Javier A. Tabush

          Different perspectives and different points of view is what make the MPC such an enriching learning environment. Everyone gives a little piece of knowledge and little by little we get close to the absolute truth. I am really anxious to see how each of the great works we are planning relates to each other, and how we will be surrounded by wonderful ideas that will probably change the world in a hopefully near future.



          During the drama course I’ve been giving this semester I have learned a lot from my peers as much as they have learned from me. We have been working on losing stage fright, being more aware of your actions and yourself, and recently we practiced an exercise about meaning, which I felt, relates a lot to the activities that have been going on this first year at the MPC. The exercise consisted on having the same set of “contentless” lines, and in pairs, performing them by creating a story and giving your own meaning to it. It was wonderful to see how each one of us interpreted the lines in our own way, and created amazing, different stories. We related this activity to “the way of the samurai” (the vow of silence activity), since we all gave different meaning to it. In my case, I didn’t feel that the activity helped me to portray the part of an observer throughout the whole day. For me, it was more like a discipline exercise, to prove myself that I can face challenges like this one. In my case, it was a difficult challenge since I like talking a lot and expressing my thoughts to everyone, but after a long day, I manage to speak only twice throughout the whole day. It was difficult since we live in a society where everybody speaks constantly, so I had to control myself and communicate as least as possible. But in the end it was an enriching experience simply for the fact that it was getting outside of my comfort zone.



          With our drawing teacher, Kassandra, we came back to one of the first classes we had, perspective. I related this to meaning as well, because we all had to draw the same thing, in this case, the library, but each one from a different position, a different perspective. This class has really helped me to view things in another way, and have a different approach towards them. It’s amazing how truly observing things you realize how different they are than how you’ve always looked at them. Like when we draw upside down, instead of looking at the drawing as a whole, we look at it as a bunch of different shapes, letting go all assumptions, just like David Bohm tells us in On Dialogue, as well as Socrates in the Apology (“treat everyone as a stranger”).



          One of the questions that rose during the dialogue, was, why is it so important to know ourselves? I believe that going through life not knowing exactly who we are, leaves insecurity within ourselves, and we never project who we truly are, or maybe we do but we’re simply not aware of it. Most of the times that I’ve seen that happen, people tend to adopt personalities from the people that surround them, since they are not aware of a personality of their own, and they feel insecure. How can I relate this to the MPC? Well, I think that a book that definitely shaped us as a culture, and took us to be where we are right now, is Getting Real. Being aware of who you are and being aware of things around you, helps you become a much more “true to yourself” type of person.



          What is leap of faith? Can we NOT have it? The concept of leap of faith consists on knowing something, anything and during one of the dialogues we were all wondering if there is such thing as not having leap of faith. I believe that this is impossible since you can’t not know. Even when you don’t know something, you still know that you don’t know it.