That, anyway, is what I have learned.

            “A foolish man thinks himself to be wise. A wise man knows himself to be a fool.” This is a (modernized) quote by William Shakespeare and I couldn’t agree with him more. The more that I learn, the less I realize that I actually know. By learning just a little, I am educated in the fact that I am in reality uneducated, thus inspiring me to learn more. As soon as I tell myself that I am certain of anything, I give up the never-ending path to knowledge. To truly learn anything, it must always contain an element of mystery; otherwise, I am blinded by understanding. I have learned so much during the past few months that it seems as though I now know nothing all over again.

I know that I am not special, and that my journey is the exact same as countless told in mythology, no matter how displaced it may be. I know I am never alone; that someone else has felt my pain. Whether the story involves Hercules’s 12 trials, or my writing a 12-page essay, the similarities are arguably more prevalent than the differences. With an open mind and an active imagination, one can look at every situation in a positive light and realize that life really isn’t so serious, and it should exist purely to be enjoyed. I have learned that sometimes I really do just need to hug a tree. Trees give me life-supporting oxygen, shade, and peace; and ask for nothing in return. Really, hugging one is the least I can do. And why not? Should social stigmas really influence how we feel about ourselves? Who cares if that couple think you’re weird while you hug that oak? They’re the weird ones. Just ask the oak. Within reason, we should do whatever makes us happy, no matter what other people think of it. Life is too short to spend it doing anything that doesn’t make you a better person than you were the day before.

I know that the phrase that will signal my downfall is “…and then one day…” This is indicative of the safe, mundane, room temperature lives which we try to avoid living, though have a hard time escaping, until something drastic happens. This “one day” will be an exemplary enactment of Darwin’s survival of the fittest. If I survive this “one day,” I am sure I will have one hell of a story to tell. If I don’t survive, perhaps I was not meant to, and my journey will have reached an abrupt ending, hopefully sending me somewhere more desirable.

But until that day, I will live life to the fullest. I will hug a tree. I will be inspired. I will look at the mountains with the same awe and amazement as I did when first I laid eyes upon them. I have learned that instead of wondering what happens after my death, to consider instead what happened before my life. I was born in the northwest corner of Germany, in the farm country of Aurich. However, where was I one year before? I don’t remember…  Therefore, it couldn’t have been all that bad. So why worry? I have learned that my destination is the same as my point of origin. But that’s not what is important. Not yet at least. What is important is my journey between the beginning and the end. My journey is what will make my point of origin worth re-visiting. I will learn all that I can until the day of my death (and hopefully afterwards). My thoughts are the only possessions I’ll be able to bring with me wherever I end up, and it will be a true shame if I run out of things to think while I’m there. I don’t know how long it will be until I die. It could be tomorrow, it could be a hundred years from now. I just need to make sure I spend every waking moment productively.

I have learned the worst thing to be is plain. Ordinary. Lukewarm. Room temperature. Indifferent. These are the worst conditions in which to end your life. “Sebastian lived a safe, ordinary life and then one day… he died because his body ceased to function.” Not very interesting, right? Why do you think all the most epic gods didn’t die of old age? Instead they were killed by the most drastic methods imaginable, even by today’s standards. But I’m going off on a tangent. Although another thing Dr. Sexson has taught me is that when I go off on tangents, I’m really just elaborating. I wouldn’t be saying it if it didn’t matter. 

Thank you so much for an extremely entertaining and educational class, Dr. Sexson. MSU will miss you.

Better late than never!

Because who's to say the lighthearted pleasure of dressing in costumes on Halloween should be reserved only for children? Why should we abandon our colorful breaks from the ordinary simply because we have gotten older?  Once upon a time, our imaginations were in shape and allowed us to live life with an open mind - a time in which our perceptions were not clouded with certainty. Let us not cast away symbols of our childhood, as these are the molds which have shaped us to be who we are today.

