Replacements
http://crisper.livejournal.com/247059.html

When I came downstairs this morning, there was an intruder in my dining room. He had already made coffee and was drinking the first cup worth.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked, reflexively taking a defensive stance.

He barely gave me more than a glance, entirely unconcerned. "Oh. Good morning." He took a sip of the coffee. "I'm you now. Your doppelganger replacement. You've been replaced."

This took a few seconds for my un-coffee'd brain to process. "My what?"

"Why don't you have the other half of the pot?" he suggested. I had to admit, that was a good idea. "Might as well sit down, too," he added, but I wasn't getting within arm's reach of him. I stood in the kitchen, flexing my weight slightly back and forth on the balls of my feet in case it turned into a fight.

Finally, once the first sips of brown benediction began to do their thing, I tried again: "You're my doppelganger replacement?"

"Yeah," he said, still casual, checking email on his phone. No, wait: on *my* phone!

"That's my phone!" I exclaimed, and reached for it. He snatched it away.

"No," he said, "it's my phone now. You're replaced. Or at least, you will be once the waveform collapses."

"Waveform?"

"Yeah," he said. "Right now we're in a state of superposition. Like the cat, right? We're both you, or neither of us are you. In an unobserved eigenstate. Soon, only one of us will be you again. Which will be me."

"You can't be me," I growled. "You're, what, six inches shorter than me, but probably fifty or sixty pounds heavier as well!"

He shrugged. "Details. You're not important enough to line up a really identical replacement."

I tried not to be offended. The guy was clearly crazy. "Get out!" I told him. He looked at me for several seconds, clearly considering a range of responses, before finally setting down my coffee mug and getting up to head to the door.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "I'll leave right now, but you've been replaced. The sooner you can accept that, the sooner your life can move on."

"Move on…?!" I practically shouted. "Move on without me, you mean!"

He nodded. "Now you're getting it. Your life will move on, only with me-you, not you-you." Then he was out the door.

After locking the door, I showered and got dressed and tried not to think about the weirdo anymore. But when I went out to my car, he was already sitting in the driver's seat.

"What are you doing here?!" I shouted.

"I waited for you," he said. "Your life can't move forward while we're both activated, so we need to stick together until you accept your fate."

"Get out of my car!"

"Make me," he said, simply, without hostility or aggression or anything. Just a challenge stated like a fact.

I couldn't. He was just too big and too firmly planted there.

"If it'll make you feel better," he said, "you can drive." He pushed over to the passenger seat.

I stood there a long time trying to think of something else to try, but ultimately I couldn't come up with anything. So I got into the driver seat and off we went.

At the office, we both piled out and headed through the front doors… then I went straight up to a security guard. "I'm being stalked by this guy," I told him. "We need to do something about him."

The guard gave no sign of having heard or seen me. My new "friend" strolled up alongside. "Nobody's going to notice us," he said, "until we collapse the waveform."

I poked the guard a couple of times, with no response. Seriously?

At the door into our wing, I tried to badge open the lock and squeeze through without letting him tailgate, but he wedged his bulk in before I could get the door closed, and slipped in along with me. Same thing at my office door. He was simply impossible to shake.

The whole time, nobody seemed to notice us at all. No response to being addressed, nothing.

I had two chairs in my office. We each sat down and looked at the keyboard of my admin machine. He woke the machine up, signed in with my password, and fired up my email. "I know all your passwords," he said. "Didn't have to be told or anything. Just knew them. Comes with the job."

The whole world was reeling. I felt like I was going to vomit; I put my head between my knees and tried to breathe deeply, calmly until blackout passed. When it was finally under control again, I sat back up. My replacement was sitting there looking at me. "I think we're there," he said. "You know what to do."

Weirdly enough, I did. I got up, went to the door. "Good luck with my life," I said, handing him my badge.

I went downstairs and out of the building, feeling tugged by a strange sense of sudden direction. Out to the sidewalk, walk, walk, walk a ways until suddenly I found myself at a house in a nearby neighborhood.

There was a pretty nice car parked in the driveway. I had no problem opening it up, getting in. I sat in the passenger's seat until a fellow came out, easily twenty years older than me. He leapt back, startled, when he saw me in the car.

"Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in my car?"

"Actually," I told him simply, calmly, "it's my car. I'm your doppelganger. You've been replaced. Why don't you get in and drive while I explain to you how this works…"

William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.


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In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

Spring 2010 MAPS bulletin (Vol. 20, N.1)

Psychedelics, Death and Dying
-special edition

DARJEEL: "Každé tvrzení je nějakým způsobem lživé." A. Crowley

'I am convinced not only that what I say is wrong, but that what will he said against it will be wrong as well.'

