The Final Finale!

Introductory Unit:

Karen Armstrong, in our introductory packet, speaks of myth and its connection with early civilizations and peoples. She explains that humans were born myth-makers, for our ideas have always transcended that of everyday reality into something more fanciful, yet something more real than our own reality. In the human experience, myth acts not only to explain our existence, but the purpose of our existence as well. Myth draws upon the archetypal characteristics of humankind in order to develop universally accepted stories of the past and the creation of people. It is through myth that humans first crafted themselves and their future generations. Leonard Schlain depicts the duality of human nature in his writings, especially those of the left and right brains and how as a people we have shifted from one half to the other due to society. Schlain explains the rigid and logical processes of the left brain and the emotional, gestalt experiences of the right brain. The human experience is crafted through the usage of our minds, and in modern society, with its influx of text, the left dominant brain becomes the lens through which we begin to understand the world. However, both brains are required in equal amounts as I like to believe in order to truly understand what it is to be human, and what experiences make us human. David Abram also brings up a point about the progression of the left brain, but he is mainly concerned with the advent of writing, script, and text and all of its effect on humans. Abram brings about a point of modern, left-brained culture has destroyed its ties with the past, with the connection to nature. In the human experience, nature is key to our understanding of the world and ourselves, as well as others around us.

Nature, Human Beings, and Sacred Space:

Australian Aborigines were one of the first topics studied in the Nature and Sacred Space Unit, and understandably so. Aborigines’ sacred spaces were those places of rock shelters filled with paintings which conjured up images of dreamtime; a primordial state where their ancestors remain that provides a stable backdrop to life. Sacred spaces play a role of connection within the human experience: they provide a connection between the past, nature, and the human mind and spirit. Shakespeare’s The Tempest deals primarily with human interaction with nature: Prospero controls natures to his own wishes while Caliban lives in relative harmony and camaraderie with nature. The Tempest presents the influence and importance nature has in the experience of being human, whether it is submissive to modern culture or flourishing within “primal” culture. The Tempest clearly shows that nature’s role in life can be a guiding force, whether it slowly affects Prospero through spirits such as Ariel or directly such as Prospero’s magic manipulating nature to wash Ferdinand’s ship ashore. Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” brings about a role of nature that is considerably more bound to humans than anything in The Tempest. Montaigne speaks of cannibals and their communal connection with nature that makes modern society seem barbarous. Montaigne shows that the role of nature in being human is that nature has become a provider of food, drink, victory, defeat, joy, and sadness. Such cannibals love their wives, enjoy their daily food and drink, and lead a relatively simple life, but, as Montaigne mentions, “'tis rare to hear of a sick person, and they moreover assure me, that they never saw any of the natives, either paralytic, bleareyed, toothless, or crooked with age.” Nature’s importance to being human, it seems, is that it is the most ancient and primal organism that can live alongside humans and both may flourish.

Love and Beauty:

The Picture of Dorian Gray not only shows the importance of beauty in the experience of being human, but also the flaws undeniably associated with being human. Beauty provides for Dorian, as well as the human race, a glimmer of perfection all people strive for. Beauty, in a natural sense, is what makes life full of wonder and awe; beauty, such as the mere shape and hue of a flower, does not necessarily mean perfection, but is rather a characteristic all people can look and comment on. The Shape of Things, however, brings about the flaws of beauty and love and how it can manipulate the human experience from a personal, fulfilling journey to a narcissistic shifting of morals to make one’s own experience more pleasurable to the experiences of others. In this sense, beauty can play a corrupting role in the human experience and consciousness as one sacrifices one’s self image and personal beauty to mimic the supposed view of beauty by others so that the beautiful can be accepted as a person, which is another part of the human experience: a want of being needed, a want of being noticed and not going unknown into the abysmal and lonely pit that is death. While on the subject of love and death, I feel it is critical to bring up the movie “All the Mornings of the World,” for it depicts everlasting love, love that stretches beyond the boundaries of human existence into the next world, and how love, with its ability to crush and to uplift, plays a vital role in what it means to be human. Love is not so much an emotion, but rather an intrinsic state that humans naturally have and can be brought to different levels of intensity. Love is incredibly important to being human because it is a connection a person can have with another person that cannot be found anywhere else in life. No fleeting bond between friends or coworkers could ever measure up to the stronger than steel connection of respect and admiration that is love.

Ethics, Law, Power, and Human Frailty:

Ethics have guided humans to “goodness” since the moment the first laws were created, yet, the question of whether a universal ethical and moral code among all people has persisted. The Hebrew Bible and its passages “The Ten Commandments” and “The Holiness Code” have offered a “jumping off” point that has been the inspiration for past and modern morals. Such explicit acts like murder, theft, lying, and adultery are brought about in “The Ten Commandments” and reinforced in “The Holiness Code.” In its essence, the basic ethics brought about in these texts have served to preserve the sanctity of the human experience and the goodness of human life. The Buddhist Precepts are similar to the ethical acts spoken of in the Hebrew Bible, and it is through this connection that perhaps a universal ethical code can be constructed to deny people the actions that may infringe upon the human experience of others. The Buddhist Precepts work alongside the Hebrew Bible as an affirmation (but not necessarily inferior to) to implant the ideas of wrong and right into the human mind, allowing a sense of justice and guidance to evolve along with humans in order to maintain a “homeostasis” of pleasure, fulfillment, and enlightenment. Woody Allen’s movie “Crimes and Misdemeanors” show the consequences, or rather the lack thereof, of committing terrible crimes and living with what follows. In the film, Judah has his mistress murdered after realizing she wished to make known his affair. Judah struggles with the moral and ethical dilemmas placed into him as a child as he attempts to justify his own actions. Though crime may be a part of the human experience, it is not as fundamental and basic as are the morals that drive our daily decisions and thoughts in life.

