I just finished a book, on recommendation of companionableills, called Story, by Steven James. It was very good. Highly recommend it. There were a few things I would depict differently, I think.
Anyway, tidbits:
James talks about light and darkness in this story a lot. They don't seem such opposites to me (fighting forces, though, yes), because darkness is the absence of light. Darkness cannot exist without light, it is not without light. It is not.
And light and darkness (as good and evil) work their wonders in such different ways.
At one point James says, "...i need some of your light to glow in my life/and burn away the darkness...i still have an echo of your image within me,/battling with this creeping stain upon my soul..."
I wrote notes:
"wash away
Rain. Leaves its own stain?
Washes in light.
Light can be heavy."
For a while I've been struggling with expressing the reason I enjoy rain so much and, specifically, Arizona rain and not necessarily any other rain. (I am determined to hate Arizona, so maybe this is why I have so much trouble.)
I have come up with this: Rain is substance.
I think I know what I mean now. I think that light can be heavy in the same way that rain can be heavy. It may wash away impurities, stains, but it also leaves a stain of its own. It penetrates and illuminates and leaves things raw and real. I am definitely blending light and rain now.
I'm sure I'm being completely incoherent.
I think that our fallen nature is not our desire to do evil, for that does not exist in that pure sense. It is our loss of touch with God and our weakness to Satan. It is our tongues and ears wrapping themselves around, becoming fluent in, the language of dark and sin rather than of light, of love.
There is so little focus on God becoming Man and I believe that this is a mistake. There is an implication, I think, that God's sole sacrifice/gift for us was His death for us but His life for us is immensely important. Because of Jesus' death, our sins can be forgiven and we can break through death, but only because of His life can we bring Him into ourselves. God became Man when we had fallen so far from the image He created us in, allowing us to don the Jesus persona. He gave us a model to mold our lives after but also made it possible. God wants us to be like Him. And so He became Man and somehow reconciled His perfect nature with our worldly, sin-stained one, making it possible for us to do the same. He found a means for cleansing our bodies so something as perfect as Christ can exist within them.
This is so difficult to explain.
These posts always form themselves at absurd hours. Not nearly as intelligible in the morning.
Current music:
Fallen Man, Relient K
Hallelujah, Rufus Wainwright
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Sunday, September 9, 2007
intelligence
Rain on my hopes.
Rain on my soul.
Rain on everything I know.
It's so ludicrous,
the pursuit of this dream.
We thought we beat it long ago.
From The Classic Crime.
When asked how much money a man needs, Andrew Carnegie replied, "Oh, just a little more."
He also said, though, "The one who dies rich, dies disgraced."
It's very interesting being surrounded by so many extremely intelligent people and not being surrounded by constant ambition to earn loads. I mean, honestly, I can't even think of anyone in my classes who is in IB or earning the grades they are or working so hard because they want to earn a bunch of money.
Which, by the way, is significant because I'm surrounded by a group of the most motivated high schoolers in the district. State. Nation.
Speaking of intelligence: I am finding lately that there are many, many different forms of intelligence. In fact, I'm beginning to think, because I have so much trouble even labeling sorts of intelligence, that each person has not a unique amount of intelligence, necessarily, but a very unique and different intelligence entirely.
Maybe a unique combination of many sorts of intelligence? I don't know.
The best way to explain this is to tell my story, which is awfully personal and not something I really enjoy letting the world see because I am ashamed of it. I think I'll do it anyway though:
I have been accustomed to receiving good grades and being at the top of my class all my life, and so it knocked me off my feet getting to high school and the IB program and finding so many very, very intelligent people. I, however, being the prideful person I am, didn't hesitate to come up with excuses for myself when I was not number one. (My mom says I need to gain the 'courage to be mediocre'.) Eventually, though, I began to chastise and struggled to stop this rationalizing part of myself, so that I could come to terms with the fact that I am not, in fact, smarter than everyone.
It was really a slap in the face, however, when I started getting to know all the people in this program and discovered that even many of the people who aren't ranked above me GPA-wise or PSAT score-wise are much smarter than I am in many ways.
I am beginning to bask in this realization. I love the people that surround me. Some times not as much as others, but for the most part I am really appreciating what a privilege it is to be in the company of so many geniuses.
Maybe the most prevalent form of intelligence is just a natural ability to be good at things.
There's also an ability to appreciate and work through literature. I am lacking in this intelligence.
