Lo que sé

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.

I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word ‘Omelas’ in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don’t you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas … Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. 0 melas. Omelas. Homme helas. 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?’ From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

The next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community; a community practising understanding and loving kindness. A community practising mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the Earth.

“I realized that I could lose myself in a character. I could live in a character. It was a choice. And when I finished with that, I took a month to remember who I was. 'What do I believe? What are my politics? What do I like and dislike?' It took me a while and I was depressed going back into my concerns and my politics. But there was a shift that had already happened. And the shift was, 'Wait a second. If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?'... I know now he does not really exist. He’s ideas... Jim Carrey was an idea my parents gave me. Irish-Scottish-French was an idea I was given. Canadian was an idea that I was given. I had a hockey team and a religion and all of these things that cobble together into this kind of Frankenstein monster, this representation. It’s like an avatar. These are all the things I am. You are not an actor, or a lawyer. No one is a lawyer. There are lawyers, law is practiced, but no one is a lawyer. There is no one, in fact, there.”

“If you want the truth,

Philosophy was practiced by the ancients as a form of áskēsis—a practice of continual self-overcoming and self-transformation. With the rise of Christianity in the West, philosophy became an orthodoxy, a quest for correct doctrine. Philosophy was no longer practiced as a way of life because the Christian way of life was already established as the only true one. Philosophy became a theoretical practice aimed at the justification of the revealed truths of Christianity. In the Chinese tradition, the reverse occurred: Truth-seeking philosophies (such as the Mohists for example) were relegated to the countercultural margins of the tradition. Hadot writes about áskēsis as a means to “let ourselves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes and convictions. This means that we must dialogue with ourselves, and hence we must do battle with ourselves.“ Áskēsis makes use of techniques of the self that are as much bodily as intellectual. These exercises were designed to bring about “a conversion which turns our active life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it.” It should not be confused with asceticism. Michel Foucault comments on the difference between asceticism and áskēsis: “Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad connotations. But the áskēsis is something else: it’s the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear that happily one never attains.”