The Inner Journey and the Meaning of Human Reality:

Waking Life presents many ideas on what human reality consists of and whether the reality we experience is truly reality. The idea of human reality plays a key role in what we believe is real, what is important to us, and what it is that we cherish in life. If one goes through a day believing that everything one encounters is not reality, then how would it shape their actions and thoughts? Knowing what is reality is critical to the human ability to enjoy life and to glean as much experience and thought from life as possible. Without a foothold in reality, there would be no telling how people may react. Shakespeare’s Hamlet offers an interesting take on the human journey, for it seems that through most of the play, Hamlet does not have just one singular driving force behind his actions, but rather multiple facets of his life that impact his actions. Hamlet’s father’s death, his love for Ophelia, his wish of revenge against Claudius, and his disgust towards his mother’s promiscuity assault him from all sides as he attempts to sort through what is most important to him. Hamlet’s inner journey is marked with decisions, which play perhaps one of the greatest roles in the human experience. Decisions and the following actions are what make people who they are, and it is through these actions that one’s life path is determined, be it pleasant or untimely. The Epic of Gilgamesh presents the idea of an inner journey, a journey that leads one to understand his own reality and his role within it. For Gilgamesh, his adventures with Enkidu were his reality until Enkidu’s untimely death. His reality shattered, Gilgamesh quested to find to immortality and the escape from mortal woes. Upon failing this quest, Gilgamesh finds that his legend stands as a form of immortality and that it is the closest thing to living forever that he could achieve. The inner journey’s role in the human experience is interconnected with the meaning of life. Completion of such a journey is what is required to live one’s life, yet it is the journey itself that is life in all of its ups and downs. The inner journey is a final step towards accepting what it is to be mortal and what it is to truly be human.

...And in the End...A New Beginning...

This past semester in Humanities has been a whirlwind through the ages and the world. Our first day in class, we were told to write down what our own ideas were on various aspects under the broad umbrella of humanities. Some of the terms I did not know exactly what they were, but as we went along in the class, we learnt more what these terms meant, as well as better learnt the meaning of the terms we thought we knew so well. One thing that I have found, through these last few months, is that while at the beginning of the class I had certain beliefs and ethics, these beliefs and ethics that I wrote about on the first day of class have not been changed, but rather more clearly defined.

In our first unit, we came to understand the beginning s of humanity itself, how we as humans have learnt to cope with our existence from early on, through the birth of language, to creation myths, to the woman of Willendorf. In the excerpts we read from The Alphabet and the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, we came to understand how written language developed from our need to translate our spiritual perceptions of dreams, intuitions and visions. In The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, we discovered that this new skill we humans developed created a schism in our perceptions of the universe, causing us to see a duality of body and mind. Through these, in the book of Genesis, and the other readings, we came to the realisation that our most basic perceptions, how humans view the world, though the higher orders may differ from culture to culture, from time to time, they all stem from some ancient, prehistoric common ancestor, just as all of us biologically do the same.

In the next unit, we furthered out comprehension on the ancient gestalt understanding of the universe through the contemporary eyes of the Australian Aborigines in the National Geographic’s documentary, Australia’s Aborigines, and through our readings about the ancient cave paintings, as well as BBC’s documentary, How Art Made the World’s episode, “The Birth of Imagination”. This then segued into the history of the sacred place, with the first sacred places being dark caves where ancient seers and shamans would paint their psychic visions of the “dream world” as the Aborigines called it. We read The Tempest by William Shakespeare, in which is described a primitive island inhabited a primitive man, one with his connectedness with the “dream world” still intact. We see the consequences of him encountering modern, “split” people. As the schism developed between us and the “dream world,” our sacred spaces changed too, from being places of union with the universe, to solemn places of beauty and prayer; from the ancient caves, to the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

This led us into the third unit, in which we explored the concepts of beauty, and what it is to love, and be loved. We examined Plato’s and Kant’s philosophic analyses of beauty, comparing their views to those of Nietzsche, and Ficino. We read the love poetry of Sappho, of the Song of Songs from the Bible, Shakespearian sonnets, and the love poems of Keats and Browning. In these, we revealed to ourselves how the expression of love has changed over time, from the erotic ancient Egyptian love poetry, to the courtly love expressed in the Mediaeval poetry of Beroul and Cappelanus, to the romantic love of Keats, as compared to our modern pop culture expressions we see on TV every day. We watched the French film, All the Mornings of the World, and read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, in which we observed the decent of a man’s morals as his superficial beauty remained preserved.

