Augustine what is time confessions

Rist 78— The later version in De trinitate explicitly presents divine illumination as an alternative to Platonic recollection and situates it in the framework of a theory of creation. Gilson ch. Letter Thus, while all human beings are by nature capable of accessing intelligible truth, only those succeed in doing so who have a sufficiently good will De magistro 38 —presumably those who endorse Christian religion and live accordingly.

Like all human agency, striving for wisdom takes place under the conditions of a fallen world and meets the difficulties and hindrances humanity is subject to because of original sin. De immortalitate animae 6; De trinitate Plotinus, Enneads IV. If, as in De immortalitate animae 6, recollection is taken to prove the immortality of the soul as it did in the Phaedo , it is hard to see how preexistence should not be implied. In any event, it is imprecise to say, as it is sometimes done, that Augustine gave up the theory of recollection because he realized that preexistence was at variance with Christian faith.

In De civitate dei Augustine emphatically rejects Platonic-Pythagorean metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls as incompatible with eternal happiness and the economy of salvation, and in De trinitate Yet it is a fallacy to claim that recollection entails transmigration. The early Augustine may have believed in preexistence perhaps simply as a corollary of the immortality of the soul , but there is no evidence that he believed in the transmigration of souls; conversely, his rejection of transmigration did not prevent even the late Augustine from considering preexistence—at least theoretically—an option for the origin of the soul Letter He rejects the rationalism of the philosophers and, especially, the Manicheans as an unwarranted over-confidence into the abilities of human reason resulting from sinful pride and as an arrogant neglect of the revelation of Christ in Scripture De libero arbitrio 3.

Against the fideism he encountered in some Christian circles cf. Philosophical argument may be of help in this process; yet as Augustine notes as early as in Contra Academicos 3. Confessiones 7. The Augustine of the earliest dialogues seems to have entertained the elitist idea that those educated in the liberal arts and capable of the Neoplatonic intellectual ascent may actually outgrow authority and achieve a full understanding of the divine already in this life De ordine 2.

In his later work, he abandons this hope and emphasizes that during this life, inevitably characterized by sin and weakness, every human being remains in need of the guidance of the revealed authority of Christ Cary b: — Faith is thus not just an epistemological but also an ethical category; it is essential for the moral purification we need to undergo before we can hope for even a glimpse of true understanding Soliloquia 1.

Without belief in the former sense, we would have to admit that we are ignorant of our own lineage Confessiones 6. The belief that a person we have not seen was or is just may trigger our fraternal love for him De trinitate 8. Thus, while no doubt faith in revelation precedes rational insight into its true meaning, the decision about whose authority to believe and whom to accept as a reliable witness is itself reasonable De vera religione 45; Letter Even so, belief may of course be deceived De trinitate 8.

In ordinary life, this is inevitable and mostly unproblematic. A more serious problem is the justification of belief in Scripture, which, for Augustine, is the tradition and authority auctoritas , not potestas of the Church Contra epistulam fundamenti 5. He follows the Stoics in distinguishing between the sound of a word, its meaning and the thing it signifies De dialectica 5; De quantitate animae 66; cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 8. In his handbook of biblical exegesis and Christian rhetoric, De doctrina christiana 1.

Language is defined as a system of given signs by means of which the speaker signifies either things or her thoughts and emotions Enchiridion Augustine therefore begins with a sketch of his theology and ethics centered around the notions of love of God and neighbor before he sets out his biblical hermeneutics which, again, posits love as the criterion of exegetical adequacy Pollmann ; Williams The words of the Bible are external signs designed to prompt us to the more inward phenomenon of love and, ultimately, to God who is beyond all language and thought.

This may be generalized to the principle that external—verbal and non-verbal—signs operate on a lower ontological level than the inward and intelligible truth they attempt to signify and that they are superseded in true knowledge which is knowledge not of signs but of things.

This holds not only for words, even the words of Scripture, but also for the sacraments and for the Incarnation of Christ Contra epistulam fundamenti After a long discussion of how verbal signs signify things or states of mind and how they relate to other signs, it turns out, rather surprisingly, that we do not learn things from signs at all because in order to understand the meaning of a sign we already have to be acquainted with the thing signified.

This does not mean that words are useless. Just as the spoken word signifies a concept that we have formed within our mind and communicates it to others, so Christ incarnate signifies the divine Logos and admonishes and assists us to turn to it cf. In De trinitate Augustine expands this to a theory about how the inner word or concept is formed The inner word is generated when we actualize some latent or implicit knowledge that is stored in our memory.

