Casey Koziara - Final Blog Post

In our humanities class, there has been an overarching theme throughout each unit. Balance. Balance within ourselves, balance within our life, and balance with our views all contribute to a healthy human experience.  Balance is essential. Without balance in our lives, our human experience is diminished. However, it appears that most areas of our human experience show imbalance. And unfortunately, these imbalances come in some of the most important aspects of our human experience. We see imbalances within society dealing with our right vs left brain, relationship with nature, emphasis on beauty, view on ethics, and the inner journey.

From the reading The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, Shlain told us how our left and right hemispheres within our brain work together. The balance between each hemisphere has helped the human species survive throughout time, especially in one of the most essential tools we use, communication. Our right brain is the more creative side, it helps us interpret symbols and icons. On the other hand, our left brain is more analytical, it helps us make sense of written word and computing numbers. Language has been a tool used by humans, and it has evolved in many ways throughout time. In God: A Brief History by John Bowker, it is discussed how in earlier times, symbols and signs were used to represent objects. “The power of symbols is that they form a common language that all people understand” (Bowker 39). Because symbols became universal, our right brains are able to dissect meaning from them. Symbols became common in religion and ritual due to their versatility; people who spoke different languages could still come up with the meanings behind symbols. Bowker talks about how myths emerged in cultures to explain how the earth came to be. This is where Shlain argues life turned from heavily right brained to heavily left brained. In A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, she talks about the evolution of myths. Myths first started as an oral tradition and were passed down through oral storytelling. This oral storytelling way of communication played to the strengths of the right brain as the right brain can pick up on the gestures and facial expressions of the storyteller. However, as communication evolved, they began to be written down and recorded, and no longer told orally. This created a left brain dominated human experience because reading and comprehending the words became a more common form of communication. Shlain has argued that the imbalance of being a left brain heavy society has created a human experience where men are superior due to the fact that men tend to be more left brained than females.

In a different battle for balance, humans try to straddle the line with nature. Nature is the most beautiful things here on earth, yet it is powerful. Today, we find ourselves living on the extreme ends of interaction with nature. Society tends to live with very little harmony with nature, while those from earlier times and a select few from today’s society try and live in complete harmony with nature. The most accurate depiction of modern society, I thought, came from Albert Goldbarth in his poem History as Horse Light. The poem talks about how modern society has turned its focus to war and power, so now the beautiful things in life such as art and nature are being overlooked and destroyed. This affects the human experience in that we complicate life and make it unfair. Not everyone can have power, but everyone can appreciate good art, which is why it is such a shame that these beautiful things within our lives go unnoticed. On the other end of the spectrum we have Timothy Treadwell from Grizzly Man who lives entirely in nature. This appears to have no harm to nature; however, Timothy trusted nature so much that it took his life. Most of us don’t live a life where we are living completely isolated with nature, but if we did, we can see that it affects our human experience because we can end up having our experience taken from us. This is not to say people can’t live in nature, but we can not, like Timothy, overstep our boundaries. It is not a life of balance if we try to act with nature if it is not how we naturally should behave. One group of people I thought that lived with the best harmony in nature were the Australian Aborigines. We first learned about these people in Nigel Spivey’s How Art Made the World Journey to the Origins of Human Creativity - Second Nature. The Aborigines take what they need from nature, but they know the boundaries that exist. They do not try to interact with creatures that they know are dangerous. The Aborigines have the perfect balance with nature because they are able to use its resources without causing it any harm. This balanced relationship with nature enhances a positive human experience because they are causing any harm to themselves or to nature.

There is also a lot of imbalance within beauty in our society. When our class wrote our first thoughts about beauty, it was clear that most believed a person needed inner beauty in order to be beautiful. In Pygmalion, inner beauty was what Pygmalion was after. He was unimpressed by the other women in the town he didn’t present themselves in a way that demanded respect. Pygmalion then sculpted an ivory statue to represent a pure and beautiful women who was beautiful on the inside and the outside. This is how society should view women. However, our society rewards outer beauty more than inner beauty. As displayed in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, we saw how damaging an obsession with appearance is. In addition, we saw how physical beauty doesn’t always correlate with inner beauty. Over time, as people began to realize that Dorian wasn’t that great of a person, his portrait began to reflect his inner self. If you looked like the way act, would you still be beautiful? Although it doesn’t work like this, it is important to act with good inner beauty rather. As much as we all love to be beautiful, physical beauty goes away and all that will be left is the person you are. Because of this, balance between physical and inner beauty is necessary. I believe that this emphasis on physical beauty is damaging to the human experience because it takes away our ability to love. Love is something that we all want when we grow up. In the poem A Prayer to Aphrodite by Sappho, we see a letter begging for love. Love is such a desirable feeling, which is why it is necessary for us to develop good inner beauty, because that is why people truly love us. With balance between the inner and physical beauty, and removing the emphasis on physical beauty, the human experience can be better because we may no longer feel pressure to look like the ideal form that is created by societal standards. In addition, we will be able to focus on the person within ourselves, which is the only beauty we can actually control; we can’t control the physical beauty we are given.

