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updated: 1/26/17

 


INSPIRATIONS

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.  Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)  Mathematical Circles

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Pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but  sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

 

David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech

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Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth." 
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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"LOVE AND DO WHAT YOU WILL"  St. Augustine

 

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Dass Guided Imagery

ALL GUIDED IMAGERY



ETHICS GOALS

[2A2] The second goal of the required leadership/ethics flag courses -- learn to make real-life ethical choices -- is closely related to the core purpose of the University of Texas, to transform lives for the benefit of society. It is also one of the basic education requirements of U.T.: “have experience in thinking about moral and ethical problems.”

our primary approach is the oldest: ethics guided by lovingkindness; more specifically, by three nonbinary emotions: biophilia, inner peace, joie de vivre

honi soit mottohoni soit motto[2A2f] To practice replacing fear and greed with love, compassion, tolerance, and the sympathetic imagination.

OTHER GOALS

honi soit motto[3C1] To unify the self: our goal is to maximize our potential by cultivating both sides of our brains, developing all our multiple intelligences.


LOOKING AHEAD: BEST AND WORST ON THURSDAY

LEADERSHIP: SINGLE: 30-40 DOUBLE 15-20 EACH BUT -30 IF NOT DONE

QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY ASPECTS OF THE COURSE?

 

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:; GUIDED IMAGERY, COMPLETE EMOTIVE ETHICS DISCUSSION FROM LAST TIME, QUIZ and then P1 GUIDED IMAGERY Blog DISCUSSION.

 


REVIEW: St. Augustine's essence of ethics:  

"LOVE AND DO WHAT YOU WILL." But what kind of "love"? how does it relate to nonbinary emotion, "empathy"; "sympathy"; "compassion"? the "sympathetic imagination"? the Brahmaviharas? caritas? biophilia? īśvará (atman)? etc. Can this kind of love defeat our fears? If not, what is the prognosis for homo sapiens?   see "Homo Empathicus"

 

[1] "EMPATHY" IN RELATION TO OTHER TERMS REVIEW: COMPASSION RIFKIN JAINISM  225; BUDDHISM empathy>joy 225>sympathetic joy, equanimity; [pp. 162-168] LEFT OFF AT 163

 

   MY THESIS: RIFKIN MUCH MORE LIKELY TO BE SUCCESSFUL BY BUILDING ON 5000 YEARS OF TRADITION RATHER THAN TRYING TO REINVENT THE WHEEL

 

[2] transition to today's topic: empathy/biophilia/love for all species, as well as other cultures, in this case Native American

[2] overview of 2-2 + 2-7

 

 


LOOKING AHEAD:

OVERVIEW: 1-17 Introduction 1-19 Emotive Ethics  1-24 Animals, Children, Feelings  1-26 Compassion and the Sympathetic Imagination  1-31 Power Animals and Native American Literature  2-2 Recovering the Animal  2-7 Transformation, Rebirth, Shapeshifting  2-9 P1A DUE  2-14 The Longhorn Texas Totem Animal  2-16 Compassion East and West  2-21, 2-23 Earthlings Compassion Test  2-28 P1b  Due 3-2 Hemingway, Toxic Aggression, and Animals 3-7 Dominion and Aggression, Genesis and Lord of the Flies  3-9 Swift and Carnism  3-21 Carnism and Sustainability  3-23, 3-28, 3-30 Carroll, Alice books 4-4 P2a due 4-6 Racism Alice Walker 4-11, 4-13, 4-18 Fowler, Beside Ourselves  4-20 Research Universities and Animals  Carroll, Adams 4-25 Boulle, Kafka  4-27 Paradise Regained Isaiah, Virgil  5-2 Paradise Regained Hicks, Davis 5-4 P2b due

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P1   DUE 2/9 !

You cannot pass the course without satisfactory essays.

REQUIREMENTS:

an accurate word count of at least 1400 words (not counting quotations)

and at least two images

and at least two of the required quotations:

[a] one from a scientific account of your animal (may be from the internet) or from the course anthology section of Animal Speak; and/or the course anthology section of Spirit Animals and/or“Power Animals in Bless Me Ultima, Harry Potter, and Black Elk Speaks: A Few Examples” and/or “Totemism and Power Animals, some definitions .”

 

[b] and one from  a library book not available in any way on the internet. You may choose one of the books on reserve listed below. (Needless to say, the quote from the reserve book can not be from pages reproduced in our course anthology. )

 

 

 

 

hrc  hrc

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE:

THIS IS YOUR JOURNEY UNDERGROUND.

Alice invites you to the fourth stage of the hero's journey, an exercise in the katabatic imagination, to a world view of yourself as the story of your descent into your personal unconscious, the collective consciousness of your society, and the great collective unconscious , back to the origins of our species, back to the time when the human-nonhuman boundary was easily crossed, a journey repeated thousands of times each year now as people go down into a caves such as Lascaux to marvel at the depictions of animals on the cave walls, reconnecting you with the animals and all the living beings from whom you descend. I invite you to the totem animal vision quest and/or to retrace the path of Gilgamesh, Orpheus, Theseus, Jason, Heracles, Demeter, Odysseus, Aeneas, Jonah, Lazarus, Dante, Alice and many others down into the underground to discover your self , to regain something or someone you  lost, to undergo a series of tests and degradations which will collapse or dissolve your old self, return you to a more primitive state so that you can be reborn, returning from the underground with new power and the knowledge of a final state of 'wholeness' or integration that connects you to all, enabling you to reach your full potential.