Thus we entered the next unit, in which we examined ethics, law, power and human frailty. We read the “Ten Commandments”, “The Sermon on the Mount”, and the “Holiness Code” from the Bible, in which we compared the ethics and laws presented in those writings with the Eightfold Path taught in the Buddhist tradition, in an attempt to distil the teachings into a basic, universal ethical code by which all cultures live, across space and time. We then explored what happened when these moral and ethical laws were deconstructed in the reading of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors, and in the Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes. We then reconstructed our ethics in learning of the birth of Christianity, from Frontline’s documentary From Jesus to Christ, and through excerpts from the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and from our readings from a spattering of ethical philosophers from throughout history, such as Spinoza, St. Augustine, Sartre, and Hume.

This then led us to our final unit of the year, in which we made a full circle, exploring the inner journey and what it means to be human. We watched the movie Waking Life, in which a man goes through a journey of self discovery through his dreams, coming to a better understandment of the universe, and of his own existence. We read The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh goes through a journey of his own, coming out a stronger and better man. Through this, we analysed the heroes throughout history, as can be explained as heroes in this definition, such as Moses and Jesus. We read about Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the world is described as a cave, in which we are all entrapped in, yet which we can escape from, if and when we realise we are entrapped, thus changing our perception of the universe itself. This then led to us watching the film I [Heart] Huckabees, which we have as of now yet to finish, but has in it one such person who has escaped from Plato’s cave, as well as people in it who are trying to grapple with their existence, and must go through some similar rebirth.

Throughout our tour through the vast and varied world of Humanities, we got a broad and yet intimate look at humanity, that is to say ourselves. Through our learning of the outer and inner journeys of mankind, we ourselves have had our own awakenings and epiphanies along the way, inner journeys of our own, hopefully reappearing on the other side changed for the better. And yet, through our discoveries, through my own discoveries, I have found that all I needed to know, I already knew, because in learning about us all, I learned about myself. In the end, we discovered that what we learned at the start of the class is the same as what we learned at the end. And what we learned was a better understanding of what it is to be human. Just as the ancient right-brained societies understood, and just as Spinoza explained, everything is connected, everything is part of the same blanket.

a grand finale

I n t r o d u c t i o n

Humanities was a class I took assuming I already had the ground works down; I assumed I knew it all and everything would be a breeze. It came as a shock when most of the materials went over my head and I was forced to realize “Melanie, you are not all-knowing, now remove the chip from your shoulder and get to work!” Thank you Humanities for finally waking me up to that realization. The introduction unit itself was enough to confuse me. The separated, brief sections on music, dance, myth, et cetera were not what got me, but rather the materials that followed. What was Dream Time? What was its function? According to the Aborigines, Dream Time gave birth to everything we now know. Our written words may have come from a need to communication long distances, but where did those words come from? They came from a place, time, and state that we cannot understand. I think even now, with all that we have learned, we still cannot answer the questions we have been seeking. We were given a handout with numerous over views, but in the end, those are simply general ideas. Outside of a dictionary definition, can you tell me what it is to love? What does it mean to be enlightened? We may have our words in a spoken and written form now, but we still cannot answer simple questions. Not only do we have this to deal with, but there is also the loss of our emotional, imaginative right brain.

N a t u r e

As a follower of western views of nature, I could not help but side with Herzog’s view in Grizzly Man. To define the western view of nature is quite simple; nature is here for our use. We must use it to our advantage and betterment, or else it is pointless. Granted, if our purpose is for it to make oxygen, obviously we’d just leave- let’s say a tree- alone. You could say nature is above us, since it came before us, but I have to think that the ends justify the means. If at the end of the world, humans have destroyed most of nature, doesn’t that mean that they are superior to nature? Just because something comes first does not make it better. It was simply a stepping stool to better our lives. Now it’s under our control, and inter mingling with it can bring about out down fall. Aside from Grizzly Man, though, there is also The Tempest, which further proves that man is above nature. Prospero has the power within himself to entrap the spirits that represent different elements of nature. It is only through his will that they are ever released from the hold he has over them.

B e a u t y

This category will also contain love and art, as the three go together like peas in a pod. To break this idea down, try to follow the logic we were given at one point in this unit: we LOVE things that are BEAUTIFUL. ART is meant to be pleasing to the eye, and things that please the eye are, in a sense, BEAUTIFUL. If this ART is BEAUTIFUL then we must LOVE it. More goes into it than that, but that was the basic break down of the idea. What makes something beautiful, I wonder? According to Nietzsche, for something to be truly beautiful, it must show both Apollonian and Dionysian qualities. Order and chaos, truth and deception, the good and the bad: all of these contradictions make things beautiful-- they create a work of art. As Nietzsche would say, it would create the perfect tragedy. Of course, Nietzsche could be wrong. Taking Kant’s perspective into account, just because one person sees something as beautiful does not mean we all do. We all see things through different eyes. Our vision varies and the colors hold different meanings. Maybe we can’t see Apollo posing in his perfection, while Dionysus drinks himself into a stupor in the foreground. It’s all too subjective to truly say for sure.

