Personal Philosophy
Essential Questions
- What is the purpose of your existence?
- What is happiness and what makes you happy?
- What does it mean to live a meaningful life?
- To what extent can literature shape your personal philosophy on happiness and meaning?
Heart, Mind and Soul - Photoshop Art Piece
Heart, Mind and Soul - Written Poem
We come out of the darkness to see the first light
deep within, we feel the start of our new life.
Our true instincts kick in
Given to us by the Earth within.
The rivers flow the blood of the Earth
The same way our veins have kept us alive from birth.
All things living are connected in some way
Yet we turn away
And let the beauty decay.
We destroy this beautiful place that gave us life.
The world’s skin is fragile and we still stab her with a knife.
The separation between mankind and nature is the great division
People have let go of the world but held onto religion.
They talk about a God that created all things
A man that rules all. The king of kings.
But we turned our heads in the wrong direction
God does come from our own reflection
God is something we see everyday, yet we don't make the connection.
We tear trees down and flood the oceans with our waste
The idea to respect nature has been erased.
The idea of greed and power has made us violent
So we search for resources within the environment.
We believe it's okay and that it's simply innovation
But we forget about the overconsumption, destruction, domination.
We have left no room for the species living amongst us
and we don't acknowledge that all the world’s problems, is from us.
In order to restore the natural connection
between nature’s selection
and man’s misdirection
We must think from a perspective of correction.
Rather than basing our decisions on money and power
And taking nature's resources like its oil happy hour.
We come out of the darkness to see the first light
deep within, we feel the start of our new life.
Our true instincts kick in
Given to us by the Earth within.
The rivers flow the blood of the Earth
The same way our veins have kept us alive from birth.
All things living are connected in some way
Yet we turn away
And let the beauty decay.
We destroy this beautiful place that gave us life.
The world’s skin is fragile and we still stab her with a knife.
The separation between mankind and nature is the great division
People have let go of the world but held onto religion.
They talk about a God that created all things
A man that rules all. The king of kings.
But we turned our heads in the wrong direction
God does come from our own reflection
God is something we see everyday, yet we don't make the connection.
We tear trees down and flood the oceans with our waste
The idea to respect nature has been erased.
The idea of greed and power has made us violent
So we search for resources within the environment.
We believe it's okay and that it's simply innovation
But we forget about the overconsumption, destruction, domination.
We have left no room for the species living amongst us
and we don't acknowledge that all the world’s problems, is from us.
In order to restore the natural connection
between nature’s selection
and man’s misdirection
We must think from a perspective of correction.
Rather than basing our decisions on money and power
And taking nature's resources like its oil happy hour.
Reflection
Before we started the personal philosophy, I didn't have an idea of what I was going to do. It didn't come to me until a week passed and I was watching Planet Earth. I'm not kidding, this is really how I got the idea. I was sitting there watching some episode of Planet Earth, and it was showing the plains of Africa and rivers flowing through them from a bird's eye view. I was sitting there staring at it and they reminded me of veins. It looked as if the water flowing through was the blood and rivers were the veins. I started thinking about how everything on this Earth is connected through this planet. The Earth needs clean air to breathe, healthy blood and complete circulation, the Earth needs strong and healthy skin, just like us and every other living thing on this planet. We all come from this planet, therefore we are like this planet. In my poem, I say, “The separation between mankind and nature is the great division, people have let go of the world but held onto religion.” What I mean by this is people have always had the belief that there is greater power or god. The belief that god looks like man and that mankind is the most important species on this planet. My personal philosophy looks in a different direction. The god people search is not above of us, we right beneath our feet. God is Earth. Everything that has ever lived and died was born on this Earth and thrived off of the resources that it provided. And every living thing is here for an important reason and that is to keep the rest of the world/god alive. Mankind has done the complete opposite. We have turned our backs on the idea to respect and worship the Earth and believe there is a god that solely comes from man himself. If this is true then this is no god, this is the devil. Mankind is the farthest thing from something good. We have destroyed this planet, along with hundreds of species and habitats, we have polluted the air so badly that the entire globe is being affected, we have dumped so much waste into the beautiful oceans that we literally have created an island. This does not sound like a species god created. Anyways, the projects that influenced my idea most would have to be the the energy project. We chose different ways humans create energy using nature's resources. I chose Natural gas (fracking wells to be specific). I thought that it was absurd that human innovation has reached a point where we are able to dig thousands and thousands of feet under the Earth’s surface and then dig hundreds of feet horizontally just to extract shale gas. It amazes me but it also scared me. We as humans have no limits to what we would do when it comes to the extraction of resources. I'm worried what we may do in the future. Also, when we had a quest speaker, I believe it was the environmentalist with the NPR journalist. Anyways, he showed us a picture taken by NASA using a thermal camera and it showed a huge red and yellow cloud above the mid-west of the United States. This cloud was a cloud of methane from the extraction of natural gas using oil and fracking wells. It was a real eye opener.
Questions I had throughout the project:
Questions I had throughout the project:
- How does our life have any relevance or impact if we only live about 80-90 years out of the billions of years the Earth has been year? Can we even comprehend time?
- Why is it that human’s intelligence is drowned out by greed and power? What inside us triggers that natural unbalance?
- Is there a purpose humans evolved to be so aware and logical but also so cancerous to the world? How did that happen?!?
- How is my perspective on life unique from everyone else’s on this planet? Is there anyone with the same?