Fleet Maull is a dedicated man. Founder and
director of both the Prison Dharma Network and the National
Prison Hospice Association, this fifty-five-year-old professor
at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, is also a longtime
teacher of Shambhala Buddhism, an ordained Zen Peacemaker
priest, and the U.S. director of the interfaith Peacemaker
Community. Perhaps most compellingly, Maull is a man who turned
a life of contradiction into a life of integrity. In 1985, at
the age of thirty-five, he was indicted for drug trafficking,
sentenced to thirty years without parole, and thus began a
fourteen-year odyssey of transformation behind bars at the U.S.
Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, a maximum security prison
hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Torn away from his family and
his spiritual community, he was left alone to face himself and
the choices that had led him to a point of no return.
Maull came of age during the cultural revolution of the
sixties. Like many of his generation, he openly rebelled against
the conservative world of his parents, searching for adventure
and a life of vividness and intensity. Traveling to South
America, he found something of what he was looking for living on
a sailboat in the Caribbean. Later, he found it working a small
farm in a valley high in the Peruvian Andes. And eventually, he
also began to find it in the danger- and adrenaline-filled world
of the international narcotics trade. In the mid-seventies, he
read an article in Rolling Stone about Naropa and its
founder, the renowned meditation master Chögyam Trungpa
Rinpoche, who was instrumental in bringing Tibetan Buddhism to
the West. Immediately, Maull knew that he had to go there. With
his Peruvian wife, who was pregnant at the time, he moved to
Colorado, enrolled, and soon became a student of Trungpa. But he
lived a double life. On one hand, he was engaged in a serious
study of psychology and the Buddha-dharma; on the other, he was
caught up in a drug habit and secretly hauling backpacks full of
cocaine on smuggling runs from Bolivia. By the early eighties,
he had become one of Trungpa's closest attendants, yet he was in
turmoil over his inability to resolve the incongruities of his
life, and his marriage was falling apart. When he finally quit
smuggling for good, it wasn't long before his former partners
fingered him, and he was confronted with the choice to run or
face the possibility of life in prison. He told his guru
everything, and after considering the matter for a few days,
Trungpa advised him to turn himself in. “That was the
first time,” Maull says, “that I ever followed his
advice.”
It was in jail that Maull turned his life around, beginning
to meditate in earnest. He completed the Tibetan practice of the
ngondro (a foundational practice that includes 100,000
prostrations) in his tiny cell, received initiation from Tibetan
lama Thrangu Rinpoche, and took novice vows as a monk. He taught
GED and ESL classes all day, cared for dying prisoners in a
hospice program he helped develop, led meditation groups in the
chapel in the evenings, and eventually matured into a national
prison reform activist. In fact, he became so committed to the
work he was doing at his high security institution that when
given the opportunity to finish out his sentence at a minimum
security facility, he turned it down, staying until his early
release for good behavior in 1999.
— Ross Robertson
I went to Peru looking for some kind of authentic
life. I lived for years up in the sacred valley of the
Incas, and there was one particular time when I really had a
deep visionary experience of non-separateness. This was after
taking a plant called San Pedro that contains mescaline. There
was an energetic fluidity to the world, and the boundaries that
I normally perceive as my own body were completely liquid and
contiguous with everything else. My whole previous notion of the
distinction between animate and inanimate objects completely
broke down in that moment—in the experience of one living
organic reality and energetic aliveness. The experience just
continued and continued, even after the mescaline wore off. When
I would put my foot down, I did not even have the sense that it
was going to hit something solid.
Part of what had driven me into becoming an expatriate and
living outside the system was my very polarized “us vs.
them” attitude. But after that experience, I could never
go back to seeing the world that way, because I had seen that we
are all a part of one process.
Every summer in Colorado, Trungpa Rinpoche held a
two-week retreat for his committed students up at the Rocky
Mountain Dharma Center. We were in a big field up in the
mountains, with tents all around, and Tibetan banners flying,
doing military-style training, with meditation and teachings and
so forth. It was a complete vajrayana world.
Walking up from the lower gate one day, I saw Trungpa coming
down the hill, heading toward the big tent where the teachings
and meditation practice happened. And suddenly I saw him like I
had never seen him before. I saw a dharma king, a magical Buddha
figure. It was a powerful visionary experience that's very hard
to put into words, but in some way it was similar to what I'd
seen in Peru. It was as if I saw his essence.
This changed my whole relationship to Trungpa and to his
teachings. Prior to that, I was very much trying to be in his
world on my own terms, trying to hold onto as much of my own
world as I could. Afterwards, I wasn't holding onto anything.
When I saw that his essence was so impersonal, he
became a mirror to my own condition. Being in his presence was
either a joyful experience of coming home and being held in the
essence of my own being, or, if I resisted, it was terrifying.
In the nakedness of the experience, I was absolutely confronted
with my ego.
When I got sentenced to thirty years my knees actually
buckled. I didn't fall to the floor—my lawyer was
standing by my side, and he kind of grabbed my arm and held me
up. They took me back to the county jail, and that evening they
put me in a solitary cell in an empty wing of the building.
There was only one tiny window way up high; if I stood on the
sink I could almost see the security lights outside. It was very
dark. Every now and then I'd hear some sounds echoing through
the chamber, but there was nobody else in the whole wing. I
don't think I fell asleep until four or five in the morning.
At some point in the middle of the night, I came to a very
dark precipice, and I had to make a choice between living and
dying. It wasn't like I was contemplating suicide—it was a
matter of choice about whether to live or to give up. By this
time, I'd already been locked up for about six months awaiting
sentencing. Most of the time I was in a cell with ten other
guys, a cell filled with chaos, noise, fighting, and craziness.
You couldn't sleep; it was insane. But on this night they left
me isolated with the fact that I'd been sentenced to thirty
years with no parole, and I thought that meant I would not get
out until I was sixty-five years old. My son was nine at the
time. As I stood there on the edge of this bottomless pit, I
felt something well up in me and make a decision to live. It
wasn't like the bells were ringing, “It's okay now.”
It was just utter darkness. But somehow, a will had risen up in
me like an instinctual thing and made a choice for life.
The next day, I finally began to experience the weight of
the grief and the pain of what I'd done to my son, to myself, to
my family and my community—the utter waste and insanity of
it. I'd never really been confronted with the consequences of
the decisions I'd been making; I'd gotten away with a lot over
the years. Now, my back was up against the wall, and I couldn't
deny my own complicity in creating all this damage. And that
fueled me throughout the rest of my time in prison. I became
radically committed to eradicating every kind of negativity and
uselessness from my life.