It is not a sign, nor of linguistic nature Augustine insists that it is neither Latin nor Greek nor Hebrew , but rather seems to be a kind of a-temporal intellectual insight that transcends language cf.

De catechizandis rudibus 3. Properly speaking, then, the theory of the inner word is not a linguistic theory at all. Like most ancient philosophers, Augustine thinks that the human being is a compound of body and soul and that, within this compound, the soul—conceived as both the life-giving element and the center of consciousness, perception and thought—is, or ought to be, the ruling part.

The rational soul should control the sensual desires and passions; it can become wise if it turns to God, who is at the same time the Supreme Being and the Supreme Good. In his Manichean phase, he conceived of both God and the soul as material entities, the soul being in fact a portion of God that had fallen into the corporeal world where it remained a foreigner, even to its own body De duabus animabus 1; Confessiones 8. After his Platonist readings in Milan had provided him with the adequate philosophical means to think about immaterial, non-spatial reality Confessiones 7.

MacDonald , and bodies, which are subject to temporal and spatial change Letter The soul is of divine origin and even god-like De quantitate animae 2—3 ; it is not divine itself but created by God the talk about divinity of the soul in the Cassiciacum dialogues seems to be a traditional Ciceronian element, cf.

In the Soliloquia 2. Phaedo dc. It says that since truth is both eternal and in the soul as its subject, it follows that soul, the subject of truth, is eternal too. This is fallacious, because if truth is eternal independently of the soul it cannot be in the soul as in its subject i. After De immortalitate animae , Augustine never returned to his proof. But neither did he disown it; as late as De trinitate He also sticks to his conviction that immortality is a necessary condition of happiness but insists that it is not a sufficient condition, given that immortality and misery are compatible cf.

De civitate dei 9. Resurrection, however, is not susceptible of rational proof; it is a promise of God that must be believed on Scriptural authority De trinitate ib. Together with an essentially Platonic notion of the soul, Augustine inherits the classical problems of Platonic soul-body dualism. De quantitate animae 22 if it is incorporeal itself? And how are corporeal and psychic aspects related to each other in phenomena that involve both body and soul, especially if, like passions and desires, these are morally relevant?

These problems are further complicated by the Platonic axiom that incorporeal entities, being ontologically prior to corporeal ones, cannot be causally affected by them. With Plotinus, he insists that sense perception is not an affection which the soul passively undergoes as Stoic materialism would have it, where sensory perception was interpreted as a kind of imprint in the soul but its active awareness of affections undergone by the body De quantitate animae 41; 48; De Genesi ad litteram 7.

In De musica 6. In addition to the usual five senses, Augustine identifies a sensory faculty that relates the data of the senses to each other and judges them aesthetically but not morally; De musica 6. In Neoplatonism it was disputed how soul, being immortal, immaterial and ontologically superior to body, came to be incorporated nevertheless. Augustine addresses the issue in the horizon of his doctrine of creation and, in the period of the Pelagian Controversy, of the debate about the transmission of original sin see 9.

Gender, Women and Sexuality. In De libero arbitrio 3. After all these options come to the fore again Letters Augustine discards none of them officially except for the notion, wrongly associated with Origenism, which was considered a heresy at the time, that incorporation was a punishment for a sin committed by the pre-existent soul De civitate dei In practice, he narrows the debate down to the alternative between creationism and traducianism, which appear to have been the only options taken seriously by his Christian contemporaries.

Augustine deploys what we may call his philosophy of the mind most fully in his great work on Nicene Trinitarian theology, De trinitate. Having removed apparent Scriptural obstacles to the equality and consubstantiality of the three divine persons bks. The basis for this move is, of course, Genesis — Augustine follows a long-standing Jewish and Patristic tradition, familiar to him from Ambrose, according to which the biblical qualification of the human being as an image of God referred not to the living body a literalist reading vulnerable to the Manichean charge of anthropomorphism, cf.

Confessiones 6. The general pattern of his argument is the Augustinian ascent from the external to the internal and from the senses to God; but since human reason is, whether by nature or due to its fallen state, hardly capable of knowing God, Augustine this time is obliged to interrupt and re-start the ascent several times.

