Finding Our Jerry Bear: Cultivating Nonhatred

We all experience aversion, whether it comes in the form of frustration, annoyance, or anger. And while most folks will affirm that there are plenty of people in the world who express hatred, not many will readily admit that hatred is a condition of their own hearts. In this talk, Matthew explores his own relationship with hatred, how difficult it can be to recognize, and what a path toward love might look like. It was originally shared with the Big Heart City Meditation sangha.

Content warning: this talk touches upon themes of racism, incarceration, and white supremacy.

Transcript

Well,

It's good to be back.

I'd like to say that because this is my second time being here that I myself don't have a little bit of the jitters,

But I do,

And I guess that's just how it goes.

There are these texts called the Jātakas,

And they're basically about the Buddha's past lives,

Buddha's past births,

And they tend to begin with something along the lines of when such and such a person was king,

Ruling over such and such a city,

The bodhisattva was born as a partridge,

Or born as a monkey king,

Or born as you name it,

A prince,

A merchant,

And then it goes on to tell a story with a moral.

I'm not going to be telling any Jātaka tales tonight,

At least not of the Buddha.

I will be telling my own,

And you can always tell when I'm beginning my own personal Jātaka,

When I'm telling a story of my past life,

Because it typically begins with something along the lines of back when I was in the county jail,

And that's how it's going to start tonight.

So back when I was in the county jail.

So yes,

I'm doing some storytelling.

Almost 20 years ago,

I had just taken a plea bargain.

So I had just been sentenced to 14 years in prison.

It was my second time going.

And I was awaiting the bus to take me from the county jail upstate.

And I'd started the process of personal transformation at this point.

So I'd started doing recovery because I'd had a history with addiction.

And I'd started a Dharma practice,

So it was pretty much disorganized.

And we'll just say it wasn't sophisticated.

I hadn't found a tradition yet,

Really.

I hadn't found something that felt like home yet.

I just knew that generally speaking,

The Dharma was the bigger home that I wanted to be in.

And I was just still doing a lot of searching.

But with all that happening,

I think the people around me in county jail started to recognize that I was at least one of the dudes that was trying to do things a little different.

I was trying to be kinder and nicer.

And there was a guy who was sitting on a bunk.

He actually slept on the bunk right next to mine in the county jail.

His name was Steve.

And he was an old timer.

Now,

Old timer in the county jail typically means in their forties.

So old timer in prison or jail definitely means something different than when you're on the streets.

But he was an old timer.

And this was a guy that we would say was doing life in prison on the installment plan.

So he never did anything so serious that he would get a sentence of life in prison.

But he just did things and got in trouble often enough that he would do a couple of years in prison and then come home.

And then a couple of years in prison and then come home.

And a couple of years in prison,

His own personal carceral samsara,

Just in and out,

In and out.

And that's what he'd done his entire adult life.

And he was,

I think,

Getting close to being 50 years old.

So he'd been doing it for 30 something years.

So he wasn't the type of guy you'd go to with advice about staying sober or advice about long-term relationships.

This isn't the type of guy you went to for that.

But he did have a kind heart and he did have a gentleness to him and a certain degree of generosity.

And he was kind of that old timer in the pod that would try to look out for the youngsters that would come in.

And I guess that would have been me at the time.

And so he could offer advice about some things,

How to do time,

How to keep your head down,

How to not get in trouble.

And if he offered advice like that,

You would typically take it.

And so there I was a couple of weeks away from taking the prison bus up to reception for a California state prison.

I'm sorry if you hear that motorcycle screaming by.

And he said,

Matt,

I want to talk to you about something.

I want to tell you something.

And I said,

What's that?

And we were sipping coffee.

It was like this terrible freeze-dried O'Keeffe coffee with Splenda.

And I probably had like an atomic fireball in there because that's how you get cinnamon.

And so we're sipping these really terrible coffees.

I remember it was the evening and he said,

Matt,

I know you're a hippie and all.

And I wasn't a hippie,

But it's kind of jailhouse term for just people who are like trying to be nice.

I know you're a hippie and all.

And love conquers all,

Yada,

Yada,

Yada.

I used to be like that.

I was just kind of being funny.

And I said,

Well,

What happened?

And he said,

You know what happened.

And he was being really serious.

He said,

I know you think you're all about love and everything,

But you've got to know that you're going to learn to hate.

You're getting ready to do a longer stretch than I ever did in all of my years in and out of prison,

And you're going to learn to hate.

And I kind of brushed it off.

