Interview with Fleet Maull: It IS Possible to Change Our World

Browsing through profiles on Zaadz late one night, I stumbled across Fleet Maull's blog and saw that he was in Japan with one of his teachers, Roshi Bernie Glassman.  On a whim, I decided to send him a message and see if he would grant me an interview in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo.  He agreed, even though his schedule was brimming with adventures to be had, and he would be leaving Japan the next day.  The first time I spoke to him on the phone I knew that he had a spark inside of him, and we talked for about 20 minutes before setting up a meeting time.  When we met in person and shook hands at the train station gates the next day I knew it wasn't a spark.  It was a fire.  I knew instantly that, just as he has taught hundreds before me, I was also at the master's feet to learn.

Your new book, just came out, when was it published?

Early this year.  Called, Dharma in Hell:  The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull.  Wish I had a copy for you, but I gave away my last one.

Is the book kind of telling that story of what happened in prison?

Not completely.  These were a collection of essays that I wrote while I was in prison at different times. Some were published in Shambhala Sun, some were published in Tricycle, Turning Wheel, different places.  And there’s a few previously unpublished essays.  But they’re about life in prison. Specifically in terms of being  a practitioner. The book doesn’t tell the whole story by any means, but it certainly gives you some pretty strong snapshots into it in terms of what life and having a practice was like there.

Have you seen Prison Break?  You know, it’s about breaking out of prison and I’ve been watching it so much that I wonder, if you’re in prison, are you constantly thinking:  how am I gonna get outta here?  Or:  how can I leave this place?

Yeah, I've seen it.  And in general, yeah.  I really worked hard to get beyond that.  But literally, you know, the first few years I was in there, where my discursive mind would go off, if I wasn’t checking it, was constantly looking around like:  where are the escape possibilities?  It’s just kind of where your mind goes.

And then of course, most prisoners are really focused on their case, and their appeal, and they hear something new about a new legal decision maybe they can get that... you know I really worked hard not to spend my time there.  I mean, I did my appeal.  I did what you had to do. But I just did it, and I didn’t obsess about that stuff at all.  I knew I was going to spend a lot of time in prison.

Can you tell us about the transformation work you started doing there?  And that you are doing now?

People who are in prison are very ripe for transformation.  And the vast majority of them are not interested in and are not going to find their way to transformation even though they’re in the right situation.  It’s quite amazing how, you know, they don’t kind of ‘get’ that I’m in prison, and this is the bottom of the heap and I should be asking some questions about my life.  But most prisoners don’t. {chuckles}

At Prison Dharma Network, we correspond with about 3,000 prisoners a year and then people in our network, including Human Kindness Foundation, they’re part of our network, we’re talking about 30-40,000 prisoners. So there's this huge interest and I think it operates on two levels.

Basic Mindfulness Training.  As you know, from your practice, you really get this sense that there’s this kind of spectrum, between how thoughts arise, which is pretty random, they’re discursive, and how that may build into a mood, or kind of a mental formation.  And that leads to, generally to, emotions and impulses, which lead to behaviors, which lead to consequences.

And most people who find themselves in trouble in their lives keep finding themselves in consequences wondering how they got there.  So, meditation and mindfulness training can help people become aware that there is this spectrum, that they have a mind and that it’s actually been running their life, and without them having much to say about it.  And they first off  become aware: oh, that’s there, and I can actually pay attention to it.  So they begin to get a sense of that spectrum and see that there actually are moments of freedom when they can make a different choice.  They can recognize, 'I see where this pattern goes.  This is usually where I tell the guard to go fuck off, and get locked up in the hole and I get beat up and you know, maybe I don’t wanna go there this time.'

So meditation and mindfulness training not only shows them that spectrum but gives them the presence of mind to actually recognize the moment of freedom and make a different choice.

So I think just in real, practical terms, it gives people a possibility of freedom in their life that they never had; because people who end up in prison, I mean, their lives are completely conditioned, most of them come from horrible backgrounds.

Meditation.  Another part of it is that prison is really an extremely chaotic environment.  Incredibly noisy.  Very hard to sleep.  You’re under a lot of stress all the time.  So, prisoners often find that meditation brings them peace.  If they’re able to do it in their cell... most prisoners don’t live in cells anymore.  They live in big dormitories.  Which are chaotic and noisy…it’s only really maximum-security prisoners which are in cells by themselves.

If they can find a place to practice or if there’s a program in the prison chapel or something, if they can just get a moment of peace, that’s very powerful for them.

And, if they start practicing enough, to actually get under the conditioning, and get in touch with the qualities of their Beingness that we would describe as Buddha Nature, or Basic Goodness, they actually touch into something that they can trust.  When their whole life, everybody’s been telling them they’re a piece of shit.  Finally they can touch into something and they don’t have to believe that anymore.  That’s incredibly powerful if in their practice they can get to where they can start touching into that depth.  And from that kind of place they can really transform their lives, transform the prisons that they’re in, in many cases.

I think it may be that some of the first people to attain deep realization in the West, and I mean, I think there are people who have attained deep realization, too, but I think many of them will be in prison.

Prison is a powerful place to practice.   Because the environment is in your face all the time.

