{"id":6887,"date":"2016-06-02T18:08:05","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T01:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/?p=6887"},"modified":"2016-06-02T18:08:05","modified_gmt":"2016-06-03T01:08:05","slug":"flashback-the-perfected-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/?p=6887","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: “The Perfected Self”"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he shark emerges from the waters. It crawls onto the land. It learns to walk.<\/p>\n

It hides itself behind sunglasses and a jacket.<\/p>\n

It spritzes itself, erratically, with water.<\/p>\n

It listens to a tape on basic conversational English. The tape asks it where to find the bathroom. It tells it the bathroom is down the hall. The shark repeats this. It speaks, tooth-grinding, tooth-vibrating painful speech, and when it has lost too many teeth from it, it grows some more.<\/p>\n

It staggers into the Shear Building. It flaps its little fins pathetically against Professor Henley<\/a>\u2019s door.<\/p>\n

It makes sense, doesn\u2019t it? I mean, that\u2019s what you\u2019d do if you were a shark, wouldn\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

You\u2019d hunt down the Seminar of the Perfected Self.<\/p>\n

Wouldn\u2019t it be better to be perfect than to be a shark?<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease, sir,\u201d the shark says through the door. It sorts through its list of phrases. \u201cThe butter is on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that Professor Henley isn\u2019t in then.<\/p>\n

He might or might not care about the shark\u2019s butter. He might or might not be able to see through the lie of words to the heart of the walking shark. But his absence is really terrible at it. His absence, the part of him that\u2019s not in the office, doesn\u2019t answer the shark\u2019s butter at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know where to find the train station,\u201d the shark tries.<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t have helped, you know. The Perfected Self isn\u2019t about that. It\u2019s not about changing. It\u2019s about becoming more what you are. It\u2019s about alchemical purification. If the shark learned Henley\u2019s meditation, I don\u2019t think it would help it. To change I think you really need Heart.<\/p>\n

But Professor Henley still found the shark afterwards, laying there, dried out on the floor of the Shear Building. I guess it had gotten into an altercation with a visiting Agent and had lost its spritzing bottle therefrom.<\/p>\n

The only way we even really know that the shark could talk at all was from the recordings.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re on the other side of the tape.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s harder to do the alchemy on someone else. It\u2019s easier to perfect yourself with meditation than to do it to something else with science. But I guess it was kind of a responsibility. The kind of thing you do, you know, when there\u2019s a shark in a jacket, all withered and dried, outside of your office door.<\/p>\n

It was still dead. It\u2019s . . .<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to dismiss that. The shark was still dead, afterwards. That death was part of its truth. But it wasn\u2019t all dried up and rotten any longer. It wasn\u2019t rough and awful any longer. Not after.<\/p>\n

You can look at it if you like. It\u2019s that thing in the lobby. People sometimes just stop and they stare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

he shark emerges from the waters. It crawls onto the land. It learns to walk. It hides itself behind sunglasses and a jacket. It spritzes itself, erratically, with water. It listens to a tape on basic conversational English. The tape asks it where to find the bathroom. It tells it the bathroom is down the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"series":[48],"class_list":["post-6887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strange-encounters","series-strange-encounters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Strange-Encounter-Henley1000.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6889,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions\/6889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6887"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=6887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}