I said,

Nah,

Man,

That ain't me.

He says,

No,

It's not,

But it will be.

Now,

I wish kind of at the time that I had pressed him further and asked him exactly what he meant,

But I had my way of interpreting it.

And maybe because it made me uncomfortable,

I didn't press it further.

Because I interpreted it in a very specific light.

If you've seen enough movies or if you've met folks like me,

You know that California prisons are very racially segregated.

And basically,

It all starts when you get booked into the county jail and they ask you what race you are.

And you tell them,

In my case,

You're a white guy.

And that means for the rest of my career,

I would be housed with other white people.

And then that's who would accept me in their group wherever I went.

And then because of just the terrible way the politics in prison are in California,

I knew where my tables were on the yard and where my water fountain was and where my pull-up bar was and which two shower heads would be mine.

Because the other ones were other people's shower heads and pull-up bars.

And when folks go to prison,

There tend to be,

I like to categorize people into two kind of groups.

There are people like me who don't buy into that,

But still have to follow the rules so as to not get hurt and kind of just want to put my head down and go home,

Hopefully without getting more time and hopefully without having been harmed.

And then there are people who,

For whatever reason,

Fly that banner and they want to enforce those rules.

And so when I heard Steve tell me,

You're going to learn to hate,

I thought he meant I was going to become one of those people.

I thought he meant that I was going to be one of the people that goes to prison and enforces these rules,

That I was going to be one of the people that got,

I don't know,

A swastika tattoo or SS bolts or all of the other different things people earn when they do that in prison.

So a few weeks later,

I ended up on the prison bus and I went to reception and then landed at Folsom State Prison.

And it was a really,

This is probably a strange thing to say,

But I'm so grateful I landed at that prison at that time because there was a lot of 12-step groups happening.

There were meditation groups happening,

There was a yoga class that I went to,

And then I sat,

As the bio mentioned,

In my first sangha in Greystone Chapel,

Which if you're a Johnny Cash fan,

You know that there's a song on that album recorded.

In the chow hall I ate breakfast in every morning,

There's a song about Greystone Chapel.

And that's where I first had a teacher,

That's where I first heard the dharma spoken to me,

Rather than just following bibliographies around like I'd been doing for the couple of years prior.

And I still continued to follow this path and I started to meet people who were also on the path.

And the stuff that provided me with meaning inside was,

You know,

Phone calls home,

Visits with family,

My sanghas,

Because I had different sanghas.

I went to a Catholic Centering Prayer sangha that kind of had the same folks in it that were in the Buddhist sangha,

And it was kind of the same folks in that who were in the yoga class.

So it was like I went to all of these things because it was just one big sangha of people who wanted to do things different,

You know.

And I got a lot of meaning from those things.

But prison happens,

And those folks who like to enforce the rules,

Usually through intimidation and violence,

They happen.

And when the violence would happen,

We would get locked down,

And that meant we would be stuck in our cell for days or weeks or months.

And during that time,

You wouldn't get phone calls home,

And you wouldn't get visits,

And you wouldn't go to your job,

Or you wouldn't go to your 12-step groups,

You wouldn't go to your sangha,

You wouldn't go to your meditation,

And you'd be lucky if you had a shower every three days.

And I started to realize that if I got hurt in prison,

It was going to be at the hands of the people that looked like me.

And I started to realize that almost all of the instances in which what was meaningful was taken from me in the form of lockdowns and whatnot,

That was also coming from folks that sort of looked like me.

And they had a particular demeanor,

And they had a particular look unto themselves.

They often had no hair.

This is actual balding.

But they often had no hair.

They often had certain types of tattoos.

They often hung out together.

They had a way of talking that's not worth repeating anywhere.

And I started to resent them pretty severely.

I started to resent them pretty severely.

But it seems like a justifiable resentment,

Right?

It's like a socially acceptable resentment.

So one day I was meditating in my cell.

My cellmate was at the yard.

I was waiting for a visit from my family.

And as I would do on visiting days,

I would sit,

I'd roll up my blanket,

And I'd sit and use that as a cushion.

And I would wait for my meditation timer bell to ring,

Which on those particular days was the sound of my name getting announced over the loudspeaker that family was coming.

And so I would sit until I heard my name called.

And as I was sitting,

I recognized that someone had approached the door to my cell.

There's someone standing at the bars.

And I opened my eyes and I saw that it was a skinhead that lived on the tier below me.

And it was someone who was friendly with my cellmate,

But I didn't know him personally.

