The Seven Veils: Lessons From Prison
These lessons are lessons I either learned in prison or taught in prison. They explore the seven most frequently experienced states of consciousness.
Security: Walls and fences and guards can give you security. But they can’t give you peace which is what you are really seeking. In fact, the presence of these external measures that are supposed to keep others separated from you will eat away at your peace. In addition, you will never have enough walls and fences. As soon as you have deployed all the security measures you wanted, you will decide you need more because what they are providing is not what you really want. Then your assumption will be you must need more of the same. What drives this need for security is the desire to avoid the unpleasant sensation of fear.
Sensation: For most of us the most frequent source of pleasure comes from some kind of sensation; food, sex, alcohol, movies, music. For a few, pleasure comes from thinking and thoughts. For a very few, pleasure comes from the movement of spirit through our being. There is nothing wrong with obtaining pleasure through our senses. The problem is when sensual pleasure becomes an addiction. Allowing an addiction into our lives is a surrendering of our personal power.
Power: There are many different kinds of power; military power, political power, economic power. The most important is personal power because all the other types of power can be taken away from you. Armies can rebel, voters can change their minds, the stock market can crash. But when you understand its nature, personal power cannot be taken away from you. There are those who will try to convince you that they have taken away your power. They will tell you only they can define what options are available to you. If you believe them, they have not taken away your power, you have given it away, which is the only way you can lose it.
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, and author of the book, Man’s Search for Meaning, said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” This choosing our attitude in any given circumstance is a small and important but difficult thing. It is also an act of Love.
Love: Love and respect are essentially the same. In prison, when I want to talk about love I start by talking about respect. Even the toughest prisoner can relate to discussing respect. In prison, as in most places, receiving respect is very important. To most people not living in a prison-like environment receiving love is very important. But this wanting to receive love or respect instead of giving love or respect is where we cause our own frustration in life. To quote Paul McCartney, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.“
Not only is giving love more satisfying than receiving it, but it is also more under your control. You can’t control if other people are going to love you. You can attempt to persuade others to love you, but you control whether you are going to give love to others. Communicating love is the most beautiful thing you can communicate.
Communication: The most important activity in effective communication is not speaking, but rather it is listening. When being understood is more important than understanding others, we become like a dancer who is so nervous that he trips over his own feet. Communication is a two-way street. If you are preoccupied with what you are going to say next, rather than what the other person is saying, you will not be responding to what was really said. If you don’t really hear the other person, then you cannot be as persuasive. Too often self-expression is confused with communication. There is nothing wrong with pure self-expression when that is the goal. Self-expression is a subjective presentation. Communication is an objective presentation. Self-expression is about needing to be heard. Communication is about giving information in the most helpful way possible to the listener. Complete communication provides both knowledge and insight.
Insight: Insight is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge is about facts; the way the world works. Insight is about why it works in the way it does. This can be anything from the metaphysical principles that undergird the universe, to the deepest unconscious motivations driving a person to behave in irrational ways. This is the reason the “why” question can be asked an infinite number of times and still not have provided all the possible answers. The why question, whether we realize it at the time or not, addresses an infinite area of being. It also explains in what way we are all related to each other.
Unity: It is easier to see how we are all connected when you know what we all share in common. Everything that is alive wants to remain alive. From bacteria to Redwood trees, everything alive has the drive to continue living. There are a few exceptions. When the pain, either physical or emotional, becomes too great the desire to survive can fade into the background. Even then it never disappears completely.
This also explains the reason we are all here. We are here to help each other stay alive with as little suffering as possible. If we do nothing else than this, then we are following God’s plan.
The next blog: Why You Don’t Remember Your Interlife
Douglas R Pitts is a mental health counselor in a Washington State prison and author of the book “144 Aphorisms.”
The opinions stated in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Washington State Department of Corrections.
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