If you’re part of the middle class you have so many choices, and you can manipulate your world in a certain way to avoid that which is uncomfortable, that which you don’t want to see, that which you don’t want to deal with.  And in prison you can’t do that, it’s just right in your face.  And if you practice you are very aware of your state of mind moment to moment.  If you’re not in a fairly relaxed state of mind the environment is just going to irritate the shit out of you.

I lived on a floor with about 175 men, it was designed for 50, and I got a single cell, not like a cell with bars, but a small room.  Well it could have been a cell, it was so small.  That’s why it stayed a single, if they could have fit another bunk in there they would’ve…  it might have orignially been a closet, actually, although it did have a window in it.

It had a regular door and the door had a window in it, so the guards could look through the window, and the door doesn’t lock, anyone could come in.  But anyway I had that, and for like the last 10 or 11 years of my 14-year sentence I managed to keep it.  Because when you lose your room you go back up to the 28-man dorm, top bunk.  I was lucky.

So, anytime I came out of my room, I was immediately aware of the quality of my state of mind, because it was just chaos outside my room.  My room was right on the main drag.  Full of guys, yelling, screaming, doing rap beats, it was nuts, especially in the evenings.

So, anytime I opened my door to come out there, either I experienced an “urgh” irritation or it was like “Ah! Interesting!”  I knew what the quality of my state of mind was at that moment, it was always obvious, people were always in your face, guards in your face, inmates in your face.  There was a fight waiting around every corner.   So it’s really a deep place for practice.  Whereas out in the regular world you can kind of stumble around pretty mindlessly without getting a whole lot of feedback. 

You get mindless in prison, you get that feedback in an instant.

Pema Chödrön writes about that, about going to the places that scare you, of learning how to exist in this chaotic atmosphere.

Well there’s a term that some people use, I’ve used it in my writing and it’s in my book, the notion of “charnel grounds.”  Have you ever heard that expression?

In India, “charnel grounds” were places where poor people’s bodies were put.  They couldn’t afford to be burned, couldn't afford the firewood and so forth for cremation, so their bodies were just taken out and thrown in these remote areas and wild places.  And these bodies were just left out there for wild animals to devour, and these places were traditionally considered to become the haunts of wild animals, and ghosts, and spirits, and demons.

And so yogis would go live in the charnel grounds, to confront all their own fears.  And they would actually sometimes even make a seat out of human bones and a little hut for themselves and they might spend five years living in this crazy wild place, practicing.  It was called charnel ground practice.

Charnel grounds have become kind of a metaphor for practicing in difficult places…  as Pema Chödrön says, 'going to the places that scare you.'  Prison is definitely a charnel ground practice environment.  And it’s something that’s really become part of my life, probably because of that experience.   I found the culture I was being raised in the 1950’s and 60’s to be so empty and vacant and dead and meaningless, and devoid of any kind of authenticity.  I was just looking to be alive, looking for some juice and that took me to all kinds of things...drugs, sex, and rock and roll… traveling in South America.  I just kept looking to plug into something real.

You know I kept finding various levels of that, but they all had their kind of hangover and their mirage quality, as well as their real quality until I eventually discovered genuine practice.  So I think that I was always looking for that but since being in prison, the practices that are very important to me are charnel ground practices, like,  going to Auschwitz every year.  We go spend 5 days in Auschwitz, in the concentration camp to bear witness to the reality of that place. I could barely stay there the first time. It’s like prison for one thing. To stay there and hold your seat and keep your heart open is an incredibly powerful practice.

And another charnel ground practice that’s a very important part of my life is the Street Retreats I do.

How can people have their own charnel grounds practice?

I kid people sometimes,  “Well, you know you can just go rob a bank… just take a note, don’t take a gun, just pass a note… first time and you’re guaranteed about 5 years.  You will have a felony conviction now but, you know, you can have your own 5 year prison retreat.”  I haven’t had anyone take me up on it yet. {laughs}

What's your message to Zaadzsters out there?

You know, it’s something about transformation.  That personal transformation and social transformation are actually possible. 

It is actually possible to live a life at least relatively free of our conditioning.  We don’t have to be driven by our conditioned desires.  We evolve.  We have been brought up in this world that is constantly telling us:  you need this, you need that, you need this and it enslaves us to this materialistic world.

And it is actually possible to transform that.  It’s possible to get out of that.  It doesn’t mean you have to go live in a cave.  It doesn’t mean you have to go back to the earth and live on an organic farm somewhere.  You can do it right in the midst of being engaged in the world. 

It takes practice.

You know, it is possible to change our world.  And it comes from inside.

I quickly realized when I was in prison that if I was going to change anything, if I was going to be able to accomplish anything at all, it was going to come out of my practice.  It wasn’t going to come out of my anger, it wasn’t going to come out of my sense of superiority, it wasn't going to come out of my intellect or my intelligence.  It was going to come out of my practice.  And I knew I just had to practice really hard.  And really, everything came out of my practice.  Everything unfolded from that. 

I just think that, this world we’re all living in, it can be pretty fascinating, you know, with all the media that’s available to us.  There’s a lot of creative outlets.  It can be pretty fascinating.  But I think we all experience that it is extremely materialistic and it’s extremely empty and superficial.  And there’s more than that, but you have to be willing to take on a practice and discipline yourself to open yourself to a completely different world.  Where personal transformation and social transformation are really possible.  It’s not a myth.

Thank you.  It’s been really good talking with you today.

Well, thank you for taking the time to do this.  It’s really sweet of you.

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