Self Reflection Paper

I believe that in the course of this semester I have truly developed a stronger understanding of my daily life. I was not aware of how disconnected I was from my body and how much I truly ignored it simply because I didn't think there was anyway to fix it. It was also interesting to examine how my mind worked when trying to solve certain things.

Intellectual Commitment: Unlike many others in the class, I do not fear disagreeing with the teacher. If I disagree then I will have no problem voicing my opinion. I believe that is a significant part of intellectual commintment because it shows that I will not simply sit there and be fed someone elses opinions. If I am to be taught these things and hear these lectures, I want to be able to whole-heartedly agree or at least understand them. This, however, does not mean that I am not one to change my opinion over the course of time or that I am so devoted to only my opinion. I am definitely open to change if someone presents me with a strong enough argument, but I believe to be intellectually commited to the course, you must be willing to speak up and challenge it if you disagree. While writing our chunk on thinking, I disagreed with what the teacher had said to us. "We began the unit by doing math problems...memorize the equations?"

Thoughtfullness of Orientation to Life: Conversation piece/ Personal Reaction on Sensory Excersizes.
Sensory Excersizes- I learned more about my body during the yoga excersizes. I had never really considered myself as a tense person, but as I did these excersizes and realized how limited my body really was physically on a daily basis, I realized I had become just too succumbed by the norm.
Conversation Piece- I had always known that there are certain people that, when you get into a conversation with you, are simply waiting for their turn to talk, not actually listening to you. I just didn't realize how selfish most of our intentions in a conversation are.

Writing:

Reading comprehension and analysis: I believe the entire course of the snowball paper exemplifies my ability to understand a piece and analyze it. The entire snowball paper was about comparing our personal views to those of R.D. Laing. I believe I would not have been able to write the piece, had I not been able to understand and analyze pieces well.

Conversation/"Others" Essay

We spend everyday getting into conversations. We may not notice it, but the slightest movements we make, the slightest waver of our voice, can convey how we are feeling. There are even ways to alter the way we act in conversations to not only be a better listener, but make the others feel comfortable.

In class we examined different conversations between people. The first was between Doug and Christina. Christina started off by trying to be a good listener and asking him about his break and asking what he did. Doug did what many people do; he went off giving Christina a list of every little thing he did during the break without recognizing a thing she said.
Then, Andy and Clea had a conversation. They both showed very good body language; nodding, leaning in while the other was talking. They also asked questions as the person was talking. They avoided accusatory questions (e.g. "why would you do that?", etc), and stuck to questions that would allow the person to get more passionate about the topic. They're voices would remain calm and would only elevate when they got more passionate during a topic. One thing Andy demonstrated during the conversationg was mirroring, in which he repeated the key points Clea said, which really proved that he was listening to her and comprehending what she was trying to get across.

We discussed what people orientation is in conversations, meaning what are they trying to get out of it. My orientation is often to come off as a funny, smart person. I also want someone to feel as if they can talk to me and are comfortable around me. Sometimes I even just go to talk to people who I know will make me happy. If I’m feeling under the weather, there are certain people who I know can make me happier.

However, those goals are all pretty selfish. They’re mostly about how I want others to feel about me. This is common for most people, as our objective is always centralized around ourselves. As a class we decided that ones conversation goals should be to learn about the other person and genuinely want to help them.

We were asked what are conversations that we have a lot. Mine are generally arguments, which is understandable. In arguments, I always have the same ones over and over again. This is because when we have arguments, our goal is not to hear the other person. Our goal is to interrogate, or to accuse, or to prove that we are right. We do not go into an argument wanting to sit down and calmly listen to the other’s opinion.

Andy videotaped one of our classes, which we watched the next day. One thing I noticed was when Jack said something that a few of us misheard. We then all started joking because what we thought we heard was much funnier. From then, more and more people began talking all at the same time. When I think of it, I don’t really remember what it is Jack was trying to say, however I do remember what we misheard and the jokes all of us began to make. We were all talking over eachother once we realized we all thought it was funny, we all wanted our jokes to be heard. Although we were all trying to say something, it was still refreshing to hear a joke and have that connection with a few other people that thought the same thing.

We looked at a comic strip that showed us the right and wrong way to handle situations that all have to do with how you respond to someone talking to you. One that I thought worked was sympathizing. This comic strip was about a young girl whose turtle had died. As she spoke, her father responded with things such as “Oh no, what a shock!”, “To lose a friend can hurt.”, etc. Her father was acknowledging her feelings and letting her know it’s okay to be sad.

One comic strip I had doubts about was about askings questions rather than responding with explanations. It showed a scenerio where a kid was asking his mother why Grandma comes over everyday. In the bad version, she responded giving some huge explanation. In the “correct” version, she responded by saying “You wonder about that. Why does Grandma visit us every week?”. That one is a difficult technique to ever use. The child obviously asked because they wanted an answer and they weren’t asking to develop they’re own theory on it.

“True understanding of people and their emotios is not just mental but physical”.
People often touch to express a feeling without having to use words, and people avoid touching to avoid a feeling of innapropriateness or awkwardness.

There are many types of touching. Casual which involves a bump, pound, or handshake. Compassionaite which involved a hug or a kiss on the cheek. Violent, which is a beating. Therapeutic which involves massage, and erotic which is any kind of sexual touching.

We were asked to catagorize the amount of touching we experiance and whether or not we would like to experiance more touching. I said that I am in between being touched and being frequently touched. I don’t get touched by many people, only a select few, so I can go an entier day without being touched if I don’t spend time with those select few.
As for wanting to be touched more, I said no because I never feel like I lack any form of touching so I don’t think its necesarry to increase the amount of touch I experiance.

Andys theory is that our culture keeps people starved from touch. As a result all physical pleasure has to come from a sexual partner and they feel like they’re missing something so they buy things more and more.

I agree with this, but I don’t think it was just to get people to buy more. I think touching has just become more and more taboo over the years. The whole idea of touch has been corrupted by the fear of sexual predators, rapists, and abuse. As children, we had no problem touching eachother, hugging and kissing our parents and friends. At a certain age, we start learning that it’s weird to always be hugging eachother and touching eachother. I myself have noticed that as a kid I was always kissing my parents on the lips. Sometime within the past 6 years, that has changed. I no longer kiss either of them on the lips and if I think about it, the idea of kissing my father on the lips is somewhat disturbing, even though it is my father and I know for a fact neither one of us would have any sort of corrupt intention. I even see that I’m the one that stopped kissing him and stuck to the hugging. The fact that I’ve been living in the city, and have to spend a total of an hour on public transportation everyday, I have to be confronted with the many freaks that live in NewYork. As a young girl, I often have to avoid contact because the second anyone touches me it’s very possible that something gross may happen. Just from experiancing that, I developed a wall against certain physical things that should be purely with a sexual partner.
Society has not only corrupted certain physical experiances by portraying them as taboo, but also by presenting us with uncomfortable situations that we then learn to avoid at all costs.