This is different, I think, from linguistic intelligence. Some people are very good at putting words together and making them sound nice, or working through vocabulary.
Maybe this goes hand in hand with an affinity for foreign language?
There's mathematical/methodical intelligence. Which is useful, generally, in sciences like chemistry and physics.
Not the same, necessarily, as the intelligence that goes along with a curiosity about the world around us, that requires a certain creativity when it comes to an ability for scientific advance.
And then there's the common sense, on-your-feet sort of intelligence. I have a friend with this sort of intelligence who's very good at football.
And humor, playing a crowd is a different sort of intelligence entirely. Maybe even more than one, because of all the different types of humor.
Social intelligence? An ability to manipulate and persuade and understand people.
I know someone who can solve a Rubik's cube behind his back.
And then someone whose ability to recall historical fact and information (and also interpret it) just appalls me.
Intellect, too. There are people who are very interested in truth, in philosophy and being inquisitive and everything that goes along with that. But really, there are different forms of this intelligence, too. Emotional intellects, logical/methodical/rational/mathematical intellects.
I think it is possible and not really ridiculous to make any non-physical talent or skill out to be intelligence, no?
I love looking at all the people closest to me and all the people I spend the most time with and seeing all these different forms of intelligence (and more) shine, every individual blend displayed.
I don't like labeling all these intelligences and stereotyping all these people because each one is so different, but I think it helps me fully appreciate everyone.
We are certainly a motley crew.
Currently reading:
Story, by Steven James
Current music:
So Yesterday, Amber Pacific
Rain on my soul.
Rain on everything I know.
It's so ludicrous,
the pursuit of this dream.
We thought we beat it long ago.
From The Classic Crime.
When asked how much money a man needs, Andrew Carnegie replied, "Oh, just a little more."
He also said, though, "The one who dies rich, dies disgraced."
It's very interesting being surrounded by so many extremely intelligent people and not being surrounded by constant ambition to earn loads. I mean, honestly, I can't even think of anyone in my classes who is in IB or earning the grades they are or working so hard because they want to earn a bunch of money.
Which, by the way, is significant because I'm surrounded by a group of the most motivated high schoolers in the district. State. Nation.
Speaking of intelligence: I am finding lately that there are many, many different forms of intelligence. In fact, I'm beginning to think, because I have so much trouble even labeling sorts of intelligence, that each person has not a unique amount of intelligence, necessarily, but a very unique and different intelligence entirely.
Maybe a unique combination of many sorts of intelligence? I don't know.
The best way to explain this is to tell my story, which is awfully personal and not something I really enjoy letting the world see because I am ashamed of it. I think I'll do it anyway though:
I have been accustomed to receiving good grades and being at the top of my class all my life, and so it knocked me off my feet getting to high school and the IB program and finding so many very, very intelligent people. I, however, being the prideful person I am, didn't hesitate to come up with excuses for myself when I was not number one. (My mom says I need to gain the 'courage to be mediocre'.) Eventually, though, I began to chastise and struggled to stop this rationalizing part of myself, so that I could come to terms with the fact that I am not, in fact, smarter than everyone.
It was really a slap in the face, however, when I started getting to know all the people in this program and discovered that even many of the people who aren't ranked above me GPA-wise or PSAT score-wise are much smarter than I am in many ways.
I am beginning to bask in this realization. I love the people that surround me. Some times not as much as others, but for the most part I am really appreciating what a privilege it is to be in the company of so many geniuses.
Maybe the most prevalent form of intelligence is just a natural ability to be good at things.
There's also an ability to appreciate and work through literature. I am lacking in this intelligence.
This is different, I think, from linguistic intelligence. Some people are very good at putting words together and making them sound nice, or working through vocabulary.
Maybe this goes hand in hand with an affinity for foreign language?
There's mathematical/methodical intelligence. Which is useful, generally, in sciences like chemistry and physics.
Not the same, necessarily, as the intelligence that goes along with a curiosity about the world around us, that requires a certain creativity when it comes to an ability for scientific advance.
And then there's the common sense, on-your-feet sort of intelligence. I have a friend with this sort of intelligence who's very good at football.
And humor, playing a crowd is a different sort of intelligence entirely. Maybe even more than one, because of all the different types of humor.
Social intelligence? An ability to manipulate and persuade and understand people.
