Heroes and Mystics 2022

I So in the discussion about St. Theresa and her journey, I thought about the man who followed St. Teresa’s journey. About how long and tiring it must’ve been; walking around with no knowledge that this journey will lead to anything significant. That got me thinking, what if someone, destined by an artifact to go on a journey, didn’t want to go? I realized I had already seen this in what was one of my favorite cartoons, Steven Universe. Steven Universe perfectly balanced the average kid with superpowers cartoon with the harsh reality of family trauma and mental health. Steven universe stars the titular character Steven, who is half human and half gem; an alien race from space made of a gemstone and a hologram like body. Steven’s mother, a gem who gave up her physical form to have Steven, was a rebel of the race and a fugitive. The show follows Steven as he learns to master his powers, and in the later seasons, fix the problems his mom caused at the expense of his mental health. Because...

someone in the last class used the phrase "true you" in relation to talking with someone, meaning that if you intend to hide parts of your personality you are not allowing the other person to see your "true self" which is rude to them. as I have discussed previously, the use of words like true are inherently problematic in a philosophic sense. this is because the word true implies a sense of stability. when something is true is it absolute, unwavering and unarguable. however, I know the self I was last year or the year before that is very different from the self I am today. so your "true self" doesn't really exist; it is changed and altered with every bit of information you learn or new opinion you change or form. however, being authentic is more in line with what was being discusses. authenticity is more along the lines of allowing other people to see all the opinions your have and all the changes...

  Does being someone who’s experienced pain make you a better sportsman?   we discussed in class the sports teaches you to ignore pain. by that metric, someone who's experienced more pain would have more practice at tolerating and dealing with pain. both with the mental strength and with physical strength, sportsmen will function better if they have experience and practice with ignoring and using pain as an advantage. so someone who's struggled in their life and had to fight mental and physical pain would then do better in sports. Trauma makes you appreciate pain. it teaches you to adapt and adjust to your environment and withstand its tests.Does that make you better at tolerating life? if we apply the same theory of the sportsman to the average person and their daily struggles, the same theory applies. to a certain degree, PTSD being the obvious outlier. but within the spectrum, the more experience you...

does hindsight taint memories?   Dr. Redick spoke in class about our processing of memories and how when we recall memories it changes them. this is consistent with the currently accepted theories of memory in psychology.  Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. we have also all probably experienced it. Imagine you are telling your friends a story about a terrible mistake you made. It could be locking your keys in your car, going on a date with a bad person, or taking a job you weren't suited for. during the telling of the story, you probably either said or thought to yourself "I should've know at that point that this was a bad idea". that is the magic of hindsight. then the next time someone asks you about it, that statement gets ingrained in your memory and it is repeated next time you tell it. if you repeat this over time, it could change the story so much that it becomes ...

Today I was thinking about the internal and external journey in relation to death and pain. Is pain and internal or external journey? Pain cannot be seen and therefore would relate itself to an internal journey. However, pain can be experiences through the external. You can cut yourself. That is an external process but the feeling of pain is an internal journey. Death is similar. The process of dying is external. You can observe your body breaking down, but the process of preparing oneself mentally for death is an internal journey. Accepting one's death is difficult but it takes place internally. To a religious person death means something more then just the loss of life or the breakdown of matter, it is the time in which someone enters the life after death. Is that process external or internal? I would argue that it is neither. The journey of the soul to heaven cannot be defined to the internal or external journey. It is something else all together. Figure out what this is though ...

 during our discussion in class about our topics for our term papers, an idea came to mind while Abarami was describing her topic.  Is there such thing as a good/right way to approach a journey? and does it change the outcome? The existence of good or right is highly debated In within philosophy, but for the sake of the argument let's assume we are using good as in ideal conditions in which you are more likely to succeed. ultimately a journey is difficult to quantify and measure empirically because its very nature is progression that cannot be quantified. It is also hard to control for variables since every journey is different and some aren't even aware they are on a journey until they have reached the end. there are an endless amount of variables so studying this is impossible. On the theoretical side, someone who wants to become rich and famous are going to have an easier time if they have famous family or have a t...

     It was talked about in class how there are two people that or an internal class between two different thoughts that complete a person (or that is how I understood it). The analogy was given between Odysseus and Penelope. Odysseus and Penelope are both very clever people. Odysseus made a horse to outsmart the trojans which would eventually lead to the destruction of the city. Penelope told the suiters that were pestering her that she would create a scarf and when it was finished, she would pick one of them to marry, but every night she would unwind the scarf so she would never finish it and not have to choose somebody. Both were very smart but the way that they went about it was very different. Odysseus was very aggressive with his tactics whereas Penelope was not. She was very laid back. This can be an external comparison like what is shown above but the same differences can be shown as an internal struggle. We go through hard times in our lives that are journeys muc...

       Memories are an interesting thing. They are something that happened in the past and yet they are heavily shaped by the present. Dr. Redick spoke about two ways that people in the past have viewed memories. He first spoke of how memories can be looked at in a linear fashion and in a circular fashion. If you look at it in a linear way you are simply looking back on a past event. However, if you look at it as a circle you look back on the past but then repeat what happened in that memory. Dr. Redick proposed a different look on the topic. The memories are all spirals coming out a different point of the spirals intersecting and interacting with one another. Memory is an interesting thing especially since you can never repeat what happened in the past. Even if you go to the same place with the same people and do the same activity it will be different. It will be influenced by past events and the things that are currently going on in the present, whether external or...