Catherine Witham Final Essay

As I am sitting here writing my final exam essay I realized how much I actually did enjoy this class. When signing up I was not necessarily sure what to expect and what I did think I was way off. This class helped me open up and share how I feel, and understand myself a little bit more, even. I am noticing how much growth happened in the class. Everyone was shy and kept to themselves at first and now we all get along and we are genuinely happy to be there. Everything we have done in the class, I honestly did not think i would go back to it all, even some of it and connect to a bigger picture but now while writing this, I notice that everything we did came together to help us understand and get the best learning experience from what we read, watched and talked about in our class discussions. 

    The experience of being a human being is affected by many reasons that happen in almost everyone's lives. People all over the world think differently depending on what side of their brain they use. You are not able to choose the side of the brain that you think with but you use a certain one without noticing it. Most people that do a majority of their thinking with their left side have a more cognitive and rational thinking than people who do most of their thinking with their right side, who think more with their intuition and holistic thinking. Most people, when they hear music or see symbols they do not think much of it and how our brains connect what we see related to signs and symbols. In the handout A comparison of Left-Mode and Right-Mode Characteristics you can see that when connecting symbols to the brain, and the side of the brain that is used more when processing symbols, you can find that it is the left side. When thinking with the left side of your brain you are able to think with an abstract and symbolic nature, which helps you understand and comprehend the symbols. In The Spell of the Sensuous it is said that writing is endangered and that we are more commonly using oral communication rather than writing. Writing years back is not how we all might have pictured it, it was hieroglyphics, pictures and some words and sentences, and even tracks like footprints from people and animals. Writing is important not just for now, but for years to come for that the people who live years from now know what was going on what we were thinking and an important information that other people should know as time goes on. Also, in the handout Symbol and Sign, there is talk about language and how symbols are considered a language in themselves. Through symbols you can understand what the person who create was thinking but you can also make it your own. Symbol can mean something different to each person, which could be a good and bad thing at the same time.

    Humans play a major role in our world as well as nature does. Humans and nature go one and one, and are extremely important. In the film Grizzly Man it shows just how important nature is to some humans and not so much others. During the film we found out that a man whose name was Timothy Treadwell and he loved Grizzly bears and he felt that it was his job to protect the bears. There was also a narrator in the film, Werner Herzog, who had completely different views of nature than Treadwell did. Many people do like nature but they do not necessarily feel like the owe something to nature, Treadwell feels like it is his duty to take care of the bears and to show them that he will help. He went there every year for many years and he believed that the bears would not kill him because they knew that they needed him there, which many people would consider crazy and that would be the reason why there should be a line between humans and nature and when far is far enough. Even though there are people who are passionate about nature and all that is included in nature there is people who enjoy nature but they believe that there is a fine line between enjoying nature and trying to interfere with it. Herzog helped to show this. He believes that Treadwell being with the bears is not good for them because it is training them and in the wild they aren't trained which could be dangerous for the bears to protect themselves. Even though Treadwell felt like he needed to help the bears he also considered it his sacred space because that is where he felt like he belonged. In the Armstrong, Aborigines, and Abram chart it talks about sacred space and how they felt about being in nature. In Grizzly man you were able to see that being with the bears was treadwell's sacred space, but almost everyone has their own sacred space. In the chart mentioned before it talked about how in other time periods people would consider something a sacred space, anywhere that they wanted it to be. It was choice and what made them feel a certain way, was how they choose their sacred spaces. Others, like the Australian Aborigines considered places sacred if they could talk to spirits there. Sacred spaces are found in many people's lives, you do not have to be religious or anything related to that you can have a sacred space just because you enjoy the way it makes you feel and they reason it might be there. A sacred space can make you feel many emotions and one of those even being love, and happiness but depending on your sacred space it can also be considered a work of art. 

