FULL SNOWBALL PAPER FINISHED

In "The Politics of Experience", R.D Laing talks about how humans today became who they are. The article brings up that "the ordinary person is a shriveled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be", which is basically saying that people today are LESS then what they can be, they don't try hard enough to get places in life. He also brings up the fact that we do not use our bodies, unless we need to. We do not do anything extra in life, we just do what we need to do to survive, and stay alive, nothing more.

My opinion on this article is that I agree with it. First thing that I agree with is, when he stated, " We act according to the way we see things". This sentence stood out to me because I think that it is SO true. I think that people in today’s society follow what OTHERS do and not follow their OWN heart. I think that it is sick when I see stuff like this happen because it makes me realize how fake our society is, and that you’ll never know if someone’s acting and not being them selves, or if its REALLY them. The second thing that I agreed with in this article is "Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal." this quote stood out to me because its so true that media and all the people around us, make the "normal" person so "amazing" and everyone tries to be normal, when there is NO such thing as normal. I don’t think that there is a such thing as normal, I think that everyone is different and that no one can be the same, meaning that there’s no normal, because IF there was, everyone would be the same. Through the process of considering R.D Laing’s argument, I have gained real insight into my own life. The arguments that made me realize that I agree with R.D Laing where his arguments about disembodiment, dreams, and the way “ones thinking”. The arguments that made me disagree with R.D Laing were the childhood argument and the feelings argument.

One of his arguments was about disembodiment. Being Disembodied means when you sit around and do not move as much, while embodied means to be active, and keep in shape. Friday's morning activity made me look further into this topic. It did so because when the yoga teacher walked inside the room I noticed how in shape she was at her age and how I am younger then her and should be in as good shape, but I am not. It made me think over of all the rededisembodiement techniques I need to do. On a regular basis, I go to the gym here and there, and I play on the schools volleyball team, those are the two main things I do to be embodied. What I would like to do is join a swim team because I was on a swim team when I was younger and it kept me in amazing shape! I would also like to do yoga a lot more because I think that its a good way to keep in shape, in a settle way. I do not really like active sports as much as I like the calm ones, so I think yoga's a good match for me.
I think that teenagers these days need to be more embodied because right now they are not. Most teens just sit around and play video games or sit on their computer and chat and go on websites for hours. Its really bad for them because if you are disembodied as a young person its harder to become active as you get older, all you do is become more and more lazy. That is why you should always start becoming active at a young age.
On of the questions that was brought up in class was; who does better in school, people who are disembodied or embodied? In my opinion, I think it depends. It depends because if you are too active then you are too busy to study, or when you go to sit down you cannot concentrate, because you always have to be moving. But then if your too busy watching TV or playing your video games, you will forget about studying or doing your homework...so it all depends, I think you need to balance it out!

Another topic that he had brought up in his argument is dreams. "A dream is the experience of envisioned images, sounds, or other sensations during sleep". As stated on Wikipedia, dreams are an experience of many different things. R.D Laing looked into this subject and stated his theory on dreams; " many of us do not know, or even believe, that every night we enter zones of reality in which we forget our waking life as regularly as we forget our dreams when we awake”. His theory was that dreams are a part of out actual experience and that by denying our dreams we are missing a lot of our life...we are being alienated.
I think that dreams are experience because when you dream you experience so many different things that you would not experience in real life (most of the time). I also think that it is your experience because when you wake up you realized what you dreamed about, and it is almost as if that dream was in real life. I think that people that do not dream do not have much of a connection to their inner self as people who do dream. They don't have as much awareness, like dreams make you alert and aware of more things, so sometimes its good to dream so your more aware of you surrounding’s. My theory on dreaming is that; dreams are what you would like to do or happen to yourself. Therefore, it is coming from your thoughts. You do things in dreams that you wish you could do awake, but you not brave enough.
One thing we learned about is "Lucid Dreaming". What lucid dreaming is, is when you are dreaming and you know that you dreaming. For about a week Andy told us to try and lucid dream every night, so it was on my mind. So one night (not sure if it was a lucid dream) but at around 7:30 (the time that my alarm usually goes off) I woke up (in my dream) and someone had called my cell and it was someone saying that we didn't have school so to shut of my alarm. So then, I shut off my real alarm and never woke up for school that day. My mom around noon then waked me up and she was mad at me and said I really did have school. Overall I just thought that that was an extremely weird dream because I actually woke up turned off my alarm and went back to sleep and continued with that dream.
There are also sometimes when I think that I am dreaming but I'm really not, I'm in reality. I cant think of an exact example, but sometimes when I feel like I'm dreaming is when I have so much power and the ability to do things I usually don't do makes me feel like I'm dreaming when I'm not. Because I start to think that, it is too good to be true. In addition, in most of my dreams, many of the things I do are too good to be true, they are things I would not ever do in real life.
One activity that you got me thinking hard about the subject was that you asked us " what’s the difference between imagination and dreaming?” The difference between imagination and dreaming is that when we were doing the activity, you lead us to what you wanted us to think, while dreaming is supposed to be spontaneous and you cant lead yourself to dream what you want to dream. The similarities are that in both dreaming and imagining g, you think of the most random things ever most of the time, things that do not happen in real life. I also had heard from a friend that when you try and "control" you dreams (what you want to dream about), those are the nights that you don't dream or wake up not remembering what you dreamt about.
In conclusion, dreams connect to dealiantion because when someone does not dream or they wake up not remembering their dreams, they are not connecting with a part of themselves. They are not realizing things about themselves. Because when I wake up remembering my dreams, they show me a part of my life I've never realized, it always warns me about certain things that my be coming up in my life. So yes, I can see how not dreaming can dealiante you from you inner self and even the world/society, because you are not seeing the things others are!

