These letters, from Bo Lozoff’s Prison-Ashram Project newsletter, exemplify the kind of spiritual straight-shooting at which Bo excels.
Thanks to Bo for permission to reprint them.
— Ed.
Dear Bo and Sita,
I just re-read your newsletter for March, 1982, and once again your philosophy has touched me.
In 1968, I was beaten, tortured, and gang-raped in a county jail. Although I was released two weeks later, I never really left it emotionally. Even as my fellow inmates were working me over, I forgave them because I had a pretty good idea who my real tormentors were. My cellmates were criminally insane, made that way by a criminally-controlled society.
I know this is judgemental and with this I’ve struggled for the past fourteen years. I haven’t been able to let go of this incident in my mind. Emotionally, the clock stopped for me on October 15, 1968. Few days have gone by since that I haven’t experienced at least a few moments of shame and self-disgust and the wish for death. For the first few years, I numbed myself with marijuana. But after I stopped using drugs in 1972 I slipped into a depression that lasted until 1980 when I finally began therapy. After two years of therapy, my rage is greater than ever. And now my rape may be a factor in the breakup of my twelve-year marriage. A therapist has warned me that I may have become obsessed with being heard about my assault because of so long a silence.
For the two years before my rape, I had been a fulltime political activist living in the barrios of San Antonio. I published and edited a tiny liberal community paper in Spanish and English. I often marched and demonstrated alone against poverty, against the Vietnam War, against discrimination and injustice of any kind. I was in jail for smashing two closed-circuit television cameras in a restroom of a factory, to help workers publicize their grievances and win their strike. It was my first offense.
You said, “Our greatest acts of violence are how we constantly judge others.” I understand these words but I feel so powerless to rid my heart of the desire for revenge. I know how overloaded you are with pleas of help from the prisons all over the country, but in your prayers, could you please remember me? I do the same for you and all our brothers and sisters in the prison-ashram.
On my forty-sixth birthday, February 14th, I began fasting from solid food. On February 22nd, I cloistered myself inside my leaky, uninsulated camper. I am also not speaking. I communicate only in writing. I am withdrawing from society and — if necessary — from life unless I am blessed with justice and/or enlightenment.
God bless you for your wonderful work.
Namaste
Tom C.
Napa, California
Dear Tom,
You’re certainly in our prayers, and in the prayers of thousands of people who will read this in our newsletter. I don’t know whether anything I put into words will be able to convey anything useful to you, but I’ll try; and maybe between the lines we can communicate as if I were sitting with you in your camper. I wish I could be.
You know that I’ve been involved for a long time now with people who have gone through the same sort of nightmare as you. I’ve never met anyone who had an easy time of it, or who looked back and said, “Boy, I’m glad that happened,” so I’m not going to bullshit you with spiritual fairy tales. But I do know, and have seen, people endure with their sanity and humanity intact — and stronger — after such a horrifying leap into Hell. A friend of ours in a Florida prison wrote a few months ago:
I am at Polk City. God has used this place to test my inner peace and strength towards being a humble man. I would like to share with you one of the most degrading acts of violence that anyone could go through. Since I’ve been here I have been raped by twelve people and was forced to shave my legs and chest. Can there be any kind of violence as low as this? I wonder.
But anyway I am okay and happy because I can truthfully say that I can forgive and forget and still love them as brothers. I pray and meditate on asking God to forgive them for their act of violence.
Am I really happy? Yes. This was my choice because God called me to show other people that forgiveness begins in the heart and if it’s a true and honest love then it can show forth good works for all humanity. So now again I am locked up for my own protection. But I am still praying and studying. I shall never quit. I’m not even depressed over all this.
I’d like to thank you for helping me to open my eyes to what’s real around me. It makes me realize how much this world needs total peace and love for the Earth itself and for each other. God knows what he is doing.
