God is an Abolitionist

So you’re all abolitionists now which is nice! Maybe I can get more publicly wacky in other ways. Ready for the G word?

I loveeee the new Netflix show Midnight Gospel. But I have some criticisms about the use of prison within the narratives. Why does Bob (the prisoner) have to realise his violence keeps him from enlightenment? What an ungenerous reading of violence. Why use prisoners to tell a story about spirituality and the human condition? It’s such a cliche. Why is it never on the guard to realise he’s pissing in his own eye? Why do people with jobs never have to realise how trapped they are? Why is the violence of the walls invisible?

The Buddha said we can get self realisation from any realm, human, hell or other. There is always a path. So why the fetish for hell? Do they know any violent prisoners? Why are we threatened by violence when it’s criminal and not, say, army violence? Why are people so obsessed with these kinds of people’s realization? Stop pretending to do Bob a favour. Or people who die in custody. It is at best a lazy representation, spiritual bypassing and at worst justification for oppressive control over people whose lives you know nothing about.

On the subject of spiritual bypassing I found this book the same week by a benign cult, the Hare Krishnas, talking to the biggest gang in the world, the lieutenant of Chicago Police public media relations department. They were discussing the definitions of crime. If you don’t know the Krishna movement is obsessed with celebrities and was founded by George Harrison. I’d call this the warrior realm.

Their ideas about why people do crime makes sense maybe when thinking about are celebrities and other important powerful people if at all but no further. Their ideas about why people do crime sort of make sense from the perspective of celebrity, but doesn’t hold any weight beyond that. They can only see it from why they themselves would commit crime and are oblivious as to the reasons other people from entirely different realms of reality do it.

This is just one part of the huge amount of money the police spend every year to keep their reputation up. I wonder how much they got paid for this. At the end of the inveview the cop asks how they can bring crime down, and the guy says, chanting. He promises to take this valuable information to the superiors as though they’re gonna listen to what he has to say? It’s clear neither of these people are listening to each other, they are both trying to placate the other’s ego and illusion of superiority and self righteousness. It’s quite audacious to see people using their god and the taxpayer budget to make the police and the cult look good and talking about people who they have no comprehension of. Boil my piss.

I love the Buddhist wheel of worlds. I see this as spiritual classes of being. And I don’t think it’s cool to come to another world and say what’s what. I tried to do buddhism classes to get well and it made me worse cause the ideas were for humans who the Buddha says learn thought education about liberation. I was a hungry ghost or a hell being and I had to learn these ideas another way (twelve steps and help from other addicts). Essentially I needed a basis of stability that people are assumed to have. This stability brought me to the human world. Now I am well enough to do meditation and not do crime. The only people who understand why crime and violence happen in hell or ghost worlds are those who’ve been there.

The Ten Commandments are a mistranslation. They are simply facts. When we are getting our needs met we tend not to hurt each, other covert each other, kill each other. So obvious you might just miss it. They aren’t rules and making them rules is playing God. Making prisons is playing God. I am punished by my anger not for it. I don’t need any human or institution to administer it. Stability is much more than just material security, for me the biggest thing I have now is access to a group that won’t reject me. That’s changed my life and my relationship to everything.

“Religion means to abide by the laws of god” he says to the police rep. Noit don’t, you got cause and effect backwards mate.

So what I wanna know is what Bob was not getting in his life to bring him to that point of being the worst thing possible- a cliche in a TV show. Its implied Who the implication is, that he deserved to be imprisoned for our safety and who is somehow spirituality or socially reformed by his experience. Can we stop exploiting suffering to justify the biggest stain on humanity’s collective conscience?