As we live our daily lives, we don’t realize that a single conversation we have could be completely altered depending on a simple touch or word. We don’t realize that we often enter a situation with a selfish intention to either get something out of a conversation or to avoid any kind of uncomfortable situation.

R.D. Laing Essay, Final

As we live and experience life, we rarely take a moment to stop and consider how in touch we truly are with ourselves, our past, and our surroundings. R.D. Laing is a Scottish psychiatrist who often wrote about mental illness and had a great influence on existential philosophy. In and excerpt from the book The Politics of Experience, by R.D. Laing, Laing discusses how what we experience in life is but a fraction of what there is to experience. He claims that we are disconnected from who we truly are and what we are capable of being.

Summary
In the excerpt R.D. Laing explains that our goal in life is to completely experience and understand our reality. However it is impossible to do this immediately because we only experience our reality in fragments. One of the most important things Freud contributed to society is his demonstration that an average person is nothing compared to what the person could be.
Laing believes we barely know ourselves mentally because we don't remember exact memories and dreams. For our bodies, we only know enough to know when we want or need basic things. Beyond that, we barely know ourselves at all. The only way we can fully appreciate things in life, we first have to unlearn the way we’ve been taught to live.

When it comes to dreams, Laing believes that many don’t realize how, when we fall asleep into a dream we forget our real lives as quickly as we forget our dreams in real life, showing how the way we experience things ins always the same and not very deep. We are just as alienated when we are awake as we are when we are asleep or unconscious.

What we consider normal is something that is barely a fraction of what things are really like when they are “normal” because we are so separated from the actual experience. There are two different types of alienation. The normal alienation which is someone who’s just like everyone else who’s experiencing all the same kinds of alienation, and that which is labeled bad and crazy by the normal people.

Society tries to make us all these “normal” people with the same traditional alienation but those “normal” people are also the ones who have killed millions of their fellow normal men. Even these normal people are all flawed.
Laing claims the way we behave is simply a reaction to our experiences and how we see things. If our experiences are limited and destroyed, our actions will be the same.
Because we get a limited version of our experience, we then loose sight of our deeds and purpose in life, and if that is taken then we are no longer a functioning part of humanity. We are all equally able to change each other and have a positive or negative impact.
Laing believes that if we don’t fix the way we are living than we are going to destroy ourselves. The way we are experiencing is not opening up our way to view the world but closing it.

Response to Laing
According to the Laing, we are all zombie-like, barely existing in the world. Personally, I can see how one may think that, but I also believe not all humans are living like that.

However, I do believe there are ways that the theory proves to be true in our daily lives. We are often consumed with simply where we are going and the quickest way to get there. There are always new gadgets, new technology, that is supposed to make our lives more enjoyable but are simply taking away from our experience. As we walk down the streets we don't notice the way the air smells or the way our feet are hitting the ground, because we are too consumed with drowning out the surrounding world with our iPods and trying our best to be as unnoticeable as possible. We become so obsessed with miniscule things that we think will make our lives easier at the moment. We believe that paying 150 for a new pair of shoes will change the way we go about our daily lives because it will make us better and more presentable. But will we remember these things one day in 20 years?

Yet, at the same time, will we remember the way our foot felt on the pavement one day in 20 years?
Although we may not live our lives remembering every aspect of our dreams or our childhood, we still remember the most crucial and life changing parts. However, one can also say that at the end of our lives will we care about clothing and our best purchases, or whether or not we truly lived.

I personally think I have the ability to notice when the space between my thumb and forefinger has an itchy feeling, or that the way I'm sitting right now is slightly cutting off the circulation in my leg and hurting the bone in my butt, and that my pinky toe is hurting. Is this not experiencing what my body is feeling? I feel every aspect of pain in my body, and every part that feels fine, I just choose to ignore the parts that are hurting because I am in class and there are other things to be focusing on. Like writing what I'm feeling.

Sensory Excersizes
In class we have been doing “Sensory Excersize Activities”, activities in which we focus on our body and how we are feeling. We may focus on our breathing or the way our foot feels, or any strictly physical feeling we may experience on a daily basis. According to the sensory excersize activities we have been doing in class, we truly do not notice the tiny things in our life. When we ignore the rest of the things in life and simply feel what it is like to exist, we realize that the essence of living is much more complex than an iPod may lead us to believe. As I did the sensory awareness excersizes, I found myself doing routine, rhythmic things. Such as when we performed the sensory excersize in which we just stood in silence for 5 minutes, I would catch myself getting lost in counting the number of chips in the paint on the wall or the amount of tape used on the paper or reading the words on the signs over and over again. Sometimes I would also find myself tapping my finger or shaking my leg. These ritual things were probably a way for me to calm myself down without having to be so uncomfortable by just focusing on my heart rate or breathing. I would stand with pressure in my knees, and my toes would often wiggle in order to keep my balance. I would become more aware of the itches on my face, and they would probably be amplified because I was so focused on them and the fact that I couldn't move to scratch them. During one excersize, I stood with my arms crossed, probably to avoid having anyone look at my stomach completely relaxed. Due to the fact that I was standing so tensely, without even realizing it, I lost the ability to breathe deeply.

For one excersize, we were sent to the first floor, blindfolded, then told to find our way back up to the classroom. I realized the entire time I relied on other people or things. If I wasn't touching a wall or holding the railing along the stairs, or holding someone's hand, I would get dizzy and often loose my balance, or get completely turned around. Again, I would get lost in a form of counting, counting the number of steps for each landing.

As we did the yoga excersizes, I did notice that there were parts of my body that were very tense. Even simple parts of my body that I use every day, such as my calf or my thigh, were also stiff. What was interesting to me is that if I got into a position that would strain parts of my body that hurt or was uncomfortable, after a while my body would get used to it and accept it, probably the same way it accepts sitting in a hard chair for 6 hours every day. I walked out of that class feeling loose, and like if any muscle in my body needed to be used, it was relaxed and ready for the job. However, the next day I felt the after-affects. My body was very sore, mostly my stomach and thighs. The following days I would notice how tight my body felt, unfortunately this was how my body felt every day, I have just been so used to it for so long that I wasn't aware of how loose it could actually feel. I decided that as a way to help my body, I should make an attempt at doing yoga more often in order to feel that loose feeling again and get to a point where I no longer feel sore or tense the following days. However, chances are I won't have enough time, or I simply just won't think it's important enough to get out of bed to do.

