IDL Paper (my insights)

Thesis: I agree with RD Laing that human beings are generally disconnected from themselves, others and their own experience.


The insight into daily life class used RD Laing’s: Politics of Experience as the anchor text and was designed to help each member of the class not only to gauge their level of “embodiment” but also to improve upon it. We attempted to do this through thoughtful discussions and many exercises in class and at home. The class was divided into many “mini-units” focused on different aspects of life such as childhood, dreaming, thinking, and morals just to name a few. Although some of the lessons benefited me more than others, all of them helped to prove Laing’s theory that human beings are generally disconnected from their own experience. This class, like all of Andy Snyder’s classes, is unique in that we publish all our assignments on a Web Log (Blog) so that our work isn’t just read by teachers or parents but can be read by anyone with access to the Internet.
The final unit of the class was on feelings. It was probably the most beneficial to me out of many of the other things we did in the "Insight” class. Each day we started the class by logging in our notebooks what we were feeling at that exact time. I never really had much to write because I didn’t have feelings that were that were overt, or stood out to me. From this however I realized about my self that my feelings are on a sort of “autopilot” throughout the day, maybe as some sort of defense mechanism if you will, for getting through the day at school with out having to have any real emotional interactions with any one. One interesting thing I found extremely interesting was "introspective" thinking. On that particular day I was in a bad mood. I noticed my bad feelings were held as physical pain in my upper body, which I have heard is where a lot of your stress and emotional baggage is held. We also discussed the meanings of the words feelings, mood, and emotional orientation. We defined feelings as some sort of emotional state that you are aware of (sometimes) that tends to last between 0:01 seconds and 0:29 seconds. Moods last between 0:31 seconds to 3:00 hours. A mood is longer and more intense than a feeling, you’re often not aware of your mood. Lastly there is your emotional orientation, which is your general outlook on life; this can last between six months and a lifetime. The next unit shifted gears from our emotions into dissecting our actual thought process.
Our teacher gave us riddles to solve in class and the instructions were not to figure out the answer to the riddle but to notice HOW our minds went about figuring out the answer. In other words: our mental process. We quickly learned that mostly everyone attacks problems using different strategies, and examining our thought process can teach us a lot about ourselves as human beings. What the riddle it self was about is not important, other than that they were what you would call “moral dilemmas”. Basically a group of my fellow class mates and I brainstormed the many ways of solving it. We came up with many strategies that our teacher then put into philosophical wording. Minesweeping, contextualizing, awareness of genre, and then simply asking others for help. I happened to be frustrated that day and gave up rather quickly on a certain riddle. This may be because another member of my class was taking charge and I felt I didn’t have to. I felt no obligation to work on solving the riddle at this point, so I left the computer lab. Looking at this experience in a phenomenological way tells me a lot about my thought process and personality; such as that I require a supportive team to help me work through problems. Another “method” of thinking I find myself using quite a bit with riddles is trying to find the most obvious answers, then getting them out of the way, and then thinking of more abstract ideas which generally turn out to be the correct answer. This way of thinking is an example of “Mine sweeping” because it is like I am sweeping my mind for ideas until one explodes like a mine. Overall I was happy with the insight into my life that the unit on thought process provided me with. However I found the next unit on dreams to be even more insightful.

