Authors: Damien Echols
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Kobutsu was first in line through the door. I could see the light reflecting off of his freshly shaved, pink head. I also noticed he had abandoned his usual Japanese sandals in favor of a pair of high-top converse tennis shoes. To see a pair of sneakers protruding from under the hem of a monk’s robe is an odd contrast.
Behind him walked Harada-Roshi. He wore the same style robe as Kobutsu, only in pristine condition. Kobutsu tended to have the occasional mustard stain on his, and didn’t seem to mind one bit.
Harada-Roshi was small and thin, but had a very commanding presence.
Despite his warm smile there was something about him that was very formal in an almost military sort of way. I believe the first word that came to mind when I saw him was discipline. He seemed disciplined beyond anything a human could achieve, and it greatly inspired me. To this day I still strive to have as much discipline about myself as Harada-Roshi. Beneath his warmth and friendliness was a will of solid steel.
Following Harada-Roshi was Chisan, a female priest from the Japanese temple. I had never seen a female priest in person before. I might not have even known she was female until I looked closely, because she wore the same black robe, and her head was shaved just as bald as the rest of us. She was Harada-Roshi’s translator, as the only word he could speak in English was “Hello.” She was filled with good humor and extremely fun to be around. After the ceremony she told me, “Now I am your big sister, and you must do as I say!” As I tried to judge how serious this warning was, she erupted into peals of laughter.
Last in line was Kobutsu’s new lady friend, Dakota. She stood out from everyone else just because she had long, blond hair and was wearing jeans. Many people think all monks are celibate. This isn’t true of the Japanese Rinzai tradition, where monks often marry and have children.
We were all lead into a tiny room that served as death row’s chapel. After everyone greeted each other and gave “hello” hugs, we all settled into our seats.
Harada-Roshi talked about the difference in Japan and America, about his temple back home, and about how few Asians came to learn at the old temple now, it was mostly Americans who wanted to learn. His voice was low, raspy, and rapid fire. Japanese isn’t usually described as a beautiful language, but I was entranced by it. I dearly wished I could make such poetic elegant sounding words come from my own mouth.
Harada-Roshi set up a small travel-altar to perform the ceremony. The altar cloth was white silk, and on it was a small Buddha statue, a canvas covered with calligraphy, and an incense burner. We all dropped a pinch of the exotic smelling incense into the burner as an offering, and then opened our Sutra books to begin
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the proper chants. Kobutsu had to help me turn the pages of my book because the guards made me wear chains on my hands and feet. During the ceremony I was given the name Koson. I loved that name and all it symbolized, and scribbled it everywhere. I was also presented with my
rakusu
.
A rakusu is made of black cloth, and is suspended from your neck. It covers your
hara
, which is the energy center about two finger widths below your belly button. It has two black, cloth straps and a wooden ring/buckle. It’s sewn in a pattern similar to the way a rice paddy would look if viewed from the air. It represents the Buddha’s robe. This is the only part of my robe the administration allowed me to keep inside the prison. On the inside of it Harada-Roshi had painted beautiful calligraphy characters which said, “Great effort, without fail, brings great light.” It was my most prized possession until one day years later the prison guards took it from me.
The canvas on the altar was also given to me. It translates to “Moonbeams pierce to the bottom of the pools, yet in the water not a trace remains.” I proudly put it on display in my cell.
Kobutsu wrote a wonderful article about the experience, and it was printed in a Buddhist magazine called
The Shambala Sun
, along with lots of pictures of us all posing together. They printed a small piece I had written as a sidebar. I must have looked at that article and pictures a thousand times over the years. Just looking at it gives me strength to continue.
