Saint Augustine's Confessions Part 6

In this chapter Augustine has been focusing on memory.  This brought several questions to mind.
How much of who we are is shaped by memory?  As we remember things, we change them in the act of remembering.  If we are shaped by memory, can we change ourselves by changing our memories?
Just some thoughts that have been knocking around in my head.

Saint Augustine's Confessions Part 5

Chapter 10 is labeled Memory.  I had glanced through it before and it looked interesting and so I was looking forward to reading it.

It is confusing.  I'm not sure I understood much of it.  It is laid out very differently from the rest of the book and it feels different as well.  I don't know if he changed his way of writing or what but it is harder to read.  He is also talking about things that I have never really thought about before and diving deeper into subjects that I have considered.
All in all it is a section that I feel like I have to read and reread over and over.

Saint Augustine's Confessions and Way of the Human Being part 3

Sometimes when I write papers they come very easily.  I know what I want to say and it just happens in a logical order.  Other times it is like feeling around in the dark hoping that I'll stumble across a point I want to make and then fiddling about with the ideas I have until it is in a readable order.  This paper is turning out to be the stumbling kind.

The Way of the Human Being Part 3

The way Martin describes my culture in the Way of the Human Being is not flattering.  In his eyes the traditional Native American culture is superior.  They seem to have the monopoly on the perfect way of living.  He makes it sound as if they have the right idea and we are ignorant people who have lost a key aspect or being a human.  I don't have clearly articulated thoughts on this yet but there is something that puts me on edge.  Maybe because I am not a Native American, for him to completely write off my culture seems unfair.  I don't think that my culture is perfect.  Far from it!  But by writing off my culture I feel as if he is also writing off part of me.

Saint Augustine's Confessions and Way of the Human Being part 2

I have discovered a new problem.  When I try to write a paper that deals with big issues that I have also been dealing with it changes from a comparison to a opinion paper.  This will need to change.  I need to remember that I'm not writing about what I think based on what I've read from these authors but what THEY think in comparison to each other.  The first draft is very much that.  A first draft.  It will change quite a bit.  Hopefully it will turn into a actual paper as opposed to a word barf of my own thoughts.

Saint Augustine's Confessions and Way of the Human Being

While both Augustine and Calvin Luther Martin agree that reality is more than what we see just in front of our faces, they disagree on what that reality is and how we go about finding it.  Augustine sees the ultimate reality as a understanding of God and evil.  Martin sees it as a connection and balance between the earth and humans.  Both of them argue for a spiritual aspect of reality but while Augustine believes that our interactions with God are the most important, Martin sees our interactions with animal-people and the earth as the highest priority.

Saint Augustine's Confessions: Themes

Throughout the book Augustine wrestles with the idea of God.  How can our brains comprehend the massive idea of God without trying to reduce Him to a material form?  How do we perceive God?  

"How could I see this when me eye saw only the body and my mind only a construct?  Nor did I realize that God is a spirit, without parts of his whole having their own length or breadth or weight.  Any part would weigh less than the whole.  If spread everywhere, such a body would still weigh more or less in any spacial segment of it, and each part could not be everywhere, as with the spirit, as with God" 

He also thinks about how we perceive the world around us.

"I 'called up before my mind' the whole range of creation, whatever is obvious in it to our senses - earth and sea and air and stars and trees and animals - and whatever is not taken in by our senses - the high spiritual canopy and all angels and all spiritual entities.  But even the latter, like the former, I imagined as occupying some kind of place.  I made out the whole of creation as one vast physical stuff, articulated into different sorts of material bodies - the real bodies or those I imagined as the spiritual realities.  I made it out as vast, without giving it any specific magnitude (which I could not measure) but, be it ever so large, reaching a certain limit in any of its extensions.  And you, Lord, I saw as embracing and pervading all parts of this mass, but stretching far outside it on all sides - as if there were a sea everywhere, and everywhere only this boundless sea throughout the endless reaches, and in the sea a huge but not infinite sponge, totally soaked with that sea in every particle of it."

The Way of the Human Being Part 2

I am very good at immersing myself in the fictional worlds of books.  If the rules of that world say that something is true I will completely believe it within the world the author has created.  This is great if I am reading fiction.  However, when I read nonfiction this skill carries over.  I still unconsciously view the world of the book as separate from the real world.  Any idea or argument that the author introduces in the book becomes very true to me within that world.  Because of this I have a hard time taking ideas or arguments and looking at them in a critical way.  I also have a hard time transferring those ideas from the world of the book to my life.
 I have a feeling that as I read The Way of the Human Being this is pose a problem.  Problem noted and will be paid attention to.

The Way of the Human Being Part 1

As I started reading this book I was already looking for anything that has to do with Beauty/Quality.  I wasn't disappointed.

"Beauty has an older claim on us than does time; beauty was there in the beginning before time was conceived; it was inherent in the originating Word, the idea and its pronouncement.  Time is but beauty's scaffolding."

"We were created, they say, to restore the beautiful."

"The weaving-way restores the beautiful.  Beauty comes from the act itself; "man experiences beauty by creating it,"say the Navajo.  Understood is the principle that an event is nothing without human participation: there can be no beauty without our creating role in it."

