We Are All Prisoners

I just came upon this documentary about the teaching of Vipassana inside a New Delhi prison.  It's an excellent movie, and I strongly recommend you find 53 minutes to watch it.  It might just change your life.

Interestingly, as I was watching this, I was wondering how this might relate to a recent meditation retreat I had participated in.  Both of them teach Vipassana.  Well imagine my surprise when I found out they were not related at all ... instead, the were exactly the same course!

So I guess that's what you get when a course is given for free, eh?  Just the same stuff used to try and reform hardened criminals 😳  In retrospect, I am not a bit surprised.

I choose not to talk about the specifics of my experience in the retreat -- in case others find an opportunity to take the same course, I'd rather let them experience it as I did, without any expectations or presumptions about what will occur.  This movie gives you a little taste of what it will be like, and that's just enough.

I will say I found the course had a profound impact on me, and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have taken it.  (BTW, my course began on 5 March 2020, just as we were learning about COVID-19; it ended one day early, because of plans to close national borders. The class scheduled for a week later was canceled entirely.  I consider myself very lucky to have had this experience).

I'll write more about some of my retreat experiences in the future, on this or another one of my blogs.  Until then, just consider that we are all prisoners, but only some of us are "doing time" 😬

What do I mean?  Mainly, that we don't see reality as it truly is.  Some examples:

We have a comparative mind, that sees things as good and bad, right or wrong, easy or difficult, beautiful or ugly, or gradations in-between.  That comparative mind is part of what keeps us behind bars.  In reality, things are simply as they are, without any judgments applied to them.  That's just Life!  It is we that apply the labels, perform discrimination, and jump to conclusions.

We also -- by our nature, and as part of society's conditioning -- create a "self" (including the ego) to navigate in our world.  By trick of nature, we think this self is constant and enduring, even though we can see frequent dramatic changes in ourselves as we navigate through life.  There is no permanent, unchanging self.

Finally, we inherent and are conditioned over time with traits and habits that become seemingly "hard-wired" into our being.  These habits can govern our responses to situations, even without any mediation by our rational mind.  These "reactions" are there for evolutionary reasons, but when they are not saving our life to pass along our genes, they can bring us suffering and misery.  Because we think and say and do things in the heat of the moment that we wish we hadn't, and bring harm to others and/or to ourselves.

That's how some of the prisoners in the movie came to be behind bars, and luckily, we have avoided that fate.  But the important point is that these "reactions" can be lessened or eliminated over time, or as Victor Frankl wrote:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. 
In that space is our power to choose our response. 
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz Survivor 

And all of that can help us to become equanimous to all that Life brings to us, moment by moment.  This equanimity gives us the opportunity to apply wisdom and discernment when making decisions, setting intentions, or dealing with challenging situations.  And with that insight, we can liberate ourselves.