Criminal Guilt
by Ajahn Brahm
Before I had the honorable but burdensome office of abbot dumped upon me, I used to visit the prisons around perth. I kept a careful record of the hours of service I had spent in jail to be used as credit in case I ever got sentenced!
On my first visit to a big prison in Perth, I was surprised and impressed at the number of prisoners who came to hear me speak about meditation. The room was packed. Around ninety-five percent of the prisoner population had come to learn meditation. Yet the longer I spoke, the more restless my captive audience grew. After only ten minutes, one of the prisoners, one of the leading criminals in the jail, put up his hand to interrupt my talk and ask a question. I invited him to go ahead and ask.
"Is it true," he said,"that through meditation you can learn to levitate?"
Now I knew why so many prisoners had come for my talk. They were all planning to learn meditation so they could levitate over the prison walls! I told them that it is possible, but only for exceptional meditators, and then only after many years of training. The nest time I wet to teach at that prison, only four prisoners turned up for the session.
Over the many years that I taught inside prisons, I got to know some of the criminals very well indeed. One thing I discovered was that every criminals feels guilty for what they have done. They feel it day and night, deep in their hearts. They only tell this to their close friends. They wear the standard defiant prisoner face for viewing in public. But when you earn their trust, when they take you as their spiritual guide for a while, then they open themselves and reveal their painful guilt. I would often help them with the next story: the story of the class B kids.
I was talking to a friend that was saying that if you lie before then you're a lier. I was totally offended with that, I truly believe what Ajahn Brahm said that the most important moment is now, there is moment where we lie and we did not lie before this moment. It is our choice to carry which one with us at the moment or you can carry none. Appreciate the moment now and don't ever focus on the two bad bricks.
Never heard about two bad bricks yet? click here! Two Bad Bricks
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