A couple of days ago, as part of a class discussion about altered states of perception (as this topic relates to the book, The Botany of Desire, that we are currently reading) I presented my students with the following common scenario: you have a sugar/caffeine high that makes you see everything as basically happy and good for at least five minutes, and then you "crash" and feel tired and cranky and believe everything around you to be shit. Which, I inquired, of the two experiences is "real," the experience of the world as wonderful or the one of it as shit? They answered unequivocally that it was the latter.
Their response has somewhat haunted me (even more than my recent viewing of Paranormal Activity 3). At the time, I simply informed them that they are all clearly pessimists. Even though we as a class moved on shortly after, I have continued to dwell on their belief that, as a few of them explained, the perception of goodness is a false one, while the perception of bleakness is an understanding of reality or the "way things really are."
How many people out there feel this way? And what does it say about them if they do? Contemplating this makes me think more deeply about my students. Just how unhappy are they really? I teach low levels of developmental composition at a community college. Many of my students do not, as of yet, possess the skills they need to succeed at college-level writing; they are of varying age and have incredibly diverse backgrounds. All of them are attending college with at least a vague notion of improving themselves, or at least their economic potential, in one way or another. Many of them are disabled, from severe vision problems to learning disorders. And even those who do not have any kind of disability or children at home (isn’t that the same thing?) have a lot on their plates and in all honesty, most are juggling their various challenges quite well.
But, what about their inner-lives? If they believe the world is "really" a shitty place and that to see it as otherwise is a false perception, what can change that? Will the acquirement of a college education and maybe better work prospects change that?
Just to be clear, I am not saying that the world really is a beautiful happy place like we sometimes perceive it after just the right amount of rum-and-cokes or a puff of weed, but rather that it's all a matter of perception. The world is nothing without us ascribing meaning to it.
So, if the world is nothing aside from what we make of it and aside from what we believe it can be, then the people who have decided that, no matter what, the world is a terrible place, will live terrible lives. They will conduct themselves under the false belief that the only way to experience happiness and see the world as possessing wonder and beauty is to be under the influence. Under the influence of a sugar high, or to be drunk, or to be entranced and immobile in front of their television, or to be living their lives via their Iphones, or to be in the middle of scarfing a Big Mac, or to be stoned. To be under the influence of any consciousness altering drug or to be distracted by fabricated worlds. They will be addicts who operate under the assumption that they need whatever it is they're dependent on to function because if they come out from under whatever their drug of choice, the world will be a scary dark place with nothing to offer them. They will be living as drones, always too scared to come out of their distractions and create a different perception of what is "really" around them. To answer my own question about their inner-lives, they won't have any.
I do not know as of yet if this is really the fate for my students, and I certainly hope it's not. In the meantime, I find myself with a renewed sense of purpose in my job as their English instructor. I commit to do what little I can to help them see the power of their perceptions, the power of their belief in themselves, the power of reading to help them form different perceptions, and the power of their writing to give shape to their perceptions and therefore the world around them.
I leave you with a quotation from Marcel Proust, who can of course say all of this much better than I because he's French: "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
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