Seeing, Saying, and Doing

A few weeks back Dr. Sexson spoke on an ancient ritual based around Seeing something, Saying something, and Doing something.  And I have to say that this resonated with me.  Those three aspects are what make life and what make life matter.  It resonates and as Dr. Sexson mentions it echoes through all of Shakespeare and even beyond, much farther beyond I would say.

To begin we look at the senses; seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting.  These are the five senses as everybody knows but what are they important for.  They take in information and send signals to the brain for the brain to do whatever it wishes with that information.  Ultimately this is the first part of the equation on human life. Seeing Something.  Now I've applied all of the senses to this because often we see something but we also hear something and isn't it wonderful when you can rely on the less prevalent senses as well.  But either way you take information into your body and store it in your brain in an imperfect way.  This is why some of the more significant experiences that we may take in stick with us for a very long time.  If it is memorable enough in the information relayed and triggered some sort of reaction from us than it will likely stick around for longer.  Much of our education is based around this part of the triad.  We take information in constantly.  For us English majors we read and read and read and when there isn't much else to do we read some more.  Information from our outside world is how we know to make connections and is inseparable in from our learning process.

The next of course is saying something.  There are many ways say something.  Speech we learn from our parents and community.  They relay information to us and early on we interpret their meaning and by five years of age we know a myriad of words and phrases that we can use to relay our own information to others. Furthermore there is nonverbal communication which many of us take for granted because we listen more with our ears than we do with our eyes.  Yes you can listen with your eyes if you pay close enough attention.  Another form of communication of course is writing.  We write to communicate to each other in the now and to communicate to future generations.  And communication changes through the ages no matter what anybody does to try to keep it the same language and communication change.  But what is important about this part of the triad is how we use it.  Saying something came about from responding to the information that we take in (remember the first step?).  Our brain takes in the information and prompts us to respond.  I like to think primally about these things.  How did our ancient ancestors discover communication.  My best example is in music, because that is something that is still so strange to us.  Most important to music is the beat.  You hear this beat and it calls for you to join in or respond and we find ourselves tapping our foot to the beats of a song.  Sometimes involuntarily but something called you from what your brain took in to respond to communicate that this information has been taken in and that you have interpreted it and now you want to add to it or keep it going in some way.  There's something so extremely amazing about this to me.  How many times do you sit there and read something that you love and in your mind you're saying, "YES!" but have nobody to communicate this to.  You may want to say it directly to the author but many times s/he is dead.  So what do you do? You recommend it to a friend so that they might read it and then you can speak with them about it.  Bouncing ideas off each other about something you read the book becomes so much more at this point.  It becomes something that two people can now better understand each other with if they didn't before.  And what is even more interesting is that when you respond to something you've taken in you're likely to remember it better the next time you may have to relay the situation again because you've added to it or said something about it.  In order for you to have added to it must have first taken the information in and then your brain had to have made an evaluation over it to find something relevant that could be meaningfully said through the interpretive devises that it is aware of.  In this way when you respond to something or say something about something that you remember it better.  This is very important for learning.  I find this part of the step the most important to our abilities to function properly in this world of ours.  Because most times our senses are always there and action means nothing if you cannot communicate why you were called to the action.  There is so much more that could be expounded upon on this topic but it would take much more than one blog post to relay.

Now for the final part of the triad of ritual that drives our humanistic existence.  ACTION.  Many say that actions speak louder than words.  If you were to take this literally you would have a hard time understanding, but of course the repeaters of this phrase mean that your reactions to the information that you take in is more important than what you say about it.  In some way your action speaks to who you are and what you are willing to DO about a any given situation.  I personally think that if you can't communicate why you DO something than how is somebody who has no prior knowledge on the subject supposed to know the reason for the action.  But this is not to say that action is not important.  And before I get into the importance of action, I feel I must set it up some.  What is action? In the simplest form physical movement of your body.  In more complex forms going somewhere to move or build with outside materials for a purpose.  I mean just look at our modern society.  Look at every thing that has been built.  Physically, infrastructurally, and now even virtually.  All of this came about by action.  There is something to be said for physical movement and the relation that it has to our thought processes.  I'm not really even sure how to address it, but let's look at an example.  For some reason I'm thinking of Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars.  But let's look at him he's large and yes he can communicate and take in information.  But he rarely moves. How does he really know about his surroundings without actually interacting with it.  He has everything brought to him for purposes that have no validity because he has no physical interactions with them.  How would you know how to prepare food for yourself if you did not prepare it with your hands?  How would you run away or towards something or someone if you did not use your legs often?  How would you know when someone needs a hug if you had never hugged someone before?  We must interact with our surroundings and the people in them in order to be able to interpret them in the fullest way.  In this way Action and Doing something completes the triad of importance to our human existence.

There is much that I haven't said in this post but I know that this triad of ritual is what makes life meaningful to us as humans.  But what is important most of all about this triad of meaning is in having the experiences within our lives be MEMORABLE.  Meaning that as we go through life we should attempt to enjoy ourselves.  How can we enjoy ourselves if we are continually having experiences within this triad of meaning that are not satisfying in some way.  I challenge everybody to make their life meaningful and enjoyable with a constant balance of what you love and this triad of meaning.

