Assignment: Title an essay of at least two thousand words, "stand outside the person standing outside yourself and write what you see." Remember to incorporate quotes from Ram Dass's The Witness, in your course anthology. Most relevant here might be the discussion of seeing yourself from above, as if you were moving around in a small town. Points will be deducted for less than FOUR quotations. In addition, because visual rhetoric is a component of the grade for the course, you must include ALL pictures of yourself in "action" in the course that are on our website. (Select "Pictures" and then go through the folders downloading the relevant pictures. Then incorporate them in color in your text). Points will be deducted for every picture of you in the course that is missing. (You may add additional pictures also, if you wish.) The purpose of the pictures, of course, is for you to stand outside yourself and see yourself, literally. Hence you must actually discuss what you see in the picture for at least two of the pictures. All pictures are to be placed in the text where they are most relevant to the text. None are to be placed at the end. …stand outside the person standing outside yourself and write what you see…   I’ve had moments of extreme clarity in my life.  They are few and far between.  It’s when everything is a maelstrom of emotion, chaos, and uncertainty.  At those moments, it seems easier to give up.  Questions of “Why” and “What if” plague my thoughts, and as in a hurricane, the inner walls are the must tumultuous.   Suddenly, it becomes starkly calm as the of the eye storm moves onto the scene. At this moment, the noise in your head just stops.  And you see, and hear, and perceive everything as it should be.  At this moment, you can “stop and face what’s right before us. [You] can look at what is, (156)” I always wonder why you can’t accomplish this all the time.  “What’s required is the dispassionate Witness within. (156)”  Even so, I feel like I am very self-aware, in the respect that I perceive my unwarranted anger, I can see the jealousy that inspires malicious dialogue and I can hear the contemptible words that I some say.  I know that I am being difficult or whiny or lazy, and I feel as if I could easily control this situation.  In fact, I am aware, at those moments, that I could control the situation.  Often times, however, I just don’t.  Why doesn’t my Witness have a stronger voice? I think there is a definite conscious decision one makes when shaping who they want to be.  I often see people as they are and assume there was not much they could do about how they turned out, and if there was, it was not something they realized.  Perhaps their Witness stayed dormant.  As I encounter my own demons, however, I start to think otherwise.  Sometimes I act the fool and could not have predicated it.  Retrospectively, in those situations, I can observe the path that got me to that uncomfortable situation, and then decide from then on to handle it differently.  More often, however, my Witness is almost always awake, and if I decided to control my actions and my thoughts and my feelings at the moment they were occurring, and tried hard enough, I have a feeling that I could do that. Part of this course asked us to construct personal goals to try and achieve by the year’s end.  I know that every goal that I listed is certainly obtainable.  I wouldn’t have included it if it wasn’t—I hardly attempt something that I know I will fail at.  As the term went on, however, it was much easier to resign to failure with my goals than to even attempt them.  I started the course out with gusto.  I read every assignment and constructed what I thought were thoughtful journal responses.  My goal was to do as much as I could.  This is college—you’re supposed to better yourself.   I can see myself completing many of my later assignments, however, at the very last minute, and not out of the want to read something new and connect it to my life.  Mostly, I was afraid I would be left behind in the class.  The fear equated to me not wanting to be deemed “lazy” in regards to my fellow classmates.  I had some sort of reputation to keep up, not only to myself, but to the world. People needed to know, or at least assume, that I was smart and diligent.  This, I see now, is a classic case of clinging “to one dimension of our identity at the expense of the others. (153)” What about my other goals?  What about connecting my writing?  What about expanding my mind?  I could have put less emphasis on how I stood compared to others and instead, studied, read, contributed to the person I would like to be instead of putting the minimum effort into assignments that didn’t interest me and forsaking the creative opportunities in others.  So this role I identified with, a smart kid that did well in school, “is ultimately incomplete and transient. (154)” And the interesting aspect of this is that, I can see it, and I’ve seen it all year-- the inactive personality, the lazy approach to schooling, the lack of initiative, I know it’s happening! And the question is, why, when I see the way that I’m being and why, when I don’t like the way that I’m being, do I continue being that certain way? Why do I allow myself to be restricted by silly conventions and competitions that I fully know will not define my ultimate individual?  I will have to step just once more outside of myself, outside of this entity that is aware of my failure to escape the easy route. Though initially I perceive my semester rather pessimistically, I see that there are moments worthy of gold stars and self-praise.  In looking back over the readings for our first optional journal, I see my detailed annotations on every passage, and the arrows and lines connecting sentences and passages together.  It was a happy moment for me, but also sad, to think back about my former gung-ho enthusiasm.  Later in the course I hardly did my journals, and not because school work was overwhelming, but because it was just easier not to. I am happy with the initial approach I had in this course.  I found the outdoor elements of the course very helpful and I am most proud of my progress in connecting to the natural world around me.  It takes giving up a lot of the easy conventions of who you are to step away from society, materialism, and to really attempt to be one with nature.  