He said,

Hey man,

I'm sorry to bother you.

I came looking for your cellie,

But I just a little favor to ask.

I'm hungry.

Could I borrow a soup?

And in prison soup,

That means Top Ramen.

For those of you who don't know,

Top Ramen is the staple crop of prison.

So there might be rice or beans or potatoes in certain cultures,

While in prison culture,

Everything is built on Top Ramen.

It's also the currency.

At the time,

It cost about 20 cents.

Now everything inside of me wanted to tell him just to go away,

Right?

Can't you see I'm meditating?

Something like that.

And I noticed that I was having a physiological response to his presence.

I noticed an elevated heart rate.

I noticed just this clenching of both my body and my mind,

This contraction.

But I didn't say what I wanted to say to him and I just gave him a soup.

And he said,

Thanks,

Man.

I'll get you back.

And I said,

Don't worry about it.

You can have it.

You don't need to get me back.

It's better to give a gift of 20 cents than worry about somebody owing you in prison.

Trust me on that one.

And I sat back down.

And that was when I realized that Steve had been right.

I realized that the moment I saw that person at my cell doors that I absolutely hated him.

Everything about him,

The whole being.

I didn't know him.

I didn't know anything about him other than what he looked like.

I had assumptions about who he was.

Some of it may be true,

But there could have been no denying the fact that I had learned to hate.

And it had only taken,

I don't know,

I'd say nine months,

Something like that.

Nine months.

It just came in a form that I hadn't expected it.

It came in a form that,

As I said,

Maybe fails or felt socially acceptable because where I come from,

What people like him espoused was socially unacceptable.

And therefore,

They're acceptable to hate them.

And so,

It can kind of fly under the radar as justifiable.

Now,

There's this text called the Visuddhimagga.

And I think it was written in the fifth century or something like that by Buddhaghosa,

Who's the principal commentator for a lot of the Pali canon.

And in it,

There is this discussion of personality types or temperaments.

And there's six of them,

But they're presented as three pairs that are essentially kind of like three unskillful or unwholesome temperaments and that transition into something else when tempered with wisdom.

So,

It's six total,

But three pairs.

And so,

For example,

You have the greedy personality type who,

With wisdom,

Becomes generous.

And then you have the confused personality type who,

With wisdom,

Becomes equanimous.

And then you have the hating personality type who,

With wisdom,

Becomes discerning.

I've always been struck by the definition and the distinction the Visuddhimagga makes between the hating and the discerning personality types.

And it says that someone with a hating disposition condemns entire living beings,

And someone with a discerning disposition condemns mental formations.

Now,

I didn't know this at the time because I'd never been exposed to the Visuddhimagga,

And I didn't have Google,

And it was very difficult to find things like this.

But I can say in hindsight that I was on that particular end of the spectrum of condemning living beings.

But the moment there in the cell with what I'll call the hungry skinhead did leave me with some degree of cognitive dissonance.

I recognized this presence of this hatred,

Which was for all of him,

While simultaneously realizing that I didn't know him and that he'd essentially come to me harmlessly,

If anything,

Vulnerable.

It's not so often that people come up to you and say,

I'm hungry,

Can you give me food?

And that's what he did.

And so I became curious.

Not so curious that I became like a journalist asking all the skinheads on the yard,

You know,

Why did you become this way?

I didn't do that.

But I just listened.

I had to live with them 24 hours a day.

I had to work with them.

I had to share the same shower heads and pull-up bars and water fountains and tables and all this stuff.

I had plenty of exposure.

I could just open my ears and listen.

And I started to notice patterns.

These patterns were not true for everybody,

Of course,

But I started to hear stories of broken families.

I started to hear stories of not ever getting visits from family.

I started to hear stories of being broke or not having money sent to them so they could never afford to go buy soups and mayonnaise and Folgers and all the things that I had the privilege of being able to afford when I was inside.

I heard stories of becoming a part of the system at a young age.

Not just young as in the sense of 18 years old,

But young in the sense of earlier,

Whether that was through foster care or whether that was through juvenile hall.

And so I guess you could say I started to look into or recognize that there might be some causes and conditions for this,

That there might be a history that leads one down this path.

There is a sutta in which the Buddha offers five recommendations or five suggestions for subduing for subduing hatred.

And the first three are essentially Brahma-viharas.

The first three were also,

In the instance of these folks I was living with,

Mostly unavailable to me because the Buddha recommends loving kindness,

Compassion,

And equanimity.