The final book shows that the exercise of analyzing the human mind does have preparatory value for our thinking about the Trinity but does not yield insight into the divine by being simply transferred to it De trinitate The last element ensures the active character of perception and intellection but also gives weight to the idea that we do not cognize an object unless we consciously direct our attention to it MacDonald b.

Augustine begins by arguing in a manner reminiscent of his cogito-like argument; see 5. This pre-reflexive self-awareness is presupposed by every act of conscious cognition. As the mind in its fallen state is deeply immersed in sensible reality, it tends to forget what it really is and what it knows it is and confounds itself with the things it attaches the greatest importance to, i. The result are materialist theories about the soul, which thus derive from flawed morality De trinitate If it follows the Delphic command, however, the mind will realize that it knows with certainty that it exists, thinks, wills etc.

And as the substance or essence of the mind cannot be anything other than what it knows with certainty about itself, it follows that nothing material is essential to the mind and that its essence must be sought in its mental acts ib. Again, the ethical side of the theory should not be overlooked. As a strong voluntary element is present in and necessary for an act of cognition, what objects imaginations, thoughts we cognize is morally relevant and indicative of our loves and desires.

And while the triadic structure of the mind is its very essence and hence inalienable, Augustine insists that the mind is created in the image of God, not because it is capable of self-knowledge, but because it has the potential to become wise, i.

He takes it as axiomatic that happiness is the ultimate goal pursued by all human beings e. Confessiones Wetzel , 42— This structure Augustine inscribes into his Neoplatonically inspired three-tiered ontological hierarchy Letter The Supreme Being is also the greatest good; the desire of created being for happiness can only be satisfied by the creator. If we turn away from him and direct our attention and love to the bodies—which are not per se bad, as in Manicheism, but an infinitely lesser good than God—or to ourselves, who are a great good but still subordinate to God, we become miserable, foolish and wicked Letter Just as after the Fall all human beings are inevitably tainted by sin, we need to be purified through faith in order to live well and to restore our ability to know and love God De diversis quaestionibus We love absolutely only what we enjoy, whereas our love for things we use is relative and even instrumental De doctrina christiana 1.

The only proper object of enjoyment is God cf. Wickedness and confusion of the moral order results from a reversal of use and enjoyment, when we want to enjoy what we ought to use all created things, e. An obvious problem of this system is the categorization of the biblically prescribed love of the neighbor.

Are we to enjoy our neighbor or to use her? The problem is inherited from ancient eudaimonism, where it takes some philosophical effort to reconcile the intuition that concern for others is morally relevant with the assumption that ethics is primarily about the virtue and happiness of the individual.

Augustine is aware of the problem and gives a differentiated answer. In De doctrina christiana 1. Love of the neighbor thus means to desire his true happiness in the same way as we desire our own.

Confessiones 4. In principle Augustine follows the view of the ancient eudaimonists that virtue is sufficient or at least relevant for happiness. There are however several important modifications.

True virtue guarantees true happiness, but there is no true virtue that is not a gift of grace. The perfect inner tranquility virtue strives for will only be achieved in the afterlife. Virtue is an inner disposition or motivational habit that enables us to perform every action we perform out of right love. There are several catalogues of the traditional four cardinal virtues prudence, justice, courage and temperance that redefine these as varieties of the love of God either in this life or in the eschaton De moribus 1.

This does not mean that virtue becomes non-rational for Augustine love and will are essential features of the rational mind; see 6. The criterion of true virtue is that it is oriented toward God. Even if Augustine occasionally talks as if the four cardinal virtues could be added to the Pauline or theological virtues of love, faith and hope to make a sum of seven Letter A.

These modifications have several interesting consequences. Even though Augustine postpones the happiness that is the reward of virtue to the afterlife, he does not make virtue a means to an end in the sense that virtue becomes superfluous when happiness is reached. To the contrary, he insists that virtue will persist in the eschaton where it will be transformed into eternal unimpeded fruition of God and of the neighbor in God.

Then it will indeed be its own reward and identical with happiness Letter Both eschatological virtue and virtue in this life are thus love of God; they only differ in that the latter is subject to hindrances and temptation. For this reason, those who have true love of God—e. When analyzing virtue in this life, Augustine takes up the Stoic distinction, familiar to him from Cicero De officiis 1.