One part of his letter struck me especially. He started out a criminal and now writes beautiful passages about the real social change that the world needs most. You started out as an activist and then were subjected to the very same experience that turned him into one. Is this God’s painful educational process for a few chosen people like yourself to discover the most profound degree of compassion and forgiveness required to really bring about social change? Maybe you really are an activist, Tom. Jesus was. And his response to humiliation and torture has endured as an inspiration to the human spirit for two thousand years.
You’ve been given an experience which few people could handle. I certainly can’t say how I would do. The closest I can come to imaging how hard this is, is relating it to my own 100-m.p.h. collision with a tractor-trailer. I’ve gone through a lot of operations and intense pain during the past 18 years, and I can remember times when the pain just wore me down so much that I didn’t know if I could keep going through it. Many times I squeaked through on the thinnest shred of faith or grace, who knows which? But as I kept trying to open around the misery rather than tightening or pushing it away, every now and then I experienced the transcendence of it that the spiritual life offers. The pain is still pain, and it still hurts like hell when you transcend, but you’re big enough to allow it to be a part of you; it no longer takes over completely. Whether I like it or not, physical pain continues to be a part of my daily life and it continues to bring me wisdom. It’s just the cut of the cards.
And then there’s your pain, different from mine, and the pain of a young mother whose child was raped and murdered, and the pain of the elderly couple robbed and humiliated a dozen times in one year, and the pain of a Canadian friend who fell off a mountain and is permanently paralyzed, and the subtler but equally real pain of so many countless unhappy people whose lives are no more than a succession of confused bleak days and nights, and the list goes on forever.
In a sense, all our forms of pain are different and none of us can quite understand the pain of the others. That’s on the personality level, where we hold on to our differences in order to preserve our specialness. But a little farther in (or up), pain is pain is pain is pain, and we all do truly understand all pain, all humiliation, all helplessness, rage, and loneliness. And we see that this is not accidental to the human condition or an abomination of it, but rather an integral part of what we’re doing here on Earth. As Dennis said, “God knows what he is doing.”
What more can I say to you, though, while it’s hurting so much? These may all seem like meaningless words as you sit hurting in your camper. All I can do is send this along, not for the words, but as a symbol of my love for you and my companionship at this incredibly tough turn of your spiritual journey. If you do decide to get through it rather than to die, imagine the depth of compassion and understanding you can give to others as they suffer in their own forms of Hell! I hope for you, me, and the world that you can emerge from this as that kind of spiritual activist, with a loving heart forged in the hottest fire of pain.
Love,
Bo
Dear Bo and Sita,
I hope this letter finds you exceptionally fine. A lot has happened in my life since I last wrote you. I decided to cut my own foot to get into the hospital. When I cut it I went at the bottom of my foot in which now I’ll never be able to run again. Also I got hooked up in a “battery on another inmate” charge. This dude who was involved in the death of my partner came here and I couldn’t back off from trying to take him out after I heard him bragging about it. I took an iron leg off of a chair and walked up behind him while he was playing cards and tried to knock his brains out but it only knocked him out and put him in a coma. I was locked up and now am on maximum security lockdown.
I don’t have any regrets at trying to kill him and even if he died and I received a life sentence, I still would not regret it. I know you feel I’m wrong, but I respected my friendship with my partner to the extent that I felt what I did had to be done. I’m old fashioned, Bo and Sita, when it comes to values and morals and living by the convict code, but that’s me and I’ve never claimed to be anyone but me.
In eternal friendship,
L.H.
Dear LH,
I hope our friendship is really eternal, because I want to be straight with you about your letter. It sounds pretty fishy to me. You’re busy trying to defend your actions when neither Sita nor I have judged you in the first place. I think you’re actually having a battle with yourself and using us as symbols of part of you which feels you blew it when you tried to kill that guy. Otherwise, why tell us at all? The thing is, your actions are one thing, and your attitude quite another. You seem to be busy creating a whole philosophy, which you’re calling the “convict code,” to justify what you did as a noble deed committed by a good old-fashioned guy with high values.
