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 and Way of the Human Being part 4

As I write I often find myself slipping into a very formulaic sentence structure.  Every sentence is exactly the same and it plods along.  Once I have my ideas and arguments laid out I go back and rewrite every sentence.
It is a bit harder to do this when the ideas haven't yet fallen into place.  Instead of reworking what I have I'm erasing and writing completely new stuff.  This paper is like pulling teeth.

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.

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 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.

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 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 4

"The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans.  The present is our only reality.  The tree that are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore always unreal.  Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal.  Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place.  There is no other reality."

This seems a really fine way of cutting it.  Why is it worth it to think about these things?  Do they help us understand the world around us?
Does thinking about the past, present, and future this way redefine how I act or how I live?
Does it matter?
I'm not sure.

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.