1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, "life".
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately
"work".4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There's no part of life that doesn't contain its lessons. If you're "alive", that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better a place than "here". When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here".
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life's questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
Monday, February 4, 2008
"Ten rules for being human"
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Why Secret Societies are kept secret
"However they deck it out with the rhetoric of mystery and wonder, theirs is a universe of blind force," Booth writes, and you don't have to believe in Isis and the philosopher's stone to see his point. Most people will still choose to believe in something "more," whether it's the ninefold path of the Buddha or the pillars of Islam or pyramid power. Chances are that whatever they choose will sound ridiculous to anyone who doesn't also believe. That's something religion has always had in common with sex: If you're not into it, it looks silly. Which explains why all the really clever people do it behind closed doors."
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Feyzi Baban’s (2006), “Living with Difference: Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Political Community"
Here are some quotes and corresponding footnotes I have copied and pasted from Feyzi Baban’s (2006), “Living with Difference: Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and PoliticalCommunity,” Studies in Political Economy 77 (spring): pp. 107-128.
cosmopolitan thinking encourages us to rethink how sameness and difference is dealt with in a highly complex globalized world.5 In a series of well articulated books and articles, Held and Archibugi have been defining the blueprint for a world polity that needs to be reimagined outside the scope of state sovereignty.6
6. D. Archibugi and D. Held, Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); D. Archibugi and D. Held, (eds.), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); D. Held, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); D. Held, Globalization-anti-globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); D. Archibugi, (ed.), Debating Cosmopolitics (London: Verso, 2003).
Central to these and other works explaining the “cosmopolitan condition” is the need to redefine world politics that cannot be managed by states alone. Held argues that, as a result of the growing number of complex global issues. such as regulation of trade, poverty, and the environment, we can no longer sustain the assumption that nations can control their own destinies alone. He then asserts that, as a result, we either leave our destiny at the hands of the market or try to create new forms of democracy, regulation, and accountability to subject global forces to effective political control.7
7. M. Guibernau, “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy: An Interview with David Held,” Constellations 8/4 (2001), pp. 427–41.
Proponents of cosmopolitan theory remind us that we need to reimagine a political community that is not bounded by borders, one that would include all human beings as its members and adopt democracy as a cosmopolitan ideal implemented on a global level.8
8. D. Held, “Globalization and Cosmopolitan Democracy,” Peace Review 9/3 (1997), pp. 309–14.
This cosmopolitan democratic ideal requires a paradigm shift in international relations and should base itself not on international law, but on cosmopolitan law that “would guarantee the fundamental rights of every individual human being whether or not such rights were respected by their ‘own’ nation-states.”9
9. R. Fine and R. Cohen, “Four Cosmopolitanism Moments,” Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, (eds.), S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 137–62.
This shift entails removing nation-states from their privileged status in international politics and extends the concept of sovereignty to individuals who would be the legitimate agents of the international domain.10
10. D. Archibugi, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Democracy,” Re-imagining Political Community, (eds.), D. Archibugi, D. Held, and M. Kohler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 198–230.
Laying the groundwork for democratic global order is one of the principal objectives of cosmopolitan theorizing.(110)
...cosmopolitanism should be imagined and read within the context of margins, local experiences, and cultures.(109)
Sunday, January 20, 2008
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