World of Wonder

 Looking at Jonathan Swift's life and biography in preparation for the upcoming class, I am struck by what a wonderful life and time he was living in. It was an age of exploration, but it was also an age where Swift observed the follies of too much power and, with that, an abuse of power. Gulliver's Travels in many ways is a culmination of Swift's dour take on the way humanity turns against itself (and other species) out of a sense of narrow focus and entitlement, not realizing that our ideas are limited by our perspectives. By voyaging to different worlds which play on different perspectives (big and small, human and non-human, strict and lax rules. etc..), Gulliver shows us the ways in which our perspectives are always relative and can change very easily. It certainly paints a pessimistic view of human beings at times, but it reflects a time when microscopes were being used extensively to map "new worlds" of the small, while telescopes were exploring the grander views beyond Earth. Optimistically, perhaps, Gulliver's strange journeys can show people that there are always many ways of seeing the world and our position in it; we just need to be shaken up a bit, as does Gulliver.
   I would love to take some of the ideas in Gulliver's Travels and use guided visualization to get students to imagine how they see things in new ways, as well as to get them to question their current ways of seeing. I did a similar thing with a class I used to do with the Buddhist group, called  "Living Chan". But somehow I have a feeling that Gulliver's Travels is a good place to start because it's a funny book, and people like things that make them either laugh, or cringe, or both. They want to be entertained, in other words, while also being challenged. If I only present this kind of thing as a theoretical exercise, it might not leave much impression. But Swift's satire offers many opportunities for exploration into perspectives that are interesting and unique.