It is important to have a good balance with ethics and law in order to create fairness and equality within society. Some ethics have become universal, as we can see comparing The Ten Commandments and The Ten Non-Virtues from Basic Teachings of Buddhist Ethics. The Ten Commandments and The Ten Non-Virtues both advertising against killing, stealing, adultery/sexual misconduct, lying, desiring what others have, and they both advertise respect. The balance that needs to be found here is within the respecting others portion. The golden rule most people are taught is to treat others the way you want to be treated. This means people need to respect those with different beliefs than them. Ethics, in my opinion, is the trickiest aspect of the human experience because everyone has a different set of beliefs, yet there needs to be a universal code of ethics in order to maintain order and limit chaos. This gray line between right and wrong was clearly illustrated in Guests of the Nation by Frank O’Connor. Here, two men are forced to execute POWs, which whom they have grown to like as people. However, the soldiers were ordered to kill the POWs. Although the universal code of ethics seems to agree that killing is a violation of ethics, the soldiers were given no choice. This is where there is an imbalance and confusion involving ethics. Ethics play a huge part in the human experience because we learn them as we grow up and it impact how we behave. In addition, for the most part, if everyone followed the universal code of ethics, the human experience would be a much more positive experience.

The last aspect of the human experience to dissect is the inner journey. Everyone's inner journey is different, and everyone has a different end goal. In the book Siddhartha, the end goal for Siddhartha was enlightenment. In order for Siddhartha to reach this point, he had to go through a rollercoaster of emotions. These emotions and experiences are where I see commonalities with the inner journeys. Siddartha experienced personal pain through becoming a samana. This experience wasn’t what lead to Siddhartha’s enlightenment, but every experience is necessary in leading to the destination. This personal suffering is similar to the pain felt by Hamlet. Hamlet felt pain, and struggle in dealing with it, due to the murder of his father. Lastly, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov struggles with poverty. All these sufferings and experiences of pain are eye openers. I believe pain is an essential step in achieving your goals for your inner journey. Next Siddhartha was driven by desire and the want to love, which he learned from Kamala. However, drive for desire often leads to dangerous ends. Desire is taught to be the root of suffering in Buddhism, and I agree in that desire derails you from your inner journey, yet I still see it as an essential step in leading you to your end goal. Unfortunately for Raskolnikov and Hamlet, they were driven by the desire to kill, and it ultimately prohibited them from reaching any type of enlightenment. Luckily for Siddhartha, he was able to escape desire, and he ended up working the fields and the ferry with Vasudeva. Here, Siddhartha experiences more pain when he son rejects him, but this pain leads to self reflection, and that is what I believe to be the final key to achieving your inner journey. With a little pain, Siddhartha was able to reflect on himself. He realized that he too had ran away from his father. With pain, desire, and self reflection, I believe it is possible to achieve your inner journey. The inner journey impacts the human experience because it is what gives our life a purpose to ourselves, and we are only living our lives for ourselves only, so I believe if we can achieve our inner journey, it presents us with a positive human experience.

Balance within life is what creates a positive human experience. If we can, as humans, create a society where we use both sides of our brain it will create a better experience as humans because right brained and left brained individuals can equally contribute. Balance within nature is also necessary. We need to live in harmony with the planet to a point where we aren’t causing the planet any harm, yet we still keep ourselves out of harm. Balance with beauty is another essential key to life; we should strive to be beautiful people on the inside, not just physically. With ethics, balance is hard to find, but the human experience is more positive when the gray area between right and wrong is limited. Lastly, balance within ourselves is the most important balance that is necessary in life because it is what allows us to achieve our goal and create a healthy human experience.