I know someone who can solve a Rubik's cube behind his back.
And then someone whose ability to recall historical fact and information (and also interpret it) just appalls me.
Intellect, too. There are people who are very interested in truth, in philosophy and being inquisitive and everything that goes along with that. But really, there are different forms of this intelligence, too. Emotional intellects, logical/methodical/rational/mathematical intellects.
I think it is possible and not really ridiculous to make any non-physical talent or skill out to be intelligence, no?
I love looking at all the people closest to me and all the people I spend the most time with and seeing all these different forms of intelligence (and more) shine, every individual blend displayed.
I don't like labeling all these intelligences and stereotyping all these people because each one is so different, but I think it helps me fully appreciate everyone.
We are certainly a motley crew.
Currently reading:
Story, by Steven James
Current music:
So Yesterday, Amber Pacific
Saturday, September 1, 2007
pride, music, love is real, tied to the flesh
Pride is an enormous subject with me. I'm gonna start with a definition. Ambgtr (maybe I should start using nicknames like companionableills -- I know I'd have fun with that) can attest for the semantics problems we've had because we didn't bother to give our personal definitions.
When I speak of pride (most often, at least, and when I'm speaking of it here), I'm referring to pride the sin. Pride the sin is believing that you are good without God. It's trying to be God without Him. It's attributing your talents or skills or hard work or whatever it may be to yourself, rather than to Him who gave them to you.
(It's horribly ludicrous, in other words.)
The Devil is the epitome of pride. He works with pride, through pride; he is pride. Pride is something I have really struggled with, and, to me, it is the root of all sin. A man is greedy because he wants more things, and he wants more things very often because he wants more than his neighbor, and he wants more than his neighbor because he believes himself to be the best. It gets more complex than that, but that is only one example.
In short, if we didn't believe ourselves above having God in complete control, then He would be in control. If He was in control, we wouldn't sin any longer.
So, um, that was an introduction to pride? I originally was going to say a lot about it but it's 12:22am three days later and I haven't finished my homework and this post is long enough anyway. Next post, probably.
This is a blog from the Andrew McMahon of Jack's Mannequin and Something Corporate, and it's what I want from my music. I am very, very picky. This might sound very cliche and not at all unique, but I look for music that is real and sometimes I have trouble finding it.
Music is a bit of heaven, and a powerful emotional device, and a means of motivation, and a method of catharsis, and whatever you want to take from it, really. It can be damaging. I am very careful with my music.
Sometimes I feel things in my chest and know that they're not necessarily lasting. It's not until I feel them in my gut that I know they're there for good. Those are the things that tug at my heartstrings. That's what is my core.
I was talking to someone I really look up to the other night and he expressed a feeling he had, before conversion, of emptiness. He felt it inside of him, physically. He'd spend time around strong Christians and sensed a core, stability that he was missing.
God is my rock.
All of this is such great evidence to me that we are truly tied to the flesh. I am not a materialist or empiricist and really, philosophically, often lean more towards idealism (I suppose technically I'm a dualist maybe?), but my faith tells me that our reality is, in fact, inherently real. I cannot prove this -- my TOK (theory of knowledge - a required class for the IB program) classmates, or at least the ones that discuss things with me, know what I mean. It is a matter of faith and so I take it to be true. God tells me that He made all things and they are good. I take that to mean that my body and the things around me and the world I live in are useful tools in knowing God, becoming closer to Him, loving Him and loving His people, and I believe that the things God put on this earth can be and are used by Him to reach us. Music, food, water. The question is, to what extent? I'm not actually going to get into this yet, though.
I'm sure we've all heard DesCartes's "Cogito ergo sum. [I think, therefore I am.]". (What a coincidence because after writing this I read this week's TOK chapter and it talked about this.) Love proves my existence to me the same way Descartes doubting proved his (he may doubt that everything is real, but there has to be a doubter and so, he exists). I love people, and so something is being loved. I can't technically prove the existence of that something, but someone is certainly acting upon that something, no matter how little basis for doing it that someone has. I guess this is part of what I was trying to say at the beginning of this post.
