The only sorts of questions to which answers bring a close are no more than requests for information, of one form or another. When that information is given in answer to such a request, the question is closed. In contrast, the question that genuine authority poses to each of us is one we can never close. It must always be held open, awaiting further response. The question that genuine authority poses to us is one that can only be answered with the entirely of our lives.
Read moreDisrobing the Emperor
Vested authorities never like having their authority called into question, opened to being looked into and searched out. To have their claims to authority questioned threatens to make those claims and those who make them ridiculous, something not to be taken seriously. Something deserving of being mocked and ridiculed. Those who claim authority cannot stand the thought of such a thing happening to them.
Read moreDivine Authority
Divine authority is absolute. It depends on nothing else. It speaks for itself. Furthermore, what it says always liberates.In contrast, those whoinvoke divine authority to support their own claims, in an attempt to impose them on others, thereby demonstrate--unknowingly, of course--just how lacking in authority they and their claims really are.
Read moreThe Freeing Word
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.
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