you can use in your spiritual practices. It has to do with your philosophy and your single-mindedness of purpose. That’s the secret of whether you get lost in your shit or not.

When you have made a commitment to want to use your life in order to awaken, and when you have a deep enough understanding of the way in which the Spirit works, and the way in which God manifests on earth, you then recognize that all experiences can be used as grist for the mill of awakening. The situation you find yourself in is just a very hot fire in the sense that it will force you to confront your own attachments, desires, fears and doubts. When you are really ready to do this work, you may not be enthusiastic about the situation you find yourself in, (e.g. being in prison) but you take it and you work with it and with your reactions to it.

Q: How do you cope with the space created by losing one’s external freedom and not having anything yet to replace it?

A: When an individual loses his external freedom and before he’s found his internal freedom, he gets very neurotic, and he freaks, and he shows a lot of weird behavior. And you may be showing a lot of behaviors that you wouldn’t be showing on the outside, because of the situation you’re in. Our strategy is to suggest that you get to work on developing your internal freedom, so you don’t have to be as neurotic about having lost your external freedom. The important thing is not to over-react to your own peculiarities. When neuroses show themselves, sexual panic, frustrations, anger, loneliness, fits of weeping, fits of depression, notice them, acknowledge them and say, “Are they going to get me to God?”; and if not, start to let them go. The best practice is to sit down and start to follow your breath and quiet your mind, or to pick up a spiritual book and start to read it, really read it for a few minutes, open yourself to it. Just take one of the poems, or one of the quotes in this magazine you can work with and keep working with it. It’ll quiet you down and open you up. The journey of a thousand miles begins with but the first step, so just sit down if you’re freaked and start to join us in this journey. You’ve got to begin somewhere.

Maharaji was once sitting inside the gate of a British-Indian army camp. The Base Commander, a British Colonel, happened to drive by in his jeep and see this sadhu sitting inside the gate. The Colonel stopped and questioned Maharaji as to what he was doing there. Maharaji said, “Why not? I am the C.I.D. (a spy).” The Colonel said, “Get out!” Maharaji laughed and replied, “It’s not your land. It’s not yours. I’ll sit here.” The Colonel then called the guards and had Maharaji placed behind bars. The head of the guards was an Indian devotee who Maharaji sometimes visited at the base. When he saw Maharaji, he pranamed and Maharaji said, “Do your duty!” So Maharaji was locked up.

A little later the Colonel once again drove by the gate and, much to his chagrin, saw Maharaji sitting in the very same place. The jeep screeched to a halt, and the officer once again questioned Maharaji as they waited for the guards to arrive. Maharaji simply said, “Here I am — the land doesn’t belong to you. Everything belongs to God.”

When the guards arrived, the Colonel rebuked them soundly for not placing Maharaji in jail as ordered. The guards not only swore that they had, but furthermore said that he was still there. The Colonel left Maharaji with the guards with firm instructions to return him to prison, and drove on ahead in the direction of the jail. Upon arriving he was both shocked and amazed to see Maharaji smiling at him from behind bars. The Colonel said, “What! This must be a trick, a hallucination . . .”

Today a photograph of Maharaji hangs in the Officer’s Mess of that army camp.

The clear water sparkles like crystal,
You can see through it easily, right to the bottom,
My mind is free from every thought,
Nothing in the myriad realms can move it.
Since it cannot be wantonly roused,
Forever and forever it will stay unchanged.
When you have learned to know in this way,
You will know there is no inside or out!

                                                                             — Han Shan

Bo Lozoff

At this early stage of higher consciousness, if someone comes up to me for instruction on the Path, can I teach them by following my intuition about enlightenment, or should I wait until I understand more myself?

It’s important to simply share your journey without teaching. You can share your books, your practices, experiences, insights, without coming on like a teacher. When you begin to see yourself as a teacher and someone else as a student, then you begin to lock yourself into false spaces that get stickier as time goes by.

The journey demands total honesty; you have to play it very straight. If you’re laying out teachings that are higher than you are, everyone around you will eventually feel it. On the other hand, if you’re always just relating openly and giving of yourself with no big hoop-de-la, others will get very high from your sharing. Maharaji used to say, “When you’re a candle, all you have to do is shine.”

I want to offer a constructive criticism of Inside Out: The journal sort of says that prison is not such a bad place to be and compares prisons to monasteries and ashrams. Well, in all my experience, prison is the worst place to be — period! It is the last place in the world that I would like to be. Prison by definition is the opposite condition of freedom and supportive growth situations. OK?

I agree that no one should frivolously say that prisons are great places to be, or that you should purposely do something to get yourself into prison. At the same time, I can’t get lost with you in the melodrama that prisons are the worst places to be when one begins to awaken to the Spirit.

What we’re saying is that if you are in prison now, and you’re reading these words, you’re actually in a fine place to begin transforming yourself spiritually. Your freedom can’t be taken from you by anyone; you’re the one who gives it up, all the time. There isn’t a cell on this earth, nor a prison, nor a guard nor a warden nor a system, which is not totally within God’s view. And there hasn’t been a moment of your life which has not been within the lawful workings of karma and grace. No accidents, no obstacles, no interruptions; just continuous opportunities to suffer further or to lay your burdens at God’s feet. Most of us choose the suffering again and again. Here we are, always here; the trappings fade into the background after a while.

I don’t eat any meat (as a result of Be Here Now), and it is hard to eat at the prison mess hall here, as most everything they serve is cooked in grease.

Be Here Now was taken from talks which Ram Dass gave to people outside of prison, who had free choice of what to eat. In your situation, there is no “yoga diet.” If not eating meat seems to help your energies, and there’s plenty of other balanced food, that’s fine; but if you’re doing this at any expense to your health or ease of mind, don’t.

Look again at the eating meditation described in the first Inside Out. As it turns out, many people on the street are so neurotic about following a “yoga diet” that whatever they eat just feeds the neurosis and guilt anyway. All disciplines must be done with lightness and humor.

I’ve been here almost a year on a ten year sentence. I’ve never been in an enclosed environment before and it’s nearly suffocating. I’m a person who is used to the outdoors; to have the sun and stars over my head. Here I have the sun some of the time, but I haven’t seen the stars in 18 months. I’m almost wondering if there are any left.

You are right about emotions, but what do you do when you look around you and see three stone walls and one of steel. I’m not used to being in a cage.

Art

There certainly are things that you can do for yourself to ease the suffering, and they’re not very hard to learn. But they require a lot of energy — constantly looking into yourself rather than “out there” for the seed of your problem. Are you really ready to give up the delicious quality of the suffering you feel? Think about it, really. There’s something that all of us dig about suffering — that’s why sad songs and books and movies are so popular! In order to overcome suffering, first we have to realize that we suffer by choice, and that it has nothing to do with what other people do to us; second, we have to really decide to give it up and stop being sufferers.” Yoga is simply the process of getting down to seeing reality as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. Once we stop fighting, fighting, fighting the way things already are, we begin to have a great positive effect on the way things become in the future. To be a warrior is to live in the present — no looking back, no self-pity, no dreams of the future, no regrets. And only warriors have peace of mind. Because the battlefield in this case is all the melodrama which tries to keep us suffering and craving all our lives. Believe me, there is no joy in that sort of living. The key is to stop seeking so much what is not already here, and then you realize that peace of mind always is here — because that very peace is simply the state of not seeking anything at all; just using whatever we’ve got at hand.

Stone walls do not a prison make
     Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
     that for a hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
     And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
     Enjoy such liberty.

                     — Richard Lovelace