    We read a lot, and watched a couple things based on love, art and beauty and I think that this must have been my favorite unit to learn about. Talking about love and beauty and art just makes me genuinely happy, as I do think it does with other people. We watched a film in class called The Shape of Things and I think it really had the whole class thinking about what they consider love vs using people or just caring about them and it also made us think about what we consider art and what we believe makes art beautiful or things beautiful in general. In the beginning of the movie it seems like the two characters are in love, and we feel like we know this based on the things they are doing together and the way they act but throughout you realize that things might have been off. Love is something that is double sided, in my opinion. It takes two people to love, or be in love rather, and love it a tricky topic. I think that love should not affect or change a person because then they aren't being love for their true selves. Other people though may not think of love in that way, they might believe that you should change due to making each other better and growing together. Beauty in this movie was shown through the artwork the a character Evelyn created. She saw beauty throughout it while others were disgusted or had no idea why it was beautiful and what makes it beautiful. This topic was on of my favorites because there are many different viewpoints to look at for each topic. In the text The picture of Dorian Gray it talked a lot about beauty and how it seemed so important it is to be beauty and never age. Aging is a process that we can not stop, and aging, in my opinion does not make you ugly or no longer beautiful but it shows what you have been through. At the end, Dorian Gray is no longer young and beautiful and turns the opposite but beauty is opinion related I think. You can be beautiful when you are older and you see that there are wrinkles and age spots, it shows what you have been through and to some people they think that it more beautiful than a physical appearance. I also focused a lot onto the philosophers of art and beauty because what each one of them said I found pretty fascinating. In the paper Plato and Aristotle on Beauty and Imitation you learn that Plato views beauty as an idea What we see, to Plato, is a copy of a more ideal form that is located somewhere else. There is a difference between Plato and Aristotle because Aristotle thinks that beauty is a function of a form. We learn that he thinks it is real, but it is a function of a certain form and it is not abstract like Plato seems to think.

    When i think of Law, Ethics and Human Frailty I noticed that my own opinions and ethics became stronger and more apparent in my life, since I learned about the unit in class. Looking over the works that I have read and worked on, which are The Ten Commandments and The Ten Non-Virtues, Basic teachings of Buddhist Ethics, and The Ten Commandments. In The Ten Commandments and the Ten Non-Virtues it is talking about the different commandments that judaism and christianity has and the difference of those and the Buddhist religion has. The Christian and Judaism religion has 10 and the same goes for the buddhist religion but they are not all the same. On both lists there is no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no murder no covetousness, and no lying but what isn't stated is how harshly they take effect based on these lists and how often people obey these. Based on each religion ethics are different for everybody and even in religions people have their own point of views based on what they know and believe and people's personal ethics could be different than the ones their society uses. The Ten Commandments handout that was received in class shows the rights and wrongs based on the judaism religion. A majority are ethics based on things that many people know are right and wrong and what you should and should not do. The issue the comes into play a lot is if people have the same personal ethics as the ones that they are trying to obey because if they do not they may not obey each one which will get them in trouble with the law.  After reading over the Christian commandments the class looked deeper into Basic Teachings of Buddhist Ethics and when looking at this I noticed that the buddhist practice was to reach freedom. They had certain commandments to help them stay on course to reach this so that they can do things in the world and see things for how they actually are. Depending on each religion and what people believe in the way that they see and believe things will be different and that is alright, ethics can be personal and need to be respected. 

    For our last topic to study in class we learned about the Inner Journey and the meaning of human reality. This topic was hard for me to comprehend, not only because it was the end of the year but because I have a hard time comprehending books. We read Siddhartha, Gilgamesh, and Hamlet. The book Siddhartha followed Siddhartha's journey to find his enlightenment and happiness and showing what it is like to be a human. We then read Gilgamesh, which had some death in it and shows that you can lose someone close to you and still find yourself throughout it. The last book we read was Hamlet. In hamlet, we learn that Hamlet finds how he is and follows his life path as a human but in sadness and sorrow and depression. Through these three books that we read we learned that you can reach your own happiness and go through your own inner journey in your own way and you do not have to do it in certain step by steps, you can do things anyway you would like but you can achieve happiness and go through the path of human life in your own way. 

    Through learning about all these units and the subtopics in each one I came to find out what I really enjoy learning about. I honestly thought this class would be nothing like it was and everything that i have learned throughout the weeks and months taking this class, I found that I am now able to start to become the person that I have always wanted to been through taking this class. I began to learn who I am, and who I wanted to better yelf to be. I learned more about my ethics, as well as others ethics and I feel like i have grown through taking this class into a better person.