Robert Musil

KERRAY: Expose yourself to nyx and you will spend countless hours reading bullshit other people have to say instead of creating something of value

Expose yourself...

With so many options in media, interaction and venues, you now get to choose what you expose yourself to.

Expose yourself to art, and you'll come to appreciate it and aspire to make it.

Expose yourself to anonymous scathing critics and you will begin to believe them (or flinch in anticipation of their next appearance.)

Expose yourself to get-rich-quick stories and you'll want to become one.

Expose yourself to fast food ads and you'll crave french fries.

Expose yourself to angry mobs of uninformed, easily manipulated protesters and you'll want to join a mob.

Expose yourself to metrics about your brand or business or performance and you'll work to improve them.

Expose yourself to anger and you might get angry too.

Expose yourself to people making smart decisions and you'll probably learn how to do it as well.

Expose yourself to eager long-term investors (of every kind) and you'll likely to start making what they want to support.

It's a choice if you want it to be.

Seth Godin

Politika je, když někomu extrémně dobře platíte za to, aby vám vnucoval svou vůli.

(Tom Robbins)

Tabu jsou nepříjemná. Tabu jsou pověry s tesáky. Pokud je člověk nepřesáhne rozumově, udělají mu díru do mozku a vysají mu ducha. Tabu je krystalizovaný uzel společenského strachu a musí se rozbít, rozříznout nebo zničit, pakliže se lidé chtějí osvobodit.

(stejný zdroj)

Občas nastane situace, kdy Osud cítíme tak blízko, jako když rukou bereme za kliku u dveří. Jistě, můžeme se vzpírat. Bohy ale otravuje klika, za kterou nikdo nevezme, i dveře, jež drží a nikdy se nepohnou. Bohové mohou vykopnout futra. A co hůř, mohou znechuceně zmizet a nechat nás tupě viset na zaseklých pantech, aniž bychom v životě dostali jakoukoliv další šanci zeširoka vstoupit do zbytečného rizika a tím i do říše kouzel.

(stejný zdroj)

"Věci. Věci se na lidskou duši lepí jako pijavice. Vysávají z ní všechnu sladkost, harmonii a prvotní radost z toho, že nejste zatížený žádnou hypotékou. Chápete? Lidi jsou pod šíleným tlakem, musí si hledat nějaké trvalé bydliště, prostor, kde budou žít, a ten mají posléze za úkol zaplnit krámy. Hluboko v sobě však k tomuto uspořádání cítí odpor, ze všeho toho materiálna kolem sebe jsou k smrti vyděšeni, protože vědí, že je ovládá a omezuje je v pohybu. Proto jim ty střílečky [akční filmy, apod] přinášejí potěšení. V symbolické rovině tak ze světa zprovodí své neživé dozorce a rozbijí zdi všemožných pastí."

(Tom Robbins: Když se z teplých krajů vrátí rozpálení invalidé)

Neříkám, že souhlasím doslova, IMHO jde hodně o přístup k těm věcem, ten uvězňuje, spíš než vlastnictví samotné.....ale nějak mě tenhle odstave hluboce oslovil :)

Každá deprese má kořeny v sebelítosti a každá sebelítost má kořeny v tom, že se člověk bere příliš vážně. (Tom Robbins)

"Consciousness is people's personal contact with a world older than life on earth."

Thomas Natsoulas
- An Ecological and Phenomenological Perspective on Consciousness and Perception: Contact With the World at the Very Heart of the Being of Consciousness

"The point is not to want to benefit anyone or make them happy. There is no audience involved, no 'me' and 'them.' It is a matter of an open gift, complete generosity without the relative notions of giving and receiving. That is the basic openness of compassion: opening without demand. Simply be what you are, be the master of the situation. If you will just 'be' then life flows around and through you."

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Je vážné se lišit ?

Ne. Vážné je nutit se k tomu, aby byl člověk stejný jako druzí. Vyvolává to neurózy, psychózy, paranoiu. Vážné je chtít být stejný, protože je to proti přírodě, proti zákonům Boha, který v žádném lese a pralese nestvořil ani jediný lístek stejný jako druhý.

Když se lidé neodváží být odlišní, jdou proti přírodě a jejich organismus začne produkovat jed zvaný Hořkost.

(Paolo Coelho)

To be angry is to let others' mistakes punish yourself. To forgive others is to be good to yourself.

řek jsem jí: holka, všechno ti vydrží tak dlouho, jak dlouho to k tobě putuje, ale co je navždy, to nepříjde nikdy, protože prostě to tu je..

My worship is of a very strange kind. Holy water is not required. No special utensils are necessary. Even flowers are redundant. In this worship all gods have disappeared, and emptiness has merged with euphoria.

~ Lahiri Mahasaya

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
G. B. Shaw