RD Lang’s opinion on dreams is that since we are alienated from our experience when we are awake so we are definitely alienated from our experience when we are asleep. I agree with Lang’s argument and think that we are even more disconnected from our experience when sleeping than when we are awake. Our teacher told us to keep a dream journal next to our beds and as soon as we woke up in the morning, to write anything down that we could remember about a dream we had that night. I have never had a very deep connection with my dreams and rarely remember them. By keeping a dream journal definitely helped me to realize how severe a disconnect I have between my dreams and I. Throughout the dream unit we discussed many ideas and theories about dreams to help us gain a better understanding. Even though I am not particularly in touch with dreams I think that dreaming is comprised of my own experience. A disconnect from your dreams, such as I have, is probably not a good thing. In my opinion a lack of connection to your dreams is a lack of connection to your unconscious mind or self. On a less philosophical note we discussed archetypes. An archetype is a sort of "generic" model of a person or concept (Wikipedia). Archetypes are ideas that one has been conditioned to have as they grow up. These are subconscious thoughts and images that most people have no control over, being that all humans (and maybe all living creatures with brains) use these archetypes to identify, and make sense of the other people and things around them. I think that these are in a very real sense “dream like” thoughts that all people use everyday. This shows an example of how deeply connected dreams are with our everyday lives, yet they are for the most part, taken for granted. We also discussed the differences between imaginations and dreams. I think that you are generally in control over your imagination and you always know when you are imagining something, but dreams are tools of your subconscious and people normally don’t have control over them. I also that think that for the most part you imagine things to amuse yourself and you dream as a way for your subconscious to make sense of things in your mind while you sleep. I think the two are similar in the sense that they can both offer insight into your life, and in that anything can happen in both your imaginations and in your dreams. My favorite topic in the Dream unit was when we discussed lucid dreams. We defined lucid dreams as being in a dream while being aware that you are dreaming. In reviewing my notes on dreams and experience I came to the conclusion that dreams are something that is happening to your unconscious mind. I attempted to have a lucid dream several times and failed all attempts. My first effort to lucid dream was attempted by performing the Wave Induced Lucid Dreaming method or WILD. I set my alarm for 2:45am and kept an article about WILD induced lucid dreams next to my bed. The idea being to wake up in the middle of the night (or early morning) and put the idea of Lucid dreams in your mind with the hope of returning to sleep and having a lucid dream. The first night I slept through the alarm. The second night I woke up at around 2:45am read the article and went back to sleep. I then woke wake up at 7:00am that morning to start getting ready for school and hadn’t had any memory of even having a dream let alone a lucid dream. This unit was enjoyable, and I am pretty sure that if I continued with a dream journal and trying to become more in touch with my dreams I would probably be able to do so. As for Lucid dreams I think in order to have one it requires a very good connection to your subconscious. Lucid dreams are probably a little above me at this point in my subconscious exploration. After exploring our dreams we moved to a heavier subject; childhood.
R.D. Lang says that as an adult we have forgotten our childhood, the contents and the flavor" When reviewing old letters from summer camp, back when I was young and didn’t realize the magical place that it is, I began to feel embarrassed. I did not want to feel the flavor of my childhood because the things I wrote sparked my bad memories from that time. However I believe it is important to remember and analyze your childhood because that is the key to figuring out how to de-alienate our selves from people, our experience, Etc.
In class we exchanged childhood stories and took the time to analyze how telling them made us feel. My childhood story was about my friend since elementary school: Dylan McDonald. I am not sure how young I was exactly but I know that it was before we entered SOF (Dylan went here for middle school). He lived right across the street from me and whenever it would snow a lot we would meet in my backyard. I live right next to the Trump Palace and their backyard and a seven-foot wall separates mine. We would run "secret missions" into the Trump courtyard all day and it seems as though we never got cold. When it got dark are fun was magnified. Our missions consisted of jumping over the once enormous wall into the other playground and sliding down their slide, or swinging on their swing, before the Trump security came out to get us. Or so we thought. Another story that is probably more meaningful and will stick with me forever was when my Father and I spent the night in the central park zoo and we got to walk around the rain forest at night with flashlights. We had to sleep on a carpeted floor, which I was fine with, being such a young child its not like I had a bad back or anything. My Dad however said it was the worst night sleep he had ever gotten. I can now understand why. I was very young and don’t really remember the flavor of that particular experience, but the event that I will remember forever is that while we were sleeping the famous blizzard of 1996 was in full affect around us. We awoke that morning inside the zoo with (what seemed like) five-feet of unplowed snow layering the entire park. This beat seeing the animals at night and became the highlight of the story. My father and I went home to get my sled and proper clothing and spent the rest of the day having the time of our lives or at least mine. 