At the ranch, we were asked to write about that singular space surrounding our being.  For someone who is not used to roughing it out in nature and connecting to a deeper or different sense of the world, I made every attempt to immerse   myself in the situation.  Babe was a fabulous sight— she was gigantic image of something normally deemed small and quirky.  She had a persona all of her own and I wanted to connect with her.  It wasn’t so much the 30 bonus points that drove me to kiss Babe on the nose; it was that it had never been done before.  Stepping outside of myself, I wonder if that was a drive to outdo other individuals or to outdo Babe or to simply get her comfortable enough to allow me to do so.  I really believe that it was the later, and that is a successful venture in my book.   I am sure of this because of how I later handled the situation with the donkeys.  Kissing their ears was an easy five points to receive, but instead of having my way with them and leaving, I stayed with them, petted them, and enjoyed their company.  I was happy with myself for being able to do this, and not forcing it in any ways.  I was already making the most of the course.                 And I am happy with our subsequent treks into nature. Zilker Park and Waller Creek, as well as the turtle ponds—they all were fun and interesting and a way for my to apply the goals I was trying to attain.  I could see some of my classmates resign themselves to going through the motions of the activities, but I can see that I really tried.  I took myself out of a comfortable element and attempted something new.  I wasn’t always successful.  During our meditations, my mind would wander.  I’d get bored.  I would forget what we were there.  My Witness saw all of this occurring, grabbed my mind by the horns, and steered me in the intended direction.  I let it!  I wanted it! So I made my attempts as best as I could.  I tried really hard and succeeded by my standards.  And my Witness saw it happen.  My Witness also saw the neglect of my once coveted attributes.  I left one of these attributes off my goals lists, mostly because I thought I’d have no problem nurturing it and maintaining its integrity.  I have always prided myself on my creativity, and figured college would give me thousands of ways of bringing it to life.  Little did I know, I would have to seek out these opportunities. Towards midterm I realized this and made a few attempts to nurture my right brain’s needs.  For our ROADMAP, I whipped out my formally untouched stock pile of fabrics I had drug to college and created a timeline through pieces of material that signified events in my life.  This got me sewing for the first time in college, and ignited a chain reaction of creative events.  For our Alice in Wonderland skits in Zilker Park, I made Alice’s shirt, a creation I am still proud of and wear today.  I also constructed less notable capes for the Queen’s, but nevertheless, I did it.  I found these opportunities to create.  I feel I took the most initiative around this time to actually immerse myself into Austin and college life.  That night, I went back to the Oriental Garden’s for the Japanese Moon festival and witnessed a plethora of people like myself and quite unlike myself gathering to view the spectacular sites as well as listen to some truly enchanting music.  I continued sewing on into the weeks and made my attempts to attend other cultural events. I even created a short film for the University Film Alliance, and I felt as if I was on the right track in accomplishing all of the goals I set out for myself before school started and for this class. I suppose the satisfaction of accomplishment began wearing off, and my Witness watched as I stopped drawing, sewing, and sketching out my newest ideas for a movie. I was once at the head of the class, now, there is no initiative to maintain that position.  I had once reached for the hammer, and now I’m content to watch it go to someone else.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because my motives behind receiving the hammer were not all that commendable.  And I’m not worried about my grade-- I’m pretty sure that I will make an A in this class.  It upsets me that I know exactly where I’ve failed and I know that if I had just made the conscious effort to succeed I probably would have.             I have one very major disappointment about my participation in this class.  Part of the reason why I chose this E603 was because of Alice in Wonderland and the various assignments surrounding the stories by Charles Dodgeson.  Not only do I wish we had spent more time as a class on the subject matter, I wish I had taken the time to study the annotated works in depth on my own.  Though Alice was one of the main reasons for joining the class, web interactivity was the second reason, and I think that I have done an effective job in participating in that sense.  I am really proud of my web-bot.  The goal was to make Owen Wilson interactive, and I feel that he responds appropriately to many questions.  Sometimes when I am bored I go and chat with him.  It’s nice to have created something that you’re pleased with and that can give you hours of entertainment in the future.  My only wish is that his creation was not done in vain.  I hope, for one, other users realize that Owen has many programmed responses and pattern responses, and therefore can talk to about many things, and two, that they can make their bot just as detailed.  Regardless, my Witness commends my achievements in that domain, and only wishes that I had worked on Time Management in order to maximize all of my accomplishments.  I can see myself busying away on a computer, typing furiously at an obscene hour of the night, and then becoming so tired that I force myself to bed, but not before setting my alarm for an extra early start.  If only I would take all the hours I waste doing nothing and start my projects EARLY!             So overall, I have had a mixture of failures and successes.  I have dabbled with each of the goals I had set out for myself initially, but I still have quite a ways to go with the majority.  As for this class, I think that there should be more creative opportunities afforded to us, although forced creativity is not creative at all.  Instead, I suppose, I hope that I will view my patterns from above and next time I see myself piddling around, my Witness will jump to chastise my laziness.