And those aren't anything that I had the capacity to offer people like that at the time.

The fourth recommendation is to ignore the subject of hatred,

To ignore the person that you find,

That you're hating.

And even that was mostly unavailable to me as well.

Of course,

When there is harsh language and people were saying terrible things,

I could just ignore that.

But my own safety kind of depended on knowing what these people were doing.

And so I couldn't ignore them entirely.

But the fifth recommendation of the Buddha was,

Is to essentially look into the karmic history of the person with whom you're,

With whom you're hating or for whom you're hating.

To look at the actions they've done in the past and the things that have had to happen to them and the actions that they've done as a result.

And again,

I didn't have access to the sutta in prison.

And so I think just my exposure to the dharma repeatedly somehow led me in the direction of following that fifth suggestion,

Which I think is presented in a very purposeful way in the sutta.

There are other teachings where the Buddha offers something,

And if that doesn't work,

Then here's plan B.

And if that doesn't work,

Here's plan C.

And I feel like this teaching works that way.

Be loving,

Kind,

Be compassionate,

Be equanimous,

Ignore it.

And if all else fails,

Let's just look deeply into why this is the way it is.

And so that's what I did.

I had some curiosity and I'm not going to tell you that I suddenly started loving all the skinheads in my life because that's not what happens.

So flash forward a few years,

And I ended up in a place called Fire Camp.

Now Fire Camp is like a minimum security facility where you,

As it might sound like,

You fight fires for the state of California.

And I did that for my last three years in prison.

And because it's a minimum security prison,

There are.

.

.

People tend to have less time there,

Right?

They tend to have less time left on their sentence,

But I got there with a relatively large amount of time left compared to other people.

Some folks might get there with six months or a year or two years or something,

But I think I had a little bit more than three years left when I got there.

And that meant that over my time there,

There was a lot of turnover.

And so if there were other people that were doing a long time there as well,

Then then all the other people would leave,

And then I would come to get to know just this handful of folks who were there with me.

And so when I got to Fire Camp,

There was this one guy named Mouse,

And he was a skinhead,

And he was a knucklehead,

And he was violent,

And he was.

.

.

You know,

All those things I had come to,

You know,

To a certain extent hate in the folks that I'd seen at the higher level security.

But there was also something about him that struck me as different,

And maybe it's because I just spent more time with him,

But he also struck me as redeemable.

He struck me as like there was like some part of him that felt like there was some joy in there somewhere,

Like there was some kindness hiding in there somewhere.

It was like a spidey sense,

But he felt different than the other folks I'd been around.

So I used to hang out in the hobby shop there,

And we're allowed to like do like arts and crafts.

So I was into oil painting,

And I wanted to get into making belt buckles.

So it's like like metal working and stuff.

And Mouse,

The skinhead,

Had the booth in the hobby shop next to me,

And he was into making belt buckles,

And he was like really good at it.

And so I had asked him to teach me how to do kind of like metal crafting and stuff.

And so there was some time we spent together where he was teaching me how to do this.

And as the years went by,

There were only a handful of us left who had been with each other the whole time,

And he was one of them.

And it was during that time I started to realize that we likely had more similarities than differences,

Certainly a type of common suffering.

And we were in the hobby shop one day,

And this is,

You have to kind of picture this guy.

He's this like kind of short,

Stocky,

Extremely buff,

Tattooed from head to toe,

Like,

And it's all terrible tattoos,

Right?

It's just all terrible prison tattoo.

And there are swastikas in there,

And there's all this,

There's demons,

And there are like Nordic gods,

Because,

You know,

It's the skinhead thing.

And he's just covered with this mess.

And he's wearing these shorts,

And he says,

Matt,

I want to show you something.

I want to show you something.

And he points at his leg,

And he points it like just this mass of blue ink on his leg.

And I'm like,

I don't know what I'm looking at,

Mouse.

What are you showing me here?

He says,

Can't you see it,

Man?

It's a jerry bear.

It's a jerry bear.

And I know there might be some people who don't know what a jerry bear is,

So let me help you out here real quick.

Okay,

That is a jerry bear.

Is that showing up for you?

Okay,

It is.

So that is a jerry bear.

A jerry bear is a piece of uncopyrighted artwork that showed up on one of the Grateful Dead albums that eventually became like,

Kind of emblematic,

Kind of like the second,

The second symbol,

If you want to call it that,

Of the Grateful Dead.

But it's got like,

You know,

The Grateful Dead,

There's a lot of connotations with it,

Like kind of like hippie-ishness,

Love.