Childhood
As for childhood, Laing believes that we barely remember the significance of our childhood and have completely lost touch with it.
“As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood. Not only it’s content, but it’s flavor.” –R.D. Lang
For me, I believe my childhood lives with me every day. I was born in Texas. I remember sitting on my lawn all the time as a kid. I remember what it felt like when I was 3 and I was playing in an ant bed. The ants crawled up my stockings and were biting me and my mom was on the phone in the house and assumed I was dancing so simply gave me a thumbs up and continued to ignore me until I came to the house with my stockings around my ankles.

I remember walking to the park in front of the college down the block by myself and buying a Lime popsicle from the guy with the ice cream cart. I remember that it was sour but sweet and the ice would just fall apart in your mouth and I would always crave it. I remember my neighbors and the guy who would always make my mom and I come in so he could give us books and Sesame Street magazines. I remember sitting on the lawn trying to make a puppet show with friends. I remember using some lady’s furniture to make a clubhouse in the garage in the back with my friend without her knowing. Only to have her take all of her furniture back the next day. I remember my dad bringing home a dog without my mom knowing. I remember sitting on his lap eating Oreos with milk. I remember seeing my mom cry for the first time.

I remember my preschool. I remember the first day. We were at lunch outside because it’s Texas and the weather’s always perfect so we were always outside. I couldn’t open my chocolate pudding, the kind with the dark chocolate with the stripe of milk chocolate in the middle. I asked a boy to open it for me and he couldn’t so he offered to take it to the teachers to open it for me. He didn’t come back till the end of lunch and when he finally did, he had chocolate smeared on his mouth. And I could feel the tears welling up behind my eyes. I remember sitting in class learning how to set a table the proper way. I remember when my friend and I thought we should find the best rock and the way we would judge whether or not it was the best rock was to see if it could fit in our ears. I would put the rocks in my ear, and after an excruciating period of rock judging, we found the perfect rock. It fit perfectly in my ear. And then I couldn’t get it out, and none of the teachers could either, so my mom had to come pick me up and I remember she was in a suit and had to pull it out with tweezers in the bathroom. I remember when they would give us snacks of celery with peanut butter on it with raisins on top. It was called Frogs on a Log. I remember dragging my dad to the playroom in school making him watch a play I forced my friends to do, even though I pretty much played every character because they couldn’t do it right. I remember when kids would come in with home made lemonade icees and they tasted so good I would try to make them at home but they just never turned out right. I remember my Dad’s girlfriend refusing to bring me lunch. I remember she had really long red nails. The kind that are so long that they start to curve. And her lipstick always matched her nail color and I hated her.

When I see pictures, I can remember specific details about maybe that dress or that place or that person. There's a picture of me, I was probably around 7, visiting my Dad in Texas. I was getting ready because he was going to take me to a Spice Girls concert, my first concert ever. We had to dress up like one of the members of the band and I chose to dress like sporty spice. I wore sweat pants and a top and my step mom put my hair up in a high ponytail. To complete the look, I needed my dad to draw a tattoo on my arm that matches hers. I remember standing there for a long time watching him draw it on my arm. I was so scared he would mess it up, and when he didn't I was so amazed. My Dad could do anything.

When I look at the picture, I remember that shirt I was wearing and those pants. I feel like I could go in my drawers and be able to find it. I remember the apartment my dad and stepmother were living at at the time. I remember being so excited.
I remember a lot about my childhood. I remember big events and I remember little things. I remember the way things smelled and the way they tasted and the way it felt and the way I felt. I know I remember a lot about my childhood, especially when I sit down and try to think about it. My childhood is what has made me, so I’m not surprised that it comes so detailed to me. The major events in my childhood are what have altered the way I feel, act, think now. Even though, as I try to think of what events may have impacted me the most, the most negative memories come to mind, I know it’s the small good memories that have helped along the way as well. They seemed so much more important at the time. They were what mattered. Not until I got older did I realize that I was just too young to understand the impact of certain things and that the fact that I didn’t get the exact Barbie that I wanted wasn’t going to be the thing that would change me forever.

Dreams
Laing believes that our dreams are a significant part of our experience as well. However, he believes we don't pay enough attention to them, despite how much significance they may hold.
"..as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do.." -R.D. Laing
I'm not sure if I necessarily believe that my dreams are part of my experience. R.D. Laing is claiming that our experience is the absolute reality of what's going on, and a dream is not reality. It is a place our unconscious creates, either to play out hidden desires/wants/needs, or simply something that is influenced by outside noises.

Those dreams that are developed by our unconscious when we are in a deep sleep, present to us what we normally may not want to accept or acknowledge. It is coming from a part of ourselves that we normally do not listen to, for one reason or another. However, it is all part of who we are, and part of ourselves.

I feel dreams are not necessary to our existence. I feel that a disconnect from our dreams would not be the worst thing to experience. I feel that the dreams are all coming from some where inside of ourselves, so while the dream may be presenting to you something you normally do not think about or see that way or acknowledge, it does not mean that you could not notice these things without the help of the dream. It is all coming from within you.

In the New York Times article, "In the Dreamscape of Nightmares, Clues to Why We Dream at All", by Natalie Angier, it discusses what might cause certain nightmares. It begins by describing a man that started out with a traumatic childhood, being physically abused by his schizophrenic mother as he would lay in bed trying to fall asleep. He grew up to be a relatively normal man, until one night when he awoke to find a burglar going through his things. He then began to have horrible nightmares in which there was a middle aged woman intruder, and a knife hung above his head.

A psychologist, Dr. Ross Levin said; "The old fear memories have not gone away.. [they] were easily reactivated by the recent trauma." The doctor claims that nightmares can often be altered by using certain excersizes in which we gain more control in our dreams.

I found this part of the article to be interesting. It shows you how past experiences and traumatic events in our lives can lead to our dreams. Unresolved issues in our daily life can affect our dreams in very abstract ways.
When we first started examining dreams, I noticed that I often didn't dream at night. My dreams would mostly be the kind that occur due to outside noises. I would wake up, eat some breakfast, turn on the news, then fall asleep as the news is on in the background. These dreams would all be scenarios my mind has developed that incorporated, or was based off of what I was subconsciously hearing from the news as I slept.

As we got in the habit of writing down our dreams after we had slept, I began having more vivd and deeper dreams at night. I began to notice very repetitive things in my dream. Often, at some point, I would think "This is most likely a dream" however when I woke up the feelings would all be very real. I would wake up either relieved or disappointed that it was all a dream. If it were a dream involving being chased, I would wake up with my heart racing and feeling very anxious. I would often wake up confused, and only half aware as to what was going on.

