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Transcendentalism In Feeling Alright Right Now By Rick Hanson

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English Essay
Cecilia Weber
Stillwater Area High School
English 11
Brandon Maxwell
1/26/23

We can relate to the world around us because we are connected to it. We are forever in nature and will become the earth we walk on now. Is that an often thought question in circulation with the disarray of your daily query? Our personal identities are established by our connections with these physical environments, which reveal both who we are as individuals and how we interact with various aspects of the physical world. This has repercussions for our personal choices and how we view our moral responsibilities to the world. That brings the question "How do we relate to the world around us?” up for discussion. Many diverse philosophers, including …show more content…

In a 23 minute guided meditation by Rick Hanson called “Feeling Alright Right Now, it begins by reassuring you that all of your feelings in the now are simply that of just feelings or thoughts and that physically you are okay in the present moment. For his walk through of the third fundamental operating system in your brain he talks about the part of the mind that attaches itself to things or others and our need for connection. It makes you start to think about the connections you already have with the familiar objects around you and then circles into thinking about your connection with the natural world around you. When you start to think about the things and the small ways you are connected with the world you can start thinking about how much you have in common with it and how you fit inside of it perfectly. He tells us about our need for connection and starts guiding us in the understanding that if we think about connection, you can see you are already connected to everything we do “As if you experience yourself as a single wave, but then look around and realize you're already apart of a vast ocean”(Feeling Alright Right Now 15:51). If we didn't have the technology for resources like that today, I would have never been able to explore it and think about these ideas further. It all congregates back to the question “How do we relate to the world around us?”. We relate to the world around us in our intertwined connection to everything around us, technology included. Going out and feeling the realness and bond with nature and experience is how we recognize this connection in our everyday

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McCandless has often been compared to Henry David Thoreau and without doubt McCandless was influenced by the transcendentalist movement but to compare these two people would be an insult to Thoreau and his philosophy. It is true that he displayed civil disobedience hitchhiking when it is not allowed, hoping freights, and hunting in Stampede Trail without a license; Chris’s father also points out that “He refused instruction of any kind” (Krakauer, Wild 111). He interprets “civil disobedience” as a rejection of any kind of imposed law expressing extremely individualistic ideals freeing yourself from society and power, but Thoreau considers his responsibility to break the law if it overrun the rights of other human beings and is against his judgement of morals rather than following the will of the government and the majority blindly.

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In the novel Into the Wild written by Jon Krakauer, it becomes apparent that some claim Christopher McCandless had “courage and noble ideas,” whereas others state that he was “a reckless idiot” and “a wacko,” but the question still remains, is he really a transcendentalist? Transcendentalism is a philosophy stating that spiritual things are much more real than material things and the basic human experience. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are two of the most important transcendental enthusiasts who shaped the beliefs of this ideology. Emerson founded the Transcendental Club and led the whole movement in the mid-19th century. He, as well as his friend, Thoreau -- an avid abolitionist -- wrote strong transcendental pieces explaining

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"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”- Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalism is an American philosophy that revolves around self-reliance and independence, commonly in nature, a Transcendentalist wants to find the true meaning in life. I believe that Chris McCandless was a Transcendentalist because he was able to leave his whole life behind and take on a minimalist lifestyle while having a strong relationship with god. However, I believe that I am not a Transcendentalist, but simply an adventurer.

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