The Ways of Knowing Self, Society, and the Cosmos

When I think about this class I realize that I never had a class quite like it  before. I have never had a class or a professor that told me to just sit down, shut up, and observe the world. Then I was told to observe to world with a different lens. I was told to look with an aesthetic lens, a spiritual lens, a scientific lens, and an intellectual lens. This was a challenge for me.  I can try to look at the world differently but that's all I can do. Try.

The aesthetic lens came more naturally to me due to the fact that I go to art school and I have been honing this lens for a decent amount of time now. What I realized through the conscious viewing with the aesthetic wok is that it often leads to obsession. I will stay up for days getting that look I want. The aesthetic of what this school does can be done in normal hours and it is possible to not stay up for days working on art. We just do. I don't really know why.

The spiritual lens is a strange grey area for me. I am not religious but I am a Jew. I believe that the world is interconnected with everything else because of scientific evidence. But my spiritual way of knowing has been changing rapidly since I started paying attention. I firmly believe that we are missing something but I couldn't tell you what. And I can't tell you how regain that missing piece. When looking at the world in a spiritual fashion at the world everything seems much simpler.

The intellectual WoK is the the art of asking the right questions. Although I associate it with academia  at it's core it is philosophy. My attempt to wander this world with more intellectual insight was a strange challenge. I find that more often than not I how instead of why. Intellectuals discuss and obsess over the why. For example if I need to program a lighting console for a show I don't first ask why I am making those looks I make sure they look how they are supposed to.

The scientific Wok is what I spend a fair amount of my life in. I look around the world on ask how. Straying from that was a difficult task but in doing so I learned that may not always be the best thing to ask. I always wondered about how things work and rarely did I ever think of the consequences of my tinkering. Moving beyond the scientific WoK  made me aware of that flaw.

This class, for me was about the exploration of different personalities and myself. I never gave any of this stuff much thought until this class. This thought exposed some flaws in the way conduct myself and my affairs. The spiritual, scientific, aesthetic, and intellectual WoKs all have a part to play in who you are. This class was the first to tell me to explore that.

SCIENCE!

Viewing the world through the scientific lens is a a great way to be unbiased towards anything you see in life. And I admit I am a bit biased towards this wok. It's very simple question everything. Observe, Theorize, Test, Deduce.        That is science in its core.

Science brings up powerful memories that are surprisingly  not scientific at all. My grandfather, a genius, was present at all of the family events. One Rosh Hashannah I brought a slinky to keep me entertained, adult conversation was and still is as exciting as dirty wash cloth. My grandfather, Walter, immediately asked to see my toy. Four hours later he was still examining that stupid thing. Ever the scientist he told at the end in of the night that my toy could never serve any practical purpose in a mechanical device.

This was hardly a life altering revelation to me but that moment was my first exposure to what a scientist does. A scientist takes a circumstance or phenomenon that they don't understand and learn from it, but mainly they take toys from children. A real scientist is intensely curious about the world. there is one major draw back though. Every weapon ever made needed science to back it up.

For example, nuclear energy helped to spawn the atom bomb. Was this science worth it? That is impossible to tell but the benefit of science is that they don't have to worry about that. They just worry about the pursuit of knowledge. Being a scientist and and intellectual are very similar in this regard. The biggest difference is that Science often deals with numbers more than theory.

Intellectualty and its flaws

When I think of intellectuals and the world they reside in I think of Academia and I get incredibly bored. People who work to be intelligent for no other purpose to be intelligent bug me.  But I am a student, academics is a part of my life. I have to read, I have to write.

I never understood what an Intellectual wok is. I tried. But how does look at the world through an intellectual lens. One can't just turn on brains and see the world differently. But I will give this a try.

Plato created an allegory of a cave. In this cave some people in a really awful situation were tied down and forced to stare at the wall. In this caves shadows were projected on to the wall. This was the entire life that these people knew. Now being an intellectual means that you ask the right questions regarding that situation. And thinking out the answers to such questions. Suppose that someone asked if the people in that cave were happy. If I were an Intellectual I would say they are not.

I would reach that conclusion by asking questions.  These people had only ever known life in the cave correct? yes. How would they react if they saw the real world? I can only assume that they would only react with fear. Being exposed to something with such a massive contrast to what they have known must raise many questions if not insecurities about the world and the very sanity of the cave people. But are they happy in the cave? Humans by nature have ambition, sitting in a cave does nothing to do that. Being stagnant  leads to depression.

An intellectual and their way of knowing is simply using logic and thought out ideas to see the world. While academia is prevalent with intellectuals it is not everything. The intellectual wok is a way to view the world  from a very philosophical point of view.

Me and my Spirituality.

In the past semester my spirituality has been tested a few times at the very beginning I was told to make a shrine to a person. That alone tested my Judaism , One of the first things I was told was "Thou shalt not worship a false idols." Building this shrine would directly contradict that. How would that work? I decided to build a shrine to light and its properties. But that's the entirety of how that project challenged my spirituality.

But wait there's more!

My spirituality is more than just religion. The world is comprised of atoms, those are comprised Electrons, Neutrons, and Protons. That's just electricity. The world is made out of electricity and nothing else. That gives a new meaning to the term "electric slide." Our thoughts are also electricity that also send out tiny impulses around the world. Is it possible that our thoughts affect the the world around us? Physics says that is completely possible. Therefore spirituality and thought and reality are all connected.

I try to remain positive and calm not only is it because that's a good way to go about life but I hope that maybe it might affect the world around me. That is my spirituality. I don't have "faith" I do believe with evidence, and there is a small amount of evidence that points to a connected reality. I try to be positive just in case the theory holds true.