Another very common aspect of my dream would be that I would be with people who, in my dream I obviously know and are very good friends with, but in reality I have no idea who these people are. They would also never have a clear face, or I would just never get a good look at it, so it makes it impossible for me to try and figure out who they might be, however in the dream that's never a problem.

I've noticed that I have very abstract dreams. And recently, as I've been noticing them more and writing about them more,
they've been more and more violent and disturbing. The majority of them have involved either killers, running from some kind of monster, being kidnapped, or fighting someone.

A dream that I once had during the course of this dream unit, involved being kidnapped. I was in a taxi cab, and it was during some kind of riots, so the cab driver had to pick up multiple people. We stopped by some kind of riot, there were buildings burning, and people running. We stopped for a man and when he came into the cab, we asked him what was going on. He then proceeded to pull out a gun and force us to to drive where he said to. I kept whispering to the driver that he should do something, that he could easily get the man out. He was paralyzed by fear, or just refused to help us. He was too concerned with getting himself shot then saving all of us. Finally, we got to a gas station where apparently the persons partner was there with other people they had kidnapped. During the course of all of this, I just kept trying to text my mom or something to let someone know where I was. The entire dream was full off fear and anxiety. When I woke up, I was just so relieved that it was all a dream. I had similar anxiety ridden dreams, in which Jeffrey and I were being chased by some killer and he kept pausing and tying his shoe or looking at some sign. I kept trying to run because I knew the killer was close, and I just kept screaming because I was getting so concerned. Another dream I had, the 11hth and 12th graders went on a class trip together and I ended up fighting some girl and getting all of my anger out.
The majority of the dreams I wrote about in a dream journal involved some kind of violence, or extreme amount of anxiety.

Thinking
Laing also says that we barely make use of our minds real ability. We only think about things that are needed for ourselves or what we would like to think we need.
"Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited." -R.D. Laing
R.D. Laing is trying to prove that you may know what you are thinking or what you are interested in, but none of that really benefits you. And what we as people have been taught to think is common sense, is "pitiful" and limited.

So basically, what we may view as being intelligent and smart, may actually just be barely what should be the norm.

"I don't know, that's just how I was taught" was an answer uttered by many during this unit.

We began the unit by doing math problems, showing how we solved them, then discussing what makes us think to solve it this way. These are the elementary things we have been taught along the way. We do not truly know what these things are or how they truly work, we are simply repeating the steps we are told to memorize. Our teacher claims that that is what is truly pitiful. That the act of just going to our Math classes simply because we are told to, is pitiful. But I wonder, what am I supposed to do instead? I cannot leave the class, or else I fail and get in trouble with teachers and principles. Were I given the choice of going to math class or not, I would not go to math class. I don't think that learning the functions of lines is necessary to my essential being, so why be excited for that class? Why go into that class to do anything other then memorize the equations?

R.D. Laings entire argument is that we don't think about things that are really beneficial to our daily lives. I agree because I couldn't care less about functions because I never think about such things unless I am being forced to go to math class. So what is pitiful: Going to your math class, to truly understand how a function works and how these math problems really go, even though you won't ever think about it in your daily life, or going to your math class because you are not given any other option,and you simply memorize the problems because you see no point in spending time understanding the problem completely because you know you will never think about it again? Which is more worth while?

To better examine our thinking, in class we would work with riddles and as we tried to solve them, we took note on how our minds worked to solve them. As I worked on riddles, I noticed my mind using previous knowledge. Since I knew it was a riddle, then I went by what I've noticed about riddles I've known in the past. I knew that riddles tried to trick you, sometimes there are plays with words, and sometimes the answer is blatantly obvious. With this, I would repeat the riddle in my head, examine either each word or section, with what I knew. I'd go through each significant word in the riddle, to think of what a play on that word may be. Or I would try to think very basically to see if maybe it tricked you and the answer was actually very clear.

Feelings
In relation to being stripped of our physical experience, R.D. Laing also believes that we are not in touch with our actual feelings. To examine that theory, each day we would write down what we would be feeling at the beginning of class. I basically felt the same things everyday; tired, bored, drained, hungry, annoyed, and the urge to laugh or be happy.
When we feel our emotions, we are too consumed by them to step back and acknowledge "Oh, what I am feeling now is anger". We just know what we are feeling and express them or try to figure out why.

Andy presented his argument that virtually the whole day we're managing our feelings using tools society gives us. We hang out with our friends because that person makes us happy and makes us laugh. We go to sleep early so we feel relaxed. We wear this because it makes us feel a certain way. Tools that society supplies us with are the following: medication, music, movies, drugs/alcohol, food, sex, drama, clothes, dancing, art, friends. All of these things can often be positive to us, some we may not even think are tools for feelings, but they all help us reach a certain emotion we're trying to obtain. However, they only please us for a period of time.

I certainly agree with this but I don't necessarily believe it's a bad thing. I guess it is kind of true that with this we can sometimes alter how we feel, going to hang out with the people who make us happy when we're having a bad day.
But I also think, we as humans, all have some kind of pleasure in dwelling in our negative emotions. Take music, for example. When we are upset, angry, disappointed, maybe we've just broken up with someone. We don't listen to our iPods and blast happy, loving, excited music. You make a playlist full of sad, missing, possibly angry songs. However, when we're feeling happy we may not just listen to happy music, we listen to a mixture.

There is also the fact that there are two different forms of pleasure; physically fulfilling and mentally fulfilling. Most pleasures make you happy but don't last. They often leave you dissatisfied and wanting more. Possibly the more common mentally fulfilling activities (i.e. books, tv, music) leave you wanting more on purpose, most likely for a corporate gain.
We were asked, if we could, would you like your feelings more of less intense? Personally, I wouldn't know. Some feelings I wish I felt more strongly, some I wish I didn't. I want pain to be less. Then again, maybe if it was all less intense I wouldn't have to deal with pain at all. You feel less happy, so once you hurt it isn't too big of a deal. But then, I'd loose the happiness of laughter or simpler things.

We did a song experiment in class. Andy played clips of different songs and we were to write what the artist was trying to convey, and what it was we were feeling.

The first song was Comfortably Numb, by Pink Floyd. I felt that the feeling trying to be conveyed was calm, almost content with feeling close to nothing. However, the feelings I felt were the feeling of emptiness, and longing to have something/some emotion.

