snow ball final paper

By analyzing pieces of Ardy Laings short text, and trying different experiments of our own based off the text helped the class and myself analyze ourselves and be more in touch with who we are. Apart of knowing who I am, is knowing where I came from, apart of knowing where I came from, is knowing the steps that have taken me from when I was a baby to who I am now, even if I am not aware of the journey I have come through, every day. Conscious or unconscious realizing that there is more to me than I may realize there is more to life than i am living.

But how can we grow as people if we don't understand our thinking process. A very important part of who we are is our brain and our thinking process. Weather we realize it or not, our minds are flowing with thoughts and we are constantly thinking. Even when we are sleeping we are still thinking, the result of that is dreams. Sometimes i cant fall asleep at night, i often lie in bed for hours before falling asleep. This happens because i cannot calm my thoughts down, i cant stop thinking. Either there is something on my mind bothering me, distracting me from going to sleep. Thinking and dreaming is related.
"Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing in our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love." Ardy Lang
My reaction to what Ardy Laings quote is the way we think and live is automatic We don't really have control over our thoughts or our actions. We just go with the sensations our body feels, we don't really think about it that much. We think all the time, but we rarely live off meta cognition thinking, thinking about our thinking in school or our everyday lives. People who think at this level perform better in school and are thinking on a more intellectual level. But we rarely think about our thinking. We just make decisions but dont wonder why did i make that decision, or why did i choose something over another thing. People live out of habit and we live automatic lives, living automatically isn't really living at all. It's as if we are robots living a life without even thinking about anything. We are like robots, we have the same routines everyday. When you first learn to do something you think about each step you put into it. Like driving for example, when you are learning how to drive, you pay attention to every detail and can recall every turn you made to reach your final destination. But once you start driving for years, you drive out of habit and put little thought into where you are going. Last year in class we watched the movie "Memento" The main character had lost his memory and said "Habit and routine make my life possible." He had lost his memory so he had no new memories to help him everyday. Habit, routine, and a lot of notes made him live as an automatic thinker.

Ardy Lang believes "As men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world; we barley remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do;" Ardy Lang argues that dreams mean something, and one reason people don't know the very meaning of themselves is because we don't remember our dreams and we don't ever stop to think what do our dreams really mean. In class we keep a dream journal, and paid more attention to our dreams. People easily forget their dreams, which is why it is important to write down your dream right after you wake up. I often have more than one dream in the night and my dreams tend to play like a movie without a beginning or an ending. I often don't see what happens in the end of my dreams, they usually cut off. Similar to the music video we watched in class. Where the man was lying of the street and everyone was surrounding him and wanted to know why he was lying down. He responded by telling the people "You don't want to know why I'm lying here" the crowd grew larger and they asked him if he was lying there because there was no point in living and he responded no. The man eventually told the people why he was lying on the floor but we couldn't hear what he was saying, soon the whole crowd was lying on the floor. This is similar to my dreams because there are so many dreams where i never see the end, and i want to see the outcome of my dream but never do.
My imagination is less realistic and you often imagine about your desires in life, dreams are similar. I often dream about my desires and in life. Your imagination and your day dreams are less realistic, while my dreams often seem very real, so real while I'm dreaming i think its real life. My dreams fool me while I'm sleeping. Unless I'm having a lucid dream, where I'm aware i am dreaming i think its real life. I rarely have lucid dreams, but they are the most enjoyable dreams to have because you can play around in your dream. It's like living in a different world for a little and any thing you do has no outcome. One reason life can be boring is because we constantly thinkg about the effect our decisions will have on our lives.
I'm in my own little world a lot of the time. I think that dreaming and your imagination are similar, but not the same. You have control over your imagination and your thoughts in class. But you have no control over your dreams. I think dreams are more meaningful than your imagination, because dreams are the root of your inner most desires. Dreams lead to the root of you, and dreams ofter reveal a lot about a person and their thoughts. People try to hide their feelings and emotions while awake, but when dreaming you can see how you really feel and what you really want. People choose to not pay attention to dreams because they think they mean nothing. After reading Fromm, and the Ardy Lang articles i am paying more attention to my dreams because there is more meaning in our dreams that we would come to realize.
"A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul."- Erich Fromm. I value what Fromm is saying here because i relate this statement to my dreams. My dreams are personal and weird but always tell me something about myself.

"As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its
flavour"- Ardy Lang. I somewhat agree with Ardy Lang. I don't remember much of my childhood, but my childhood still has an essence to it. I cant describe it but there is a flavour in the memory of my childhood. I have forgotten most of my childhood, there are random times of my youth i remember but i will always carry the essence of my childhood with me throughout life.
My childhood is like a vague dream. Just like dreams i only remember the highlights, and i don't recall the details. With certain memories i have certain emotions and feelings that go along with those memories. I feel like i do remember the essence of my childhood. There are a few reasons that i remember the essence of my childhood. I have lived in the same neighborhood since i was a little girl, and memories are sparked everyday when i come home. I have also gone to SOF from sixth grade until now. I was constantly around the same enviorment, at home and at school and i was constantly reminded of my past. I also see a lot of the same people i knew in middle school. But i feel like a lot of people are not reminded of their past that much. Many kids move, they change schools, and meet new people and as people get older we forget who we once were. In the movie Harold and Maude, Harold has lost touch with himself. His mother is to blame. Life for Harold seems meaningless and he fakes death in his house. Maude was Harold's push, and she helped him become more in touch with his body.