I ventured into the realm of Zen to gain a handle on my negative emotional states, which I had achieved to a great extent, but I now approached my practice in a much more aggressive manner. Much like weight lifting, I continued to pile it on. On weekends I was now sitting zazen meditation for five hours a day. My prayer beads were always in my hand as I constantly chanted mantras. I practiced hatha yoga for at least an hour a day. I became a vegetarian. Still, I did not have a breakthrough
Kensho
experience. Kensho is a moment in which you see reality with crystal clear vision, what a lot of people refer to as “enlightenment.” I didn’t voice my thoughts out loud, but I was beginning to harbor strong suspicions that it was nothing more than a myth.
A teacher of Tibetan Buddhism started coming to the prison once a week to instruct anyone interested. I attended these sessions, which were specifically tai-lored to be of use to those on death row. One practice I and another inmate were taught is called
phowa
. It consists of pushing your energy out through the top of
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your head at the moment of death. It still did not bring about that life changing moment I was in search of.
There is a man named Bob who lives in Tennessee and pours concrete for a living. He’s also written two books on the subject of meditation and mystical experiences. He was once a Zen teacher but decided to hang up his robes one day for a more mundane life. He had taken his own experiences and stripped them of all religious connotations and terminology so that it was more practical and useful to the average person. The name he gave his technique was “non-conceptual awareness.” If you passed Bob on the street you would never look at him twice.
He was average in every way; he certainly didn’t look like anyone you would prostrate yourself at the feet of. You would never guess that Bob had had that experience I was now desperate to have, but inside that plain, average body was an incredible mind, and I consider it a miracle to have found him. Who would believe that an enlightened Zen master lived in Tennessee and poured concrete for a living? Not I, simply because he didn’t look exotic enough to play the part.
This southern-fried guru became a friend of mine, and I will forever be grate-ful to him. I once wrote him a letter discussing technical aspects of Zen teachings, one of the key points being emptiness. Zen teaches that we really do not exist, and I just couldn’t buy that. How could I not exist if I can reach down and touch myself? This not existing, which is what is called the emptiness teaching, was really disturbing me. I wrote to Bob and said, “If I don’t exist then why does it hurt if I hit my hand with a hammer?” His answer, which changed me forever, was, “No one said the pain is not real. No one said the body is not real. It’s the entity you believe experiences the pain that is not real.”
It was as if those words broke a dam in me. All the meditation, all the study-ing, all the sutras, all the yoga—it had filled me to the bursting point, and now it all overflowed. The only thing that makes that description inadequate is that there was no “me” behind the experience. It seemed to expand and deepen constantly over the course of the next year. There was only the experience itself, there was no one to experience it.
To give a more concrete and easily understandable experience I’ll use daily chores as an example. When I brushed my teeth the act of brushing occurred, and it was perceived by pure consciousness, but I no longer lived under the delusion that there was an entity called “Damien” to do it.
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Many people have told me this is a horrifying concept, and that they would never want to cease to exist. That’s the illusion. The truth is that we never existed in the first place, and only made the mistake of thinking our reflection was who we really are. All of my anger and outrage slipped away. Nothing anyone did, even the prison guards, could get to me. I could see myself in everyone. It was like every man, woman, and child on earth were fingers on the same hand, but had forgotten it. There are no words capable of expressing how simple everything was, and how beautiful, but I still wanted to try to explain it. I wanted everyone to be able to see the world the way I now did, so I grabbed a pen and began writing. The result, which I finished in less than a month, was a group of essays that covered topics from Alchemy and sex, to meditation and enlightenment. I called them collectively
Little Essays Towards Truth
, in honor of one of my favorite his-torical spiritual seekers.
For some people the experience I had only lasts a split second. For others it lasts their entire life. I consciously and deliberately discarded it, so I could move on to the next thing. I didn’t want a “holy” life of prayer and contemplation. I want a life of strife, lust, striving, seeking, struggling, and debauchery. I was not content to settle for one experience when there are a whole lifetime of experiences to be had. I am so hungry for knowledge that I live several lives at once to acquire it. A Catholic, a Buddhist, a reader and a writer, a sinner, a philosopher, a husband and a father, a native American and a white man. I no longer have any desire to fit into any category. I see no reason why I can’t love pornography and the art of Michelangelo equally. I want to see life from every angle.