"There is beauty, and, existing outside it, unconscious of it, there is time."

Ah ha!  The ongoing theme strikes again.   

Saint Augustine's Confessions Part 4

Augustine has a way with words.  Once you get past the initial difficulty of reading the older language it is beautiful.  He can get straight to the heart of the matter.

"You knew what was going on within me.  No human did.  My lips could disseminate little of it to even my closest friends.  How could I find the time or the eloquence to report all the ravages of my soul?"

This semester has been a time of looking at big questions and trying to wrap my head around them in new ways. There has been a lot to think about and the combination of reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and now Augustine is giving me a little bit a whiplash.
Augustine can put into words things that are difficult to articulate.

Saint Augustine's Confessions Part 3

As I read through Augustine's Confessions I find that there are sentences that jump out at me.  Certain things that grab my attention and resonate with things I have been feeling or struggling with.

"Two wills were mine, old and new, of the flesh, of the spirit, each warring with each other, and between their dissonances, my soul was disintegrating."

"I could not renounce the world to follow you when I was still undecided about your truth.  Now I knew."

"Though no one wants to sleep forever. realizing that wakefulness is the higher state, yet man puts off waking when torpor, making heavy all his limbs, smothers him sweetly in slumber, against his better sense that 'it was time to be rising'" "All I could mumble, muzzily, was: later on.  Or: Any moment now.  Or: Wait a bit.  But the any-moment never came, and wait-a-bit stretched out into endless bits."   

This last one really hit home.  

Lots of things to think about.

Saint Augustine's Confessions Part 1

After reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance this was hard to get into.  The way in which it is written is a bit off putting and hard to wrap your head around.  When I read sections 1-3 I was focused mostly on how hard it was to read and not so much on what he was saying.  Having now read 4-6 I can start to pay attention to the meaning of the text.
There were several things that I felt tied back to Zen.  In 4 Augustine says this:  "How can we love anything but the beautiful? What, then, is a beautiful thing or beauty itself?  What entices and satisfies us in what we love?  Can anything compel us that is not beautiful and fitting?"
This sounds like the idea of Quality in Zen.  A beautiful thing has quality right?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 9(The final post on Zen)

I have finished Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Over all, I enjoyed it.  It made me think in ways that I had never experienced before and brought up ideas that had never occurred to me.  It was very enjoyable in some parts and very hard in others.  The story of Phaedrus and the Narrator was captivating and drew me along because I wanted to know what would happen to them.  The mixture of narrative and Chautauqua  felt very balanced in some parts but over all the Chautauqua took over the book.

When I was reading it I noticed that I was having a hard time thinking critically about the arguments presented in the text.  When I read a book, especially fiction and this felt very much like fiction, I totally except the rules of that world.  Since the arguments made sense in the Narrator's mind and world, I had a hard time seeing how it might not be true in the real world.  This is something that I think I got better at as I continued reading but it is still   a struggle.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 8

I'm not quite sure what I think about the epilogue.  It seems rather like a normal epilogue up until the point where the author starts to talk about Chris's death.  He begins to wonder where Chris has gone.  He decides that it is the pattern of Chris that he misses. 

In my mind this reduces Chris down to a sort of object and not a creation of God with a soul.  

He talks about wanting to know where Chris will reappear.  He then moves on to talking about his daughter that was born after Chris died.  The way that he talks about her unsettles me.  He must love her but he talks about her as if she is the reappearance of Chris and not her own person.   

There is just something about this that really unsettles me.  I can't quite put my finger on it.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 7

The end of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is rather confusing.  Phaedrus seems to come back and have a conversation with Chris.  There is not much that is said about what actually happened.
Did the Narrator become a ghost much like Phaedrus was at the beginning?  Did the two personalities meld in some way?
Something that was very interesting was that the Narrator seems to acknowledge that he wasn't living a quality life.  He simply existed for Chris and his wife.  If it were up to him he would just sit and not interact with anybody.  It seemed like when Phaedrus was erased the personality that replaced him was two dimensional where Phaedrus was three dimensional.  As if had a stronger more real personality replaced Phaedrus the Narrator wouldn't have been able to hold it together even that long.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 6

As you near the end of the book several thing begin to stand out.  The writing becomes more chaotic and a new theme is introduced.  This idea that in order to understand Quality you have to leave the rational world because Quality exists outside and above our rational way of thinking.  It is made clear that Phaedrus did just that.  He completely abandoned all reason and rationality.  He ignored his wife and child and chose to slip away into chaos and madness in pursuit of his goal.
I don't understand how a man could be that driven toward one thing even if that thing means the end of himself.  He abandoned his wife and child!  How could someone throw them self into something like that?  What end did he want to accomplish?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Response 1

Hey Afreen,
In your post you mentioned your reaction to the slightly fuzzy beginning of the story.  I came to almost the same conclusions.  I think Phaedrus used to be him.  He doesn't have a split personality, he has a old and a new personality.
I do agree with you about the motorcycles.  While I feel that I am learning quite a bit more about how they work,  the reason I am interested in the story is the mystery of what happened to him.  I want to learn what happened.
Even though I want to know, it feels slightly rude to keep prying into why he is who he is.  Yes, it is in a book, but it is written in such a way that you have to pry to find out.