The next song was Going Down the Road Feeling Bad by Elizabeth Cotton. The music/soundtrack was very upbeat, however the actual lyrics were dark and depressing. These left me feeling kind of lost and a little morbid.
The third song was Cleaning out My Close by Eminem. With this song, I felt what Eminem was trying to express. I felt intense anger, the desire to be one's self while knowing that there's no way to do that because so many already hate you. It was just an entire song of admitting all of the skeletons in one's closet.

These are the song I felt the most from. However, before the experiment, Andy would be simply playing songs in the background as we wrote, songs with no words. But as they played, they reminded me of music I used to listen to, the music I listened to when I was feeling alone or upset or lost. When I heard the music, my heart felt heavy.

It seems as children we were taught to express and accept our feelings, while as we grew we were taught its preferable to hide those feelings.

We watched a children's TV show, Carebears. All Carebears had happy names; Braveheart, Birthday Bear, all very positive happy things. All the bears/animals expressed their feelings. When they are happy they would tell each other, when they were having fun, they would tell each other. The enemy in the show was named Professor Coldheart. The entire feeling of the show was that those who felt nothing were the enemy, those that don't accept everyone for their feelings are the enemy. The show only represented a dichotomy of emotions; happy versus sad, mean versus nice.
Another day in class, we were presented a scenario. If we had the option to be plugged into a machine, you can be plugged in it forever, a couple years, as long as you want, and you were able to experience any kind of pleasure, would you? You would decide the pleasure before you were connected.

I said that I would be plugged in for a short amount of time, maybe for a massage or something that is feasible but I am not able to get very often. I wouldn't want to stay in forever because I believe you would lose your ability to appreciate the pleasure. If you are constantly getting this one kind of gratification, it will become normal and will no longer be pleasing. Without a balance of pleasure and unhappiness, you can't experience the pleasure a hundred percent because you do not appreciate it.

We then began discussing medication and the affect it has on our emotions. I chose to read the entry The (un)medicated Life, Part 2 from the blog callalillie. It's a girl discussing how things have been since choosing to end her prescription of antidepressants. She describes how she believes using the drugs may have made it more difficult for her to deal with her emotions because she was unable to depict what emotions where being caused by the meds and what were feelings were genuine. Which is essentially the opposite of what the drugs claim they should do: help you better understand and manage your emotions. She also addresses a certain kind of paranoia when it comes to your emotions, "How do you really know when your emotions have crossed the border from characteristically cranky to spiraling sorrow?". When we have all these medications that are so available to us, and the number of those who are taking prescription pills constantly rising, we forget that we are human and we sometimes feel sadness and anger and that we may just need some time to deal with it rather than being told that if we are not happy all the time, we require meds. I relate to this piece on a personal level. I recall the frustration of getting on meds. It appeared to be a quick fix for, what turned out years later to be, a deeper problem rooted from my childhood. Once choosing to stop the many pills I was taking, I continued to be frightened by my own feelings. On each medication, I always had a negative reaction; panic attacks, worsening depression, increased hostility, etc. etc. After ending the prescriptions, I, much like callallie, found it difficult to feel unhappy without having it spiral into a fit of thinking I’m unable to be without medication. After being diagnosed with something that was so worthy of so many pills, I was left feeling like any sort of negative feeling would build and send me back to the doctors.

From personal experience, and reading callallies similar experience, medications block you from your emotions and being able to truly understand that it is human to feel everything both negative and positive.

Laing definitely touches upon some significant issues about our daily lives. The fact that we must be more in touch with our bodies, and that we should be more in touch and better understand our actual emotions. However, Laing takes his views and leaves little room for exceptions, while I believe that there are many that feel they do exactly what Laing believes no one does. Although some of Laings views may not all be precisely true for each individual, I believe it is very significant for one to read his theories and philosophies, for they can open your mind and help you develop your own theories and own beliefs on experience.

