How does liberation come to a mind?
A word spoken with an authority that neither has nor needs any authorization beyond itself delivers it.
Read moreAuthority and Authorities
It is one thing to claim authority. It is something else altogether actually to have it. Those who truly have authority have no need to claim it. Nor do they have any need to seek out opportunities to assert it by exercising their authority over others.
Read moreFor Shame
What makes each and every one of us so special is that none of us is anybody special. For each and every one of us to take appropriate measure of ourselves is for each and every one of us is to affirm ourselves as no one special, nobody who stands out from anyone else. What is appropriate to all of us is to affirm that none of us is anybody special.
Read moreDisempowering the Devil
Addicts, it is worth noting, are like fish, at least up to a certain point. When they begin to succumb to the lure of their objects of potential addiction, they make the death-dealing mistake that the fish makes. Like the fish, they take the bait that gets dangled before them, and they get hooked.
Read moreThe Devil at Noon
What could be more boring than being alone in some hermit's cell in the middle of some vast wilderness, with nothing left to do to divert oneself any longer, the long hours of the afternoon spreading out endlessly before one?Nothing else could even be as boring, surely. Unless . . .
Read moreFrom Striking Back to Witnessing: The Freeing Power of Words
Jimmy Santiago Baca's story of his imprisonment is, in fact, a demonstration of the total failure of the entire system of which prisons are a part. That is not a failure of that system to "serve" Jimmy or others like him, or the broader society of which they and all of us are a part. Rather it is failure of the system at issue to do exactly what it is designed to do, even if there were never any conscious designers. It is the failure to that system to disempower those to whom it applies itself.
Read moreThe Power of Non-Compliance
Jimmy Santiago Baca found freedom while confined in an isolation cell in Arizona’s Yuma Prison. He found it in learning simply to refuse to comply with the orders of his jailers, merely ignoring them instead.
Read moreLiberating Imprisonment
Those who erect prisons and then lock people up within them may, altogether irrespective of the prison-builders' own intentions, end up liberating the very persons they have so imprisoned. Those whom such prisons are designed to hold captive may, through that very captivity, find themselves set free at last--inalienably so: never again at risk of being held captive by any captors. Henceforth, their capacity will always exceed their captivity, springing open their prison doors, no matter how tightly locked they may remain.
Read moreWhat Education Is For
Education is undergoing the process of learning just what we are, in order that we might then at last truly and fully become it. In turn, when we blossom into what we have at last learned we are, we become in effect the opening of space wherein all the world as well has room to bloom, like a rose.
Read moreBasic Training--and Training, Basically
Training is conditioning for doing determined things in determined settings in order to achieve determined ends. It is not pursued for its own sake, but always for the sake of something else. To train is to make "fit" for doing something, "qualified" or "proficient" at doing it, able to do it effectively with reliable regularity.
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