On a kind of irrelated (I'm gonna get way ahead of you all and point out to myself that this isn't a word) note, love (and, really, emotion in general, but I like talking about love) is much more real, philosophically, to me than anything else. In TOK we talk about the ways of knowing (emotion, language, perception, thought) and really, the only one I really trust is emotion. I won't go into why the others are generally very unreliable (maybe another time) but emotion is something, really, that is pretty reliably outside of ourselves. I'm getting myself kind of tied up here because all my ideas for the effects of emotion rely pretty much on perception or language, but for the most part emotion is not really part of us. Though we might have control over emotions, the very fact that we might want or have to have control over them indicates that they are separate ('outside', I think, is not the right word) or not of ourselves. Emotions uniquely make us act certain ways -- it's not like when I see a tree and so decide to walk around it (and so the tree made me do something), where I could very easily not walk around that tree. I made a conscious decision to walk around the tree. I didn't really have to, but I, myself, decided to and made me do it. Maybe, though, I was feeling particularly masochistic that day and so instead of walking around the tree I ran into it quite painfully, probably. If I didn't have those bad feelings of myself, that emotion, I'm sure I would have avoided that tree. Or maybe I was feeling bad about myself but I thought about it and realized that walking into a tree was an awfully ridiculous thing to do, so I went around it. My point is, I still thought about it. If I didn't have that emotion, I wouldn't have given it a second thought at all. I would have walked around the tree because that's generally what common sense would have me do. But when I have this emotion, it requires some thought or control to walk around the tree when I otherwise would do it automatically.
All I'm really trying to say here is that emotion is pretty reliably (not provably [haha! didn't think that was a word], I know) not of ourselves. (But this is a ridiculously knotted argument because it may in fact rely entirely on perception [that is, sense-data, for those of you who read the TOK book]. How sad.)
This is not to say that emotion is always correct (not the word I want, really) though. Example: Once, I had a dream that somebody I knew did something really, really stupid and irritating. I woke up mad at him, and couldn't shake that anger for about a day and a half. I even talked to him about it. Completely unbased (what is that red squiggly line doing there?!) emotion.
Maybe, though, I'm mistakenly considering 'perception' as a way of knowing (which, to me, mostly includes language) and our 'sense-data' (we have sensations of color, texture, heaviness -- the color, texture, weight itself is a sense-datum) to be the same thing.
Well shooot. That switches things around a lot, I guess.
So I went maybe a little wikipedia/link crazy on this one. Maybe not. I also have discovered that my vocabulary sucks. In the normal sense but also in the I've-got-to-stop-making-up-words sense.
This is one of my more rambly (another red squiggly line :[ ), stream-of-consciousness posts and I'm going to apologize to and virtually pat on the back anyone who did me the favor of reading through it. Maybe not as high a substance-to-word ratio as desirable, but I'd still like to hear what you have to say.
Currently reading:
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Current music:
Between the Trees
Notre-Dame soundtrack
First Time, by Lifehouse
Twenty-Four, Switchfoot
Globes and Maps, Something Corporate
When I speak of pride (most often, at least, and when I'm speaking of it here), I'm referring to pride the sin. Pride the sin is believing that you are good without God. It's trying to be God without Him. It's attributing your talents or skills or hard work or whatever it may be to yourself, rather than to Him who gave them to you.
(It's horribly ludicrous, in other words.)
The Devil is the epitome of pride. He works with pride, through pride; he is pride. Pride is something I have really struggled with, and, to me, it is the root of all sin. A man is greedy because he wants more things, and he wants more things very often because he wants more than his neighbor, and he wants more than his neighbor because he believes himself to be the best. It gets more complex than that, but that is only one example.
In short, if we didn't believe ourselves above having God in complete control, then He would be in control. If He was in control, we wouldn't sin any longer.
So, um, that was an introduction to pride? I originally was going to say a lot about it but it's 12:22am three days later and I haven't finished my homework and this post is long enough anyway. Next post, probably.
This is a blog from the Andrew McMahon of Jack's Mannequin and Something Corporate, and it's what I want from my music. I am very, very picky. This might sound very cliche and not at all unique, but I look for music that is real and sometimes I have trouble finding it.
Music is a bit of heaven, and a powerful emotional device, and a means of motivation, and a method of catharsis, and whatever you want to take from it, really. It can be damaging. I am very careful with my music.
Sometimes I feel things in my chest and know that they're not necessarily lasting. It's not until I feel them in my gut that I know they're there for good. Those are the things that tug at my heartstrings. That's what is my core.
I was talking to someone I really look up to the other night and he expressed a feeling he had, before conversion, of emptiness. He felt it inside of him, physically. He'd spend time around strong Christians and sensed a core, stability that he was missing.
