Magazine: Yoga Journal
Issue: January/February 1996
Author: W. Bradford Swift

CRIME AND ENLIGHTENMENT

After 20 years running the Prison-Ashram Project, Bo Lozoff reflects on service, selflessness, community, and redemption.

I first met Bo Lozoff at a Unity Church retreat in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Although Bo was the keynote speaker of the conference, I had never heard of him or his organization, the Human Kindness Foundation. It took only minutes to realize Bo was cut from a different bolt of cloth than the speakers I was accustomed to hearing. For starters, he sat on a table in the center of the stage to deliver his talk, in the classic lotus position. In fact, after being introduced, that's all he did do-sit quietly, as the minutes ticked away, in silent meditation.

Eventually, as the audience of over 250 began to fidget, Bo opened his eyes and smiled, revealing a little of the spiritual rascal he's so fond of talking about. "I'm so thrilled to see this number of people for a two-hour silent meditation. It's so moving." He waited for the laughter to die down before adding simply, "And so we begin," and begin he did, mesmerizing the audience with simple truths that cut to the heart of today's issues.

Speaking first on the importance of adding sacred practices to one's life and, later in the conference, on the need for America to become "a safer, kinder society," Bo exemplified his topics. Although most people identify him with the work of the Prison-Ashram Project that he and his wife, Sita, have been involved in for over 20 years, his message is holistic; it resonates across all boundaries of culture, religion, and socioeconomic class. At the core of his message is what Bo refers to as "a handy list of five essential human values for a happy life: self honesty, courage, kindness, sense of humor, and sense of wonder."

The seed idea for the Prison-Ashram Project started to germinate when Bo and Sita visited his sister's husband in prison after he had been busted in a drug deal. The Lozoffs had just settled at an ashram in North Carolina, and the parallels in their day-to-day lives were remarkable. "We were waking up at four in the morning, wearing all white, working hard on a farm all day without getting paid, eating meals in groups, and not having sex," recalls Bo. "We would visit Pete on the prison farm and see that he had to get up at five in the morning, too, and work hard on a farm all day; he didn't get paid, he only ate in a group, and he had no sex. We were struck with the similarities between ashram and prison life."

Soon after the visit, Bo and Sita stumbled upon Ram Dass's Be Here Now. The book so transformed Bo that he invited Ram Dass to visit him in North Carolina. During the visit, Ram Dass mentioned that he had been mailing copies of the book to inmates and invited the Lozoffs to take over the project. Soon, in addition to sending out books, Bo and Sita were offering prisoners instruction in meditation and yoga, both in person and through a voluminous correspondence.

Besides speaking across the country and conducting workshops in hundreds of prisons, Bo has delivered his message to thousands through his books, the best known of which is We're All Doing Time, now in its eighth printing. The Human Kindness Foundation's catalogue features Bo's books and tapes, plus a few special, hard-to-find books and tapes by others. One hundred percent of the proceeds goes to support the work of the Foundation, which includes providing Bo's materials to prisoners for free.

As I parked my motor home near the front porch of Bo and Sita's self-constructed rural home in the Piedmont of North Carolina, I realized that Patricia Norris, who had nominated the Lozoffs for the prestigious Temple Award for Creative Altruism, was right. They do live a "lean and Gandhi-like existence." Yet their simple life-style rings true. It is an integral part of who they are and what they believe is missing in America. I realized it had been this resonance of integrity that had drawn me to overcome my customary shyness at approaching a speaker in the first place. Bo is a "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" kind of guy.

Bo never sat down to develop a master plan for his life. The Human Kindness Foundation evolved organically over a period of years, an evolution that continues 22 year later, touching thousands of people's lives in and out of prison. He surely touched mine. On that first interview day, I never would have guessed I'd end up selling my motor home to simplify my own life-style, but after spending time with Bo, it seemed the right thing to do.

Yoga Journal: You seem to focus your practice and your energies on a group of people living in extreme conditions and viewed as the scourge of society. How does ministering, if that's the right word, to this particular group of people affect your teaching?

Bo Lozoff: I've realized any spiritual teaching or philosophical advice that doesn't address the realities of life in prison or prisoners' backgrounds is not very interesting to me. If you look through various spiritual traditions, like Christianity, it's always been the wretched and the afflicted who have most enthusiastically converted to taking seriously a whole new way of life. The middle-class followers of various traditions are always the most comfortable and often turn out to be the most resistant to making radical changes. When you're dissolving into a spiritual view, you give up all your self-protectiveness, all your boundaries, all assertiveness. Now that's very radical.

