Marisa Engelhardt final

 When I signed up for Humanities I was eager to learn about a subject I had never heard of before. When reading the course description it described a wide variety of topics, and although I was eager I was also a bit nervous. I was never into learning about religion or philosophy. I was not excited to learn about art considering I am not an artistic person. The thing I did realize was you do not need to be an expert in one specific subject, or even an expert in all the subjects being taught. All of the texts somehow connected to each other so it made it easier to remember and apply them to each other. The main connection that was being made throughout the course was how do all of these articles, books, and movies explain the experience of being human?

Opening the course with the Introductory Unit we learned about the right and left hemispheres of our brains, symbolism, storytelling, time and space, and different elements we can allow our minds and bodies to reach. Humans need not only a sense of emotion, but also a sense of direction. Considering I am planning to major in Psychology I enjoyed all the articles and handouts on the right and left brain. In order to have a sense of the human experience we need to be able to feel and to do. The chart titled The Two Sides of The Brain and What They Do really gave a sense to the idea of emotion and thinking. In order to form relationships with people we need the right side of the brain to develop compassion, and a good memory. Remembering names and faces allows us to have a picture of the person we are interacting with which creates a stronger connection to them. The left side of our brain, to me, is almost like a survival guide. It gives us logical and analytical thinking, verbal and mathematical functions, and picks out details. These are all critical to keeping up in a developing society. In underdeveloped, and ritualistic societies like the parts where the Australian Aborigines are from, the right side of the brain would be more beneficial for their human experience. Their involvement in trances and altered states of mind would not be reachable without the right side of their brains. When thinking about how our brains influence all of our human experiences it makes me think of the TED Talk by Jill Taylor: My Stroke of Insight    Facing such adversity, and still being able to bounce back after years of allowing her brain to recuperate is astonishing. The brain is a vital incorporation to fully experience life and what it has to offer. Half of Jill Taylor’s brain shut off, and in the lapses of time she was able to go back and forth from different states of mind and still bring a sense of euphoria over herself. The brain is a marvelous thing, but it also does need outside help to create these marvelous occurrences. I’ve always known music and rituals have  huge impacts on human emotion, but never knew the depth of them. When we read God: A Brief History by John Bowker it really opened up my mind to the influence music and rituals really have on us. Bowker’s section about music and how it connects to trances and altered states of mind was something new to me. Personally, I feel like we all need to experience that sense of leaving our ordinary life or “being possessed by outside agents” to develop a real human experience. There can not just be the life we are currently living. With the power our minds hold, we have to be able to leave and go to another realm of life.

The first unit, Humans, Nature, and Sacred Space focuses on what it means to be human. So, what does it mean to be human? Is a criminal less of a human than a religious leader? If you look or act a certain way does that make you a different kind of human? Personally, everyone is a human, everyone just has different senses of humanity. We all go through the same thing though, experience of being a human. There was a lot of controversy within the class when discussing the inmates in the documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars. Some people thought that since these people have committed horrible crimes, they aren’t human anymore. They’re in a sense, animals. However, we began to get onto the topic of human nature, which is completely different. These criminals and surrounding families in the documentary can not forget about the crime that was committed but, they can forgive themselves, learn from their mistakes and move on to become a better person. A piece of the human experience is to be able to make a ton of mistakes, but to be able to overcome them and come out on top. If we go through life dwelling on the things we’ve done, we will never truly be able to bounce back. The documentary was based off the play The Tempest by Shakespeare, and a huge theme in the play is labeling someone before you know them. All of these inmates were labeled as monsters just like Caliban was. However, I enjoyed that they didn’t tell us the crimes they committed right off the bat so we could not label them as said monster. We were able to get a sense of their new and improved human nature before we learned about the old them. Everyone comes from a different background and goes through life differently, and that is what brings me to the activity we did- What Does it Mean to Be Human? We looked at a board filled with different people from all over the world and picked out things we noticed. The main thing we all noticed was that everyone was unique in their own way. Understanding that no one is or ever will be perfect is a crucial part to the human experience as well. The main goal is to be happy with who you are and where you are in life. To end this unit we discussed sacred space. A sacred space can be anything, but a sacred space for everyone is nature itself. We learned this in a couple of the nature poems we read. A poem I can relate this to the most is Oh Earth, Wait for Me by Pablo Neruda. Someone was reaching so desperately for nature, and did not care if they lived or died in that second as long as it was in nature. That is a big claim to  make; putting life or death on the line just to be surrounded by nature. Everything we need can be found within nature so it is hard to say it is not a sacred space.