Augustine therefore distinguishes between true i. Among other things, this distinction underpins his solution of the so-called problem of pagan virtue Harding ; Tornau b; Dodaro a: 27—71; Rist — because it permits ascribing virtue in a meaningful sense to pagan and pre-Christian paradigms of virtue like Socrates without having to admit that they were eligible for salvation.

From this point of view, Socrates is closer to Paul than to Nero, even though his virtue will not bring him happiness, i. It is closely related to virtue and often used synonymously with will e. De civitate dei As in the Symposium and in Plotinus Enneads I.

In a more general way, love means the overall direction of our will positively toward God or negatively toward ourselves or corporeal creature De civitate dei The former is called love in a good sense caritas , the latter cupidity or concupiscence cupiditas , i.

The root of sin is excessive self-love that wants to put the self in the position of God and is equivalent with pride De civitate dei In his earlier work, Augustine has some difficulties incorporating love of neighbor into the Platonic and eudaimonist framework of his thinking De doctrina christiana 1. After , in the context of his reflections on the Trinity and his exegesis of the First Epistle of John esp.

In loving our neighbors, we of necessity love that love which enables us to do so itself, which is none other than God; love of God and love of neighbor are, accordingly, co-extensive and, ultimately, identical De trinitate 8. He keenly insists that each and every action, even if it is externally good and impressive, can be motivated either by a good or an evil intention, by right or perverse love, by charity or pride.

This goes for the actions prescribed by the Sermon of the Mount and even for martyrdom In epistulam Iohannis tractatus decem 8. It is therefore impossible to give casuistic rules for external moral behavior. In a sense, his ideal agent is a successor of the Stoic and Neoplatonic sage, who always acts out of inner virtue or perfect rationality the latter Augustine replaces with true love but adapts his outward actions to the external circumstances cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos On the one hand, this limits the authority of other people—including those endowed with worldly power or an ecclesiastical office—to pass moral judgments.

Augustine repeatedly recommends withholding judgment so as to preserve humility De civitate dei 1. On the other hand, Augustine makes our inner motivational and moral life opaque even to ourselves and fully transparent only to God Confessiones We can never be fully sure about the purity of our intentions, and even if we were, we could not be sure that we will persist in them.

All human beings are therefore called to constantly scrutinize the moral status of their inner selves in a prayerful dialogue with God as it is dramatized in the Confessiones. Such self-scrutiny may well be self-tormenting; the obsession of Western Christianity with inner latent guilt here has its Augustinian roots.

Catholic bishops are therefore obliged to compel heretics and schismatics to re-enter the Catholic church even forcibly, just as a father beats his children when he sees them playing with snakes or as we bind a madman who otherwise would fling himself down a precipice Letter Obviously, this is a paternalistic argument that presupposes superior insight in those who legitimately wield coercive power.

And as even the Church in this world is a mixed body of sinners and saints see 8. History and Political Philosophy , it may be asked how individual bishops can be sure of their good intentions when they use religious force Rist — Augustine does not address this problem, presumably because most of his relevant texts are propagandistic defenses of coercion against the Donatists. Though other Latin philosophers, especially Seneca, had made use of the concept of will voluntas before Augustine, it has a much wider application in his ethics and moral psychology than in any predecessor and covers a broader range of phenomena than either Aristotelian boulesis roughly, rational choice or Stoic prohairesis roughly, the fundamental decision to lead a good life.

Augustine comes closer than any earlier philosopher to positing will as a faculty of choice that is reducible neither to reason nor to non-rational desire. Augustine admits both first-order and second-order volitions, the latter being acts of the liberum voluntatis arbitrium , the ability to choose between conflicting first-order volitions Stump ; Horn ; den Bok Like desires, first-order volitions are intentional or object-directed and operate on all levels of the soul.

Like memory and thought, will is a constitutive element of the mind see 6. It is closely related to love and, accordingly, the locus of moral evaluation. We act well or badly if and only if our actions spring from a good or evil will, which is equivalent to saying that they are motivated by right i. With this basic idea in view, Augustine defends the passions or emotions against their Stoic condemnation as malfunctions of rational judgment by redefining them more neutrally as volitions voluntates that may be good or bad depending on their intentional objects De civitate dei 9.

As in Stoicism, the will to act is triggered by an impression generated by an external object visum. To this the mind responds with an appetitive motion that urges us to pursue or to avoid the object e. But only when we give our inner consent to this impulse or withhold it, does a will emerge that, circumstances permitting, results in a corresponding action. The will is the proper locus of our moral responsibility because it is neither in our power whether an object presents itself to our senses or intellect nor whether we take delight in it De libero arbitrio 3.