If you're pretty comfortable in your life, it weighs on your mind: You sure you want to do this? Whereas somebody in a hole in Attica is saying, "Man, I got to do something or I'm just going to explode."Then somebody comes along and says, "What I've got to say is radical, but . . .." "I don't care, man. I don't give a shit. If it's real, lay it on me."

I think we have a pretty easy job. Ministering to the wretched and the afflicted is always easier than ministering to the comfortable. If you look back-where did Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, and Jesus achieve their great revelations and transformations? Respectively, it was on a lonely mountain top, in the depths of a damp cave, on the hard ground under the bodhi tree, and out in the desert. It's been in times and places of loneliness, of going out on the edge, not knowing whether you're going to come back. It's like the sacrifice of the virgin into the volcano.

People in prison have the choice of using their prison experience either to greatly solidify a harsh, tough, stubborn, and negative self, or to allow the harsh, negative experience of prison to beat the hell out of their egos, and be reduced to a genuine, classic seeker of the one Great Truth. Those are the people Sita and I never tire of meeting: somebody who in that situation makes that choice. People ask how we can continue to do this for so many years, it must be depressing, but it's just the opposite. It's deeply inspiring to see one more person make that choice, because we know it's hard. It's not easy for the middle-class or for the wretched and the afflicted.

The two of you have been codirectors of the Human Kindness Foundation for over 20 years. How have your spiritual practices come into play with the work of the Foundation? What exactly do you do as part of the Prison-Ashram Project?

Our personal methodologies have never had a great deal to do with the work of the Prison-Ashram Project or Human Kindness Foundation. We have a guru who arose from the Hindu tradition, and we're deeply involved with this lineage around Hanuman, who is a monkey. How relevant is that going to be to most people-in or out of prison-in the modern West? It's always been clear to us that our work is not to proselytize the particular methods we are using to become more conscious and loving, but to proselytize being conscious and loving.

In the prisons we teach a very universal form of breath-centered meditation, something like the beginning stages of vipassana instruction. We also teach a practice of eye-to-eye meditations that I've evolved over the years which helps to clear out barriers between people. We encourage people to get involved in some physical methodologies like yoga or breath work, depending on what they feel their needs are. We encourage people to do spiritual reading, and if they're attracted to a particular tradition we help them get more involved in that tradition.

What is your gift to the prisoners? What do you hope to imbue them with? What is your hope for them?

I see myself as a simple person of goodwill. I work with a lot more than prisoners. Right now we're having this conversation to influence people through the pages of Yoga Journal. It doesn't matter to me if I work for prisoners or anybody else. I see myself as somebody reminding people that there are some simple, classic, universal, spiritual truths and rules we need to become aware of and obey if we want to have a happy life. There are rules about goodwill and kindness, courage and truthfulness, truths about our connectedness to each other and the Law of Karma. What I'm trying to get across is, "Look, I know you are at root a decent, good person, because I've come to see that in myself and I see it is true of everyone. I know you want to have a happy life and you don't want to harm others. At your deepest root you wish no ill, so let's proceed from there."

I remind people that everybody needs to have some code of values, some philosophical view, no matter how simple it may be; something that will connect the individual to this universal, transcendent truth that has, at its core, what you might call the Great Wonderfulness. It's a cross-cultural, cross-religious message that no spiritual or religious tradition disagrees with.

I think that's one of the reasons why our work has been popular with the people in prisons, because it's a simple message. It helps somebody to get back to square one of what the spiritual journey is about. If you accept that we're all connected and life has some deeper meaning for us than just making a living, then the next step is, how am I supposed to conduct myself? And I say, "Well, I've studied all these religions and traditions, and they all say be kind to each other. If you aren't, you'll suffer." We go from there. "Well, how do you be kind if the person next to you is being cruel to you?" We begin wrestling and struggling with the universal issues between people of goodwill. How do you follow the spiritual journey in an environment that is usually against it?

What can you teach or offer prisoners who have no hope of reentering society-those locked up for life?

If you or I make the mistake of thinking somebody in prison is out of the way, or shut off, then they're going to see it like that, too. You and I have to see everybody as dead-center in the middle of their spiritual journey. If I had to choose between the worldly journey and the spiritual journey, I would choose the spiritual. It's true, prisoners are very limited in their worldly affairs. I just deal with the fact of it with the prisoners. There are a lot of death warrants being signed now, so we say to a prisoner on death row, "Let's deal with the idea that it is possible your date could be signed any day. You're going to be one of those few people in life who knows exactly when and how you're going to die. Wow! That's pretty awesome. You could really prepare for that. You could tap into some of the technologies from all the spiritual traditions like mantras and breathing techniques, and you could do some intense spiritual work going out that way."