G o o d, B a d, and G o d

Good and bad are defined by personal moral values, as others have also stated. Everyone justifies their actions in one way or another. Looking to Raskolnikov, who killed two people, can we truly say his actions were wrong? The first murder occurred for the good of the people- or so Raskolnikov though. He justified it to himself, that by murdering the pawn broker, that he would be doing good. Regardless of the feelings of others, he accepted the action as good, thus making it good in his mind. Then he kills her sister. The murder was done out of the fear of being seen and, eventually, caught and punished for his crime. Fear can make even a sane man do strange, irrational things. Had he his mind, would Raskolnikov have killed her? Who can say for sure? According to Biblical readings, his actions were wrong, no matter what his motives were. “Thou shalt not kill” is one of the ten commandments, and it’s quite obvious that Raskolnikov did not follow that. Not only is murder against the Bible and God, but Buddhism also frowns upon is, viewing it as “wrong action”. In a life where you should be doing good as religion states, it can be said that Raskolnikov’s actions were wrong. Outside of that view point, however, it is subject to debate.

L i f e

I am in agreement with Megan’s post when she says “the meaning of life cannot be discovered.” I think there is no “the” involved- meaning, there is no specific meaning to life- but for each person there is “a” meaning to life. Many people have searched for a meaning, and each has come back with something different. To Gilgamesh, he learned that to live was also to die. To Dorian the meaning of life became about fulfilling his own desires and staying beautiful. Both of these could be their meanings to life, and it cannot be questioned. Until there is some holy sign saying “This is the meaning of life!” no one can truly argue it one way or the other.

Mission Final: Operation Humanities and the Experience of Being Human

In the introductory unit we explored the concepts of myth, ritual, mind and language. We read an excerpt from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, who asserted that our current phonetic alphabet evolved so that we as a culture are further separated from our intuitive and emotional right brains. Instead, we are experiencing the growing domination of the left brain which incorporates the skills our society is developing. The female right brain recognizes faces, solves spatial problems, and uses metaphors to explain feeling-states. These attributes of being and holism were better evolutionarily for the earlier gatherer/ nurturer roles of humans. The masculine left brain is associated with doing, speech, abstraction and analysis. The ability to focus in on one aspect is associated with the left brain, and is therefore associated with the hunter/ killer aspect of the brain. Shlain also discuses story-telling, which incorporates both brain hemispheres because a lot of human communication is nonverbal, including gestures, voice inflections and facial expressions. Writing, however, only uses the left brain since it focuses on linearity, sequence and abstraction which separate our feelings from the act of writing characters on paper. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram also affirms that writing separated humans from our emotionality. In early forms of writing, characters were pictograms, which separated the emotional experience of the object into the lettering, but were still directly related. Eventually, the verbal names of some objects were combined when pictograms were put together. For example, “the Sumerian word ti, which means ‘life’, was written in cuneiform with the pictoral sign for arrow, which in Sumerian is also called ti” (98). Eventually, the phonetic alphabet took over, by creating a character for each consonant sound, and vowels, the sounded breath added, were chosen by the reader. Abram affirms that “a direct association is established between the pictoral sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured,” which also bypasses the direct, emotional, more-than-human experience. This more-than-human experience is referenced by Karen Armstrong in A Short History of Myth. Armstrong cites the Australian aborigine concept of Dreamtime as a more-than-human divine realm which they connected to through ritual. She writes that “a sense of participation in the divine was essential to the mythical worldview: the purpose of a myth was to make people more fully conscious of the spiritual dimension that surrounded them on all sides and was a natural part of life” (Packet 2). Our ancestors who created more fundamental myths connected to a divinity with their emotional and intuitive right brains through ritual. As evolution and writing progressed, the left hemisphere became more dominant. However, both hemispheres are connected and important for a human experience.

The next unit focused on humans, nature and sacred space. The Tempest by Shakespeare, relates in the discussion of Caliban, the native of Prospero’s island. Caliban eloquently speaks about the island, his homeland, with beautiful imagery. He represents the victims of European colonization, torn from their indigenous culture by those who exploited and subjugated them. Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay, “Of Cannibals”, a point of view that would see Caliban as a “noble savage”. De Montaigne’s experience of cannibals considered them nobler than the Europeans because they did not torment for fun, but killed for honor, although the Europeans thought themselves superior. They lived in accordance with nature, not synthetic institutions and devices or alienating inventions. Humans came from nature so it is seen as the proper was to live in that organic atmosphere. Caliban is rude and unrefined, but his emotionality and connection with nature is true. Sacred spaces were also considered in this unit, specifically with Chartres Cathedral for my group. The architecture is elaborate, but all is symbolic to Christianity and even ancient Greco-Roman mythology. The experience is just as important, including sensory stimuli and ritual, because it creates the right brain here-and-now participation. This is what creates the experience of the divine, like the prehistoric caves which were home to rituals. Shamans would enter the caves and connect to their spiritual realm, and create paintings that depicted their visions. Chartres has depictions also of religious figures and events that foster these connections and religious experiences. Humans have a need to connect to a divine more-than-human reality, and create sacred spaces to do so. Nature is sacred, and prehistoric peoples fostered a deep connection to it, and so did the indigenous. Caliban and de Montaigne’s cannibals lived naturally and in harmony with nature, and were therefore honorable, but seen to others as crude or foolish. Nature and experience are deep parts of being human and therefore related to the understanding of the sacred.

