I wasn't even going to write this final paper, I was so discouraged. I don't understand all this. It doesn't add up, and I realized it's because they're leaving out this one massive part of the equation. It's being discussed here and there, but in terms of public policy and official channels, they're not addressing the fact that we have no end in sight.
Lockdowns and social distancing will NEVER solve this, but the way they're addressing the problem suggests otherwise. That we might be fine in a few months. The situation isn't going to change much in a few months. They need to be talking about how we probably need a solution that extends for an entire year or two. We might get lucky and solve this much sooner, but on the other hand, a vaccine may well prove to be more difficult than expected. We should even be prepared for this to last substantially longer, possibly even becoming the permanent state of things. Nothing being proposed in most of the world even comes close to facing this.
Anyhow, this last course I was taking was odd. I try so hard to find interesting classes, but it hasn't gone well. I'm having a hard time finding 60 credits worth of anything at CCV. It was supposed to be a class about the study of consciousness, but the teacher mostly just had us recite dreams, and give presentations on a book about paranormal experience. I don't understand the point of the class at all, but it's so loosely structured and then further disrupted by COV19,
So, we had to write a paper on the subject of consciousness, citing at least three sources. Not about anything we learned in class or anything like that. Write a paper that we could have written without ever hearing of the class. Whatever this is supposed to be a test of, I wasn't sure what to even bother with. I'm so tired of all this.
When the first student posted their paper on mindfulness and anxiety, an idea struck me. I've been bringing up neuroscience a lot lately and experience being a fabrication of mind. Why not write a paper coming at it from the opposite angle. I just needed to find three Buddhist scriptures to cite.
Unfortunately, that's actually harder than one might think. So much of it isn't even translated, and we just have these vague ideas about Buddhist concepts like this. When I started looking, there wasn't a lot to be found with the limited time and patience I had. Granted, I could have more easily quoted Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron, but that wasn't quite what I was going for. Without good passages to expound upon, I struggled to really come up with much, but..
Guess while I'm at it, here's the previous paper, more of a report on a single book.
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