Pearce4, Hughes4, Walsh5

Pearce Ch.4- For this assignment, I started by jumping back on the Pearce marry-go-round. He took me idea hopping through the synthesis, dramatic breakthroughs, visions, and experiences of other people. He started by explaining St.Paul’s formula, which I highly disagree with what Pearce’s assumption was about this, then I was taken off in the next paragraph on a journey about Bertrand Russell, followed by Albert Einstein, Arnold Toynbee, James R., Newman, the Kazantzakis, Jean-Paul Sartre, St. Augustine, Laski, John Wesley, Pere Teilhard, the Platonic retreat, Piaget, Nietzche, John Dalton, Wiliam James, Wallas, Mircea Eliade, Nirvana, Hamilton, Bruner, Douglas Hunt, Carl Jung, David Bohm, LSD, William Butler Yeats, Ellman, Mozart, and Jungian.
This time instead of talking about eggs, I found out sporadically about this hypothesis called Eureka! What can I say about Eureka? Overall, nothing. Pearce starts talking about throughout his arguments and halfway-explained conclusions about how people discover Eureka, a term not thoroughly explained, but pointed out as having a meaning of illumination. It’s hard to find what an author is really trying to say when readers have to siphen through off topic discussions.
Hughes Ch. 4- I found it difficult reading about dreams. To some people, who are able to recall their dreams, you hear of how people feel dreams are meant to be interpreted. A lot of people see dreams as a foreshadow, or a sign. Then others, like me for instance, have a hard time remembering dreams, so it is hard to say that we feel a dream could tell us anything about our lives since we don’t really have them. It is rare that I will wake up in the morning, or even during the night, remembering a dream. Maybe it depends on certain body factors, like being at total ease that you can drift yourself into a dream. Or maybe you have to be at a certain consciousness level to recall a dream. The fact is though, I find that a dream is something a person has and it is to their personal beliefs what a dream means to them. The dreams that I recall are always happy, and usually always involve meeting someone famous, or winning a game, or race. I feel this may not be a foreshadow really telling me that I am meeting someone famous, but it is a personal motivation to work towards my dreams and goals. I feel that your mind knows how important some dreams, if they would come true, would mean to your heart and I feel that our body responds by trying to self-motivate and push ourselves to achieve what we wish for. Other occurrences like nightmares, dreams about death, whether it is personally or witnessing someone else, or strange visions, I believe are results of a tired mind playing tricks, and pretty much just shooting out any thoughts.
Walsh Part 5-Shamanism is not something I believe in, nor will ever experience. After watching the movie in class, I found Shamanism to just be a colt looking for more followers. It was very weird seeing these people shake, cry, topple around while sitting on the floor, feeling as if they were floating within themselves, listening to some chant, while smoking up in a dark room with Indians, as well as envisioning snakes flying around towards them, and Technicolor alligators floating around amidst the snakes, and then sit there to watch this abstract color show for about ten minutes, symbolizing the visions towards the end. I did not relate to this at all and can see why it wasn’t a seller among the videos for the U.S. It was also weird in the beginning watching an animal get killed too.