So, in essence, you're telling the prisoners that it's not too late to make a contribution to themselves and to society?

That's right. I genuinely believe that everybody, anywhere, can make the greatest contribution to the world through their own full realization, through enlightenment. I don't think somebody shut off in a prison cell has no effect. We've been told, and the Dalai Lama has affirmed, that right now there are women and men sitting in caves in various places in the world we will never meet, we will never know their names, they don't have any contact with the world in a physical sense, but they are helping us to survive by the power of their blessings. Prisoners can become the same sort of force, even if they never get out of prison. When somebody's heart opens to the infinite, when somebody really merges into the Christ-heart, it changes the entire world. It helps every one of us to get through the day.

You have strong views on our current prison system and what you describe as the "socially sanctioned hatred" of criminals. Some might even consider your views contrarian. Where do you think America has gone off the mark with our prison system?

The prison situation, just like the homeless situation, the ecological situation, and a lot of others are reflections of how we are caught. This is a period of our national life in which goodwill has taken a great beating, as has the importance of reconciliation and the importance of being neighborly. Especially now, with the Internet and being able to work on our computers at home, we have the means to become the most isolated people in the history of the Earth, because we don't have to go out and mingle with any riffraff. We don't have to go to a movie. We'll just wait a few weeks until it's out on video so we can sit in front of our big-screen TV in the comfort of our home and not have to smell the people in the row behind us, or take the chance of getting mugged. We're perfecting isolationism and loneliness in our lives.

Translate that to the criminal justice system. When somebody violates us, or offends us, we put them in an isolated environment with people of the same gender and generation, basically. We treat them harshly to make them regret it. We're not trying to integrate them into anything or reconcile anything. Their families go visit them once a month, or a couple of times a year, but we basically don't want to have anything to do with their lives.

How do we reverse the escalating crime rate?

There's a fledgling movement called "restorative justice," as opposed to the current model of retributive justice which is based on punishment. Restorative justice is more holistic, saying, "Let's restore the community to a functioning whole and not exile this person forever. Let's keep a tighter embrace on him in the community. We need all the good people we can get. We know you're a good and decent person at heart, so let's get together more." Rather than say, as soon as somebody breaks the law, "Get out of here. We don't want to ever see you again," we have to actually widen the embrace and say, "Get back in here. What do you think you're doing?"

It's a totally opposite perspective, but we have to believe in it. When I say deeper values, I think everybody has a deeper value of goodwill, hope, peace, and reconciliation. It's fear getting in the way that we have to look at. Look at people like Newt Gingrich and Pete Wilson. That's what happens when fear embodies and takes powerful office. Since this is a democratic nation, these people are our fears embodied. They're taking billions of dollars away from valuable programs that people really need to be able to eat, learn job skills and good ways of growing up, and putting that money into warehousing human beings until the day they die in prisons. That's what fear does. Fear acts completely contrary to common sense and to goodness. We have to take responsibility for that and say, "Newt is our fear. This is me. I've got to change the way I'm looking at this and the way I'm living in order to change who's going to be representing me in Congress". Like John the Baptist said, "Before kingdoms can change, people must change."

What do you envision for the future? What's next for our collective spiritual consciousness, particularly for this country? What do you see as our particular road blocks or obstacles?

First let me say something very, very positive. The greatest comfort in choosing to be a person of spiritual faith is this: The end has already been accomplished, and it turned out good. Light and darkness, good and evil have already had the final showdown, and the good guys won. Jesus did that on the cross, Buddha on the ground, Moses on the mountain, Mohammed in the cave. There's no chance of it turning out any other way.

So each and every one of us, from Timothy McVeigh to Mother Teresa, will triumph. That's the problem of free will. We can do whatever we want, but the laws of karma don't change. We will suffer and struggle to the extent that we continue to violate our essential divine nature. At this point in history we are taking food from the mouths of hungry children, locking record numbers of people away in prisons, electing meanspirited people to represent our fear and anger in the halls of power.

We will definitely self-correct at some point, but isn't it sad what we may put ourselves through until then? Our cultural lifestyle is a big part of the problem. We're racing frantically through life like lemmings toward the sea. We have to be willing to get serious about being calmer people who perform daily spiritual practices from any of the great traditions. We have to rethink our main goals. During the past 50 years, our goals have become absurdly, unworkably, insanely individualistic. It's sheer delusion to obsess on self-esteem and ignore community esteem; the self exists in relationship with the community.

