Word: breakdowns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Typical of the day is TIME's downgrading of St. Thomas Aquinas' mystical experience by comparing it with a "breakdown." Other religious leaders have had similar experiences, characteristically considered the crowning events of their lives. The "normal" Western mind does not recognize spiritual excellence when encountering it, and even the churches fear nothing quite so much as religion...
...feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Italian Dominican Friar Thomas Aquinas entered a chapel in Naples to say Mass before beginning a day of lecturing and writing. During the Mass, something profound happened to him: some kind of physical or nervous breakdown, perhaps accompanied by an overpowering mystical vision. Afterward, he ceased dictating his theological masterwork, the Summa Theologiae. "All that I have written," he explained to concerned friends, "seems to me like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me." He never wrote another line. Three months later-700 years ago last month-he died...
...Mental Breakdown. Pirsig is no orthodox Zen Buddhist; his equivalent of a meditative tea ceremony is tuning his engine. "A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance," he says, "is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." In an age preoccupied with sensation, Pirsig does not regard "reason" as a dirty word. His persistent message is that thinking is feeling, a view that underlies his advice about how to prepare mentally for troubleshooting an engine. Briefly, motor maintenance requires a good deal of quiet concentration so that the underlying principles of the engine are allowed to fill...
...Chris riding on the back of the cycle. By the time they reach Bozeman, Mont., where Pirsig once taught college English, it is apparent that his ideas have been earned at considerable cost and suffering. He reveals some frightening facts about himself. In 1961 he suffered a mental breakdown and underwent a series of shock treatments, which wiped out many of his personal memories. To give his philosophical inquiries a dramatic edge, Pirsig refers to his shadowy pretreatment self as Phaedrus, the name of one of Socrates' straight men from Plato's Dialogues...
...necessity for touring both for the efficiency and reliability that it gives you. You may never break down with a three speed, but you will also never keep up. And while you may keep up with a cheap ten speed, you may also end up with a breakdown somewhere out in East Jesus...