The Sixth Sense.

By -
In a world that avoids all things magic, I have come to the understanding that there is no one real reality. Different cultures dictate what is real and what is not. In the past year, I have dabbled in reality-bending myself, I have read books that have made me question what is real? Are there dimensions that are overlapping with ours? How can we really know what we are seeing is what other people around us are seeing. 
The world's a mind fuck, to say the least, the sixth sense is just another way that people use to reflect that. I understand that what I see is not always real. I live in a reality dictated by the drugs that my doctors shove down my throat so that I will not see what others do not see. This always made me question what is real. I am a person that has suffered from severe paranoia my entire life. What I heard and what I saw from a young age was not the same as my fellows, so out of fear and conformity I went to the doctor, I got pills that would make the shadows disappear and the voices turn to a low mumble. In some cultures, I would have been deemed a shaman or profit, but in the west, I was deemed in a state of psychosis. 
What is your reality, and what makes it yours?

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMay 12, 2020 at 9:09 AM

    Don't hold back, Rey. What seems clear in what we've been reading and discussing is the very real, palpable effect on people of the fact that "Different cultures dictate what is real and what is not." Thus as you say, "In some cultures, I would have been deemed a shaman or profit, but in the west, I was deemed in a state of psychosis." The social construction even of what we sense and know can marginalize us, if that's what those in power want and make it so. Or elevate us as shamans and prophets

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more