The next unit explored love and beauty. A video we watched again explored the concept of the more-than-human. It talked about art found from prehistoric times, and how it accentuated what was seen by that culture to be beautiful, even if it was not realistic. Love alters true perceptions. The Song of Solomon from the bible and Sappho’s poetry compare love to eating fruit and other sweet natural foods. It is a transcendent experience that has inspired them to create art and compare it to nature. Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde was the subject of the titular character’s love. He confused his love for her art and beauty as love of her. The beautiful distorts perception of reality, but is a transcendent experience for which Dorian was willing to sacrifice a great deal. In the film All the Mornings of the World, Saint Columbe was inspired to create his best art through love of his wife. Love is a spiritual, more-than-human experience that fosters beauty, or even is beauty personified. Kant considered beauty a model of nature. Again the natural world is of utmost importance when considered the human experience, although transcendent.

Law, ethics, and human frailty were discussed in the penultimate unit. The Ten Commandments were one of the first basic law codes. It contains many universals found in the Five Buddhist Precepts. Righteousness or faith, and forbidding killing, lying, stealing, and sexual misconduct are things found in most laws. Some laws stem from moral reasons, though some are for societal control. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky explored the nature of ethics as well in the main character, Rodion Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov suffered from a mental breakdown after breaking his own moral code. Humans are frail mentally in regards to morality, either from breaking their own code, or from succumbing to outside influences. His distress at his condition at the hands of society caused Raskolnikov to formulate a theory of great men. He claims he feels no guilt after murdering the old pawnbroker, yet he must suffer from some sort of transgression contrition gauging from his reaction. In the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the main character Judah hires his brother to arrange the killing of his former mistress. He endures intense guilt, but it goes away once he realizes the good and morality in the world stemming from his faith which he had previously abandoned. It seems that morality is necessary to see the world as a good and overall happy place. Ethics put meaning in the world, and laws reflect that. From the books and movies explored, it seems that human frailty stems from a person’s unclear ethics or distress. Ethics and laws are necessary for a properly-flowing society and for moral and balanced human life.

Last of all in Humanities we explored the inner journey and the meaning of human existence. The entirety of the video, The Power of Myth: the Hero’s Journey, is focused on the inner journey, although the hero must defeat external obstacles. The hero must confront challenges along the way that reflect inner strife. Eventually s/he enters the “belly of the whale”, or the abyss, in which the hero must face their greatest fear or moral failing. The hero is thus transformed and comes to a revelation and achieves atonement or a feeling of oneness with his/her new self. “Night Journey”, a dance by Martha Graham based on the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, is a representation of the point of moral debilitation when Jocasta and Oedipus realize their fate and unwitting transgressions. They discovered the truth through a series of questionings and a prophecy, and atone for their sins in discrete ways. Jocasta cannot come to terms with her fate and sees suicide as the only way to reconcile the irreconcilable. Her inner journey could not come to full fruition because she did not see herself restored after atoning. The titular character from The Epic of Gilgamesh experiences many challenges is his quest to seek fame and immortality. The death of Enkidu sends Gilgamesh into the abyss of his heroic journey. After his failure to retrieve the plant of immortality, he must truly confront his mortality. Gilgamesh must heed and reflect on what the gods told him. Mortality is what made him human after all, and gave his life true meaning. The inevitability of death gave love and adventure more significance and impressed their importance onto Gilgamesh. Every protagonist, such as Hamlet from Hamlet by Shakespeare, must recognize their moral failings or disparity in their morality. The trial comes in seeking reparation and accepting and overcoming the ultimate challenge. Morality and mortality go hand in hand, for death gives meaning to life and its struggles.

Although I wish it wasn't ending...

This class has expanded my mind, emotions and intellectual ability. It is my sincere pleasure to be assigned to write a wrap us essay about it. Thank you all for coming to this class with open minds, which let us have uninterrupted and intelligent conversations. Thanks again for an awesome way to end senior year, I wish everyone the best in your new adventures.

We started off our learning journey by looking at some general ideas about the humanities. John Bowker touches on religion, ritual and myth in the intro packet selections, but the section that grabbed me was about music. He tells about how music is a sort of road to connect our right and left brains, so we can fully express ourselves through it. Karen Armstrong writes about myth, lending her incite to how the human imagination works. She states, “The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology.” The intro unit links the human existence to all these thins the writers mention that have always been and will always be important basics to be a human being, Even though that all was a long time ago, I distinctly remember my interest in David Abram’s Becoming Human. All the new words and ideas made me think harder than I had in awhile. When Abram mentioned how human history and the formation of writing are incredibly connected, it made a lot of sense. We as humans began our existence living in a cyclical way but when we started writing things down, it created an undeniable switch to a linear way of life. Maybe this is when our destruction of the earth began also, but that is hard to prove.

