Bo Lozoff Quotes

Everyone is born with a spiritual responsibility also, as specific as our hearts pumping blood: We must learn to love one another, to receive and express goodness. It doesn't matter whether we believe in it or not. Obey it and we will thrive, disobey it and we won’t. Period. Isn’t that wonderful? Our human justice system may be all screwed up, but the Divine Law treats us absolutely equally.

Here are people who go out into the world with two strikes against them. First, they're felons, with all that conjures up for people. Second, they don't know how to work for a boss. Don't know how to handle a schedule, how to show up on time, how to manage the obligations. When they leave us, it's like they're swimming upstream.

Coming out of retreat and looking around at my own culture, looking at the crises that we are in, the problems that exist in the American family, I saw that on one hand, many of us have come a long way in order to be able to acknowledge Eastern masters, saints from other traditions. But where are the American realized beings?... What this country needs more than anything else is for us to become elders, walking the streets and doing our jobs, really happy, classic, ageless spiritual human beings. So that's the opportunity we have and I don't think any people in the history of the world has ever had more access to the methods and ideas for how to do that. We are very fortunate in that way, even if you’re in prison.

Look all over the world and see the people who unselfishly receive and express goodness, who are dedicated to the cause of love. They’re the only people who are truly happy. They have tapped into the one mysterious, wonderful connectedness that frees them to live full-time in love. Some of them had great childhoods, some were horribly abused, some are pretty, some are homely, some tall, some short, rich, poor — our situations are always unequal, but life does not judge us by where we’ve been, what we own, or what has been done to us; life judges us by what we do.

We realized that this wasn't something that would happen sometime, or later, or in a few years. We thought, oh shit, we have to do this thing now... I can still remember sitting at that long table with all those big-shots [in Washington, D.C. at the Bureau of Prisons] and marveling that just a few years earlier, I sat around with revolutionaries arguing about how to blow up those very buildings. Life is very funny.

The need was there. These were people who had changed their lives, their values, while they were in prison. And they were getting ready to be thrown back into a society that wouldn't support that... We wanted to provide a place for ex-cons to live before moving out on their own.

In the midst of global crises such as pollution, wars, and famine, kindness may be too easily dismissed as a ‘soft’ issue, or a luxury to be addressed after the urgent problems are solved. But kindness is the greatest need in all those areas.