Saint Augustine's Confessions Part 2

"But he is worse off if he holds that his error is a matter of religious faith, and persists stubbornly in the error.  His faith is still a weak thing in its cradle, needing the milk of a mothering love, until the youth grows up and cannot be the plaything, any more, of every doctrinal wind that blows."

The last line really struck a cord with me.  I feel as if my faith is still very weak.  I don't know enough and the new ideas that are being presented have a large effect on me.  They can easily sway me one way or another if I am not very careful in my thinking.  I have a foundation but many of those ideas I have taken for granted without dissecting exactly what it is they are saying.  If I don't know how the things I believe effect my life then how can I add new ideas and information to that?  How would I know if they go against one another?
This is something I have been thinking on quite a bit as I learn new things and try to figure out how my faith should effect my life.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 5

I feel like there are  more things than you can count that you have to form an opinion about.  Political issues, religious issues, philosophical issues, and many more.  I feel overwhelmed sometimes because I don't know where I stand on many of these things.  

Because of this, I used to think about each thing individually. For each issue, I would figure out what I thought and move on to the next one.  What I knew, but didn't realize, is that these issues all interconnect.  If I come across new ideas and they change my view point on one thing, then other things might change as well.  

This makes me want to spend hours just sitting and thinking about what I believe and how that affects my position on various subjects.  

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance this changing of ideas and positions has been an ongoing theme throughout the book.  The narrator starts with one view and then narrows it down, discovers new aspects or ways of thinking about it, changes views because of this new information, and discovers new aspects again.  He is not afraid to find a new viewpoint that might be better.  

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 3

Instead of talking about a quote or piece of text that really grabbed me, I wanted to talk about the scenery.  Especially in this part the scenery matches what he is talking about in the Chautauqua.  As he gets closer and closer to Phaedrus's breaking point in the Chautauqua, he and his son get closer and closer to the top of the mountain.  

There is an interesting point where they get above the tree line and he wants to head back down.  At the same time in the Chautauqua he leaves Phaedrus's line of thought and heads off on his own.  He is scared to pursue the things that destroyed him in the first place.  

 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 2

"Quality... you now what it is, yet you don't know what it is.  But that's self-contradictory.  But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality.  But when you try to say what Quality is apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof!  There's nothing to talk about.  But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists?" - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Is he right?  Is defining Quality really that hard?
I can provide many examples of why one thing is better than another, but is that quality or opinion?  Maybe quality is in the eye of the beholder.  This would make sense because then we would all define it differently.  There wouldn't be one definition of quality.  You might think that one movie is better than another.  I might disagree completely.
If that is the case then the definition of quality would be something like this.  Quality is your opinion of how much better one object/idea is than another. 

How would you define quality?

On Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 1

"If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found in the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.
Few people travel here. There is no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile." - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Reading this book is both something I look forward to and dislike at the same time.  It is a book that lulls your mind into a basic story and then hitting it with huge ideas.  I feel very stretched.  Every time I put it down I have new information to try and assimilate into my world view.  There are many things in here that I'm not sure I agree with but don't have enough information to say why.  Like he says in the quote above, I feel as if I am at the uppermost country of my mind.  These ideas he is bringing up make sense on some level but don't on others.  I haven't ever thought about scientific theory, personality, and motorcycles as being connected before.   I don't understand everything that is going on in this book but my hope is that I will find some austere beauty.