📓 Notes From The Underground Reflections — "Twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too."

"Twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too."
That line. It stuck in me like a little stone in the shoe—irritating, irrational, and somehow… poetic.

This chapter is hard to pin down. It moves like a restless wind—part laughter, part bitterness, part revelation. But one thing becomes clear: the Underground Man doesn’t hate comfort because it’s bad.
He hates it because it’s too predictable.

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🛠️ We Build, We Destroy

He says something strange but strangely true:

“Man loves the process—not the result.”

That we like building roads, but not finishing them.
That we like struggling toward a goal, but once we arrive… the meaning vanishes.

It made me think of how I sometimes chase things—not because I actually want to possess them—but because I want the feeling of pursuit.
Like he says, we want the striving more than the success. Because success is too still. Too quiet. Too... final.

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🥀 The Strange Seduction of Suffering

The Underground Man writes of humanity’s strange love for suffering—not just enduring it, but choosing it. Suffering becomes a way to prove we’re alive, to prove we aren’t mere piano keys playing the notes of logic.

I reflected on how some people speak often of their pain—perhaps to be understood, or perhaps because that pain has become part of their identity. Sometimes I’ve felt frustrated, wondering why they circle their stories again and again.

But then I caught myself.

Because haven’t I shared my own sorrows too?
Maybe not to be pitied—but yes, maybe… to be known.
To say: “This is who I am. This is the road I’ve walked.”

And I’ve hidden a lot too.
Wrapped my pain in silence.
Told my sob stories to God—and sometimes, even from Him, I’ve pulled away.

But now I realize:

Whether we speak or stay silent, what we long for is the same—to be seen, to be held, to be loved.

There’s no shame in that. Only the ache of being human.

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🧮 2+2=4? No Thanks.

And then comes that line:

“Twice two makes four is excellent, but twice two makes five is sometimes charming.”

He’s not denying math. He’s denying a world where there’s no room for wonder, rebellion, or mystery.

2+2=4 is neat, finished, final.
But twice two equals five? That’s absurd, yes—but it’s human.
It’s irrationality chosen freely. It’s rebellion against being programmed.

The Underground Man wants that right—to shout into the order of things:

“I don’t care if it makes sense. It’s mine.”

It’s painful. But it’s also honest.

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✝️ Where He Rants, I Rest

He chooses suffering as proof of freedom.
I choose grace as proof of hope.

He celebrates the process and mocks the destination.
But I believe in a journey that leads not just to effort, but to glory.

And when he says:

“Give man paradise, and he will destroy it,”

I whisper:

“But give man Christ… and he may finally choose to rebuild it—with mercy.”

---

End of Entry.
I no longer want to destroy what is beautiful just to feel alive.
I want to be part of a better song—one not played by piano keys,
but composed in the heart of a loving God. 😌

📓 Notes from The Underground Reflections — Journal Entry: Chapter 7

“Man acts in his own best interest.”
Do we really?

That’s how Chapter 7 begins. A smug, Enlightenment-era belief: that humans are rational, moral agents who pursue what’s good for them.
But the Underground Man spits at that idea.
And to be honest, so do I.

Because I know what it’s like to sabotage myself.
To say the right things, believe the good things, even preach them—then turn around and do the opposite.
And that contradiction—it cuts deeper than I sometimes admit.

He introduces a “friend”—a well-mannered gentleman who acts against his own ideals.

“This friend, reader, is not only mine—but yours too.”

That line stung.
Because I am that friend.

I’ve given advice that I haven’t followed.
I’ve called out evil in the world while hiding my own.
And I’ve done what I hate—like Paul says in Romans 7:

“The good that I want to do, I do not do; but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

There it is again—that loop, that war within.
What the Underground Man calls contradiction… the Bible calls sin.
Not just confusion. Not just moral irony. But a deep fracture in the will.

And yet, unlike the Underground Man, Paul doesn’t stay there.

“Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

---

Later in the chapter, Dostoyevsky brings in Attila the Hun and Stenka Razin—violent men remembered as heroes.
It’s like he’s saying:

“If humans are so rational, why do we celebrate destruction?”

Then he speaks of Cleopatra—rumored to have tortured slave girls for pleasure.
And he mocks modern readers who gasp at this and say: “We’re better now.”