Essay

As we live and experience life, we rarely take a moment to stop and consider how in touch we truly are with ourselves, our past, and our surroundings. R.D. Laing is a Scottish psychiatrist who often wrote about mental illness and had a great influence on existential philosophy. In and excerpt from the book The Politics of Experience, by R.D. Laing, Laing discusses how what we experience in life is but a fraction of what there is to experience. He claims that we are disconnected from who we truly are and what we are capable of being.
In the excerpt R.D. Laing explains that our goal in life is to completely experience and understand our reality. However it is impossible to do this immediately because we only experience our reality in fragments. One of the most important things Freud contributed to society is his demonstration that an average person is nothing compared to what the person could be.
Laing believes we barely know ourselves mentally because we don't remember exact memories and dreams. For our bodies, we only know enough to know when we want or need basic things. Beyond that, we barely know ourselves at all. The only way we can fully appreciate things in life, we first have to unlearn the way we’ve been taught to live.
When it comes to dreams, Laing believes that many don’t realize how, when we fall asleep into a dream we forget our real lives as quickly as we forget our dreams in real life, showing how the way we experience things ins always the same and not very deep. We are just as alienated when we are awake as we are when we are asleep or unconscious.
What we consider normal is something that is barely a fraction of what things are really like when they are “normal” because we are so separated from the actual experience. There are two different types of alienation. The normal alienation which is someone who’s just like everyone else who’s experiencing all the same kinds of alienation, and that which is labeled bad and crazy by the normal people.
Society tries to make us all these “normal” people with the same traditional alienation but those “normal” people are also the ones who have killed millions of their fellow normal men. Even these normal people are all flawed.
Laing claims the way we behave is simply a reaction to our experiences and how we see things. If our experiences are limited and destroyed, our actions will be the same.
Because we get a limited version of our experience, we then loose sight of our deeds and purpose in life, and if that is taken then we are no longer a functioning part of humanity. We are all equally able to change each other and have a positive or negative impact.
Laing believes that if we don’t fix the way we are living than we are going to destroy ourselves. The way we are experiencing is not opening up our way to view the world but closing it.
According to the Laing, we are all zombie-like, barely existing in the world. Personally, I can see how one may think that, but I also believe not all humans are living like that.
However, I do believe there are ways that the theory proves to be true in our daily lives. We are often consumed with simply where we are going and the quickest way to get there. There are always new gadgets, new technology, that is supposed to make our lives more enjoyable but are simply taking away from our experience. As we walk down the streets we don't notice the way the air smells or the way our feet are hitting the ground, because we are too consumed with drowning out the surrounding world with our iPods and trying our best to be as unnoticeable as possible. We become so obsessed with miniscule things that we think will make our lives easier at the moment. We believe that paying 150 for a new pair of shoes will change the way we go about our daily lives because it will make us better and more presentable. But will we remember these things one day in 20 years?
Yet, at the same time, will we remember the way our foot felt on the pavement one day in 20 years?
Although we may not live our lives remembering every aspect of our dreams or our childhood, we still remember the most crucial and life changing parts. However, one can also say that at the end of our lives will we care about clothing and our best purchases, or whether or not we truly lived.
I personally think I have the ability to notice when the space between my thumb and forefinger has an itchy feeling, or that the way I'm sitting right now is slightly cutting off the circulation in my leg and hurting the bone in my butt, and that my pinky toe is hurting. Is this not experiencing what my body is feeling? I feel every aspect of pain in my body, and every part that feels fine, I just choose to ignore the parts that are hurting because I am in class and there are other things to be focusing on. Like writing what I'm feeling.
In class we have been doing “Sensory Excersize Activities”, activities in which we focus on our body and how we are feeling. We may focus on our breathing or the way our foot feels, or any strictly physical feeling we may experience on a daily basis. According to the sensory excersize activities we have been doing in class, we truly do not notice the tiny things in our life. When we ignore the rest of the things in life and simply feel what it is like to exist, we realize that the essence of living is much more complex than an iPod may lead us to believe. As I did the sensory awareness excersizes, I found myself doing routine, rhythmic things. Such as when we performed the sensory excersize in which we just stood in silence for 5 minutes, I would catch myself getting lost in counting the number of chips in the paint on the wall or the amount of tape used on the paper or reading the words on the signs over and over again. Sometimes I would also find myself tapping my finger or shaking my leg. These ritual things were probably a way for me to calm myself down without having to be so uncomfortable by just focusing on my heart rate or breathing. I would stand with pressure in my knees, and my toes would often wiggle in order to keep my balance. I would become more aware of the itches on my face, and they would probably be amplified because I was so focused on them and the fact that I couldn't move to scratch them. During one excersize, I stood with my arms crossed, probably to avoid having anyone look at my stomach completely relaxed. Due to the fact that I was standing so tensely, without even realizing it, I lost the ability to breathe deeply.
For one excersize, we were sent to the first floor, blindfolded, then told to find our way back up to the classroom. I realized the entire time I relied on other people or things. If I wasn't touching a wall or holding the railing along the stairs, or holding someone's hand, I would get dizzy and often loose my balance, or get completely turned around. Again, I would get lost in a form of counting, counting the number of steps for each landing.
As we did the yoga excersizes, I did notice that there were parts of my body that were very tense. Even simple parts of my body that I use every day, such as my calf or my thigh, were also stiff. What was interesting to me is that if I got into a position that would strain parts of my body that hurt or was uncomfortable, after a while my body would get used to it and accept it, probably the same way it accepts sitting in a hard chair for 6 hours every day. I walked out of that class feeling loose, and like if any muscle in my body needed to be used, it was relaxed and ready for the job. However, the next day I felt the after-affects. My body was very sore, mostly my stomach and thighs. The following days I would notice how tight my body felt, unfortunately this was how my body felt every day, I have just been so used to it for so long that I wasn't aware of how loose it could actually feel. I decided that as a way to help my body, I should make an attempt at doing yoga more often in order to feel that loose feeling again and get to a point where I no longer feel sore or tense the following days. However, chances are I won't have enough time, or I simply just won't think it's important enough to get out of bed to do.
As for childhood, Laing believes that we barely remember the significance of our childhood and have completely lost touch with it.
“As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood. Not only it’s content, but it’s flavor.” –R.D. Lang
For me, I believe my childhood lives with me every day. I was born in Texas. I remember sitting on my lawn all the time as a kid. I remember what it felt like when I was 3 and I was playing in an ant bed. The ants crawled up my stockings and were biting me and my mom was on the phone in the house and assumed I was dancing so simply gave me a thumbs up and continued to ignore me until I came to the house with my stockings around my ankles.
I remember walking to the park in front of the college down the block by myself and buying a Lime popsicle from the guy with the ice cream cart. I remember that it was sour but sweet and the ice would just fall apart in your mouth and I would always crave it. I remember my neighbors and the guy who would always make my mom and I come in so he could give us books and Sesame Street magazines. I remember sitting on the lawn trying to make a puppet show with friends. I remember using some lady’s furniture to make a clubhouse in the garage in the back with my friend without her knowing. Only to have her take all of her furniture back the next day. I remember my dad bringing home a dog without my mom knowing. I remember sitting on his lap eating Oreos with milk. I remember seeing my mom cry for the first time.
