It is common for human beings, as a race, to fall into the comforts of routine – living each day similar to days before and days to come. Unfortunately, it is often too late before one even realizes that they have fallen into this mundane way of living in which each day is completed rather than lived, as explained by David Foster Wallace in “This Is Water”. This commencement speech warned graduating students of the dangers of submitting to our “default settings” of unconscious decisions and beliefs (Wallace 234). However, this dangerous way of living is no new disability of today’s human race. Socrates warned the people of his time: “A life unaware is a life not worth living” and who is to say he wasn’t completely right? A topic of long debate also includes the kind of influence that consciously-controlled thoughts can have on the physical body. A year after Wallace’s speech, neurobiologist Helen Pilcher, published “The New Witch Doctor: How Belief Can Kill”, which explains the influence of the mind and individual beliefs on the quality of one’s life. Together, both authors illustrate how detrimental a life lived unaware of one’s own thoughts and beliefs can be on the body and spirit. And though it is easy to live by …show more content…
Wallace argues that “[if you wish to live to] be thirty, or even fifty, without [ever contemplating putting a gun to your] head”, you must have enough control over your mind to keep you from going through a “comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and natural default setting” (Wallace 234-8). Pilcher emphasizes how one can be “persuaded to believe that they are going to die and actually have it happen” so why not do the contrary and persuade yourself to be the strongest, bravest version of yourself possible and conquer all of life’s obstacles (Pilcher
Not only is human connection vital to live a happy and joyful life, but it is necessary to create a legacy, and thus live on through others. But in order to do this, one must first overcome their ego and their sense of self. Once all of the “I” thoughts are gone, one can relate, but fully understand, the higher powers as well as other human beings around us. However, it is important to accept that we may never fully understand the driving force of this universe. While it can be experienced, and we can briefly get an idea of what it is, it is impossible to define these concepts in words, because we don’t have a language that transcends what we can understand. And though many recognize that these concepts could never be fully understood by the human brain, determined minds continue to ask questions that will never have an answer, “pushing their minds to the limits of what we can know” (Armstrong,
In This is Water, Wallace effectively uses logical reasoning and the parable of the religious man and the atheist man to explain how consciousness is a choice, not an unalterable state. To do this, Wallace states that in many cases, “A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” Using logical reasoning, Wallace’s own admission reminds his audience that they are also often wrong, as, logically, humans are not perfect and make periodic mistakes. Once he establishes that people can be wrong, he returns to the parable of the two men and claims “…the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.” This idea is familiar to his educated audience, as he claims it is one of the primary foundations of a liberal arts education. Thus, Wallace uses his audienc...
Underlying each of these claims is the theme of the unification of body and mind into a state of consciousness which greatly facilitates clarity and order in one's awareness. Through the deep periods of rest achieved during levels of transcendental consciousness, t...
“Community. Identity. Stability.” These three words constitute the planetary motto of the characters of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian fiction Brave New World. (7) Theirs is a carefully structured post-modern society which managed to overcome political and social unrest through genetic engineering, strict social conventions, exhaustive conditioning, hypnosis and dependency on a drug called soma. In order for the stability of this world to be achieved, inhabitants are stripped of independent thoughts and emotions. This work is an exploration of the disturbing effects of homogeneity, control of technology and loss of personal autonomy on the members of the Brave New World.
Social restriction robs individuals of their creative personalities by preventing freedom of thought, behavior, and expression; but is vital to the World State for maintaining complete control over the society. Social restriction’s purpose is to enforce obedience conformity and compliance out of people. The World State achieves this through two methods; hypnopaedia and shock therapy. Hypnopaedia is sleep-teaching where morals are taught on on repeat during the infant years of children while they are asleep, these messages become permanently embedded in their mind and become their permanent, new, artificial personality. This is proven in the quote “... drops of liquid sealing wax, drops that adhere, incrust and inc...
...take away the freedom of thought. It will stay with us until the end of time. Viktor E. Frankl illustrated this in his essay “An Inner Freedom” from the book Man’s Search for Meaning. He stated, “The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not the result of amp influences alone.”
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World illustrates a colorful, fantastic universe of sex and emotion, programming and fascism that has a powerful draw in a happy handicap. This reality pause button is called “Soma”. “Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.” ( Huxley 54 ).
Many people in the world get into an almost unbreakable routine, shielding themselves from the real world. We wake up, brush our teeth, go to school with the same people, go home, and do it all over again. Once there is a roadblock in the way, it forces us to step outside our shell and look at others views for a change. American mythologist, writer, and lecturer,Joseph Campbell once said,”We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” It is the act of noticing others words and actions that will reshape our lives for the better. In “Secret Samantha” and “Sol Painting, Inc.” the authors suggest that observing someone else’s perspective and taking the time to understand others can be mankind's greatest
A person cannot be considered human if their thoughts are controlled by someone else. In Brave New World, children are conditioned to believe what the world state wants them to believe. A technological advancement, known as hypnopedia, can be used for moral teaching. During a child’s sleep, an incessant voice tells the child to follow behaviors that are beneficial to society. The hypnopedia, for example, can tell the world state motto, “Community, Identity, Stability” (Huxley 1). In Brave New World, a person no longer has free will because they are implanted with ideas on how to live. In Do androids Dream of Electri...
...en. The society is facing a challenge of whether or not the world should stop mental control or keep it going with the worry that it may take over the world one day. More realistically though, it could turn man into a community of people who is controlled by the government and does not have any emotions and can not figure out anything for themselves.. If the world misuses psychological conditioning enough, it will be a threat to humanity and that is not something that people of this world should think of as something good, because it could potentially ruin all of mankind together.
“Egoism, the fear or not near but of distant death… are not, I think, wholly natural or instinctive. They are all strengthened by the beliefs about personal identity which I have been attacking. If we give up these beliefs, they should be weakened” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:14).
“To be awake means to be alive”, and to be awake during the time of Romanticism meant one could witness literature as an intellectual achievement. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman were three authors during this time that wrote about an idea that would later become the theme of many papers, discussions and lectures, Wakefulness. Though some may not have recognized the significance of these authors’ work at the time, their ideas and beliefs have captivated the minds of many people. Wakefulness, the idea of intellectual exertion throughout everyday life is essential to becoming self-reliant, creating a more intellectual and better community, and becoming closer to god.
Walsh, K., King, M., Jones, L., Tookman, A., & Blizard, R., (2002). Spiritual beliefs may
In life, many things are taken for granted on a customary basis. For example, we wake up in the morning and routinely expect to see and hear from certain people. Most people live daily life with the unsighted notion that every important individual in their lives at the moment, will exist there tomorrow. However, in actuality, such is not the case. I too fell victim to the routine familiarity of expectation, until the day reality taught me otherwise.
“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a tea pot, it becomes the tea pot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”