His other argument was about ones thinking, and how it works. I believe that the way I think is different from the way others think. I am always trying to see the positive in everything, even in the negative things. I think this way because everyone that I am surrounded by thinks very negative and I see where he or she is going in life, and how thinking negative just makes them a tense frustrating person. So after seeing people think like that, it makes me want to do the opposite and always find the positive in everything.
What R.D Laing's theory was that; people tend to use automatic thinking, and do not really look into things. That everyone just wakes up and does what they need to do to survive like eat,sleep,etc.They use automatic thinking , they do everything without even thinking , they just do it. He is saying that we are like dead people walking; zombies.
My take on R.D Laing's theory is that I somewhat agree with what he’s saying because I believe that people act before they think, or speak before they think, and most of the time it leads/puts them in a bad place. I do think that people just wake up and do what they do EVERY day without using their brains and thinking. This connects to the activity we did in class, you put us into different situations, and wanted to see how we thought/reacted to them. One of them was that if we were on a raft [during a boat crash] and there was thousands of dieing people in the water, would you take the chance of trying to fit one more person and a FULL raft that might sink any moment? Well what an automatic thinker would think is that " no, I wouldn't take that chance id just leave them" or " I'd kick off two fat people and fit four more skinny people on the raft". But really you could have looked at it a different way, like what if you were the one in the water trying to get on the raft? What if you were that fat person they were trying to kick off? There are so many ways to look at it, but what everyone just does is use their automatic thinking and not even look into it.
Another thing that I have noticed about my thinking is the whole "self interest" thing. A problem that I have is that in class if something does not interest me, I kind of ignore it. If the teacher is teaching me something that does not interest me, I want store it in my memory, I do not even think about it. However, in the end, I do not even mean to do that, and I try so hard to pay attention and remember everything I learn, but it is hard because my brain just blocks it all out.

