Assignment for Week 1

Answers to this week's quiz:

1. What attracts me to Chinese medicine?

Well, during the middle of my first year working toward my massage therapy degree, I took an Energy Massage Techniques class. The midterm project for this class was to experience one of the modalities we'd learned about that dealt with energy (Acupuncture, Reiki, polarity therapy, cranio-sacral therapy, etc), and I had chosen acupuncture. I'd always been interested in it, but never had a real reason to find a practitioner and try it out. My professor referred me to a man who was a third generation acupuncturist. His his grandfather, and his father and he had all been acupuncturists.

I made my appointment for late February, and drove over to see him a couple weeks later. I didn't know at all what to expect, but he gave off a surprisingly calm aura, and it immediately settled my nerves. He answered any questions I had, as well as telling me why he was doing what he was doing (looking at my tongue, feeling my wrist, and so on), until he told me he had developed a treatment plan for me. I went in there relatively pain, stress, and disease free, so we settled on trying to fix my seasonal allergies. After the treatment, spring rolled around, as well as fall, with no symptoms. As soon as spring had come and gone, I told my professor that I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what I was going to aim to do with my life.

2. What do I honestly think of physics, really?

Before our first class, I had expected a lot of math, which was unfortunate, because I had left my graphing calculator in Michigan along with my will to do any more math. After the first class, I think I'll have an easy time immersing myself in the material. A friend of mine started out as an astrophysics major at Michigan State University, but because she couldn't justify her brilliant ideas with the math, she fell behind on the material and ended up switching majors within her freshman year. As I mentioned before, I'm glad that this isn't a math class. Numbers and I don't tend to get along well.

3. Now that I think about it, have I ever experienced time "slowing down" or "speeding up"?

One time that comes readily to mind is when my friend suggested I listen to a music track, called Absinthe. It must be listened with stereo headphones, and the nicer, the better. I have a pair of comfortable Sony over-the-ear headphones, and I had 45 minutes (The length of the track) of time to sit and see what happened. She explained to me that she had done it previously and had some rather odd hallucinations on the backs of her eyelids. Bear in mind that she had done this without the use of hallucinogenic drugs or the like.

As I sat down and started to fall into the sound (the sound is of two different, sustained notes. One played in the left ear, one in the right), things started dancing across the back of my eyelids. I was rather shocked, but I decided to keep my eyes closed for the duration. At one point, I found myself back in high school, remembering a memory as vividly as if I were reliving it at that exact moment. I remembered details that, had it not been for this forced-meditative state, I would never have remembered.

When the 45 minutes was up, I could hardly believe it. It took me roughly fifteen minutes to snap completely out of the trance the sound had put me in. I was blown away. And even as I sit here writing this, I can't remember what scene it was that played across the back of my eyelids; I only know that it was from high school, and that I was dating a girl named Carolyn.

This is definitely a better example of time speeding up than I gave in class (simply saying "meditation,"), but I figured that, instead of being rather long winded, I could simply detail my post with details of the example I had originally had in mind.

Post your reflections on this week's class - "The Meaning of Time"

I really enjoyed the discussion for this first week, however, I found it kind of hard to grasp the ideas of P-time and M-time. With only a table to guide us, it felt like it was hard to explain to the other students what exactly the difference between Eastern and Western views on time were.

I particularly enjoyed learning about the seven arrows of time. I didn't know anything like that even existed, but it's neat to know. It may even be what I end up writing my midterm paper about, though I don't want to sell myself short with the myriad topics we'll cover before the paper is due.