The main points I have gotten from Ardy Langs excerpt is what we call normal, what we are taught to believe is normal is a form of destruction. We are taught not to be ourselves, but to experience the world the way people tell us to experience things. We are stripped of our deeds; we're alienated from our everyday lives. Children are free, happy, and in touch with themselves more than anyone else and that is the easiest time to manipulate a person. Everyone is taught to grow up. Since children can be easily taught or brainwashed, most of us are "lost" all together. When you are a child, you enjoy life. You don’t think about making money as an adult and you don’t even picture yourself working in an office firing workers and yelling at people. Business men were once young and did’t see themselves as corrupt business people, but that is who they have become. As Ardy Lang said “As men of the world, we hardly know the existence of the inner world;” The way we grow up we are all more or less alienated from our bodies. That is why most adults and teenagers smoke weed, drink alcohol, or other types of drugs. It makes you feel like you’re for the first time seeing life the way you should see the world. Like these substances opened up a whole new world for you. Where being in a different state is better than being sober. I don’t understand how Ardy Lang who says we are alienated from ourselves took acid? He must have been alienated himself although he still had good insight to our class.

"If we are stripped of our experience, we are stripped of our deeds; and if our deeds are, so to say, taken out of our hands like toys from the hands of children."-Ardy Lang. Ardy Lang believes we are not aware of our bodies and we don't experience the world fresh the way we should. He believes we are taught as children to loose our self and experience life the way we should experience it. One example of children being taught to feel certain emotions is the Care Bears. The moral of the show is to treat your friends well, and that you should always be happy and that grumpy is not the way to act. How we deal with our feelings is different for everyone, and everybody acts differently according to the way they feel. But in the end we pretty much end up acting more or less the same. But then again we did all watch the same shows growing up, so that explains a lot. Everyone more or less live the same life, just in different bodies. Most teenagers through adult years are alienated, but the world we live in its hard to impossible not to be alienated from our bodies and really experience the world the way we were meant to experience it. Ways to become alienated are video games, movies, cell phones, ipods, AIM, myspace, facebook, TV, and computers. We more or less live in a virtual world. Video games are the most extreme form of alienation in my opinion because you are virtually someone else doing something you would never do in real life, its like your in a dream state. Maybe if we paid more attention to our dreams we wouldn't feel the need to play video games.

After taking this class, and reading this text and analyzing what Ardy Lang and Erich Fromm has to say I will defiantly not only pay more attention to my body, my emotions, my feelings, my dreams but I will try and think why do I feel this way and what is making me feel a certain way. Ardy Lang’s text is serious and very controversial. Although it is arguable no one in our class put down everything that Ardy Lang had to say, everyone in my class including myself agreed with the points he was making and I have never heard life being talked about from that point of view, and it makes me think what kind of world are we living in.

7th chunk

How we deal with our feelings is different for everyone, and everybody acts differently according to the way they feel. But in the end we pretty much end up acting more or less the same. Ardy Laing said "Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal." This is very true, people want to be considered normal, and people will act differently to be just like everyone else. In class we watched the show Care Bears. This is an example according to Ardy Laing of how we educate children to lose themselves, they are brainwashed. Even though i never watched Care Bears, i watched other shows such as Barney, Sesame Street, the Rugrats, Ren and stimpy (the weirdest show ever by the way), hey Arnold, full house, boy meets world, Rocco's modern life and some others but those were the TV shows i watched when i was younger. A lot of these shows had a moral to them, and they always wanted to do good deeds and be a good person. Full house is a perfect example of a show with "good morals".
The pizza pie of my emotions consists of these emotions. 1/4 Happy-with friends people i enjoy being around. 1/4 worthless, i feel like me in the world, is nothing in comparison with everything around me and my life is pointless. 1/8 hyper, mostly at nights. 1/8 tired and lazy and just need to do nothing and relax. 1/8 disconnected with everything around me.
I am happy when i am laughing, i feel worthless in life because who am i in the big picture of things? I'm nothing a speak of dust. This makes me feel disconcerted because i feel whats the point and i am very lazy, I'm tired a lot of the time and i am not a morning person, i often never remember my mornings because i don't pay attention to things when i am tired. I also have a lot of energy which is why i like playing sports and running around.
When we listened to music in class it made me realize that music makes people feel a certain way and can express an emotion more strongly. For example when your watching a scary movie, they play high pitched violin music or whatever and it really does make you scared more. It doesn't make sense to play reggaton at a funeral because that type of music is upbeat.
I wasn't in class when we talked about the nozicks machine, but the way it was explained to me was you could enter the machine and do what ever you want, for example time travel, fly, swim underwater. If i could i would enter the machine, i would rather travel throughout time and travel all over the world and see what this world really has to offer than live out my life. I don't even enjoy half of the things i do, i feel like i am forced to do things all the time. My parents have me go places with them, where i don't want to go. I don't want to go to school, i really don't like school but i still have to go because if i didn't i would be in a even worse situation. I would say that i spend 50% of my time actually doing things i like doing.
Ardy Lang said " Our capacity to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love." Ardy Laing said we are taught at a young age to loose ourselves, our feelings are easily manipulated. The care bears is a show teaching kids to feel a certain way.
Looking over my feelings throughout the past few weeks in class i noticed i usually said the same thing. On a typical day i was content with my self, i felt ok being in school. Not great, not bad. I was also tired a lot of the time, those were the morning classes. Whenever I'm in school i always think about being out of school, what am i doing this weekend and so on.
A lot of the time we don't deal with out feelings the right way. I don't always deal with my emotions the way i should, i tend to overreact sometimes. x