The only element that is in our power is our will or inner consent, for which we are therefore fully responsible. Thus, a person who has consented to adultery is guilty even if his attempt actually to commit it is unsuccessful, and a victim of rape who does not consent to the deed keeps her will free of sin even if she feels physical pleasure De civitate dei 1.

Temptations of this kind are, in Augustine, not personal sins but due to original sin, and they haunt even the saints. Our will must be freed by divine grace to resist them Contra Iulianum 6. In the s, opposing the dualistic fatalism of the Manicheans, he uses the cogito-like argument see 5. Harrison A contemporaneous definition of will as a movement of soul toward some object of desire emphasizes the absence of external constraint, and the ensuing definition of sin as an unjust volition see above seems to endorse the principle of alternative possibilities De duabus animabus 14— In De libero arbitrio , free will appears as the condition of possibility of moral goodness and hence as a great good itself; but as it is not an absolute good which is God alone but only an intermediate one, it is liable to misuse and, hence, also the source of moral evil De libero arbitrio 2.

In this hopelessly negative argument, Augustine accepts that the notions of past, present, and future are useful for human beings. He refutes the idea that time can be measured through the movement of stars and planets. He points out that they may move in time, but that those heavenly bodies are not actually time.

Even if none of the stars or planets existed, time would still pass. Augustine cannot give the reader a positive definition of time - he offers only a negative one. He suggests that, as Plotinus writes, time is actually a distention of the soul.

He adds that this is a distention away from the perfect being of God. In an about-face, Augustine suggests the possibility that time is something that we measure within our own memory.

We cannot grasp the past for it has no existence , but we can consider the memories of the images or sensations we had in the past. Time is thus not a feature or property of the world, but a property of the mind. This criticism of the beginning of Genesis, which is also referred to in other parts of Confessions , was common amongst Manichees and other Christians in Augustine's day. This discussion of time in the rigorous philosophical sense may seem out of place in a theological text.

In fact, Augustine apologizes somewhat at the beginning of this Book for the philosophical nature of this discussion. He does not want to appear to be philosophizing for vanity or curiosity's sake he considers idle curiosity a sin; see Books II and III.

On the surface this discussion may seem like secular philosophizing, but, especially in light of the preceding Book and Augustine's ongoing difficulties with the Biblical book of Genesis, the understanding of nature of time is necessary to defending the nature of the omnipotent, unchanging God of Catholicism.

Many of the points in this chapter seem either unknowable or pointless even to the modern metaphysical philosopher. In Augustine's day, however, these ideas were of the utmost importance to religion. It was a time of many different types of heresy Manichaeism, Donatism, Arianism, Gnosticism, among others , most of which differed with each other specifically with regards to the nature of God and Jesus Christ.

Definitions of things like creation and time were integral to the explanation of the nature of God, so these sometimes arcane arguments were of the highest dogmatic necessity. The Catholic Church at this time was not only defending its dogma from heresies, but was also in the process of codifying it completely and writing it down. Things like baptism and some kinds of sin were thought of slightly differently in the Catholic Church of Augustine's day, partially because questions like these were not completely codified.

This kind of theological inquiry, especially from someone of Augustine's education and theological genius, was necessary and very valuable to the early church. The refutation of the existence of time is persuasive even today. The idea that God is the "beginning point" rather than the beginning in a temporal sense is particularly neat, though Augustine, as in so many things, owes a debt of gratitude to the Neoplatonists for this concept.

Despite the muddled and convoluted form Augustine's arguments sometimes take, these arguments are useful not only to metaphysical philosophers, but to anyone who has ever pondered the first principles. In the middle of the night a bunch of drunken soldiers got in a huge fight over a poker game, I got caught up in it and in the process thrown off or shoved through the window while the train was moving, not waking up until the next day with the train long gone as well as all my identification and duffel bag.

After telling my story I was turned over to more covert types within the consulate and they contacted the OSS. The OSS, apparently buying my being thrown off the train story, said with all the information I have I must be one of theirs and to send me on through, only provide me with a cover, which they did. Not quite the Himalayas, but closer to the monastery than I was. Lets just say in more ways than one, returning in full to the monastery involved war torn Burma, the Japanese invasion of India , the crash of a C high in the rarefied air in the Tibetan area of the Himalayas after being lost on that same aforementioned flight flight from Calcutta, and a U.