In giving this story some thought I realize that I can still feel all the emotions almost as clearly as I did that day six or seven years ago. I think this particular story is an example that contradicts Laing’s theories on embodiment but at the same time this is one of the few memories that I still hold a deep connection too. For me this confirms the fact that since we are disconnected with our childhood or our past, how can we possibly have a deep connection with our present lives? This story also got me thinking about one of the most important aspects of childhood: friendship. I met most of my best friends before sixth grade and they are for the most part still my best friends. I have learned that I am more in touch with my childhood than I previously thought, I realize that I remember more flavor of my childhood than I previously gave my self credit for. I do feel however that we have mostly forgotten the flavor content of our childhood because I can only remember it on specific memories that I bring up a lot in my head. Remembering your childhood experience is important because we are a lot less alienated as children, if we can gain insight into how we used to be/feel it will make it easier to de-alienate ourselves from our experience. I Sensory Awareness: I have gathered a lot of insight from the various sensory awareness exercises we have done in class. Some have meant more than others and some were more difficult than others. The first eye-opening experience was the "Roof" experiment, where we attempted to use all our senses at one time. This was one of the hardest to do because I think we are trained to use one or at the most two senses at one time. My favorite SAE was the "Blindfold" experiment where we blindfolded ourselves and walked up the stairs seven flights to class. It was the most fun but also one of the most insightful; for instance when I put the blindfold on I had an immediate sense of anxiety, this is what I expected, but when I just trusted my memory of where things were I found myself walking around rather comfortably and at my normal pace. The most boring exercise but probably the most meaningful was "Standing". We were asked to stand for only six minutes, not to talk, close our eyes, and just 'notice'. This was nearly impossible for almost everyone in the room. It made us realize the extent of our inpatients, and that we need something to distract ourselves because we aren’t even comfortable enough in our own skin to stand still. I personally didn’t have to talk to anyone during those six minutes but did continuously shift my weight from side to side. I think it is extremely true that people are not in touch with their senses. I know for me personally it is too strenuous to attempt to 'experience' with out using the basic 5 senses. You would think it would be very hard to learn this new way to experience but Lang says that it is unlearning that must be done because society has conditioned us to sense things in the most basic and primitive ways, not to be in depth with our senses. When I attempt to experience things on a deeper level I find my self at best thinking phenomenological about the senses I am familiar with; Sight, Taste, Touch, Smell, and Taste. Trying to use other senses to experience is like attempting to use a higher percentage of brainpower, you know you have the capability to do so but don't even know where to begin. 
The little fragments that I remember from when I was very young do seem extremely vivid. As a young child you have reactions to almost everything and everybody, this relates to what Lang said; people are supposed to have a very real affect on each other. When you are a young child you are not yet completely conditioned to thinking alienation is 'normal'. I must admit that sometimes it just seems boring to try to have a deep ‘sensual experience’ with things you do and see everyday, although this impatience most likely springs from being taught to experience the minimal and not pay attention to deeper feelings that may arise. Lang’s Article is about the lack of depth people have as far as understanding our experiences and sensations. People have been normalized by society to notice and experience the minimal as necessary for survival. Another important idea in this writing is that people by nature are 'interdependent' on each other, and that humans are supposed to have affects on one another, but now we are alienated from each other (as well as ourselves). Lang says that it is necessary to 'un-learn' the idea that alienation is normal "...before one can begin to experience the world afresh..."(1). 
Lang mentions at the end of the piece that when a child is born they are a fresh start, free from the "...veils of mystification..."(2) that shroud our senses.


During my favorite part of the unit on thought and our thinking process we were given moral dilemmas and puzzles and instructed not to think about the answer but to think about the way our minds come up with the answer. Essentially we were “thinking about our thinking. The dilemmas were all based on the similar idea of having to choose between your life and others or saving some people but letting some die. The thought process in retrospect was extremely interesting. One important thing I noticed was that for these types of dilemmas, my brain broke the solution down into these categories and in this order: 

1. What is best for me? 
2. What is best for other people? 
3. Some sort of merging of the two ideas this process gives a lot of insight into my brains inner workings. Clearly I value myself over complete strangers, although I still want to help as many people as possible (as long as my best interests are still preserved). It is horrible to say but I think you would be heart pressed to find a person who felt otherwise, I think it is simply in our nature to think this way. One particular insight that these thought problems gave me is that for the most part we are “automatic thinkers”. What I mean by this is that when we are faced with a problem it is hard to stop yourself from automatically trying to figure out the answer. I got better at this meticognation (thinking about my thinking) the more I practiced it. I agree with RD Lang that one can learn how to think again, and like everything it gets easier with practice.