 

hrc 

At the entrance to Lascaux

hrc

in the cave

ENTER

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Alumna Swift Fox unburies a Native American Walrus Man hybrid totem in Alaska

  >honi soit motto

MOVING INTO THE ANIMAL WORLD, BECOMING ANIMAL

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AFRICA: THE ULTIMATE SOURCE

illustrated by a visit to Animal Kingdom Lodge in Orlando

honi soit motto

sign right outside our room!

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POPULAR CULTURE TODAY:

 


tower m otto tower m ottotower m otto

tower m otto tower m ottotower m otto

 

tower m ottotower m otto
tower m otto tower m otto

 

 

        

 Finding Your Power Animal in Fight Club

http://youtu.be/boj75h3urLU

tower m otto tower m otto

tower m otto

  RUMI,   "THE SEED MARKET

Can you find another market like this? Where, with your one rose / You can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where, for one seed / You get a whole wilderness?  For one weak breath / The divine wind?

You've been fearful/ Of being absorbed in the ground, /Or drawn up by the air. 

Now, your water bed lets go / And drops into the ocean, / Where it came from. / It no longer has the form it had, / But's still water. /The essence is the same.

This giving up is not a repenting. /It's a deep honoring of yourself. /When the ocean comes to you as a lover /Marry, at once, quickly,/For God's sake! /Don't postpone it!

Existence has no better gift. /No amount of searching /Will find this. 

A perfect falcon, for no reason, / Has landed on your shoulder, And become yours

 

FOX VIDEO

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tower m otto

hawk's shape as it flashed by instructor at Waller Creek;

video of visit of red-tailed hawk to instructor at Waller Creek

videos of instructor "flying"; seeing from, feeling the perspective of red-shouldered hawk


 

What a Spirit Animal  is NOT.

Spirit Animal Appropriation.

In pagan religions and systems, a spirit animal or totem is meant to be a representation of the traits and skills that you are supposed to learn or have. Online, saying something or someone is your spirit animal is a statement that said person or thing is a representation of you or what you want to be.

Friend 1: "Did you see Misfits last night?"  Friend 2: "YES. Nathan Young is my spirit animal."

#totem #gpoy #spiritanimal #pagans #totem animals

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spirit%20Animal

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Last month, the University of Montana, in response to protests from Native American student groups, passed a resolution against the asking of "what is your spirit animal?" in orientations and other meetings. The school cited "institutional racism" and "a need for greater cultural awareness" as causes for the change.

As the Tumblr user garconniere summed it up back in 2011:

yes, i am really uncomfortable with how often people say "person x is my spirit animal" or just randomly tag things "spirit animal" without thinking about it. for the longest time i didn't get what it even was supposed to mean… just look at the tag on tumblr and you see hockey players, fictional characters, movie stars, "hipster animals" and hey! even a few animals. it has come to my attention that it is trendy to throw a "spirit animaltheme party. (for the record, this is just dressing up as animals)

just take a second, step back and think about it before you throw around a term like spirit animal. is there a better way of saying what you're actually trying to convey? if you're talking about a person, could you say, "i have a lot of admiration for you/we're kindred spirits/you're my brother from another mother/sister from another mister?" if you're throwing a theme party, could you just throw an… animal themed party?

You could. But most casual Internet-ers wouldn't think of it, because most don't think of the spirit animal—the conceptual meme—as an appropriation. Most of us think of the term simply as a shorthand, one that is well-suited to a web culture that has been thoroughly influenced by Facebook and Tumblr and other social media. And one that has also been, at this point, thoroughly commercialized.

As The Toast recently summed things up in its glossary of the Internet: "spirit animal: here's something I like; I am not familiar with what a spirit animal is or does."

The Internet, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and "spirit animal" revealed a need: to take all the cultural products—people, things, ideas—that are pinging around on our screens and organize them and categorize them and express our appreciation for them. As the Internet's infrastructure built itself around identity expression—all those status updates and Likes and Instagrams and Vines, all those tweets and Tinder profiles and blog posts and Snapchats—the concept offered an easy way for people to share their affinities and aspirations, all with the conveniently low stakes of irony. As Miltner puts it, "Referring to a (human) celebrity or character as a 'spirit animal' brings in both the ironic and the performative, and irony and performance are core, animating features of Internet culture."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/your-spirit-animal-a-cultural-investigation/382369/

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Begin with the animal.

You can use any selection process you like but the emphasis should be on the animal choosing you rather than vice versa. Then you can then draw on your memories and/or the scientific observations of others (worth extra points) to establish the traits of the animal that are most relevant to you.

Here are three contemporary guided meditations that may help you find a power animal in the Native American tradition:

Steven Farmer

Shamanic

Denise Linn

 

honi soit motto

“Stress Recess” Stressed by papers? Tests? Relationship issues? For these and other stressors, take a few minutes to check out a new interactive website called “Stress Recess” at http://www.cmhc.utexas.edu/stressrecess, a component of the UT Counseling and Mental Health Center. This site is loaded with videos, animation, video games, body scans, quizzes, clickable charts and graphics and practical information tailored to YOU. Learn what causes stress, signs of stress and—most importantly---what you can do to manage stress in healthy ways!


     

     honi soit motto

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