Nature. The base of all life on earth, the reason we are alive. If it were not for nature, the earth would either be like mars (scorching hot and dry) or not existent at all. And it doesn’t matter who one asks they will all say the same thing. To the grizzly man, nature is not only important to humans but crucial to animals and plants off which we live. To Gary Snyder, author of “Toward Climax”, humans have shaped, moved and advanced because of nature. And as expressed in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, humans and nature are inevitably connected by supernatural forces. All of our definitions of nature were the most vivid, in my opinion, which continues to prove how indisputably crucial nature is to the human community.

Dorian Gray started out as a naïve young soul, ready to go through life taking the easy road by not fully understanding everything. Until one day, a man named Lord Henry turned the young boy’s world upside down by exposing the truths of the world to him. After many long class discussions of this book, we all have different opinions on the true beauty of people, but we can most likely agree that Dorian did not end up with a good soul. The “beauty” in this book illustrates how humans can be one thing on the outside and completely opposite on the inside, which is why the world can be sketchy at times. We also watched the breathtaking movie All the Mournings of the World. This movie, like Dorian Grey, showed the kinds of love, beauty and heartbreak individuals can encounter. Those three things are a huge part of the human “world”. We cannot go through life without encountering love and beauty as can be seen in The Shape of Things. Evelyn expresses her art through the beauty of another. She makes a statement that can be debated as not morally right, but in the end she proves a very good point that what we see on the outside clearly effects who we are on the outside.

Judah pays someone to kill a woman who could ruin his personal life, is it wrong? His aunt and some philosophers say that if he can live with the guilt without letting it eat his soul away, than it is fine. But if Raskolnikov kills two people because he thinks it will better the community, is it morally right? Most would say no unless it really did better the world, in which case John S. Mill would say that he has done something good. In every situation in life there is a right and a wrong, but the thing that can trip us up is that there is no way to figure out which is which other than following our instincts. This is why ethics, laws, power and human frailty play such a huge role in our societies. Rules can advise but not enforce; such as laws. The Ten Commandments have been known for many years now, but they are just the goal for most people because no one can be perfect. Ethics are individual therefore hard to have large numbers of people follow. And power scares and enthralls almost everyone who gets a taste of it.

In my head, the meaning of life cannot be discovered. We can travel hundreds of miles, kill off beasts or nearly starve ourselves like Gilgamesh did but the meaning of life may still be far off in the distance. The journey through ourselves turns out to be the hardest one. We can go through madness, strife, anger and happiness before one even begins to acknowledge what they are. Hamlet seems to do this as he searches for the killer of his father. Advised by his father’s ghost, he devises a plan to get the revenge to the deserving people. Along the way, he finds some things in himself that he didn’t know were there like hatred and the ability to stay focused even after committing a horrible act. Some people say they know the real goal in life because he or she has been to a place of ecstasy and enlightenment, like the mentor in the movie I <3 Huckabees. That would be cool to know how the world works like Dustin Hoffman’s character does. The way he acts and speaks shows how wise he is. I have to ask again though, how can we know the goal if we have never been there?

- Stay Excellent. Megan Hart.

A semester in 5 jumbled Paragraphs, YA!