I feel as if I’ve learned a tremendous amount from my excursion into the realm of eastern thought, philosophy and practice, things I’ll carry with me to the end of my days. Still, it doesn’t come close to the lessons learned from and with the woman who is now my wife.
XXXIII
In certain tribal cultures spirit guides were represented by animals. The animal guides usher people into the next realm of development in their lives. In plain language, they make us grow as a person. My guide to growth is a beautiful monkey.
My wife is the single most erotic and intelligent creature that has ever existed.
She can have all the poise and grace of a feline, but shining from her eyes is pure monkey mischief. She is my strength and my heart. Without her to keep me going I would have withered and died long ago. I have no reason to keep breathing, outside of her. She is my life. I had been on death row for about two years when I received an odd letter in the mail. It was from a woman who was obsessed with movies, and had recently seen a documentary about my case in a small art house type theater in Brooklyn, New York. She did something no one else had ever done; she apologized for invading my privacy by seeking me out. That really struck me, because I felt like I no longer had any privacy. My entire life had been exposed for anyone and everyone to come examine and poke at with a stick. I was a fly that had its wings ripped off by an obnoxious fat kid. I was the proverbial ant under the magnifying glass. Every day I received letters from people who did nothing but ask questions about the most intimate aspects of my life, almost as if the world was entitled to demand anything of me they wanted to know. Imagine being hounded by the paparazzi, only instead of taking your picture they throw rocks and try to dissect you.
So, this was a woman who understood the value of common courtesy. She said she felt horrible about what I’d been through and was compelled to contact me, but that she didn’t want to intrude. I immediately wrote back to her, and ever since that day we’ve tried to write each other every single day for the past eight years. Our letters to each other now fill up a closet.
She’s the most magickal thing on earth, but it took me at least a year to be able to understand her, because she was so foreign to anything I’d ever known. She was from New York, college educated, a world traveler who’s been from South America to the Middle East, and an architect who had worked on projects for 146
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people I’d only heard of from Hollywood movies. I was introduced to a whole new way of life through her.
It was a slow and gradual process, forging a world together. In the beginning I couldn’t have even articulated what we were doing because I had no concept of subtlety. Now it’s a personal obsession of mine, to know more of subtlety. I believe it started with literature, like the Latin American writer Julio Cortazar.
His writing had had a huge impact on her life and his books were among her most valued possessions. When she sent them to me I was dumbfounded. I truly couldn’t understand why anyone had thought these stories important enough to commit to paper. They made no sense to me. I had been raised to believe a real story had a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion in which the loose ends were tied up. Therefore the stories I received from her seemed to defy logic. Ah, but those books were the least of my headaches.
Her music and movies baffled me a thousand times more so. Before me, her life was movies. Not big Hollywood productions designed to entertain popcorn munching morons, but foreign films, art house movies, independent productions, etc. Everything I considered a waste of film, in other words. There was no way I would pay to see any movie that didn’t have monsters in it. My motto was
“No vampire, no werewolf, no zombie—no ticket.”
I knew I was in love with her when I started to wake up in the middle of the night furious and cursing her for making me feel the way she did. It was pain beyond belief. Nothing has ever hurt me that way. I tried to sleep as much as possible just to escape. I was grinding my teeth down to nubs. Now, years later, it’s exactly the opposite. Now there is no pain, yet she still makes my heart explode with incredible bursts of love. Now there is only fun and love and silliness. She drives me to frenzy, because I can never get enough.
She had to fly from New York to Arkansas every time we saw each other, so in addition to the phone bill this was an extremely expensive relationship. She always laughs now when she tells anyone about the first time I ever called her. She picked up the phone to hear a deep, southern accent ask, “Are you okay?” It was such a shock to her system that it took a second for her to think of a reply. She said it nearly killed her. Now, eight years later, she still sometimes teases me about my accent, but her friends in New York often tell her that she is starting to sound just like me.