Smells and Bells

 In her book Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India Diana Eck discusses the importance and role of vision in Hindu religious practices. One element of this that stood out, is how the idea of looking in Hindu practice seems to be reciprocal. Looking upon the statue of a deity is a significant religious act and so is being looked at by one. The gaze of a newly sanctified statue is considered powerful enough that when their eyes are painted on they must not be looking directly at someone. This significance of looking, with vision having the power to transfer blessings and curses between humans and gods is particularly interesting when considered in comparison with other religious contexts. In The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch by Constance Classen, an important topic is the importance of touch in Medieval Christianity. During the era of relics, a different example of a religious object thought to be imbued with holiness, in some sense, and able to bestow its blessings on...

I enjoy thinking of the senses in whimsical ways. Our noses act as time machines transporting us back to our fondest memories. Magic happens inside of our eyes and brains popping images of anything we’d like to see into our minds. Our eardrums get tickled by invisible waves, causing us to dance. Butterflies flutter in our tummies at the touch of someone special’s lips to ours. Life is granted to us through tasting the flavors of the world.  I’ve contemplated the absurdity of our ability for sight specifically for a few years now. As I became older I naturally began having many revelations regarding how the world really works . One being the fact that the reason we see things is simply because our eyeballs capture the light reflected off of.. well literally everything. I learned about this process during my junior year of high school in AP Pysch, how our retinas capture the light reflected off of objects to create images in our brains, but never realized the actual hecking craz...

  Web Blog Sensory Interpretation Blog Prompt or 6? 5 senses... Welcome!  Here is the Web post  Assignment for our class, and general guidelines for what to include in your posts Sensory Interpretation Web Blog Posts  (6 posts on each of the senses, 5% each, plus one summarizing blog post the last week of class 10%, for a total of 40%).  Short reflection writing assignments to be posted on a blog set up specifically for this class  here . Students will "log" what they are learning about the relationship between the senses and "religious" experience throughout the term, and be able to comment on one another's questions and insights.  You should make at least 7 posts, @one every two weeks. Make sure you have one post each tagged with "taste", "smell", "hearing", "sight", "touch" or "6th sense."  To assure you will get credit for covering each of the six senses in your blog posts, edit them to make sure th...

Over the past month, I got really sick. It got to the point where they thought I had gotten the coronavirus and I spent a really “wonderful” day visiting 2 hospitals and being put in the COVID section. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t open my eyes to see because light would send piercing pain throughout my head. I got accustomed to being wrapped in a blanket when I got intense chills. I couldn’t smell because of my stuffed up nose. I was used to hearing my doctor on the phone asking the question, “have you been in contact with anyone who has been investigated for corona?”  My senses were overloaded and not working at the same time. I couldn’t enjoy what I used to enjoy. Have no fear, I did not have the corona. Instead, I got a really fun case of mono. How’d I get that in quarantine? I have no idea. Already being chronically ill, getting any other disease makes it feel ten times worse.   The view I had of my crocs in hospital room #2  All I wanted was to go back t...

For most people, sight is the most heavily relied on sense that is used. To read this you're using your eyes to send these words to your brain in order to process them. Humans take in an extraordinary amount of visual information each day. This is used consciously and unconsciously to make decisions that impact our lives. Often when we want to understand something our first instinct is to look at it. This could be an object, an animal, or perhaps another person. We observe traits of the thing we are looking at in order to better understand it. In her book Darśan , Diana Eck says "not only is seeing a form of 'touching', it is a form of knowing. ... We speak of 'seeing' the point of an argument, of 'insight' into an issue of complexity, of the 'vision' of people of wisdom"(Eck, 1998). (CC BY-SA 2.0) Often when we wish to express to someone that we understand something we will say "I see". Our society has widely revolved ar...

Something scary that I heard once is that people who become blind see darkness, but people who are born blind see NOTHING. That is just such a crazy concept to me that makes me so thankful for the fact that I can see. While all senses are important, I feel that sight is one of the more important ones because it helps to confirm things. Sometimes you can mistake what you hear, mistake what you smell, and might even need a second opinion on how something tastes. But in most cases, when you see something, you see it, and sometimes it can be hard to un-see it.  Apart from performing the necessary top-down and bottom-up processes, sight can be depicted to mean so much more, like how "seeing" is a religious experience to people of Hindu descent. "Darsan" is a religious connection that one shares with their deity in the Hindu religion; the people are figuratively "seeing" their deities. One of the things that struck me as interesting was how Darsan is ...