We have to rethink our current assumptions that lead us to farm out our kids to be raised by others, farm out our parents to be cared for out of sight and out of mind until they die. What's the implication? That the most important thing in life is the period between 20 and 60? Our career? Our comfort? Our convenience? Ask people on their deathbed whether they wish they had spent more time with their families. Ask them how much they would give to waste a few hours with their kids just one more time-just hanging out, not accomplishing a thing. Ask them, and then look honestly at your own priorities.

Do we need to work this hard? Do we need all this stuff that we're accumulating? Wouldn't it even help the environment tremendously if we slowed down, made less money, lived with fewer gadgets? Wouldn't the gap between the haves and have-nots lessen, resulting in less crime, less resentment?

How do you put your spiritual practices into practice every day? Of course, everything is spiritual practice. Every moment. But on the other hand, as Lao Tzu pointed out, it is egomania to think we can attain enlightened awareness without appropriate rituals and self-discipline. So I see our daily practices as informing and inspiring the entire day. I'm a big believer in spiritual practice, especially for people who do service.

There's a story of a guy who goes to his spiritual master and says, "My problem is, I've been trying to faithfully devote an hour a day to meditation, but I have a wife and three kids, a demanding job. The kids are up when I awake, and there's so much going on when I get home, and my wife and I need to spend time together at night. Tell me what I should do."

The master replies, "Do two hours a day."

Sita and I take that story to heart, and as our service commitments increase, we increase our practice times as well. Nowadays we spend between four and five hours a day in practice-from 5:30 to 8:30 in the morning, and about 9 to 10:30 at night. That is not "time out" from our work, but actually the core of it. What spiritual power can we bring to people if we don't take time to access it ourselves? Especially people who are seeking great change in their lives, they don't want to just hear the right words; they want to feel the real stuff behind those words: the peace, the clarity, the devotion they're hoping to find in themselves. Spiritual practices work; we just have to take the time to do them.

The other thing about being steadfast in daily practice is this: If you are sitting at your altar every morning and evening dissolving all your identities-as Joseph Campbell put it-then you only have about 12 hours at a time to screw yourself up. Vices and misdeeds can't flourish as easily if you're cleaning the slate every 12 hours. It's a great help.

What are some of your spiritual practices?

We practice silent meditation in the morning and evening. Also, Sita and I are very involved with the lineage of Hanuman and the Ramayana. Hanuman is considered the pinnacle of all three of the major branches of yoga: jnana yoga, which is knowledge; karma yoga which is service; and bhakti yoga, which is devotion.

We also spend a couple hours each day chanting, which has taught us a great deal about both obedience and devotion. But one of our favorite practices, morning and evening, is our reading period. I read aloud to Sita, something we did all the time our son was growing up. It's so civilized. I think we are in the generation of Americans who are needing to reinvent what we consider civilized behavior and life-styles. Finding a little time every day with your family, reading from any holy book, and doing a period of prayer and devotion are not extraordinary activities. Just civilized behavior.

The word dharma means to hold back from disaster. We do these practices to help hold ourselves back from disastrous behavior, from making poor decisions, from being so lost from the transcendent nature of life that we get totally sucked up, chewed up, and spit out. It's sad so many people are walking around daily feeling this way; all the people on Prozac, people engaging in substance abuse, and people in quiet despair. We feel we are part of this movement in late 20th-century America of reinventing and rediscovering the components of a civilized life-style. We have to bring our standard of civilization up if we are to have a kinder, safer world for our children to grow up in.

I'm not talking about anything particularly religious. I'm talking about a level of civilization. If somebody doesn't have a basic philosophy of life, something more involved than whatever they're doing that particular day, then their life is going to feel really small and chaotic. That's what's happening. More and more people have no larger philosophy of life.

At one of your talks at a spiritual retreat of Unity Churches, you asked the questions, "Who will be tomorrow's spiritual sages?" and "If not you, then who?" Do you feel American society is heading toward being without our own sages?

We will never be without sages, but the question is, will we recognize them, seek their wisdom? Well, that's one question. The other question is, are we willing to become them?

Why would we have difficulty recognizing them?