God is my rock.
All of this is such great evidence to me that we are truly tied to the flesh. I am not a materialist or empiricist and really, philosophically, often lean more towards idealism (I suppose technically I'm a dualist maybe?), but my faith tells me that our reality is, in fact, inherently real. I cannot prove this -- my TOK (theory of knowledge - a required class for the IB program) classmates, or at least the ones that discuss things with me, know what I mean. It is a matter of faith and so I take it to be true. God tells me that He made all things and they are good. I take that to mean that my body and the things around me and the world I live in are useful tools in knowing God, becoming closer to Him, loving Him and loving His people, and I believe that the things God put on this earth can be and are used by Him to reach us. Music, food, water. The question is, to what extent? I'm not actually going to get into this yet, though.
I'm sure we've all heard DesCartes's "Cogito ergo sum. [I think, therefore I am.]". (What a coincidence because after writing this I read this week's TOK chapter and it talked about this.) Love proves my existence to me the same way Descartes doubting proved his (he may doubt that everything is real, but there has to be a doubter and so, he exists). I love people, and so something is being loved. I can't technically prove the existence of that something, but someone is certainly acting upon that something, no matter how little basis for doing it that someone has. I guess this is part of what I was trying to say at the beginning of this post.
On a kind of irrelated (I'm gonna get way ahead of you all and point out to myself that this isn't a word) note, love (and, really, emotion in general, but I like talking about love) is much more real, philosophically, to me than anything else. In TOK we talk about the ways of knowing (emotion, language, perception, thought) and really, the only one I really trust is emotion. I won't go into why the others are generally very unreliable (maybe another time) but emotion is something, really, that is pretty reliably outside of ourselves. I'm getting myself kind of tied up here because all my ideas for the effects of emotion rely pretty much on perception or language, but for the most part emotion is not really part of us. Though we might have control over emotions, the very fact that we might want or have to have control over them indicates that they are separate ('outside', I think, is not the right word) or not of ourselves. Emotions uniquely make us act certain ways -- it's not like when I see a tree and so decide to walk around it (and so the tree made me do something), where I could very easily not walk around that tree. I made a conscious decision to walk around the tree. I didn't really have to, but I, myself, decided to and made me do it. Maybe, though, I was feeling particularly masochistic that day and so instead of walking around the tree I ran into it quite painfully, probably. If I didn't have those bad feelings of myself, that emotion, I'm sure I would have avoided that tree. Or maybe I was feeling bad about myself but I thought about it and realized that walking into a tree was an awfully ridiculous thing to do, so I went around it. My point is, I still thought about it. If I didn't have that emotion, I wouldn't have given it a second thought at all. I would have walked around the tree because that's generally what common sense would have me do. But when I have this emotion, it requires some thought or control to walk around the tree when I otherwise would do it automatically.
All I'm really trying to say here is that emotion is pretty reliably (not provably [haha! didn't think that was a word], I know) not of ourselves. (But this is a ridiculously knotted argument because it may in fact rely entirely on perception [that is, sense-data, for those of you who read the TOK book]. How sad.)
This is not to say that emotion is always correct (not the word I want, really) though. Example: Once, I had a dream that somebody I knew did something really, really stupid and irritating. I woke up mad at him, and couldn't shake that anger for about a day and a half. I even talked to him about it. Completely unbased (what is that red squiggly line doing there?!) emotion.
Maybe, though, I'm mistakenly considering 'perception' as a way of knowing (which, to me, mostly includes language) and our 'sense-data' (we have sensations of color, texture, heaviness -- the color, texture, weight itself is a sense-datum) to be the same thing.
Well shooot. That switches things around a lot, I guess.
So I went maybe a little wikipedia/link crazy on this one. Maybe not. I also have discovered that my vocabulary sucks. In the normal sense but also in the I've-got-to-stop-making-up-words sense.
This is one of my more rambly (another red squiggly line :[ ), stream-of-consciousness posts and I'm going to apologize to and virtually pat on the back anyone who did me the favor of reading through it. Maybe not as high a substance-to-word ratio as desirable, but I'd still like to hear what you have to say.
Currently reading:
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Current music:
Between the Trees
Notre-Dame soundtrack
First Time, by Lifehouse
Twenty-Four, Switchfoot
Globes and Maps, Something Corporate
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