In the Introduction Unit we learned about the beginning of humans. According to the bible in Genesis, God created Man on the sixth day. Genesis 2:7 says-"the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." This is very similar to many other creation stories, a human figure created from mud or clay and breathed into life. We did not just look at religion though, but where the idea of religion came from. Karen Armstrong talked of this and where religion, specifically myth, came from. Myth came from imagination which is unique to humans. These myths gave life meaning and explained the unexplainable, like death. Armstrong said, "Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words." Is that not what religion does? It is there, whether it is by the Greek who used to explain everyday things, or todays Christianity to explain what is supposed to happen after death. These myths lead to symbols and art and Sporre talked of the evolution of the symbols as humans themselves evolved. Symbols started to appear as early as 250,000 years ago. Eventually Homosapiens appeared and they made art. They made jewelry, sculptures, engravings and drawings and also had bone whistles and flutes. Homosapiens are the people of today. Today we make art which reflects on religion among many other things.
The aborigines of Australia use art to portray their religious animal figures. They also have sacred spaces, several of them. In general, everywhere is sacred, but there are some exceptionally sacred places. One is a sacred cave where men can go to perform rituals and to become men. By doing this they paint the outline of their hand on the wall of the cave. The other very sacred space is where they put the bones of their dead. They put these bones in a boulder with a hole in it. They believe by putting the bones of their dead in this places that the souls of the people will pass into Dreamtime, something that is like an afterlife. These aborigines live in the nature, just like Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was the main character of a documentary by Werner Herzog. Treadwell lived in Alaska with wild bears learning from them and about them and from them. He believed that nature (this includes the bears) was innocent and need to be protected, especially the bears. The director, Herzog, thought different. He thought that nature was evil and dangerous. Treadwell took his work very seriously and lived very close to them. He was eventually killed by a bear. This, for Herzog, confirmed what he thought of nature. In The Tempest by William Shakespeare the main character, Prospero, is a magician and can control things nature. Prospero used to be a duke and now he thinks that its time that his daughter, Miranda, got married, but because they live on an island, there is only a slave/servant man there named Caliban. So, Prospero uses his magic to make a tempest to sink a boat near his island so Miranda will have someone. Prospero set her up with a prince from the boat, Caliban bans together from someone from the boat to kill Prospero so they can rule the island, but they fail. Miranda and Ferdinand, the prince, plan to get married and the play ends happily with everyone leaving the island to go back to Naples. Religion, like the sacred space, is important to humans, without it there would be nothing to explain what happens after we die. Nature also plays a large role in being human, how it can cause love, like watching the sun set or picking flowers. This also shows how unpredictable and dangerous nature can be with Treadwell dying.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is about a man named Dorian Gray who is corrupted by a friend of his names Lord Henry. Lord Henry teaches him to be vain. Then a painting is made of him where his soul is put into the painting so that the painting will age and not him. He becomes a horrible person, but never ages and people love him. He eventually murders his friend who made the painting. He eventually sees what he has become and goes up to get rid of his painting, which is in hiding. He goes up to get rid of it and goes to stab it. The next day Dorian is found in the room, old and wrinkled with a knife in his heart. Moving on from one sad case to another, the movie All the Mornings of the World a man names Sainte Colombe plays the viol. When his wife dies he becomes severely depressed and starts to write loads of music, none of which he publishes. He gets a student eventually who falls in love with his daughter. He tells him to go away because he does not FEEL the music so the daughter teaches him. He becomes a famous teacher and player, and eventually learns to feel the music like Sainte Colombe. Speaking of love, in class we went over some Egyptian love poems. They talk of the beauty of a woman using nature as metaphors. "Her face is like a snare in a forest of meryu / And I, a poor wild goose, / A poor wild goose drawn down / to take the bait." This woman drawn this man in like a snare might draw a goose in. The bait I think is like her beauty. Dorian shows that beauty isn’t everything by how his soul became blackened, Sainte Colombe showed how strong love can be and its influence on music, and how nature again can influence love.
In class we learned about the Ten Commandments, The Holiness Code, and the Buddhist Eight Fold Path. All three of these have some similar views. These similar views or laws could be called universal laws. Things like: do not lie, do not steal, and do not murder. Others that aren’t eh same and are specific for the religion are things like in the Ten Commandments, No Gods before me, or the Eight Fold Path's thought of Right Mindfulness. The universal law of do not murder does not apply to one man though, and his name is Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov is the main character in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. He got the idea in his head that some people are better than others and that this difference makes certain things, like murder, not apply to them. He believes that he is this type of person and because of this he goes out and murders a woman and robs her. He does this because he is incredibly poor and she was a horrible person so he thought it was alright to take her life. The guilt eats him alive and makes him physically sick. A girl he falls in love with eventually gets him to confess, not only to the cops but to the public. He goes to jail but she waits for him. In the book Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut a man dies. He not only dies though, he decides not to move on and stays on earth as a spirit. He watches as the world is bombed and the human race changes. It evolves from what we know to a seal type creature. This narrator, Leon, watches as the human races evolves over one million years. When he dies his father told him to enter the light and join him in the afterlife. Leon refuses, and his father says he won’t be back in one million years, and in that time he watches the human race come under economic stress and die except for a select few who evolve into aquatic mammals. Raskolnikov showed that no one person is better than another, and that all ethics apply to everyone equally. The universal laws show what people are supposed to abide, and Galapagos showed the human frailty, how people were driven out of being human and became an entirely new species.
In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare three men want revenge. Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s death, Laertes his father, and Fortinbras his father. The play ends with everyone getting what they want, but also getting somewhat dead. Hamlet and Laertes both avenge their father’s deaths; Hamlet kills Claudius and Laertes killed Hamlet. Hamlet ends up killing Laertes before he dies himself from the poison sword. All three men die, and the queen does too, though her death has nothing to do with any revenge. As Hamlet is dying he tells Horatio that he wants the land (for the king and the heir not going to live to rule) to go to Fortinbras. Gilgamesh is the name of a man who is two-thirds god and one-third man. He goes on some epic adventures with his friend Enkidu. They go out to make a name for themselves. Gilgamesh doesn’t want to be forgotten. He fears death and what it brings so he goes and does all these amazing things so that he will forever be remembered. Enkidu eventually dies and Gilgamesh morns the loss of his friend and looks for a cure to aging. All of these treks have dreams that foretell what is going to happen on the journey. Similar to those dreams is the movie Waking Life which is about a young man who is dreaming. He continuously dreams. There is an idea that when someone is dreaming that they are part of a collected consciousness. This being said, it was also said that once someone dies they join that consciousness forever. By this I mean that they are in a continuous dream state, one that they cannot wake up from. It is a very interesting concept. The inner journey of Gilgamesh relates to the many inner journeys many different people have. Hamlet shows that revenge isn’t everything in human existence and Waking Life shows that what we may take for reality may just be a dream.