I remember my preschool. I remember the first day. We were at lunch outside because it’s Texas and the weather’s always perfect so we were always outside. I couldn’t open my chocolate pudding, the kind with the dark chocolate with the stripe of milk chocolate in the middle. I asked a boy to open it for me and he couldn’t so he offered to take it to the teachers to open it for me. He didn’t come back till the end of lunch and when he finally did, he had chocolate smeared on his mouth. And I could feel the tears welling up behind my eyes. I remember sitting in class learning how to set a table the proper way. I remember when my friend and I thought we should find the best rock and the way we would judge whether or not it was the best rock was to see if it could fit in our ears. I would put the rocks in my ear, and after an excruciating period of rock judging, we found the perfect rock. It fit perfectly in my ear. And then I couldn’t get it out, and none of the teachers could either, so my mom had to come pick me up and I remember she was in a suit and had to pull it out with tweezers in the bathroom. I remember when they would give us snacks of celery with peanut butter on it with raisins on top. It was called Frogs on a Log. I remember dragging my dad to the playroom in school making him watch a play I forced my friends to do, even though I pretty much played every character because they couldn’t do it right. I remember when kids would come in with home made lemonade icees and they tasted so good I would try to make them at home but they just never turned out right. I remember my Dad’s girlfriend refusing to bring me lunch. I remember she had really long red nails. The kind that are so long that they start to curve. And her lipstick always matched her nail color and I hated her.
When I see pictures, I can remember specific details about maybe that dress or that place or that person. There's a picture of me, I was probably around 7, visiting my Dad in Texas. I was getting ready because he was going to take me to a Spice Girls concert, my first concert ever. We had to dress up like one of the members of the band and I chose to dress like sporty spice. I wore sweat pants and a top and my step mom put my hair up in a high ponytail. To complete the look, I needed my dad to draw a tattoo on my arm that matches hers. I remember standing there for a long time watching him draw it on my arm. I was so scared he would mess it up, and when he didn't I was so amazed. My Dad could do anything.
When I look at the picture, I remember that shirt I was wearing and those pants. I feel like I could go in my drawers and be able to find it. I remember the apartment my dad and stepmother were living at at the time. I remember being so excited.
I remember a lot about my childhood. I remember big events and I remember little things. I remember the way things smelled and the way they tasted and the way it felt and the way I felt. I know I remember a lot about my childhood, especially when I sit down and try to think about it. My childhood is what has made me, so I’m not surprised that it comes so detailed to me. The major events in my childhood are what have altered the way I feel, act, think now. Even though, as I try to think of what events may have impacted me the most, the most negative memories come to mind, I know it’s the small good memories that have helped along the way as well. They seemed so much more important at the time. They were what mattered. Not until I got older did I realize that I was just too young to understand the impact of certain things and that the fact that I didn’t get the exact Barbie that I wanted wasn’t going to be the thing that would change me forever.
Laing believes that our dreams are a significant part of our experience as well. However, he believes we don't pay enough attention to them, despite how much significance they may hold.
"..as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do.." -R.D. Laing
I'm not sure if I necessarily believe that my dreams are part of my experience. R.D. Laing is claiming that our experience is the absolute reality of what's going on, and a dream is not reality. It is a place our unconscious creates, either to play out hidden desires/wants/needs, or simply something that is influenced by outside noises.
Those dreams that are developed by our unconscious when we are in a deep sleep, present to us what we normally may not want to accept or acknowledge. It is coming from a part of ourselves that we normally do not listen to, for one reason or another. However, it is all part of who we are, and part of ourselves.
I feel dreams are not necessary to our existence. I feel that a disconnect from our dreams would not be the worst thing to experience. I feel that the dreams are all coming from some where inside of ourselves, so while the dream may be presenting to you something you normally do not think about or see that way or acknowledge, it does not mean that you could not notice these things without the help of the dream. It is all coming from within you.
In the New York Times article, "In the Dreamscape of Nightmares, Clues to Why We Dream at All", by Natalie Angier, it discusses what might cause certain nightmares. It begins by describing a man that started out with a traumatic childhood, being physically abused by his schizophrenic mother as he would lay in bed trying to fall asleep. He grew up to be a relatively normal man, until one night when he awoke to find a burglar going through his things. He then began to have horrible nightmares in which there was a middle aged woman intruder, and a knife hung above his head.
A psychologist, Dr. Ross Levin said; "The old fear memories have not gone away.. [they] were easily reactivated by the recent trauma." The doctor claims that nightmares can often be altered by using certain excersizes in which we gain more control in our dreams.
I found this part of the article to be interesting. It shows you how past experiences and traumatic events in our lives can lead to our dreams. Unresolved issues in our daily life can affect our dreams in very abstract ways.
When we first started examining dreams, I noticed that I often didn't dream at night. My dreams would mostly be the kind that occur due to outside noises. I would wake up, eat some breakfast, turn on the news, then fall asleep as the news is on in the background. These dreams would all be scenarios my mind has developed that incorporated, or was based off of what I was subconsciously hearing from the news as I slept.
As we got in the habit of writing down our dreams after we had slept, I began having more vivd and deeper dreams at night. I began to notice very repetitive things in my dream. Often, at some point, I would think "This is most likely a dream" however when I woke up the feelings would all be very real. I would wake up either relieved or disappointed that it was all a dream. If it were a dream involving being chased, I would wake up with my heart racing and feeling very anxious. I would often wake up confused, and only half aware as to what was going on.
Another very common aspect of my dream would be that I would be with people who, in my dream I obviously know and are very good friends with, but in reality I have no idea who these people are. They would also never have a clear face, or I would just never get a good look at it, so it makes it impossible for me to try and figure out who they might be, however in the dream that's never a problem.
I've noticed that I have very abstract dreams. And recently, as I've been noticing them more and writing about them more, they've been more and more violent and disturbing. The majority of them have involved either killers, running from some kind of monster, being kidnapped, or fighting someone.
A dream that I once had during the course of this dream unit, involved being kidnapped. I was in a taxi cab, and it was during some kind of riots, so the cab driver had to pick up multiple people. We stopped by some kind of riot, there were buildings burning, and people running. We stopped for a man and when he came into the cab, we asked him what was going on. He then proceeded to pull out a gun and force us to to drive where he said to. I kept whispering to the driver that he should do something, that he could easily get the man out. He was paralyzed by fear, or just refused to help us. He was too concerned with getting himself shot then saving all of us. Finally, we got to a gas station where apparently the persons partner was there with other people they had kidnapped. During the course of all of this, I just kept trying to text my mom or something to let someone know where I was. The entire dream was full off fear and anxiety. When I woke up, I was just so relieved that it was all a dream. I had similar anxiety ridden dreams, in which Jeffrey and I were being chased by some killer and he kept pausing and tying his shoe or looking at some sign. I kept trying to run because I knew the killer was close, and I just kept screaming because I was getting so concerned. Another dream I had, the 11hth and 12th graders went on a class trip together and I ended up fighting some girl and getting all of my anger out.
The majority of the dreams I wrote about in a dream journal involved some kind of violence, or extreme amount of anxiety.
Laing also says that we barely make use of our minds real ability. We only think about things that are needed for ourselves or what we would like to think we need.
"Our capacity to think,except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited." -R.D. Laing
R.D. Laing is trying to prove that you may know what you are thinking or what you are interested in, but none of that really benefits you. And what we as people have been taught to think is common sense, is "pitiful" and limited.
So basically, what we may view as being intelligent and smart, may actually just be barely what should be the norm.
"I don't know, that's just how I was taught" was an answer uttered by many during this unit.
We began the unit by doing math problems, showing how we solved them, then discussing what makes us think to solve it this way. These are the elementary things we have been taught along the way. We do not truly know what these things are or how they truly work, we are simply repeating the steps we are told to memorize. Our teacher claims that that is what is truly pitiful. That the act of just going to our Math classes simply because we are told to, is pitiful. But I wonder, what am I supposed to do instead? I cannot leave the class, or else I fail and get in trouble with teachers and principles. Were I given the choice of going to math class or not, I would not go to math class. I don't think that learning the functions of lines is necessary to my essential being, so why be excited for that class? Why go into that class to do anything other then memorize the equations?