Army captain who flew over the "hump" from China only to end up visiting the Ramana ashram at the same time I was there. That same captain, who had been called back into the Army to serve in the Korean War, during the throes of battlefield decimation going on all around him, as written in his tome A Soldier's Story , experienced a deep Spiritual Awakening not unlike those afforded the ancient classical masters.

Ten years before that, in May of , he was on a Liberty ship that was in the process of positioning itself to join a convoy somewhere off the southeast coast of Florida when it was struck by two torpedoes from a U-boat.

In order to save himself he had no choice but to jump overboard, landing in an area with oil and naphtha burning along the surface of the water, the fire burning his skin and the heat scorching his lungs as he plunged through and returned for air. He was found alive strapped by heavy ropes to a large piece of debris not along the east coast of Florida but in the north Atlantic, months and months later hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the site of the attack. An hour after his ship was hit, the U, the German submarine that unleashed the torpedoes, came alongside the lifeboats and offered assistance, but unanimously declined.

My merchant marine friend doesn't remember being in a lifeboat or a submarine, so how he ended up in the North Atlantic alive months later is a total mystery. On the same day he told me about being found floating in the middle of the ocean on a piece of debris he showed me a delicate gold necklace that had what looked like a small Chinese character dangling from it. He said one day in the hospital during recovery, while being given a sponge bath, he was looking in a hand mirror at his burn marks when he noticed the necklace around his neck.

He never had a gold necklace in his life. When he asked the nurse where it came from she said as far as she knew he came in with it as it was found among the few personal effects he had with him. She said typically they would not put any jewelry on a patient but some of the staff thought that since he was so scarred by the burns that he might like a little beauty in his life so someone put it around his neck.

He told me he had no clue where it came from or how it came into his possession, but for sure he didn't have it on before he was torpedoed. He said everybody always admired it and it appeared to be very ancient. Ten years after I saw the necklace for that very first time, found me wolfing down a few drinks in a bar in the Cholon district of Saigon. Unsolicited, a young woman, affectionately known as a Saigon Tea Girl in those days, attempted to put what appeared to be a gold necklace around my neck.

Hanging midway along the necklace was a small Chinese character. Basically grabbing the necklace from her hands I asked where it came from and how she got it. She turned facing a general group of barely discernible figures sitting and drinking toward the back of the barroom in the shadows along the darkened wall, telling me that one of the men, a burnt man, had paid her to put it on me. When I asked what she meant by a burnt man, using her hands in a swirling motion in front of her face she said in broken English, "burnt man, burnt man.

Nor could anybody at any of the tables remember seeing or talking to a heavily scarred man, burnt or otherwise, sitting at any of the tables although some of the GIs were fully able to recall the girl. The necklace, which I still have and continue to wear to this day, from what I could remember, looked exactly like the one my Merchant Marine Friend showed me and said to be mysteriously wearing out of nowhere the day he was found floating in the sea after his ship was torpedoed.

The only problem is, by the time the incident in the Saigon bar occurred my friend had already been dead some ten years, having passed away during the summer between my sophmore and junior years in high school.

At his memorial service I was told by family members, following a death bed request on his part, that in an effort to rejoin his fellow seamen he wanted to be cremated and his ashes tossed at sea near where his ship was torpedoed and his necklace returned to the sea as well. As far as I know those wishes had been complied with. During the high school years I worked for the merchant marine a man by the name of Bob Kaufman came by to see him several times.

Kaufman had been in the merchant marines as well, and it was through that connection they knew each other. Kaufman was also an up and coming poet in what would soon come to be known as the Beat Generation, eventually his creativity being heralded in the movement right alongside with that of Allen Ginsberg. A couple of years after high school Uncle Sam caught up with me and I was drafted.

After Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training, in that I was in the Army shortly after the Bay of Pigs, and Cuba still reigned high in the minds of a large portion of the military hierarchy I was assigned to a number of Cuba related activities. Then, right in the middle of enlistment time John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy's was shot in November of By the second month of , traveling light and wearing my Class A uniform per verbal orders, I boarded a train to Los Angeles, California, with the luxury of my own sleeping compartment and eating in the dining car before the hoi polloi got to.

