- I define spirituality as believing in something that is greater than you. This thing that is greater than you could be anything. Spirituality has no rules and is different for every person. The best way I can define spirituality is by sharing what I find spiritual. My relationship with the ocean is spiritual because it is something that holds meaning and value and allows me to be a part of something bigger than myself. It is something that gives you faith and makes you feel safe.
- Spirituality and religion are extremely different. As stated above spirituality has no rules whereas religion is chalk full of them. Religion is done via incentives with the hope of salvation. Spirituality does not have incentives, people are spiritual because of the feeling it gives you. Religion tells people how to act while spirituality is formed by the way people act. A way in which they are similar is that people give them full selves to each of them, they can both be lifestyles rather than just parts of life.
- Creativity is a way for the mind to wander in a productive manner. It can involve anything from music to drawing to design. Most of the time in our every day lives we do things by the rules, creativity is a way to bend the rules and create new realities. It is an outlet for people to express themselves in ways that would not normally be able to. Creativity can stem from almost anything and grow into whatever one desires.
- My source of creativity is being outside. The outdoors, no matter where, in a city or on a hike, gives me a chance to see the world in new ways and explore. It opens my eyes to new sources of beauty and ways of life. There are so many different landscapes that come with the outdoors making opportunities limitless. Depending on where I am, the way in which I see the world and interact changes, allowing me to be creative and find new ways to adapt.
Archive for Unit 07
The things in which we observe with great detail shape who we are as people and how we see the world. As one walks down the street, the things that one puts most of their thought into is going to affect the things that they observe. In our culture today, as someone walks down the street they are probably looking down at their phone or blaring music into their ears making it nearly impossible for them to observe the world around them. People today are lookers rather than seers, as Grey would say in his chapter “Deeply Seeing” from the book Art as Spiritual Practice. Our inability to get out of our own heads, or most likely our phones, disallows us from truly seeing the world around us. Grey describes, “deeply seeing”, as a time when “our minds stop chattering and pays attention” allowing us to truly analyze and think about whatever is happening (72). Deeply seeing is not only crucial to embracing the world that surrounds us but also the world of art. As learned throughout this course and specifically in Tefler’s article, that “aesthetic reactions” are a huge part of interpreting and viewing art (9). Without deeply seeing something, one cannot have an aesthetic reaction and therefore they will have trouble understanding the arts.
Our ability to see “determines every aesthetic decision” because by actually seeing something rather than just looking, one uses more than just their eyes but also one’s “heart and mind” (Grey 72). For example, the pathway that leads to my house was redone the other day, unbeknownst to me, even though I had walked up and down it multiple times since the renovation. I was walking with my eyes open, as humans normally do, and therefore was definitely looking but I was in my own mind. The things my eyes perceived were not being seen but rather overlooked. In my opinion, it is the monotony of our every day lives that stop us from “deeply seeing” because we no longer think our attention can be “arrested by a person, object, or scene” in a way that pulls us back to reality (Grey 72). We no longer expect to be amazed by the things around us and therefore we have stopped trying to see things that seem unnecessary.
I would argue one point that the author makes and that is the idea of “egoic chatter” which is defined as an “isolated, self-absorbed state”, which the author believes stops us from deeply seeing (Grey 72). I believe there is a difference between being in your own head and being in a self-absorbed state. Being in a self-absorbed state is to me, is when a human is truly just thinking of himself or herself and nothing else. Being in your own head can involve a number of other things and people included. One could be thinking of friends, family, televisions, the list is endless, all of which could have nothing to do with them in a selfish manner. Therefore I believe it is not the fact that we are selfish humans who cannot stop thinking about ourselves enough to deeply see but rather it is as if we do not know what to look for.
Grey, A. (2001). Art as Spiritual Practice. The Mission of Art (1st ed., pp.205-233). Boston & London: Shambhala.
Telfer, E. (2002). Food as art. In Neill, A & Ridley, A (Eds.), Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosphical Debates (2 ed., pp.9-27). New York: Routledge.