Human Musings

When the world began, humans were not as we are now. Prior to the invention of writing and its consequence of linear time, the human experience was one built upon the interactions of the surrounding landscape and the rhythms of the natural world. The basic human form was there, but the function had yet to be determined as clans and societies developed. Within this basic human form are the two hemispheres of the brain: the spatial, emotional right brain, and the decisive, analytical left. Leonard Shlain argues that the right brain is more feminine, while the left is more masculine. However, he states "Any particular society can accentuate one or the other of these two ways of interacting with the world, depending on the demands of the environment or the shaping influences of its inventions" (Shlain 27). As one of these inventions, writing shapes the brain and the human form to "read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear imprinted in the soil of the forest floor" (Abram 95). As writing and its component of linear time come to dominate the human expression, the attitude towards the cyclical earth are transformed so that "In relation to nature the human person is a lonely exile sojourning in a strange and hostile world, alien not only to his physical environment, but to his own body, both of which he is encouraged to fear and attempt to conquer" (Callicott 63-64). As humans crafted an abstract alphabet from the symbolic aleph-bet, we grew further away from our rhythmic roots toward our climax, in which we can contemplate, sacred space, love, beauty, ethics, law, and the inner journey. It is here the human experience begins to resonate across the globe throughout time.

As humans, we continue to treasure the natural world in which we find ourselves and the visceral meaning certain places hold. Sacred spaces can be as specific as the Kaaba or as encompassing as the Mysterious Beyond. In his film Grizzly Man, director Werner Herzog's view of a chaotic nature humans are no longer equipped to handle contends with his subject Timothy Treadwell's view that humans belong with nature and can readily be accepted into the wild. In these two views, we can see the preserved attitudes of humans since the break of man and mountain. These views are also present in Shakespeare's The Tempest, with Caliban the wild man at peace with nature and Prospero the magician using his wits to defeat and conquer nature. The attitudes of Treadwell and Caliban are expressed in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, where entire halls are dedicated to the portrayal of the game hunted and the rhythms of the earth. As Shlain says, in each person there is the literate left brain and the sympathetic right, and so in every person there is the possibility of experiencing both the connection and conquering of nature. In between these polarities we find the sacred spaces, right brained in accords to natural energy and left brained in abstracting significance that can be passed down. Being human means being a part of this earth, and in choosing how we interact with nature we reveal the spectrum of right and left brain practices encountered in every lifetime.

In every natural life, there is some connection to love and beauty, although they are not the same thing. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian becomes so possessed by his own beauty that he seeks to be untouched by age and sickness for the sake of preserving his youth. While it would appear in this case that beauty is an asset, through art it is revealed that beauty is an ideal that inspires human whimsy. From the Woman of Wittenberg to the Egyptian profile facing out, beauty is treasured not as what is real, but what is desired. In the same way, love is woven in desire of human connection. In the erotic "The Song of Songs," love consumes one as beauty can, but has a greater hold that takes place of food, purpose, and reason. Sainte-Columbe in All the Mornings of the World is driven insane by the death of his beloved wife, and thus composes for her with all his soul. In the human experience, love and beauty are passions which entertain the mind in such a way it is inescapable. While neither are permanent, the memory of Dorian's beauty on the one day his portrait was completed or the swell of Keats' muse's breast beside him move us to treasure these moments in "flashbulb memories" that remain with us until our deaths.

With emotive right brains and analytical left brains, humans search for guidance in how to lead their lives. Preserved in religious texts such as the Ten Commandments, the Holiness Code, and the Buddhist Precepts, a set of "universal" ethics emerge. These ethics seem rooted in the principle of conducting oneself as one would prefer to be respected by others. Perhaps the most honored of these universal ethics is that of refraining from taking another life; in Crime and Punishment, however, Raskolnikov challenges virtue with philosophical superiority. Raskolnikov claims that the ones who utter a new word, thus progressing the human race, are the ones who are allowed to break the rules in the name of vision. Despite his theoretical convictions, Raskolnikov falls a victim to guilt, and so we observe that there must be a fundamental morality in every individual that is intended to guide he or she. Immanuel Kant suggests that the personal center of morality is vital to each human life, and thus every human should treat others as equals, or as "ends and not means." The existentialists (Sarte, Camus) propose that a life is measured by one's one choices, and that by choosing one way we deem it appropriate for all others to follow. In the human existence, choices we make register to compose an individual, whether they are made through doctrine or trial and error.

All of these topics make up the overall inner journey, which in essence is what it means to be human. As they say, the sum of its parts are less than the whole. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, searches for immortality in response to the death of his best friend. While he overcomes great obstacles, Gilgamesh never becomes immortal, and thus lives the rest of his life building the great walls of Uruk and being remembered eternally. Likewise, Shakespeare's Hamlet contemplates whether life is living as "Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away" (Shakespeare Act 5 SC 1, 216-221). If all life ends with death, what is the meaning of life and what comes afterwards? In Waking Life, it is supposed that life after death is a sequence of dreams, as though we continue into dreamtime as indigenous peoples supposed prior to writing. In this dreamtime, the meaning is found in the contemplation of whether what is real and what is dream matters. Life is the choice, and death is the exit, or entrance, onto whatever awaits. In our existence, being human is the only option. There is no escape, whether we are the architects of our own destinies as Existentialists propose, or if we are at the mercy of a higher power. Being human means we encounter all the same energies as everyone else and take our own shot at living it and seeing what it amounts to when even our written words cannot express what comes next.