Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Information overload! What are we to do? As a student, we often are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information presented to us in University. As a human being we are constantly faced with attention-grabbing information. How can we sort it all? How can we sort it all when we not only study, but have jobs, and families, and chores, and church, and volunteering… and Social Media trying to persuade us of this, that, and the other? University students ask, “how can I remember the history of the Russian Revolution, with its dates and momentous events, when I can’t even remember if the prof taught whether Trotsky was even a Bolshevik?” I am supposed to support Black Lives Matter, but in fact, I may not even know what it is. I am suppose to support freedom of expression; but so much expression is anything but free. I am supposed to be true to myself; I don’t even know who that is. AHHH!

Experience, and the information that comes at us all the time (through our senses, our imagination, our phones, our families and our professors), is so vast and so much that by using Story, Place and Emotion, we can improve our memories. We can also avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of information given in lectures by developing our note-taking techniques. The talk included here, gets us to BE BETTER. We only have to remember that to be better is not necessarily connected to what we do or don’t do, to what we think or don’t think. We need to stop. We need to turn it into a habit. We need to step into the space and time that is right here and right now to prepare to be educated, and to see that education is not something to do; rather, it is something to be.

The following video highlights 2 videos presenting Alan Watts, a teacher who brought Taoist meditation to the West in the 1960’s. And it does so with the idea that right here, and right now, you can prepare your mind to be educated.