This video is very much related and every moment is worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBVJuA0jr6Y

My Displaced Wedding

We all have that aunt and uncle with whom we are ashamed to be seen in public. In my case, they are my aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Aaron. My most embarrassing memory of them is their behavior at my wedding in my uncle’s garden chateau in France. It was a beautiful scene with a fully-stocked table hors d’oeuvres – fruit platters, veggie trays, cracker sandwiches, teriyaki chicken skewers, and all other sorts of delicacies accompanied by an open bar. Basically, we had everything you could ever ask for. All of this food was surrounding our three-tier custom-made cake to be cut by my bride and I after the reception. While we were getting ready, the wedding guests starting showing up, the first of whom were Aaron and Elizabeth. The wedding went off without a hitch until my lovely bride and I went to cut the cake. There was already a huge chunk of cake missing out of it! Aaron and Elizabeth ended up confessing. Aaron said Elizabeth talked him into it. Elizabeth said that her lawyer friend who shows up just after they did convinced her to cut the cake. Personally, I think they both partook in the open bar a bit too freely. Needless to say, they’re never welcome back to any of my functions, or my garden.

If you weren’t able to decipher the myth hidden in this displacement, I will point out some hints. Aaron and Elizabeth were the first ones to the reception, which had anything one could desire. They performed the only forbidden act. The man was convinced by a woman. The woman was convinced by a snake… er, lawyer. They were banished. Give up? Of course you don’t. This is the story of Adam and Eve! But you knew that.

Calasso's Unbreakable Mold

    On pg. 174/5 in the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso tells a story of Athenian craftsmen. As Calasso puts it, the shaping of molds was the activity par excellence in ancient Athens. The Greeks knew that once made, their molds could be applied to an extremely wide range of materials for a very long time to come. The casts created using the mold will survive much longer than that which shaped them. Calasso goes on to say that "we live in a warehouse of casts that have lost their molds... In the beginning was the mold." This original mold is the foundation by which we live our lives day to day - myth.

    As Calasso states earlier in the book, myth is the precedent behind every action. I did not put that in quotes so as to purposefully plagiarize it, as he did from another sentient being who had thought that same thing in the distant past. There is no such thing as originality in life, as every possible scenario we face on a day-to-day basis has already been enacted within mythology, one way or another. Our job is simply to realize the extent of displacement that our own stories hold. Myths can be used to decode parts of your life by the century, decade, year, month, or even hour - the reward for doing so is yours to discover.

Bullet Ant Glove

Deep in the jungles of the Brazilian Amazon in the remote villbullet1.jpgage of Injuve lives the Satere-Mawe tribe. Several times a year, the Satere-Mawe Indians hold a painful 11-hour ritual in which boys as young as 12 must stick their hands in a specially-made pair of gloves, each one infested with a swarm of angry, stinging giant tropical bullet ants. No initiate can be considered a true Indian, a warrior, until he has worn the gloves not once, but 20 times. Said to be the most painful sting on earth, a stab from the bullet ant’s abdominal spear is 30 times worse than a bee sting. The tribe’s medicine man drugs the ants by soaking them in an herbal solution. Their stupor will only last long enough for them to be thrust one by one, stinger first, into the gloves. According to Satere-Mawe legend, these menaces provide the perfect test of one’s worthiness to take on adult roles. In less than an hour, the ants are awake. Trapped in the woven mitt, they writhe in angry desperation. They’re ready to be inserted in the ceremonial gloves. One by one, each young man steps up to the sacred pole, and submits his hands to the swarm. To help distract them from their blinding pain, the medicine man leads the young men in a dance around the sacred pole. To be seen as a true tribal warrior, each man must endure the punishment for more than ten minutes. With each sting, the bullet ant’s neurotoxin attacks the nerves, causing paralysis and terrible pain. Once the gloves are off, the stinging and burning will only grow more excruciating, though it is discouraged to display any signs of pain. It takes 24 hours for the toxins to dissipate completely. As the chief sees it, the ritual not only marks the initiates’ entrance into adulthood, it makes them better men. As they see it, if you live your life without any pain or suffering, it won’t be worth anything to you.

