Life Journey in "Journey to the West," Life of a Sensuous Woman" and "Candide"

About a year ago, I began to find genuine interest in spiritual knowledge and learning, and its value and many applications outside of formal education and studies. I began researching philosophers and reading their works regarding spiritualism, new ways of thinking and perceiving things, as well as how our lives as human work in conjunction with the universe around us. I find this kind of thinking, and discovering some of the infinite wealth of knowledge around me, to be both personal and liberating.

In Life of a Sensuous Women, by Ihara Saikaku, A frame story in which women tells the story of her life and all of the promiscuous encounters that have gone on in her life. In the story, I believe love for women of lower class is not affectuous but based more so on the lust men have in for the receival of goods and fortune.

Immediately from the beginning the book leads us on with the Monkey King to overcome the challenge of getting accepted to a dinner party. The Monkey King is almost exactly of what one might but with a twist. He’s a regular monkey with a little bit more to offer to the world. He possess leadership, and understands many skills worthy to be a ruler, and becomes little out of hand when he gets upset. A prime example of this is when he attempted to prove the guard that he was well worthy of entering the dinner party. The Monkey King tried to persuade the guard by stating “I am the sovereign ruler of flower-fruit mountain” in order for the guard to understand that this little monkey wasn’t so little (14). The Monkey King even laid out his credentials for the worthy disciplines he mastered. This was a great challenge the Monkey King did since it involved thousands of minor disciplines and four major disciplines. This all tells me that this monkey was no ordinary monkey, but a

It is interesting to see that in the bulk of varying cultural identities, the archetype meant to find meaning is transformed into a journey in which experience slowly shapes ignorance into enlightenment. Thus, it is clear that the journey is important in the path to meaning. Through the journey small lessons are individually learned, and then collectively combined to create a more united whole vision of the world that was previously fragmented and lost in misunderstanding before the individual embarked on the quest. And so, the quest is a dominant archetype in numerous cultures. This creates a larger conception of the journey as the path to enlightenment in a way that can transcend beyond other more mundane cultural boundaries. Truth cannot be understood all at once, and thus it is through the quest that we slowly learn the whole truth of the external world piece by piece.

Famous actor and comedian, Robin Williams, was very well known and lived a life with richness and supporting loved ones, but it must not have been all it was looked to be. He must not have been truly happy with his life because he committed suicide. Similarly, in the book, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha is not able to find true happiness. Siddhartha leaves his family in the beginning of the book because he wants to find himself. Then he ends up with the Samanas and is there for a while, but then he decides he has not truly found himself yet. So, he leaves again and meets this man on a ferry boat that encourages him to find enlightenment. Siddhartha then meets this woman named Kamala and they fall “in love” and he becomes wealthy and believes that he is happy. But after a while, he leaves Kamala and all of his wealth and social honor behind because he has not found enlightenment. All this shows the reader that Siddhartha does not find happiness with wealth and social status, as shown when he leaves Kamala and everything he has to go find himself and is only able to find enlightenment as a ferryman, which is not a wealthy position or rank in life.

Throughout history, literature has served as a prominent tool in the examination of social values, ideas, and dreams. In addition, literature has provided a vital connection between historical, social, and political events. Through the incorporation of religious principles and philosophies, writers have discovered a way to portray different time periods, characters, feelings, and most importantly God.

Henri J. M. Nouwen’s book, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, examines three aspects of spiritual movement in which he unveils how humanity relates to self, others, and God to achieve true spirituality. The first movement revealed is the movement from loneliness to solitude, second is the movement from hostility to hospitality, and finally, is the movement from illusion to prayer.

already achieve his goal to be a king, he begins to be greedier to not

In the parable “The Monkey King,” a major theme is self-sacrifice. The monkey king in the parable endured a lot of pain in order to save his people, although they were only his subjects. The monkey king knew that sacrificing himself would save more people than saving himself, and committing that act of self-sacrifice caused the human king to change his selfish ways. The theme doesn't only occur in this story, but also in ordinary lives. Ordinary people have changed history by amazing displays of self-sacrifice, such as Malala Yousafzai, Martin Luther King Jr, the teachers in the Sandy Hook shooting, and Jesus. These people and many others sacrificed themselves for the greater good, and like the monkey king, influenced the opinions of many people.

Another, aspect, spirituality is not as much a prearranged system, it is a quest and a prolongation of one’s development.

Pathfinders today I am going to help you see how important it is to be spiritually minded in today’s society.

White once put value in the “foundations of civilization,” or the goods of culture, such as “books and music and art” (McCarthy 25). He believed these goods would provide reason for his existence. Yet White acknowledges that because of reasons he cannot quite pinpoint, these goods have lost their value for himself and others. They are now things of the past. White believes, “that world is largely gone. Soon it will be wholly gone” (McCarthy 25). As Percy suggests in his book, Lost in the Cosmos, the Depressed Self may be depressed because “belief in God and religion has declined and with it man’s confidence in the place of the self in the Cosmos” (74). For White, the loss of these cultural goods is a loss of

The concept of journeys can vary from person to person; literally a journey is a progression, either physically, mentally or spiritually. Journeys come under five main titles, inner, spiritual, imaginative, emotional and physical. Practically all texts contain one or a combination of these journeys. Les Murray, an Australian poet, has a very strong concept of journeys throughout his poems. Through the use of such techniques as figurative language and film a composer can express their individual concept of journeys.

The crux of my feelings concerns the entire premise of our fictional series. When we first started writing, we did so purely for fun, and to make ourselves happy. We indulged in our fancies without any restrictions, and though we were embarrassed to confess our secret pleasure to others, we had the freedom to be wild and inventive and simply write for the sake of experiencing relationships and emotions against a canvass of creative thought. But now, the stories have become a spiritual endeavor. Their purpose has evolved from pure fun and games into a process that is supposed to bring us closer to God, and to uplift everyone around us. This purpose is pure, good, and noble, so it has been difficult to explain why this new paradigm of story-making has left me feeling so trapped.

I’d like to state the most obvious observation that I’ve made about spiritual formation; that is that I will always need to be seeking for ways to nurture my personal spirituality throughout my life. I know that to most people this may sound like a “duh” statement, but for me it has truly become a reality and one that I must admit I have been struggling to embrace. I was brought up in a church that, like most traditional churches, stayed happy living in the “comfort zone” of their Christianity. They took everything that the Bible said at face value without digging in to find out why they believed what they believed. I had never been challenged to look deeper into the text. In the past few years I have felt the need to tunnel out of this