Report from Fleet Maull, PDN/PMI Founder: Just returned from MA prison and presented egolessness to the Theravadins (which included a couple of Tibetan Buddhists. There were 12 people present. We did the Theravadin chants and sat for 15 minutes. I then presented two-fold egolessness in an open format, allowing many discussions. It was a very lively, interesting, and stimulating discussion. I spoke about egolessness from a practice viewpoint which included shamatha and vipassana. We have to return to Vipasshana next week as we ran out of time/space 🙂
I touched on shamatha as a meditation technique that cultivates attention, concentration, and peace and allows us to work with distractions much more skillfully, how distractions such as thoughts, physical irritations, and emotional irritations become more transparent, how we tend to react less to distractions.
One guy brought up the drama triangle concept: how the persecutor, victim, and rescuer are forms of ego. We explored how more mindfulness and awareness of habitual behavior patterns are liberating. It allows us to make more conscious choices in our life rather than be tossed and turned all the time in a karmic chain of action and reaction. We discussed anxiety and how it indicates catching up in the ego’s game. We talked about the meaning of “projection” and how we tend to solidify our experience due to a lack of mindfulness and awareness and then project that experience onto others and situations. We started talking about the meaning of “other”, and the clock struck 11 AM. We stopped, bowed, and said our goodbyes.
Everyone was participating in the discussion and the time went by quickly for us all. They asked me to prepare talks that we could discuss in a similar format for a few weeks.
Gratitude, gratitude, and more gratitude! I’m overjoyed with prison dharma and the chance to be with all these guys!
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