The second unit, Love, Beauty, and Art was a bit thought provoking for me, but it was also one of my favorite units. Today’s society is so fixated on our physical appearances that we lose track of what beauty really is. Beauty begins on the inside. You can be physically attractive, but if you're considered a bad person personally I don't think you can be beautiful. The way physical beauty weaves its way into the experience of being human was portrayed well in the film How Art Made the World: More Human Than Human. All around the world a person’s physical beauty is defined differently, meaning since there is no one definition of it, everyone is unique. We have a preprogrammed aesthetically pleasing view on exaggeration, so anywhere you go some part of the body is exaggerated. When we begin to look at inner beauty, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde shows how the more immoral of a person you are, the more it will ruin your life. Dorian struggled with becoming a more more person. He made poor choice and it reflected on his conscience and soul. A big theme in that book was to go through life being as moral as you can or it will catch up to you and in some way karma will take control. A huge thing people need in their experiences is love. Love makes us feel wanted, and like we have a purpose. Although all the classic myths we read had some type of incest, or weird relationship status, they all had one thing in common. Love overpowers all, and it teaches people life lessons. If we can't form loving relationships with people throughout our human experiences then something can go wrong for us. We can't survive without them. Lastly, humans use art in their lives to help describe their emotions to people. People take in art to help see that people feel the same emotions they do. Without art in our lives it would be hard for us to connect with people on emotional levels. Music, paintings, poetry, stories, movies are all art and they are all made for the specific reason the creator has for them.

The third unit, Ethics, Law, and Human Frailty to me is a big part of the human experience. The ethics we live by, determining good and evil, and morality are all vital things in our journey through life. In the Ethics Overview packet there is a section for utilitarianism and it is the choosing of an action that creates the most happiness for the greater amount of people. When we discussed in class about the leaver scenario, a majority of the class chose the decision to kill the one person rather than the five. Through our experiences in life we always want to bring happiness to the most people as possible, and that is a great thing to do but that is also when the whole topic of morality comes into play. Are we any less moral by killing that one person rather than the five? We all have to live by our own set of morals and ethics. The Ten Commandments packet gave us the main ten ethics that are pretty universal. They are similar to the Ten Non-Virtues of Buddhism. The 10 things that are listed for both are things I believe everyone should go through life following as best as they can. We need ethics and morals in our human experience to be able to make the right decisions for us when we’re faced with certain situations. According to the Basic Teachings of Buddhist Ethics the main goal of Buddhist practice is to “reach freedom from suffering and seeing the world how it actually is. You just abandon thoughts and emotions.” This is a very difficult thing to do for most people, but I believe if at some point in our life experience if we can do this at least once, we will add a piece of accomplishment to our journey. We need to see the rawness and frailty life has in order to fully appreciate it.

The last unit, The Inner Journey and the Meaning of Human Reality was sadly cut a bit short due to time but I was still able to find topics that play a role in the human experience. When we read Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet was struggling a lot with his inner demons, something we all go through. He had to dive deep within himself in order to face his struggles with trust, justice, and his search for identity. We all have bumps in our journeys but it's up to us to face them and make them better. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse showed how someone who left everything he's ever known in order to find Nirvana, and the meaning of his life. He had to go through suffering and pain in order to receive peace and wisdom. The quote “everyone wants happiness and no one wants pain, but you can't have a rainbow without a little rain” fits perfectly with that story. In order to have a real human experience we need to go through hardships in order to overcome them and better ourselves. We wouldn't understand anything about life without the mountains we have to climb. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, it taught us that we are sometimes unable to see what everyone else is seeing and that can be a cause of suffering. We need to open our eyes to reality and see what is going on around us. We need to pay attention to the now rather than the past or future. If we focus on other irrelevant things, we’ll have a hard time facing reality like the prisoners had a hard time looking at the sunlight.

To conclude this final post and humanities, it should be known that everything we have discussed in class plays a role in the human experience. Nature, love, beauty, art, ethics, morals, and the meaning of the human reality are all needed in order to succeed in the human experience. Without suffering, we could not gain wisdom. Without morals or ethics, we would not be able to be good people. Without love, we would not be able to form relationships. We face problems and accomplishments with all of these topics. As a final thought, keep your mind open to everything throughout the rest of your human experience.