Schools, Hospitals and Jails...


Schools, hospitals and jails are three of the boxes that beings like to put themselves in. Some use big concrete blocks, but simple flesh will do; mortared with strife and judgment and self-defense the walls will hold as firmly whether they are stone or built of epithelial cells.

School is a box where one submits to the authority of teachers. To do so one creates oneself as (either willingly or unwillingly) unknowing.

Hospitals are boxes where one creates oneself sick and submits to the authority of usually mechanistic biomedical authorities.

Jails are boxes where one creates oneself as harmful and under the authority of force and "others" and their morals.

In all three one can create oneself as victimized or responsible, bewailing one's fate or confronting it.

Imagine building a brain pan and crawling inside it as a patient, a prisoner, or a pupil. Some people build their flesh-and-blood walls as multiple purpose units, with the functions and authorities of all three kinds built right in. The sign on the forehead flashes, in different colors, "School... Hospital... Prison... School..." .

What is the way "out" of these "containers"? To become Own Healer, Own Teacher, Own Author of Good, Own Discipliner, to Own one's Own before all men. To stand and own what one has perceived, to honestly communicate what one has done, and to Know what one Knows without fear. No other answer has as much power in it. The complete integration of self into the Whole Know is the answer to which every question bows and before which all mystery resolves.

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