Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

meditation a day, and then pushed myself until I eventually reached five hours a day. It was only by becoming more disciplined, more focused, and more driven that I could prevent myself from falling into entropy and internal death.
    One of the first things that both Ju San/Frankie and Gene told me was that you must turn your cell into a school and monastery. You will spend a minimum of twenty-three hours a day in that cell, all alone. After I was moved to Varner, I spent only three hours a week out of my cell, when Lorri visited. Most people can’t take being forced to come face-to-face with themselves, so they become loud and mean, like baboons looking for a shiny object to distract themselves. The number one distraction is television. Most people in prison grow fat and out of shape as they spend endless hours in front of the TV. They’ll watch football, basketball, baseball, soap operas,
The Jerry Springer Show
,
Judge Judy
, and anything else that crosses the screen. They watch TV from the moment they get up in the morning until the moment they go to bed. If I didn’t want to become a brain-dead, shuffling, obese Neanderthal, I had to nip it in the bud and not allow myself to fall into the pattern.
    I moved from one area of study to another. In addition to the Theosophy texts from Gene and the Buddhist texts from Ju San, I began practicing a kind of Christian mysticism described in
A
Course in Miracles
. I was introduced to this school of thought by a gentleman named Mike. I never could figure out if the guy was a genius or a psychopath. He wasn’t actually a Death Row inmate, he was what is known as a “porter.” He was doing a life without parole sentence, and his job was to keep Death Row clean. Sweeping, mopping, washing windows, scrubbing the showers, dusting, et cetera—those were his jobs.
    I awoke one morning at two because of a scritch-scritch-scritching noise. Getting up to see what it was, I saw Mike on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush. When I asked him exactly what in the hell he was doing, he explained that he no longer needed sleep so he figured he might as well use his time constructively. That was a typical Mike answer. He said only the ego needs sleep. He was also prone to having visions. He once told me he was shown in a vision that if he fasted for a week, he could reward himself with ice cream. (If someone indeed sends you money for your account, the prison has a short list of things you can buy. Ice cream is one of them.) Just when you were positive he was insane, he would do something to stop you dead in your tracks with wonder.
    A Course in Miracles
is a book of practices that takes you a year to complete if you follow each lesson. Its aim is to completely change the way your mind has been programmed to think since birth. You come to experience reality in an entirely different manner, in which anything is possible. It’s based on quantum physics but uses biblical terminology. It’s become rather popular in recent years, and there are study groups devoted to
A
Course in Miracles
all over the country.
    Mike hung out in front of my cell every day, sitting on a five-gallon bucket. Our only topic of conversation was
A
Course in Miracles
and how it related to the Kabbalah, a book of Jewish mysticism. The Kabbalah is what we dedicated our time to learning about after finishing
Miracles
. Mike was learning from a guy in general population who was a Kabbalist, then he would come and explain things to me. You’d be amazed by how many students of various forms of mysticism you can find in prison. These prisoners are usually determined to make the most of their time and not repeat the same mistakes. These are men starving for a kind of knowledge not given in the mundane world, ready to learn and pass on what they already know. I would continue my study alone for a while after Mike was sent to another part of the prison.
    Next I went on to learn about the philosophy and practice of an organization known as “The Golden Dawn.” This was a group of people who practiced metaphysical rites of passage to mark the different stages in the evolution of consciousness. It was all about the constant learning and growth process that everyone goes through, and how to speed it up. The great poet W. B. Yeats was one of the more well-known students of this school of thought. I had my nose in these books morning, noon, and night.
    Many people donated money to a college fund that was