But the point is,

It's like definitely not the skinhead lifestyle,

Right?

Definitely not like your typical Nazi's jam is the Grateful Dead.

And so I said,

Mouse,

Is that really a jerry bear?

He's like,

Yeah,

Man.

I used to like smoke a lot of pot when I was a teenager.

Yeah,

I was like a total hippie.

And I looked at him,

Kind of like I said to Steve many years earlier,

And I said,

What happened?

What happened?

And he said,

I went to YA.

And if you don't know what YA is,

It's the youth authority.

It's prison for kids.

And I knew that mouse came from a broken family,

And I knew that he didn't know his father.

And I knew that he didn't have any of his own personal family come to visit him in prison.

He filled kind of like all those boxes.

And now I knew that he was raised by other kids in an environment of terrible violence and terrible fear and terrible isolation.

They used to call YA gladiator school.

It was so terrible inside.

And though he didn't say it to me,

When he showed me that jerry bear,

I got the sense that he was actually in some way expressing the thought,

I didn't want to be this way.

This isn't how I had it planned out.

And he never really approached me as a skinhead ever again.

He still was one.

He still acted that way with others.

But it's almost like because he showed me his jerry bear,

That performance was off.

That performance was over.

So I paroled about a year later.

I used to shoot tobacco at the time.

And sometimes Mouse would smuggle it into the prison for me.

And he had loaned me some Copenhagen.

And so I told him,

Hey,

When I get home,

I'll buy a couple of logs of it.

And I'll give it to the person that you need to give it to so you can have some smuggle back in for you.

And that's not typically something that happens in prison.

Those sort of like,

I'll get you when I get out type things.

That's not the type of agreements that typically get made.

And the night before I paroled,

I said to him,

I said,

Hey,

Man,

Don't worry.

I'm going to do it.

He's like,

I know you will.

He's like,

You're one of the few people in here whose word means something.

And then he said,

I'm just so tired of all of these dudes.

I'm just so tired.

He didn't use those words.

I mean,

Gentle with my speech here.

But I'm just so tired of all these dudes.

And it might have been the closest thing he ever expressed,

Said out loud about regret.

So I paroled and I was paroled about maybe a year later.

But his wheel,

His carceral wheel,

His drug addiction,

Samsara,

Continued when he came home and he died about six months after coming home from prison.

And so that Jerry bear was layered in there,

But I don't think he ever had an opportunity to I don't know,

Uncover it.

And I can say fairly honestly that with some conviction that I don't think I would,

I could have told you this at the time,

But it's something that comes up for me now.

Because I realized that the anniversary of his death,

The 10 year anniversary was recent.

And I was thinking about it.

Uh,

I don't know how it was possible,

But I can tell you that I love that man.

Despite all of those terrible faults.

And that it was only through learning to hate that I could learn to love him.

And it's just,

It's a paradox.

I don't have much explanation for it.

Other than the fact that one day a guy came in and asked me for a soup.

Other than the fact that,

Uh,

I started at the,

Uh,

Unknowingly,

Of course,

Cause I didn't have the suttas.

I started at the Buddha's last,

Um,

Last recommendation,

Which is to ask what happened.

To ask what happened.

Now,

Um,

Just looking into this analysis,

This questioning of causes and conditions that,

That bring about hatred.

I mean,

I've given an example of one way it worked in my life towards other people,

But I've also found it relatively useful with myself.

And,

Uh,

I sometimes,

I think at this point in my life,

I find it easier to forgive other people than I do to forgive myself.

I find it easier to let go of resentment and anger or ill will or hatred towards other people than I do myself.

And so in some ways I feel like so much of my practice today is,

Is getting in touch with my Jerry bear.

Getting in touch with my Jerry bear.

And I'm not talking about like just being a hippie or anything like that,

But just like this,

Uh,

This,

This person who I am,

When all of those things that I,

That have happened to me and all those things I've done,

Aren't layered on top of it,

Obscuring it.

And I'm not even talking about some like essential goodness or like an essential self or a soul or something like that.

I'm just talking about,

Um,

That person that's not,

Uh,

The person we are when not clouded by all of the trappings of selfhood,

When not clouded by all of the trappings of the performances we have to engage with in life.

And so we're going to sit with something like that tonight,

But I also want to give us an opportunity to,

I think,

Stretch.

Is that what we do here?

If you need to stretch,

Um,

And then we'll work a little bit with,

Um,

Maybe finding a Jerry bear.

Thanks.