Why Experience Everything?

I have this great desire to experience everything (this is how I've framed it anyways).  But what does that mean.  That's it exactly! Meaning.  I'm searching constantly for meaning. "In what context?" you ask.  And my answer would be every context.  The ways and lessons of life can be found within any subject if enough time and effort is spent in conflict with it.  I don't necessarily mean conflict with the general connotations that we would assign to it.  I mean it more in the sense of every situation is a conflict in which we attempt to discover how this conflict can be applied to ourselves.  And so in any and every subject and situation we experience this conflict of attempting to derive meaning.  There it is again.  That word; meaning.

An example of this very concept that I'm constantly tackling is in my childhood as I assume it is in several others' as well.  It starts with a word.  Let's stick with meaning.  As a child you say it without really thinking about what that word, separated from the context you are saying it in, means on its own.  But then it catches your attention.  Boom! Your mind is now on that topic.  Meaning.  And you say it again, "Meaning." And again, "Meaning."  And over and over again you say this word the entire time that your brain is further attempting to interpret what that word means to you.  Until all of a sudden you reach a point in the speech of this word that you decide, "Screw saying it! I'm gonna write it."  And you write it.  Again and again you write it with yet another process of full thought going into interpreting this word and its usefulness to you.  And then you try something even further and you say it to someone else to see what they think about your process of interpreting that word or even to see what their own process of interpreting that word is.  Now most children (including myself) would not have gone much further beyond the 'saying it' step, but the important thing is is that in reproducing this thought over and over again in a variety of ways it is stripped of all meaning while at the same time it holds all meaning.  Everything in Nothing. Is this starting to ring a bell for anybody?

So what does this mean (God Damnit I can't stop using that word)?  What does the exploration of one word mean?  I'm sure some of you have heard of the term 'multiple intelligences'.  Meaning that different people across the world and in individual communities have a variety of ways in which we learn and produce our knowledge.  But the truth of the matter is is that each and every one of us holds the potential to have all of these different 'multiple intelligences'.  It is only that our social, societal, and cultural backdrops have set up the possibility of our own 'intelligence' to likely be that which has been organically selected by groups of people that influence us as the correct type of 'intelligence'.

Yet again we reach the conflict.  My yearning for the learning (I dare you to try not laughing out loud at that) of all meaning is deep set into my desire to understand the full picture.  This analogy of a picture just doesn't quite do it but it's all I've got at the moment.  The picture is existence; humans, life, earth, solar system, galaxies, the universe, the brain, literature, everything.  Only, the picture that I see from the moment I am born is completely dark; there's nothing there.  And as I grow the picture begins to be filled with light, but it's spotty.  There are areas on the film of the picture that are clear and others that remain to be dark.  In fact the large majority of it remains to be dark as I continue to grow and discover and to fill in the darkness of this picture.  And I've never reached the edges of this picture.  But I search and I search for ways to make this picture that I know is there in entirety to become clear in all areas.  Everything I could then see and my existence would be complete.  I would as I have said, experienced everything.  But (oh the dreadful but) I know this to be impossible with the current evolutionary nature of Homo Sapiens (did you know that this term means 'knowing or wise man'?).  There is no capacity despite Frederick Turner's claim to truly hold all of this information and to still function.  Hell Dr. Sexson mentioned that in class.  But does that mean that I should stop my quest to know and experience everything? No.  What it means instead is that I find a new way to approach it.  Ah the human is crafty indeed.  If s/he cannot find the answer to their question s/he begins the search again in a new way.  This is what I was getting at up above with 'multiple intelligences'.  But in conclusion why on earth would I search for the answers when I don't even know the questions that I am asking as I proved in class with my inability to phrase my question to Nick?  This is interesting.  Interesting indeed.
# of times I used 'meaning' - 22 out of 870
Good Night

The Roles We Play

Today in class when I posed the question to Nick, "How do we break from the roles that we play?" I don't feel that that question was fully what I meant to say.  I framed it in the wrong way and although this happened I got an excellent answer.  I wanted to clarify though what I meant.  And that is how do we play every role?  For instance if you were to look at my life and really study the different roles that I have played you would see a myriad of people.  In fact you would see; a future english teacher, a singer, a poet, an academic, a frat boy, a farmer, a gardener, a gamer, a film and tv nut, a couch potato, an athlete, a basketball player, a psychologist, a writer, a sociologist, a Roman Catholic, a nonbeliever as well as a believer, a loving son, a wannabe physicist, a harmonica player,a philosopher, an actor, a creator, a community service volunteer, an uncle, a fast food restaurant employee, a roofer, a brother, a golfer, among many others.  These are all roles that I have played and I'm sure there are more that I haven't recognized and that I will eventually play as well.  And the fact of the matter is I want to play them all at some point in my life.  In this way I have related to the overall nature of what Shakespeare represents.  And I believe that his best attempt at representing this was in Prospero from The Tempest.  This is part of the reason why The Tempest was my favorite of all the plays we read.  But the purpose of this post was to relay that I want to experience everything.  This is more along the lines of the question I wanted to ask Nick.  I have some ideas on how I would answer this but I would much rather see what other people would suggest.  Also in a subsequent post I am going to explore why it is that I want to experience everything, but for now I must go.