A favourite academic area formally studied
People enjoy different phases of their life. One of the most enjoyed and unforgotten period in my life is my university lifetime. There are many things to do and a lot of activities to join in university. It is a time for students to explore their interests and find their own passion. Besides extra activities and various clubs to join, university also offers many interesting subjects to study.
Psychology is the subject that I like to study most at my first degree. I loved to learn the theory of Maslow's heirarchy of needs, the famous Learning theory of Pavlov, Personality traits and Defence Mechanism. The subject helps me to see the relationship between the motivation within and the behavior shown. It is very interesting to learn that there are always drives underneath every action. There is no any single action that happens without a root cause, whether in a concious or subconcious mind level. When there are conflicts within our mind, the very best way is to find a quiet place and explore our mind. Once we find the root cause, we need to embrace and accept it first and try to find the appropriate solutions to end or to lessen the severity of the existing problems. I think psychology not only helps me understand the others' behavior, but also my own's one.
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A favourite academic area not formally studied
My first degree is International marketing. I did enjoyed studying the subject, but outside school I am interested in how people live and what they think about living their life. I love reading the fundamental thoughts and the arguments of the ancient philosophers both from the Western and Eastern. Philosophy is my favourite subject that I did not formally studied in school.
I love freedom and love to live freely. I hate to be kept in the cage like a bird. I strongly want to live my own life. I do not want to be oblidged myself to monetary success or materials. Many times I refused the highly paid job offered that is against my living will. Some people do not understand why I made those kind of decision, but I do not pay attention on it. When come to the question whether we can live freely totally, I probably need to say, "No, it isn,t", but we still be able to manage to live freely as much as possible. Some people might again argue that 'To live freely as much as it is possible in the context' is not to live freely. I probably do not argue further as I am not a philopher with high logical reasoning ability. As long as I am happy with my decision and I am able to survive, that is it.
Although I haven't studied psychology, the subject sounds interesting. I wondering how psychologists study how people behave--is that the only thing that they want to know. By the way, what you mentioned reminded me the movies Inception. The movies is about a professional thief who steals information by hacking into his targets. In the story, the protagonist needs to make his targets fall asleep and entre into their minds to seal their secret information. It likes everyone's subconscious has memories and throughs, enjoyable or painful, and has many layers, narrow and deep. When the protagonist enters into his targets' subconscious, he will be viewed as an invader and the subconscious of his targets will create a system to get rid off him so he has to fight with the protective systems. For me, it was fun to watch the active movie. In the movies, it shows that many people has more painful memories than happy ones. So I stared thinking that is it good to have a memory? For me, I think I am facing an issue of being obsessive about those past memories whether it made me feel happy or sad.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I also interested in philosophy, but I didn't get official trainings. In fact, I know the subject from Peter. Because I am keen to learn about the subject, I have done researched and found that someone say that philosophy is an activity that philosophers do And they do that to find if there is a right way of thinking about things. As you know, I have been learning and practicing meditation to prevent me from negative throughs and the past memories. I attended meditation course in December last year and it reminded me about The Noble Eightfold Path which I think it is similar to philosophy, especially the first two path are right view or right understanding, and right though. In the meditation course, the master of meditation said that we should practices concentration meditation (Samatha Bhavna) so that we be able to center our mind and enough willpower and then we can start practicing insight meditation (Vipassana Bhavna). So I think I don't have to go to temple to practicing Vipassana Bhavna, but I can do that by reading and thinking as Peter mentioned here, and I think philosophy can allow me to do that too.
Initially, I was going to respond to something that Kitt said that caught my interest, but then Emma's comment mentioned the film Inception in response to what is perhaps the same point in Kitt's introduction. It's where he says "that there are always drives underneath every action." As Emma applies it to Inception, the amazing action scenes in the minds of the dreamers are the result of brain systems responding to the invaders seeking to plant ideas to be acted on in the real world (whatever that might be, as philosophers and modern physicists argue about).
DeleteEmma didn't mention him, but in one of my Advanced Reading and Writing Classes last year, or perhaps the year before, we read a couple of chapters from historian Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, in which he also makes a disturbingly honest comment about how the ever accelerating progress in science, especially the biology of our own brains, is piling up the evidence that there are not only drives behind every act we decide on or just do, but that behind the psychology, biology is driving those decisions and acts, and biology is driven by chemistry, which is product of physics: Harari is a great writer and neatly hints at this in the opening sentences of his book, but the implications are only fully drawn towards his conclusion of the 300,000 year history of our species.
Sadly, when I just checked, Inception is not currently available on NetFlix, so when I finish work for the day, I might watch another episode of Lupin to relax with. But I probably have at least another hour's work to do. (I don't always follow my calendar boxes.)
I had meant to make the title of Harari's book a link to the Amazon website: it's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
DeleteKhun Kitt, I certainly like your attitude that "I love freedom and love to live freely. I hate to be kept in the cage like a bird" I'm passionate to be a freedom also. I have studied yoga philosophy when I was studying yoga teacher. It was amazing and made me more understanding human being and nature. I think that if you study, you might be love it.
ReplyDeleteP Kitt when I read your comment about Psychology, I agree about your point in every behavior has a motivation and every action have a root cause. As I grow up I tend to interested more in Psychologist for Therapy. When we grew up, we all face more academic and systematic problems related to family, life, career path, finance, economic problems. Which somehow we can not always solve it. We stuck in the loop of problems. As you said learn to embrace and accept is the very core key to achieve calm and peace in life. But I'm quite sure that it's not easy that it seems. According to a Newyork Time article, today more people suffer from depression, losing self-esteem, social toxication, mental illness and etc. A lot of case appears when we cant get rid of our negative and bad feeling. So I think using the principal of Psychology can be very useful, In order to understand how is life, How to live smartly. And understand that imperfections in life are normal.
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