Bah Humbook-Week 4-Discussion

[Emily Spencer]

As our friend Scrooge learned the hard way, people can and do change, even when it seems impossible to do so. In Scrooge's case, of course, it took the visits of three ghostly visitors to achieve that; I would like to think we can skip that part of it. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't fancy being taken on supernatural jaunts through my timeline.

Ghosts aside, words, as we all undoubtedly know, can have an equally life-altering quality, sometimes in the most unexpected of ways. It can be a word, a phrase, a plot, a character, anything at all, really.

Has there been a book that changed your perspective on something for the better? Let's discuss it in the thread below

[River Fenwick]

The book that comes to mind for this is Animal Farm by George Orwell. As we know, Animal Farm is about a bunch of animals who yearn for their freedom, with Mr. Jones being what the animals see as holding them back from achieving it. So, they rebel against him and win. They can meet to decide what they want to do, and everything should run smoothly, allowing them to continue to enjoy their freedom and live cordially with each other for the foreseeable future. This should be a great thing for them, right? Wrong. It all goes horribly wrong, exchanging one kind of ‘leadership’ they had from Mr. Jones for another, finding themselves no happier than they had been before the rebellion.

So, how did this change my perspective for the better? Well, I have always taken things at face value. If I think something seems wrong from my outside perspective, then the entire system has to be wrong. I believe I was relatively young when I first read the book, and it made me realize that not all the people and things caught up in a bad thing should be blamed for it, as they may not be willing contributors, or even have good intentions. Basically, I’ve learned to try to separate system components rather than lump them into a single label.

[Prof. Sindor Aloyarc]

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by neuroscientist David Eagleman is a book that explores concepts of the conscious and unconscious mind. He also has another book called "The Brain: The Story of You" that pairs nicely with this, and another of my favorites is "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife" which offers a variety of imaginative possibilities for what could happen after we pass on that I also found to be quite entertaining and thought provoking.

Incognito was the first of Eagleman's books I read, and it really helped change my perspective on the power of our subconscious self, encouraging readers to consider that "your conscious mind — the part you think of as you — is really the smallest part of what's happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find information."

This isn't necessarily an idea that was entirely new to me (I believed in how powerful our subconscious is), but I found the book both engaging and enlightening without bogging me down with dry writing or difficult to follow information, and the implications of really absorbing the concepts within has greatly affected how I perceive the behavior of myself and those around me.

It was a similar revelation in shifting my mindset that I had while truly reflecting on the "all is one" concept. The idea that everything in the universe is connected holistically is something I came across many times growing up, but an experience I had in my mid-20s made me really consider... What if everything (which of course includes everyone) actually is, in essence, you yourself? Beyond our perceived separation, is it possible that in the eternal infinity you could be literally living the lives of everyone around you without realizing it in your present experience? How might that change the way we empathize with or treat each other? Rather than taking the golden rule as figurative, should we "do unto others" as we'd have them do unto us because on some level they actually are us?

Even with as much information as we have about ourselves, there's so much going on that we don't understand, which makes for quite a terrifying and magical ride. Life is a fascinating mystery, and I love books like Incognito which explore how we tick and help change the way we look at the world around us.