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The 10 Rules of Being Human

A few decades ago, Chérie Carter-Scott devised a list of 10 Rules for Being Human, which was published in her 1998 book If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules. These rules are often presented on social media as being “handed down from ancient Sanskrit” but their more recent origin shouldn’t keep us from learning what we can from them. Here they are:

  1. You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.
  2. You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called ‘life.’ Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.
  3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.
  4. A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.
  5. Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
  6. “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain a “there” that will look better to you than your present “here”.
  7. Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects 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.
  9. Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
  10. You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unraveling the double helix of inner knowing.

Update: Chris Glass had a lovely experience with Carter-Scott’s book recently.

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