But if all that were true, I don’t think you’d have so much conflict with it. As far as I’m concerned, the “convict code” is bullshit as is any other code. Each one of us is a person, and we have to make choices and take responsibility for those choices as individuals. This guy you whacked had brought more suffering into the world by killing your partner and then by bragging about it, and so you went on to bring still more suffering by trying to take him out. And now maybe a friend of his will hear you telling about this noble deed, and he’ll try to kill you, and then maybe one of your friends will try to get him and so forth. The state hardly needs the death penalty with good old-fashioned convicts like you around!
I think you’ve understood the stuff we’ve sent you over the years, and I think that you knew what this letter would be like before I wrote it; that’s why you wrote us. I can appreciate how you hurt over the death of your friend, and how badly it hurts to be around so many crazy people as you are. You must have been hurting pretty badly to hack your foot up as you did. But lying to yourself and creating philosophies of convenience won’t make things better. You don’t have to undo anything you’ve done, right up to this moment, but at some point you have to allow yourself to see it straight if you want to find any measure of your rightful peace. Life is really a much bigger trip than you’re allowing yourself to experience. Don’t think that it’s just words and poetic garbage. Keep on keeping on.
Love,
Bo
Dear Bo and Sita,
In my life I’ve never written to a newspaper, newsletter or whatever. I’ve been getting yours for some time now. Sometimes I read it, sometimes not. The last one I did, and I know the tone of what I’m fixing to say is not at all like where you’re coming from.
It seems to me there’s a whole lot of letters from guys sniveling about being gang-raped and being on lock-up because they’re on protective custody. Most of them are saying they forgive the perpetrators because “they know not better,” etc., and/or they re-live that horrible experience over and over. I don’t doubt their sincerity about that.
I’ve been down about eight years out of my thirty-two years. Prisons are more or less the same the world over. If a guy acts like a victim, he’s made one. I don’t need to see the results of a Princeton study on how people unconsciously invite rape attacks or mugging, because I’ve seen them do it with my own eyes. In prison sometimes a punch in the nose is the only way to communicate. It’s all some guys understand. Violence won’t handle all situations or even one in twenty, but sometimes it’s the only way. And most of the time winning or losing isn’t important. It’s whether a guy will stand up for himself.
I’ve never heard of anyone re-living a punch in the nose over and over every day of his life. I mean it couldn’t hurt as bad as that other thing. Why don’t you print this letter as food for thought for the victims and would-be victims? Life isn’t a bed of roses. If those guys aren’t willing to protect themselves, nobody else will. If a man will stand up, I’ll stand up with him. And that’s the general consensus in prison. They ain’t in polite society. Keep up the good work, y’all.
Sincerely,
Buddy
Virginia
Dear Buddy,
I’ll be happy to print your letter. I think it’s powerfully written. I don’t agree with everything you said, but that’s not the end of the world, is it?
You say that if a person stands up for himself, everything will always work out. I agree that may be generally true, and I appreciate your example about not re-living a punch in the nose for the rest of your life. But isn’t it true that sometimes a guy just like you will stand up for himself and still be beaten, raped, tortured, or killed? It does happen.
Also, maybe some of what you call “sniveling” is indeed sniveling, but maybe some of it is somebody sincerely trying to put his life back together. Not everybody reacts to things the same way. So, I do value your letter, and I also hope you keep your mind open to people who might be very different from you.
Love,
Bo
Dear Bo,
I want to thank you for answering me personally, and tell you that you gave me some food for thought. I’m afraid I was being a little judgemental (of course, a judge put me in here!).
Here where I’m at there are 500 of Virginia’s meanest. I’ve come to the conclusion that 99.5 percent of them are cowardly bullies. They’ll pick up a knife or stab someone in the back, but there’s only that half percent that’ll go against even odds. If it’s on equal terms or if you’re facing them, they won’t bust a grape.
