Smells and Bells

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...

Sometime in April, we discussed sight in Hinduism, specifically, darsan. Diane Eck’s book, Darsan, helped us understand the divine image in India, how sight embodies the holy experience.  Although I learned that we have the potential to smell infinite scents, 70% of our body’s sensory receptors are in our eyes. I think sight is so overwhelming that it acts as the bridge to connect all of our sensations together, to understand scent comes from objects and instruments produce sound. Being able to observe the world is the way we begin to understand.  It’s difficult to overstate the importance of sight in our everyday lives, I am able to type this reflection by seeing my words. How is sight used in ritual? I think sight is the primary sense used in orienting ourselves in a setting. You use your sight to determine what is reality and what is illusion. In this sense, it can be difficult in Western contexts to know when you’ve “found God” in a visual sense, as well as an emb...

“Hindu thought is most distinctive for its refusal to make the one and the many into opposites. For most, the manyness of the divine is not superseded by oneness. Rather, the two are held simultaneously and are inextricably linked.” (Eck, pg. 28) The section of Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India was really interesting to me. Usually when you see something you take it as face value, instinctively categorizing it into whatever niche your brain thinks it fits. We divide animals, plants, objects, even other humans into often arbitrary categories when our vision goes unchecked. In such a sight-based religious practice, it would be easy to see how one could think of deities as unattached to each other, each having distinct and separate attributions mutually exclusive with others. However, in Hinduism, this difference does not mutually exclude oneness. When explaining away the visual distinctions we make between humans, whether it be due to race or gender or body shape or some other v...

Street musicians in Chicago performing on buckets Throughout the reading, the same though continue to remain in my mind that Anne Rasmussen posed in the beginning of her writings: What is music?  Although the answer seems clear, there are people who find find ambient "background" noise as music. Is the difference in music or not that intention and effort put in? Even the presence of an instrument doesn't exactly equate to people considering it music. Think, for example, about a novice playing the saxophone (or many wind instruments, actually), people around them may say that it's not music and may even call it "racket". Older people talking about music of a younger generation may call it noise ("turn off that noise!"). This eliminates the idea that just an instrument is needed to indeed make something musical. For that matter; What is an instrument?  Colloquially, instruments pop into our heads that are made with the intention to produ...