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Reflective Essay On The Self And Society

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I lied. I told myself that I would be happy to be on my own, but I lied. I need a support group and I need people that understand me. Luckily, I was able to find that here in Stevenson. There is a quote from Robert Ingersoll that I live by, “We rise by lifting others.” Here in Stevenson College and the Self and Society course, we do those exact things. We all learn from each other and every single students insightful comments or conversations help each and everyone of us become greater thinkers, writers, and/or humans in general. I found that in this course, the things that shifted my views the most were not so much the texts themselves, but the people I encountered in the course, from the plenary speakers to my peers who along with me were struggling to wrap their minds around some of the highly complex philosophical and religious texts we covered. I often realized while reading these texts that span over thousands of years, my mind was in a different world. In some cases I was able to place myself into the texts and become enlightened on how to live my life to the fullest and other times the texts made me hurt and realize how vile mankind could be. I recently immersed myself fully into my religion prior to the Self and Society course and was hoping to find people to connect with, share similar viewpoints, and read over subjects with me that the course would entail. I recognized that this would be quite a challenge when most of the class said this was their first time reading any religious texts. Once coming upon this, I made the decision to start listening to them as well as sharing my experiences because here was a chance that we were all thinking the same things or had the same questions. The differences that I had with other students when it came to my beliefs did not make me scared to speak in my class because the professor made sure we discussed ground rules before going into any conversations. For example, one of the things we established within the first week was who the people were that liked to talk the most, then we made a rule where if someone is talking too much, we were allowed to tell them to shut up. Having this actually play out in class would have been pretty funny, however my seminar

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