Smells and Bells

  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...

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...

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...

Web Blog Sensory Interpretation Blog Prompt or 6? 5 senses... 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 they have these tags.   Also among your 7 or more posts you should respond specifically to ...

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...