First draft of the final draft of the self paper

I have been in Andy’s classes all last year and I tell you he has opened my eyes in many ways I see shit differently and sometimes I pull back and realize what i am doing and wonder to my self the 5 W's. So I looked at this year as to be even better you might say but I was deeply disappointed I really don’t feel this RD. Laing guy. I am not a fan plan and simple. He doesn’t rock my boat I don’t feel that his ideas, theories, or arguments about dreaming, our childhoods, and our sensual awareness and embodiment are true and relate-able on my part. Don’t get me wrong this guy has some great ideas and I really understand where he’s coming from. I guess im taking a very hard pessimistic view on this essay but I really don’t think any of this matters people will never change, they will be who there parents are and there parents are and there parents are until the sun implodes and we all die. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. I like the quote "his demonstration that the ordinary person is a shriveled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be". It is very visual and when I read the line in his essay I can see a person all wrinkled and lost all its innocence. RD Laing is an old man that talks about old man things that hold no meaning in my everyday life. I am not an ignorant person so I have not completely shut him out

Laing is a very insightful man with all the extras. He doesn’t have very many complex answers but his answers are to the point and do not beat around the bush. I do not agree with him completely though I feel that he is white and black with no gray area. Where I think there has to be a gray area and little to none black and white area. People do take things serious but maybe some one takes something very important to the but to someone else it is unimportant. Person A takes sneakers seriously cares about them and understands them in and out but the next guy Person B hates shoes and barely wears them and is more in to stamps or something. Both people have that hunger and passion for their loves but no in the same area but it is still the same intense feeling. No matter what your "love" might be its love and it means the same it’s all generic feeling everyone has it but for different things. I don’t really believe in half the things Laing talks about, I don’t feel that life is so cut and dry because if it was then people would all be the same and everyone would do everything this guy is talking about. Even Laing himself doesn’t follow his own ideas. its all a chaotic mess that no one should try to change, and if people try to change it people are going to have to die and no one likes people dying so no one is going to be able to change it. Laing wrote his paper and all his wonderful ideas just to make a buck to try and live his life to the fullest and he wasn’t writing his essay thinking that hey one day I hope a history class will look at my work and dissect it. he was just looking to do what he loved to do and what he loved to do was to write passionately about his feeling and his feelings take it or leave it I don’t agree with so im going to leave most of them, I will take some and use them in my own life but not completely change everything to look back to my childhood or think about why I am dreaming certain things I sleep because im tried and it feels good.

The sensory exercises were to get us connected back to our lives and not alienate ourselves from our bodies. We as people do not connect or even listen to our bodies we go through life missing everything that should be “normal”. The exercises we did were stupid I believe because no one really took them serious. But the best one we did was the blindfold going from the first floor back up to our classroom. People were trying to get back to the room and it sounded very funny but it was intense not to see anything at all. We were walking through the school while it was a normal day kids in class and in the halls and a group of kids with blindfold and tape around or across there eyes it was very humorous. There were a lot of people trying to keep the exercise true and genuine but most of the students were dicking around and not really doing it. I was not one of those kids I was really trying to do the blind fold and experience it for what its worth. I really thought it was interesting that it wasn’t as easy as I thought I was going to be to walk up the stairs and get in the class room with out any vision. I would rather be born blind and then go blind, it would be so much easier to cope with then seeing the grass is greener on the other side and then being told to go back to my own shitty place. But in the end all of this stuff is all useless no one will ever look at this like we as a class are looking at our senses no one gives a dam about anything until they have to deal with it. We all as a hole of people suck we don’t do anything we take what’s given to us and we live the life we think we want with the things given to us by the guys behind the desk, the people we call them. The real powerful people the guys that no one hears about and who some people call "god". those people tell us what to feel and how and when to feel it and we have to go with it no matter what so fuck it, im going to live my life the happiest way I can inside those boundaries.

Laings argument about childhood is we don’t remember it and if we were to remember our childhood we would be more in touch with ourselves. I don’t think that is one hundred percent true I think that if you believe that then no one at all is in touch with themselves. I can barely remember my childhood mainly I feel is not everything was looked at as that important. I guess though if you look at it like that then if you were in touch with your childhood you would remember it now and there for you are in touch with yourself on a more meaningful level than just the industrial fabricated person on the outside that thinks they are in touch with themselves. That’s where I can agree with him but I still don’t feel that he can honestly say that just because you don’t remember your childhood exactly then you are not in touch with yourself.

When Andy asked the class to write ten things that happened to us in our childhood I could only come up with six and it was hard to come up with those six. It was much harder then I thought it was going to be picking ten things that happened to me during my childhood

Laings argument about dreaming is that he thinks that your dreams are your experience and remembering your dreams will also have you get in a deeper touch with yourself. I don’t think that it is your experience per say but I don’t think that your dreams are about what you have thought about, what your thinking about, and what you will think about. I barely dream I feel, but when I tell people that they tell me that its not that I don’t dream its that I don’t remember my dreams.

In class Andy gave us a few questions to think about, riddles, brain teasers, and actual physical problems. We were giving the problems to figure out but as we were trying to find out the problem we had to look at how and why we were thinking the way we were thinking about solving the problem. There was one problem called the cocaine addicts problem, there were nine dots three by three. You had to make four lines but you could not pick up the pen. So I tried a few times and I thought I figured it out asked Kyle if it was the right answer because he said he had solved it. He told me it was not the right answer and I continued to work and work and no solve the problem. Once everyone was given enough time to solve it we went over it and my answer was the right answer. I was so mad and I could not believe he lied to me, but the real reason I was mad is I listened to him and did not believe in myself that I had the correct answer. So looking back at it and the way I was thinking about the problem was very interesting because everyone was thinking about how to solve it and how they were thinking and I was thinking about how to solve it, how I was thinking, and why I was wrong and how to fix it. My thought process was divided into thirds instead of everyone else’s was divided into halves.

Everyday during our feeling part of class we were asked to write how we feel, why we felt like that and so on. It was humorous to me because everything I wrote was the same I feel tired I hate school and everything was along those lines. And we had to write this everyday and I absolutely hated it there was no reason for it. I would understand maybe during the weekend or something but in school? School sucks and my feeling are linear and they rarely change. We also watched care bears and read some excerpts. Watching the care bears was one of the craziest things I had seen in along time. You don’t realize how brainwashing those shows and movies are when you are younger, but once you get older and watch them you can tell why you acted certain ways and felt certain ways. Those shows put you in moods and feelings that aren’t necessary yours as a person, it just what a color box tells you how to feel in that situation. That type of shit is good and bad all in the same mix. I think children should be told how to feel on certain topics that can not yet be explained in terms they will understand. Little kids should be treated with the aught most care because anything that happens to them now will shape there lives in some way. So some brainwashing is required but to completely brainwash a kid is evil and not a good thing for anybody.