[Nat]

"After I did the teaching, one of the people who sat with me at the dinner table was a Palestinian man who's become a very good friend of mine named Salaam Kalili (sp?). I said,"What brings you to do hospice work?"

And he said,"Well, my experience in prison."

I said,"What's that?" because I've done a lot of work in prisons and am quite interested.

He said,"I was a journalist in Jerusalem during the late '60s, before and after the '67 war, and I was writing about a free Palestinian state and Palestinians having part of Jerusalem as a capital, and at that time it was forbidden to do so in Israel. So periodically I'd be carted off to jail or prison and I spent about 6 years on and off in prison. I'd write and they'd arrest me. And while I was in prison, once in a while I would get beaten or tortured in some way - which happens in war. It happens on both sides, it's not like one side - it's just what happens when people go insane in war."

He said, "So one day, I was in this prison, and this guard was beating me and kicking me, and I died. There I was on the floor and this boot was kicking me and blood was coming out of my mouth, and the police report says that I died.

"But actually what happened is all this pain, and then it stopped and I was floating on the ceiling watching it...I watched it and I felt so peaceful because it wasn't really my body then, it was just what was happening.

"And then something interesting happened. What happened is that the bubble of the sense of my consciousness observing myself popped, broke, and all of the sudden I became everything. I was the walls of the prison and the old green paint flecking off the walls. I was the body there, but I was also the boot kicking it, and the dirt under the fingernails of the guard, and I was the goat whose bleating you could hear from the window outside, and I was all of it. I knew that I was never born and never could die. Then I looked at this and I said, 'What is all the fuss about?' I felt so peaceful and so joyful because I knew who I really was.

"And then a few days later I woke up inside this broken body at the bottom of a cell, but I was smiling. It took a while for my body to heal, and I got out of prison, but I couldn't do anything for the Palestians anymore. It didn't make any sense. I married a Jewish woman, I have Jewish-Palestinian children...

"I stay with people who are dying because I want to let them know that it's nothing to be afraid of, basically."

There is a certain way that as we come and practice together here and you sit through your pain and fear and loneliness and depression and ideas and all the different things that will come and go, there's a steadying of your being in the midst of the tension in the body. There's an opening of the mindfulness of resting in awareness itself as the mind tells its stories and the unfinished business of emotional waves come and go, that allows us to return to what we already know, to who we already are.

Afis (sp?), the Iraqi poet, he says,"The mind is ever a tourist wanting to touch and buy new things, then toss them into an already filled closet." And you sit here, and the mind does all that stuff, and something greater than that, the knowing, the awareness itself, becomes able to contain and be the witnessing of it, and beyond that, as Salaam experienced."

Zencast 161 - Ten Perfections