Eastern Religions Journal Project

So for the next 10-15 posts or so I will be turning my blog into a sort of journal-ish reflective tool for my Eastern Religions class. This may be painful to read and probably even more painful for me to write. I know nothing about Eastern Religions; I am ashamed to say I only know about Christianity and probably barely anything there as well. It seems the more you learn the more you realize what you do not know. Therefore the more knowledgeable you are, the dumber you become. So at some point I may have believed I was at least knowledgeable in Christianity or in the Bible but now I just feel as if there are so many things to unravel.

Honestly, I find this Religion class to be a breath of fresh air when lately I have been smuggled out by Christianity and mainly Baptists. I stopped attending church about 6 to 7 months ago, woah I can’t believe it has already been that long, to escape from the bigotry and overall lack of self-knowledge. One of my serious problems of the Christian church is their complete lack of understanding of other cultures and religions; I too was victim to this accusation. Very few people of the congregation would even look beyond their noses to past the bible to the outside world. I have taken this summer to attempt to thoroughly reflect on my life and my aspirations as an individual. I thought a lot of ‘The Awakening’ a novel written by Kate Chopin in the late 1800s and published in the early 1900s, it is a story of a confused woman who seeks to find herself: physically, mentally, sexually, and spiritually. I started to just flip through my copy of the book that I read and completely marked up in my AP English class. I came across a purple highlighted quote, I tried to do some sort of color organization, that spoke to me about how I felt every time I would step foot into the church building itself or even the sanctuary; “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish...like a shadow... a mist passing across her soul's summer day.” (chopin) I did feel trapped. Motionless. I felt like a little marionette moved to do what was expected of me, what people wanted from me. I only started to see myself as a ‘real girl’ when I realized I didn’t just believe what was said behind that clear pulpit. Many times I would break my trained zombie-gaze from the pastor to the rest of congregation and I could faintly make out their marionette strings nod their heads in agreement to statements I knew for a fact they couldn’t possibly have formed their own opinions on the matter. So eventually I cut my stings and my goal for the course of this class is to go through a sort of metamorphosis… a change of heart and hopefully soon I can look through a new set of eyes at the once beautiful world I used to wake up to that is now bleak and cloudy.

“She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes.” –Chopin in ‘The Awakening’