The Importance of Storytelling

Storytellers have played an integral role throughout the course of history, though their importance is often overlooked. As the picture above shows, I recently shared Scientology's creation story with my four room mates (who were, as you can tell, very enthralled with the tale). My telling and retelling of this story not only strengthens my understanding and memorization thereof, it also leaves an impression on my audience regarding a story they had likely never heard, or even considered before. It is by means of the Storyteller that we are able to fill the void between raw data and understanding. Such information must be presented in a way people both enjoy and understand. The Storyteller strives to share his tales in a way most memorable so as to achieve his ultimate goal: the recurrent sharing of his story with others by members of audiences past.

Scott's Potawatomi Creation Myth

These were the materials Scott brought in to illustrate the creation myth of the people of the Potawatomi tribe. Theirs is an earth-diver creation myth, telling of a pair of muskrats, the first trees, and a creator's three attempts at making people in a hearth. The underdone person came out white, the overdone person came out black, and the red person was juuuuuust right.

Tree-Hugger

Several Asian cultures believe humanity emerged from a bamboo stem.

"In Philippine mythology, one of the more famous creation accounts tells of the first man, Malakás ("Strong"), and the first woman, Maganda ("Beautiful"), each emerged from one half of a split bamboo stem on an island formed after the battle between Sky and Ocean. In Malaysia, a similar story includes a man who dreams of a beautiful woman while sleeping under a bamboo plant; he wakes up and breaks the bamboo stem, discovering the woman inside. The Japanese folktale "Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" (Taketori Monogatari) tells of a princess from the Moon emerging from a shining bamboo section. Hawaiian bamboo ('ohe) is a kinolau or body form of the Polynesian creator god Kāne."

^^Taken from Wikipedia^^

Needless to say, trees are important in all of mythology, whether you realize it or not. It is hard to escape the image of a tree when reading almost any myth. Be it the story of Daphne and Apollo, the story of Tree of Life, or even stories about the Dryads (Oak tree nymphs in Greek mythology), trees are constantly bewitching us and filling us with wonderment.

Scientology and its creation story

Our story begins 75 million years ago. There existed a galactic federation ruled by an alien overlord by the name of Xenu. Xenu let his federation get a little out of hand, and each planet in his care had reached a population of around 178 billion! When he heard he was to be deposed from power, Xenu knew he had to do something drastic. He devised a plan to gather billions of people together under the ruse of income tax inspections, and froze them all! He and his henchmen loaded the people into his fleet of space ships and flew them to a plan among the confederation known as Teegeeack. We now know this planet as Earth. Xenu placed all of the billions of frozen bodies around the base of every active volcano on Teegeeack and lowered hydrogen bombs into each of the volcanoes and detonated them simultaneously. This created a worldwide disaster and killed all but a few of the people instantly. The souls, then having been released of their bodies, floated upwards. Xenu foresaw this, however, and essentially created a giant soul-sucking vacuum cleaner to capture them all. He took the souls to a couple of cinemas - one in the Virgin Islands, one in Hawaii. Here, they forced them to watch "various misleading data" for 36 days straight. These souls, now having been turned evil, are the source of our everyday bad thoughts and feelings. The people who somehow survived the volcanic eruptions are the descendants of modern humans. True story!

As it was in the beginning... whatever that means.

As we discussed in class, humankind is overly worried about events yet-to-be and what exactly may come after life. Some people make it their goal to figure out the mystery of what, if anything, comes after this nearly century-long roller-coaster ride. Many people are so sure (blindly, I might add) of what comes after death that they are willing to execute people who disagree with them. What comes next? Is there an afterlife in which we are judged to be good or evil? Do we reincarnate as another life form? Or do we simply turn into earthworm food after our soul dies with our body? These are questions to which we may never know the answers. However, is it so far-fetched to wonder instead what may have come before life rather than after? People can be so preoccupied with the future they completely disregard the past. The answers may be in front of us, simply hiding in our unconscious. Maybe rather than trying to unveil the future, we should simply sharpen the memories of our pre-existential past.