Now for the two arguments that I did not agree with. The first one I am going to talk about is the childhood argument. A Question that was brought up during class that really got me thinking was; do you agree that we have mostly forgotten the flavor and content of our childhood? Personally, I think that at my age, I cannot answer this question. I think that it is too early in my life to forget about my childhood. I think that it is very sad for a 16 year old to already have forgotten about their childhood. I would understand that if you are above the age of 20, and you forget about how it was to be a 5 year old, and all your memories as a 5 year old. However, as a 15 year old, I do not agree that we mostly forgotten about our childhood. As I heard from friend, that when you are older there is a great chance that you will remember your kindergarten or first grade teacher over any of your other teachers. I think that as you get older you remember only the present and what happened in your very first years, not in between.
Another point of view that I look at all of this is that, I think that in our memory, we have everything still stored, but we just need a REMINDER to think about those things. Like for example when we went and visited the third floor and watched all the little kids, it reminded me of all the different memories, I had in that classroom when I was in 6Th grade. But on a regular day, I would not necessarily be thinking about those memories, the only time I do think about them is when I am reminded about them. Its also like how Andy took us up to the gym to play all these childhood games, playing those games really did bring back so many different memories, while if we didn't play those games, I wouldn't remember those memories. So I know that I have so many different memories stored inside of my brain, I just have to go and fetch them!
This also brings up a different point that, I used to have a beach house in Southampton but then we sold it. Selling that house made me realize how my whole childhood was gone. Selling the house just made all my memories be erased. When I try to think back to all the great times I had there, it is hard because I feel no longer a part of that house.
This summer I went back to visit my friend on our block, when I bumped into the people who now live in the house, and they had invited me in. As stupid as I was, I walked inside to only find my self-depressed. Walking through all the rooms, all I could think of is " wow they changed everything around, and now this house just looks like a pottery barn catalogue.” That’s not exactly what I wanted to be going through my head, what I wanted was for a smile to come on my face and just picture myself as a 5 year old running around with my curls bouncing. Ever since that visit, when I think back to my memories, all I can see is they way the house looks now, not how it was when we lived in it. As crazy as it sounds, that house WAS my childhood. Memories from running around the pool, the various times I almost drowned into it too... all the slumber parties I had as a child, sneaking in the basement to play Barbie's at the age of 4, too sneaking out the house to a party at the age of 15. Now thinking of all these times, they are blurred, until I am older and I buy that house back, and change it back to the way it has supposed to be. SOO...in the end I just think we need to see our childhood, or feel an emotion we felt when we were a child in order to remember how it was.
In R.D Laing's paper he argues that people are unaware of their feelings and that we are "stripped of experience". Before I took Andy's class I would have agreed with R.D Laing, but now that he has taught us to look deeper into our bodies and minds, I have learned to disagree with Laing. I disagree because now I look into my feeling everyday and try and feel how my mood is at that moment. So... that does mean that I am aware of my feelings.
At the beginning of the unit I had so many questions about my feelings and other peoples feelings, that it showed that I knew nothing about feelings and that I wanted to learn MORE. Some of my questions where; are there feelings more dominate then others? Why do people think they can control their feelings? Are feelings taught? ETC. so one thing that made me realize that Laing’s theory is wrong is that you made you list all the feelings. I came to learn that there are too many words for emotions, that you can never name them all. Which shows that you’re ALWAYS feeling something. Which then leads to the fact that us humans DO have feelings and are aware of them. This all leads to how I feel myself. If I were to make a pie chart, here are my percentages; 5% upset/sad, 6% tired, 10% energy, 19% quite/shy, and 60% happy/good mood. Most of the time i'm in a good mood and really happy. Then comes my quite and shy mood, i'm usually not talking and really quite. Then comes the times when i'm really up lifting and always moving like I have a lot of energy. Then comes when i'm really tired [mostly in mornings] and lazy. Then the times when i'm upset or in a bad mood [hardly]. I think that the point of life is to feel as much pleasure as you can [hedonism]. I believe that life is short and that i'm not going to be young forever. So I believe in having as much fun as possible and turning everything into a positive point of view. Robert Nozick didn’t agree with hedonism. He thought it wasn’t the right way to live life. So he made an experiment; a machine that can make you have anything you want, the experience machine. I don’t agree with this machine idea because if you always in it, its like your always dreaming. Would you really want to always be dreaming? I know I wouldn’t because I wouldn’t be able to experience REAL life, which I love experiencing. So overall looking at everything I wrote about feelings, it all shows that I do not agree with Laing on his feelings theory. Because I do feel like we are AWARE of our feelings and emotions!

In conclusion, this whole paper is about R.D Laing’s argument. Its all about how us humans are who we are, and how we became who we are. It’s all about how Laing is so sure that us humans are LESS then what we can be. And as you have read in my paragraphs, I disagree and agree at some degrees. I really do think that I have gained real insight into my own life. Each and every one of his arguments has really opened up my eyes to different parts of my body and mind that I never thought I would look into. So thank you R.D Laing and Andy!

7th Chunk: FEELINGS

In R.D Laing's paper he argues that people are unaware of their feelings and that we are "stripped of experience". Before i took Andy's class i would have agreed with R.D Laing, but now that he has taught us to look deeper into our bodies and minds, i have learned to disagree with Laing. I disagree because now i look into my feeling everyday and and try and feel how my mood is at that moment. So... that does mean that i am aware of my feelings.
At the biginning of the unit i had so many questions about my feelings and other peoples feelings, that it showed that i knew nothing about feelings and that i wanted to learn MORE. some of my questions where; Are there feelings more dominate then others?