Diana Eck starts her book by saying that “in India’s own terms, seeing is knowing.” (Eck 11) However, she also talks about how we all see differently. She writes how we “reach out and grasp the ‘object we see, either in our immediate range of perception or through the medium of photography, is dependent upon who we are and what we recognize from past experience.” (Eck 15)   Chicken tenders that make me very happy when I see them.  It’s true that seeing is incredibly important. It’s important for religions, life, love, and everything in between. It allows us to register what other people feel when they don’t voice it. Seeing allows us to see the story the stained glass in a church tells. However, Eck’s point of how we all see things and how we attach ourselves to visuals that we are familiar with is very important. Whether we know it or not, we are all stuck in our comfort zone. We all like our little bubble that we sometimes burst out of to try new things when w...

“Seeing is believing,” a sentiment I learned from that ghost on the Polar Express. Sight as a sense seems to transcend just seeing the world around. To see is to understand. To wake up we open our eyes to perceive the world. We see the truth, a new perspective means looking at something from a different angle. Vision becomes a part of faith to see the divine both literally and figuratively. Not The Polar Express Mountain In Darsan: Seeing the DivineImage in India , Diana Eck talks about seeing is a vital part of Hindu faith in India. The seeing of the divine becomes some important that “the places [to see the divine] becomes an icon” of the divine itself (Eck 73). Seeing is a vital part of the religious experience and feeling a connection to the divine. Being able to see the divine in the real world is integrated into the religion unlike the Puritan idea that religion must be entirely mental. Eck refers the rejection of religious images as a “Western antagonism to imaging ...

As an amateur cook, I have learned one thing, sight is what matters more than anything else, now don't get me wrong, taste matters, it matters a whole heck of a lot. But dear reader, would you eat something that looked like putrid vomit or would you eat something that looked fresh, beautiful, and overall appetizing. When I was in a culinary program I was taught one simple thing, we eat without eyes, if the food does not look good than the food in return will not be good. Jumping furthering into my point, think about the last time you went to a nice restaurant and think about the colors, the arrangement of the food and even the plating. Everything matters. For example, you go to a cheap off the highway dive and you order chicken and french fries, it comes out in a red basket with brown paper under a bed of golden french fries and even more golden brown chicken fingers. When looking at the meal your first thought could be "wow, fried, fresh and delicious", at least that i...

Vision to me has always been a funny thing. As someone who didn't need glasses until around elementary school, I wish I could say I remember what it was like to not need vision correction. Without my glasses, my terrible, terrible vision can only do so much. Anything outside my pathetically small range of vision (which is less than a foot) looks like a wonderful surrealist painting of colorful blobs and shapes. As a visual artist and writer, my vision is important to me. Though I save very little of my vision for religion, I cannot deny the very significance which religion relies on sight. Matthew T. Rader In Darśan , Diana L. Eck highlights the importance of vision and visuals in Hinduism and the religion. From sculptures to mosaics to buildings, the physical appearance of different religious aspects are fundamental to the understanding of Hindu culture. She says, "The very images of the gods portray in visual form the multiplicity and the oneness of the divine" (...

I typically begin writing these posts by first thinking about that particular sense and my favorite thing about it or something that sticks out to me, but I find this tricky with vision. I think it may be because sight is such a pervasive sense. Sight is so intertwined with our other senses. When one sees a beautiful flower they are draw in to take a sniff of its perfume. The presentation of a plate of food at one's favorite restaurant can add to the taste experience. When one sees a fluffy blanket in the isle of a store they will reach out to touch it, but not reach out and touch a simple plastic bottle. When one hears the crunch of leaves next to them they use their sight to see who or what is near them. Diane Ackerman describes sight in  A Natural History of the Senses as "the great monopolist of our senses" because "vision can... collect bushel basket of information as it goes" (Ackerman, 229-230). Dog smelling flowers © Sonny Annesley  The "bush...

In Darsan by Diana Eck I learned a lot about Hinduism and the importance of sight within the religion. For the Hindu, sight is a gateway to worshiping deities, holy men, and holy places. For the Hindu, when they are in the presence of a significant Darsan they not only get the opportunity to see God, but they also get the opportunity to present themselves to God.  I also learned about the Hindu worshiping technique of the Puja. During the Puja, the worshiper will take their murti (Image or icon of a deity) and they will bath it in milk and cover it in honey or ghee. These are poured on the murti because it is considered the best they can offer. The murti will also be covered by flower petals as well. This part of the ritual reminded me of the reading we did about Afro-Caribbean religions and that only the best parts of the animals were cleaned and offered to their deities.  In total, I enjoyed learning about the Hindu religion and it made me think about how much I take...