The new dudes don’t know that. This is the message I was trying to get across in the letter I wrote you before.
Yeah, I’ll try to keep an open mind. When I wrote you I was in a head where it was barely ajar. It’s true a punch in the nose isn’t the only way to say no, so don’t take my advice to extremes. If your old lady asks you if you want some more peas and you say no and she says, “Are you sure?” don’t punch her.
Sincerely,
Buddy
Virginia
Dear Bo,
Just received your wonderful letter. It really has brightened my day. What you had to pass on to me is really clear and good medicine.
I’ve been sweating out a lot of demons in my “cloister.” This is the thirteenth day in my truck and the twenty-second of my fast. I think I will be leaving the truck and breaking my fast in a few days. For one thing, my family is taking it very hard. They think I want to die, but they’re only partially right.
Anyway, I’m feeling much better and clearer and your letter has really helped. I will treasure the letter in my spiritual diary and I’m sure that I will refer to it in the future whenever I’m wrestling with my demons.
Namaste,
Tom C.
Dear Tom,
It’s so good to hear you’re coming out of the murkier waters. I hope by the time this reaches you things are going even better.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you lately. I don’t think my last letter offered you much in the way of practical advice. I know that once you leave the camper, you’re going to need more than nice words, so I’d like to add to your list of alternatives of how you might get on with your life.
I wonder whether after exposure to such heavy, warped experiences as you’ve been through, it’s no longer feasible to try to get out and live a “normal” American life. You and some of the other people we’ve met have come out of brutal prison experiences and tried to just find a girl, get a job, and somehow get back into the groove, but in a short time you’ve found it impossible to do. Many friends of ours have gotten released after serving long sentences in very bad places, and they hit the streets feeling spiritual, sincere, optimistic, and then within a year or two they’re back in the joint.
Maybe there’s a twist here that we’ve all been missing. I get the feeling that if you and maybe some of these other people were to give up being “normal,” and instead joined something like Oxfam, Unicef, Christian Children’s Fund, Plenty, Habitat for Humanity, Sisters of Charity, Salvation Army or some other fulltime relief agency, all your wounds would be healed quickly as you cared for the dying or fed hungry children or took in the destitute from the streets.
Direct human service has incredible power to heal our battered senses of dignity. Perhaps all you’ve failed at during the past fourteen years is living the particularly narrow, pleasure-oriented lifestyle which has turned out not meaningful enough after what you’ve seen and been through.
It’s worth considering, anyway, for you and other folks who can’t understand why they keep getting into trouble on the streets.
Love,
Bo
Dear Bo,
Even before I received your letter, I “heard” your message of serving others. I am in the process of starting once again an organization begun in Chicago a few years ago called People Organized To Stop Rape Of Imprisoned Persons. So little has been written about these subjects. I feel I can best serve my brothers and sisters through my typewriter.
I sure appreciate your letter, Bo. You are so damn right on. God bless you brother, and I hope to hear from you soon.
Namaste,
Tom
Dear Tom,
I don’t think you understood my letter the way I meant it. I think it’s important for you to do some sort of direct relief work that has nothing to do with rape, violence, or sexuality. I mentioned feeding the hungry, caring for the dying, building homes for the homeless, and so forth.
I think the worse thing you could do for yourself would be to rebuild the rape organization. All you’re doing is finding one more way to hang on tight to your greatest stumbling block. My advice was aimed at helping it to fall away. Then maybe someday you may be of use to people who have gone through similar experiences, but right now what help could you provide other than to share misery?
I can’t know for sure what you need to do. All I’m giving you is my opinion, and you have to sort it all out and make your own decisions. But I do want to be straight with you about what my opinion is, because it’s 180 degrees from how you interpreted it. I think you should try a radical change of environment and interests. If you keep revolving your entire life around the trauma you went through, it might make good Hollywood movie stuff, but I don’t think it will meet your deepest needs.
All the best to you,
Love,
Bo