R.D. Laings entire argument is that we don't think about things that are really beneficial to our daily lives. I agree because I couldn't care less about functions because I never think about such things unless I am being forced to go to math class. So what is pitiful: Going to your math class, to truly understand how a function works and how these math problems really go, even though you won't ever think about it in your daily life, or going to your math class because you are not given any other option,and you simply memorize the problems because you see no point in spending time understanding the problem completely because you know you will never think about it again? Which is more worth while?
To better examine our thinking, in class we would work with riddles and as we tried to solve them, we took note on how our minds worked to solve them. As I worked on riddles, I noticed my mind using previous knowledge. Since I knew it was a riddle, then I went by what I've noticed about riddles I've known in the past. I knew that riddles tried to trick you, sometimes there are plays with words, and sometimes the answer is blatantly obvious. With this, I would repeat the riddle in my head, examine either each word or section, with what I knew. I'd go through each significant word in the riddle, to think of what a play on that word may be. Or I would try to think very basically to see if maybe it tricked you and the answer was actually very clear.
In relation to being stripped of our physical experience, R.D. Laing also believes that we are not in touch with our actual feelings. To examine that theory, each day we would write down what we would be feeling at the beginning of class. I basically felt the same things everyday; tired, bored, drained, hungry, annoyed, and the urge to laugh or be happy.
When we feel our emotions, we are too consumed by them to step back and acknowledge "Oh, what I am feeling now is anger". We just know what we are feeling and express them or try to figure out why.
Andy presented his argument that virtually the whole day we're managing our feelings using tools society gives us. We hang out with our friends because that person makes us happy and makes us laugh. We go to sleep early so we feel relaxed. We wear this because it makes us feel a certain way. Tools that society supplies us with are the following: medication, music, movies, drugs/alcohol, food, sex, drama, clothes, dancing, art, friends. All of these things can often be positive to us, some we may not even think are tools for feelings, but they all help us reach a certain emotion we're trying to obtain. However, they only please us for a period of time.
I certainly agree with this but I don't necessarily believe it's a bad thing. I guess it is kind of true that with this we can sometimes alter how we feel, going to hang out with the people who make us happy when we're having a bad day.
But I also think, we as humans, all have some kind of pleasure in dwelling in our negative emotions. Take music, for example. When we are upset, angry, disappointed, maybe we've just broken up with someone. We don't listen to our iPods and blast happy, loving, excited music. You make a playlist full of sad, missing, possibly angry songs. However, when we're feeling happy we may not just listen to happy music, we listen to a mixture.
There is also the fact that there are two different forms of pleasure" physically fulfilling and mentally fulfilling. Most pleasures make you happy but don't last. They often leave you dissatisfied and wanting more. Possibly the more common mentally fulfilling activities (i.e. books, tv, music) leave you wanting more on purpose, most likely for a corporate gain.
We were asked, if we could, would you like your feelings more of less intense? Personally, I wouldn't know. Some feelings I wish I felt more strongly, some I wish I didn't. I want pain to be less. Then again, maybe if it was all less intense I wouldn't have to deal with pain at all. You feel less happy, so once you hurt it isn't too big of a deal. But then, I'd loose the happiness of laughter or simpler things.
We did a song experiment in class. Andy played clips of different songs and we were to write what the artist was trying to convey, and what it was we were feeling.
The first song was Comfortably Numb, by Pink Floyd. I felt that the feeling trying to be conveyed was calm, almost content with feeling close to nothing. However, the feelings I felt were the feeling of emptiness, and longing to have something/some emotion.
The next song was Going Down the Road Feeling Bad by Elizabeth Cotton. The music/soundtrack was very upbeat, however the actual lyrics were dark and depressing. These left me feeling kind of lost and a little morbid.
The third song was Cleaning out My Close by Eminem. With this song, I felt what Eminem was trying to express. I felt intense anger, the desire to be one's self while knowing that there's no way to do that because so many already hate you. It was just an entire song of admitting all of the skeletons in one's closet.
These are the song I felt the most from. However, before the experiment, Andy would be simply playing songs in the background as we wrote, songs with no words. But as they played, they reminded me of music I used to listen to, the music I listened to when I was feeling alone or upset or lost. When I heard the music, my heart felt heavy.
It seems as children we were taught to express and accept our feelings, while as we grew we were taught its preferable to hide those feelings.
We watched a children's TV show, Carebears. All Carebears had happy names; Braveheart, Birthday Bear, all very positive happy things. All the bears/animals expressed their feelings. When they are happy they would tell each other, when they were having fun, they would tell each other. The enemy in the show was named Professor Coldheart. The entire feeling of the show was that those who felt nothing were the enemy, those that don't accept everyone for their feelings are the enemy. The show only represented a dichotomy of emotions; happy versus sad, mean versus nice.
Another day in class, we were presented a scenario. If we had the option to be plugged into a machine, you can be plugged in it forever, a couple years, as long as you want, and you were able to experience any kind of pleasure, would you? You would decide the pleasure before you were connected.
I said that I would be plugged in for a short amount of time, maybe for a massage or something that is feasible but I am not able to get very often. I wouldn't want to stay in forever because I believe you would lose your ability to appreciate the pleasure. If you are constantly getting this one kind of gratification, it will become normal and will no longer be pleasing. Without a balance of pleasure and unhappiness, you can't experience the pleasure a hundred percent because you do not appreciate it.
We then began discussing medication and the affect it has on our emotions. I chose to read the entry The (un)medicated Life, Part 2 from the blog callalillie. It's a girl discussing how things have been since choosing to end her prescription of antidepressants. She describes how she believes using the drugs may have made it more difficult for her to deal with her emotions because she was unable to depict what emotions where being caused by the meds and what were feelings were genuine. Which is essentially the opposite of what the drugs claim they should do: help you better understand and manage your emotions. She also addresses a certain kind of paranoia when it comes to your emotions, "How do you really know when your emotions have crossed the border from characteristically cranky to spiraling sorrow?". When we have all these medications that are so available to us, and the number of those who are taking prescription pills constantly rising, we forget that we are human and we sometimes feel sadness and anger and that we may just need some time to deal with it rather than being told that if we are not happy all the time, we require meds. I relate to this piece on a personal level. I recall the frustration of getting on meds. It appeared to be a quick fix for, what turned out years later to be, a deeper problem rooted from my childhood. Once choosing to stop the many pills I was taking, I continued to be frightened by my own feelings. On each medication, I always had a negative reaction; panic attacks, worsening depression, increased hostility, etc. etc. After ending the prescriptions, I, much like callallie, found it difficult to feel unhappy without having it spiral into a fit of thinking I’m unable to be without medication. After being diagnosed with something that was so worthy of so many pills, I was left feeling like any sort of negative feeling would build and send me back to the doctors.
From personal experience, and reading callallies similar experience, medications block you from your emotions and being able to truly understand that it is human to feel everything both negative and positive.
Laing definitely touches upon some significant issues about our daily lives. The fact that we must be more in touch with our bodies, and that we should be more in touch and better understand our actual emotions. However, Laing takes his views and leaves little room for exceptions, while I believe that there are many that feel they do exactly what Laing believes no one does. Although some of Laings views may not all be precisely true for each individual, I believe it is very significant for one to read his theories and philosophies, for they can open your mind and help you develop your own theories and own beliefs on experience.