In the dark of the early morning hours, after the train stopped in Needles, I was told to shed my uniform and taken off the train by civilians as a civilian to Norton AFB near San Bernardino and from there flew to Travis AFB and taken to San Francisco for a flight to Hawaii and points west.

A short time later, after rout-stepping around Tan Son Nhut and visiting Saigon a few times, nearly always by myself and never having been officially assigned to a unit, albeit loosely affiliated with the 3rd Radio Research Unit for a place to bunk and eat, found me in a then developing secret base in Laos called Long Tieng, headquarters of an up and coming Laotian warlord with nobody knowing I was there and having bypassed basically all military paperwork and protocol albeit at first in the early days at least, sometimes, depending on the situation, everything fully Sheep-Dipped , i.

Because of my top secret clearance and nearly unmatched code sending ability, I was assigned to an ill-defined group of U. Army personnel put on the ground in Laos and, because of which, following a series of extenuating circumstances, all or most circulating around the ill-defined group, a few select members of those already selective groups were appropriated for other duties.

With me having met all of the necessary criteria big time, it wasn't long before I was under the umbrella of a questionable, semi extra-curricular so-said military activity ending up in the then drug infested wide-open railhead city of Chiang Mai located in the far northern reaches of Thailand.

After meeting a Buddhist monk in the city from China and me needing, or at the very least, having a strong requirement to make myself as scarce as possible as quickly as possible, as well as shaking off those who were on my tail, in what actually became an overkill of departure, the two of us left on foot traveling north high into the mountains through Laos, Burma, and on into the mountainous regions nobody knows who they belong to, basically retracing the steps of the ancient trade route known as the Chamadao that evolved from the even more ancient Silk Road.

And there I sat. People from the village some distance below would come by to look at me or leave me water and food on occasion. Kids threw rocks at me, dogs pissed on me.

After awhile someone gave me a blanket to wrap myself up with, but still I sat. Days, weeks went by. One day when some monks came out of the ruins I got up and followed them into the fields hoping to pull something, anything, out of the ground to eat.

They didn't stop at any fields but continued on, I just didn't have the strength to keep up with them over any distance. However, when they returned a short time later, like Dopey stomping along behind the other six dwarfs, I returned, entering the monastery in a single file line right along with them.

In doing so, as a double set of rough hewn wooden doors, which hadn't been there previously, closed behind me, I suddenly found myself inside of a fully functional Zen monastery. It is after passing through the forward walls of the ruins and finding a fully functional monastery on the other side of the doors that people start getting befuddled. If they don't totally dismiss what is being said, they lose the ability to grasp the concept. Once through the main portal the time associated within the walls of the monastery and the land beyond flowed like the surface of a Mobius Strip , non-orientable.

Not long after Kaufman showed up in the general Los Angeles area than he began visiting my merchant marine friend. On one of the days Kaufman was visiting he noticed the necklace around the neck of the merchant marine.

After asking him about it, then asking if it was OK to look at it, my friend, in that his hands were not nimble enough, had him remove it. Kaufman examined every minute detail. When he was done he handed the necklace back and told the merchant marine he was sure he had seen the exact same necklace once before. The merchant marine, so stunned it took what little air he had anyway away, gasping while searching for more air to respond, told Kaufman that was impossible because as far as he knew it was one of a kind, there was no other like it on our side of time.

Kaufman told him some ten years before, during the early part of , with the war still raging, he had sailed out of Philadelphia on board a Liberty ship headed toward India, ending up in Calcutta. He was stuck in Calcutta for about a month before being shipped out, sometime he thought, around the middle of May, , albeit on a completely different ship than he came in on, called the S.

Harold L. Kaufman said he had arrived in Calcutta on the S. James E. Eads, but missed shipping out because of a toothache.

However, even before the toothache and the Eads leaving he said a man around 25 years old claiming he was an American soldier, although dressed in civilian clothes, came to the ship looking him. The man that claimed to be a soldier told him he knew that he, Kaufman, would be arriving in Calcutta onboard the Ead. Kaufman also said the soldier told him that the two of them had a mutual friend, another merchant marine, which just happened to be the same merchant marine he was visiting.

Since Kaufman missed his ship and was stuck in Calcutta for who knew how long, he and the soldier, who he said, was waiting for a CNAC flight out over the "hump" to China, got together several times. It was during one of those times Kaufman first noticed the necklace and during one of those times he asked to see it, examining it very closely.