Synopsis
A story about a father and son who go on a motorcycle road trip where he discusses and discovers who they are as well as some key philosophical concepts.
Key Takeaways
Page 4 – “I’ve wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn’t see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
Everything we need is in the present moment but all we do is think about the past or the future. When the truth knocks, open the door. When the answer comes be ready to receive it.
Page 32 – “The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”
The reality around us is a construct of the mind. Allot of things are a construct of the mind.
Page 49 – “I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations.”
Be aware of what you are feeling, don’t judge it, let it be and follow it.
Page 58 -“He was trying to be friendly. But the words weren’t forthcoming for some reason. Consoling words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band-Aids like that aren’t what he needs or what’s sought”
Give kin what kin need
Page 75 – “This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.”
Could the purpose of life be this simple? To live?
Page 76 – “That’s what’s really wearing them down. The thought.”
Thoughts wear us down. Thoughts wear us down. Not the actual sensation/event. The thought.
Page 76 – “He was so swift at this his StanfordBinet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic manipulation, was recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty thousand.”
IQ is just a test at certain exercises. How many other things are just exercises with special hurdles?
Page 80 – “It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?”
How do you know your dreaming? Is this all a dream? How would you act different?
Page 81 – ““You have a new personality now.” But this statement was no explanation at all. It puzzled me more than ever since I had no awareness at all of any “old” personality. If they had said, “You are a new personality,” it would have been much clearer. That would have fitted. They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.”
We are our soul, our bodies are a suit. Love the person no matter the body.
Page 81 – “These EYES! That is the terror of it. These gloved hands I now look at, steering the motorcycle down the road, were once his! And if you can understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real fear…the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly run.”
You run from what you are, you can’t hide.
Page 92 – “There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There’s nothing else there. But what’s “potential”? That’s also in someone’s mind! — Ghosts.”
Potential and ghosts are in our mind, you can bring it into reality. Be what you are meant to be.
Page 103 – “The supreme task — is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them –”
You know what your supposed to do and how your supposed to do it.
Page 132 – “In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.”
You are everything around you and everything is you
Page 138 – “Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn’t tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.”
It’s the soul of something that makes it special, nothing else
Page 153 – “The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.”
We can only create that which we are. If we are disturbed the work will be disturbed. If we are messy the work will be messy.
Page 171 – “Quality, you know what it is, you can’t define it, somethings are better than others”
You know quality when you see it. Like a good hoodie, you can feel it.
Page 187 – “that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by.”
P’s equal degrees. Why are you at Uni? To get a job or to learn?
Page 198 – “Now we’re paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.”
Stop trying to prove yourself. Prove yourself to what? You are what you are. That’s okay. Be what you are meant to be. Don’t try to impress. Each breath, each step, one at a time.
Page 225 – “Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.”
Quality shows itself no matter the opinion.
Page 300 – “So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally.
But the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkey’s hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped…by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He can’t revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it
Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness,” is the real reason you find it hard to get started
Boredom is the next gumption trap that comes to mind. This is the opposite of anxiety and commonly goes with ego problems. Boredom means you’re off the Quality track, you’re not seeing things freshly, you’ve lost your “beginner’s mind” and your motorcycle is in great danger. Boredom means your gumption supply is low and must be replenished before anything else is done.
When you’re bored, stop! Go to a show. Turn on the TV. Call it a day. Do anything but work on that machine. If you don’t stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake, and then all the boredom plus the Big Mistake combine together in one Sunday punch to knock all the gumption out of you and you are really stopped.
This motorcycle seems to be running a little hot — but I suppose it’s just the hot dry country we’re going through — I’ll leave the answer to that in a mu state — until it gets worse or better. —
Good tools, as a rule, don’t wear out, and good second-hand tools are much better than inferior new ones. Study the tool catalogues. You can learn a lot from them. Apart from bad tools, bad surroundings are a major gumption trap. Pay attention to adequate lighting. It’s amazing the number of mistakes a little light can prevent.
The answer, of course, is no, you still haven’t got anything licked. You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I’m trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right.”
I will summarise how I understand each paragraph of the above in one line below.
- Do what you are doing, be where you are
- Don’t hold on to things that stop you from getting to the more important things
- Don’t be scared to start, first step
- When your bored, stop and come back to it.
- Mu is accepting the unknown
- You will do better work with better tools and a better environment
- Excellence is a habit and not an action.
Page 313 – “Why don’t you come out of the shadows? What do you really look like? You’re afraid of something aren’t you? What is it you’re afraid of?”
A question we should always ask ourselves. Show your whole self, do not keep anything back.
Page 338 – “She probably doesn’t understand that with a loke that she isn’t going to be lonely long”
The energy we put out is the energy we get back
Page 339 – “It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small and here its reversed”
Real friends are always close not matter the physical distance.
Page 340 – “Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with…and they are all, sooner or later, dull…and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.”
Do good work no matter who is listening
Page 341 – “The tendency to do what is ‘reasonable” even when it isn’t any good”
This is the tragedy of the modern day.
Page 358 – `He is far better than his father.’ “What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,” Kitto comments, “is not a sense of duty as we understand it…duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate `virtue’ but is in Greek areté, `excellence’ — we shall have much to say about areté. It runs through Greek life.”
Do the best you can for yourself and no one else.
Page 359 – “Quality! Virtue! Dharma!”
Its all related
Page 359 – “`Virtue,’ at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; areté, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence.” Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian you that boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté.
Virtue is doing things well, quality
Page 359 – Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency…or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.”
Build a beautiful life one day at a time
Page 377 – “A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, “You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley.” It carries him forward. “You’ve got to cross it by yourself.” It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.”
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Page 382 – “What I am is a heretic who’s recanted, and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eye but one, who knows deep down inside that he has saved is his skin”
You always know the truth
Final Thoughts
A book that takes effort to read but has allot of rewards. The explanation of quality is worth it alone. Some of it is naval gazing but allot of it provides a look behind the curtain of our own and societies biases. For example; why is it better to be reasonable then good? My main takeaway is to fill my life with quality, quality thoughts, quality actions and quality words. The other is the journey is to find yourself and not to arrive at a destination. Be open to the journey.
Stranger in Sydney 