Because we see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. Look at all the sex/money/power scandals involving the heads of large ashrams and temples. What can we learn from these painful experiences? Mostly there seems to be a new philosophy emerging that the age of gurus and masters is over, that we should never put total trust in anyone outside ourselves. I think this is way off base. The Big Journey is always the same, and there are always remarkable and inspiring people whose realization is way, way beyond anything we can understand. We're not all peers. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, we just need to stop rolling it over our toes.

What might spare our toes is to look honestly at the types of people who have betrayed our trust, and to see why we defined them as gurus in the first place. Like, for example, a guru who is handsome, charming, and witty, commanding a large salary, plenty of perks, and a hot new car-now that's much more appealing than a rugged cross on Calvary or the hard ground under the bodhi tree, or a simple robe and few possessions.

We like our masters snazzy, because that's the kind of sages we want to be-those who can have our worldly cake and eat divine nectar, too. Simple and quiet men and women who walk with heads bowed in humility are old hat, corny, trapped in "poverty consciousness!" Give us Deepak Chopra any day, who tells us, "Fulfill every material and nonmaterial desire," and "Create wealth and spend it lavishly." These teachers become our sages, not because of who they are, but because of who we are.

We are good people, very deep people, all of us. But we are not living around our deepest values. Our culture has virtually trashed notions of humility, modesty, meekness, self-sacrifice-all the classic qualities that move us beyond ego's cleverness and vanity. Instead we have empowered clever and vain "masters" and then blamed them for letting us down. But they didn't betray us; our own models did.

In a relationship with a guru, what do you feel is the responsibility of the student?

The student's classic role is to surrender and obey, which is why we need to choose our masters so much more carefully. If you choose Jim Jones or David Koresh, you're really in trouble if you surrender and obey. The Dalai Lama has said Americans are reckless in this way; he said we should thoroughly investigate a teacher or master for years before placing ourselves in his or her hands. We Americans don't know that sort of patience or maturity. We go to one workshop or read one book, and we offer our whole life to somebody.

Someone once asked my own guru, "How do I know if somebody is my guru?" He replied, "Is there anything at all, even the slightest thing, he wants from you? Anything he will gain from the relationship? If there is, then he is not your guru." That's very un-American, totally undemocratic and lopsided. But that's what a guru is-someone who is here solely for you, for me. No self-interest at all. Love personified. Nothing they need from us, nothing we can give them except our burdens.

Recently you expanded the Foundation to include Kindness House. What is Kindness House, what is it's purpose, and how is it coming along?

Kindness House is a beautiful 13-acre place here in rural North Carolina. Basically, it's a small community where we put into practice, on a full-sized scale, most of what you and I have been discussing here. Kindness House is only a year old, so we're just getting off the ground. The lifestyle itself is not a new experiment for Sita and me. The vision is to have up to a dozen permanent community members who will take over Human Kindness Foundation-process the mail, distribute our books and newsletters, correspond with prisoners, network with other organizations-and be able to host the many visitors and volunteers who contact us from all over the world, including some of our prisoner friends when they come up for parole.

I think communities like Kindness House are important these days-small, modest places where spiritual practitioners can live in goodwill and work together to address some problem or other in the world. At Kindness House we also look at the pace of modern life, and we try to slow ours down. Not that we don't work hard: We receive up to 100 letters a day, send out thousands of books and tapes, grow most of our food, do all our own construction, repair our vehicles. But we see ourselves primarily as spiritual seekers who work; not primarily as busy workers who do a little seeking.

Even ashram life in America seems often to be as frenzied and achievement-oriented as the mainstream culture. There is no way to help our society slow down except by each of us learning how to slow down. We have an upstairs deck at Kindness House called Sunset Deck which offers a gorgeous, big-sky view to the West. Most of us gather there each evening to watch the sky change colors. You can't fully appreciate it in five or 10 minutes. It takes time. It's amazing and informative to notice how many ways our minds balk at the notion of spending an hour or two watching the sun go down. Yet how civilized it feels to do it.

If we rediscover how peaceful it is to watch the sun rise or set, we indeed may not achieve as many graduate degrees. We may not accomplish as much. We may not become as successful or famous. Friends and relatives may zoom past us on the fast track, and we won't necessarily catch up in the end in any worldly way. But we may become deeper, more reflective human beings who know the simple joy of being alive. And I think the world needs us to do that perhaps more than anything else. ---------- W. Bradford Swift is a writer who lives in North Carolina. He is at work on a book to be called Life on Purpose: Designing a Life of Service, Simplicity and Serenity.

Resource: The Human Kindness Foundation, Rte. 1, Box 201-N, Durham, NC 27705; (919) 942-2540.

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