But are we?

That part brought me to a quiet ache.
Because I’ve heard people say, “How could people stay silent during the Holocaust?”
And I’ve whispered in my heart:

“What about now? What are you doing about today’s suffering?”

I see oppression around me.
And most of the time…
I do nothing.

That includes me. 🥹

---

There’s something brutal and brilliant about how this chapter tears through our self-image.

But here’s where I step off the Underground train:

I don’t stay in contradiction just to admire the wreckage.
I don’t turn my failures into clever philosophies.
I name them. I call them sin. And I bring them to the Cross.

Because Jesus didn’t die for men who are “slightly confused.”
He died for those of us who know what’s right and still do wrong.
He died for the friend who betrays, the coward who stays silent, and the sinner who stares at their hands and says:

“Lord, have mercy.”

---

End of Entry.
Let the tears fall. Let grace rise.

Flattened Wonder: When Genesis Becomes Arithmetic

 “In the beginning…”

The opening words of Genesis don’t just start a story—they strike a chord that resonates through every particle of reality. And yet, somehow, we’ve reduced them to… a calculator?

Last Sunday, our preacher opened to Genesis 6—a rich and enigmatic chapter—but before diving into its depth, he announced that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, maybe 10,000 max. Why? Because, he explained, if you trace the years from Adam to Abraham (2,000), Abraham to Christ (2,000), and Christ to now (another 2,000), voilà—6,000 years. Simple math.

But something in me recoiled—not from arrogance, but from grief.
Because that moment was not just the flattening of time, but the flattening of wonder.

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🌌 The Universe is Not a Spreadsheet

Modern science tells us that what we once thought of as "formless"—empty space—is in fact alive with mystery. Quantum fields, dark matter, unseen energies ripple and hum beneath the surface of what our eyes can’t perceive. And Augustine, writing over 1,600 years ago, had already asked:

What does it mean for something to be “formless”? Can something exist but not yet be shaped?

He didn’t try to fit Genesis into a human timeline. He stood back in reverence and said:

“Let us not be quick to assume one meaning, where God may have intended many.”

Augustine saw God as timeless, creating not in days as we count them, but in movements of order, purpose, and beauty. And more importantly, he warned that misusing Scripture to say foolish things could harm the very faith we claim to defend.

“When unbelievers catch us making a mistake in a field they know well and hear us maintaining our foolish opinions about our books, how are they to believe those books contain divine truths?”
— Confessions, Book V

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🕯️ A Gospel for the Hungry Mind

When sermons ignore the wonder of creation and treat Genesis like a dusty genealogy ledger, it’s no wonder some people—especially the curious, thinking ones—walk away from the Church.

Not because they hate God.
But because they’ve been fed stale bread, when they were starving for mystery and meaning.

We need to stop shrinking Scripture down to fit our charts. The Bible was never meant to be a science textbook or a punchline against astronomers. It is a living word, inviting us to behold a God who creates not from boredom or need—but from the overflowing joy and harmony of Triune love.

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📖 When the Bible Meets the Cosmos

When I read Genesis now, I don’t see a stopwatch—I see a song.
A cosmic liturgy where light speaks, chaos is calmed, and meaning emerges from the void.
And maybe what was once called “formless and empty” is not so empty at all.

Because God was there.
And that’s never nothing.

✨ Journal Entry: Drifting from Light, Unbecoming Human

 (A guided meditation from Book XII of Augustine's Confessions)

“The further away from You things are, the more unlike You, they become.”
Reading Augustine’s final reflections on creation, I paused here. These words struck something deep in me. Not just about the world, but about me—my soul, my story.

As I sat with them, I found myself thinking:

The more I move away from God, the less human I become.
Not in a mythical sense, but in the very fabric of my being.

When I am far from Him, I’m not just lost—I’m unraveling. I become more like formless matter, pulled apart by scattered loves and half-baked desires. My mind races, my heart clings to what fades, and my soul bends in on itself. That’s what sin is—it’s not just wrongdoing. It’s de-creation. It's becoming less.

And yet—He holds me together.

“I seek not to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand.”

Augustine’s confession feels like my own prayer. I don’t understand all things—I hardly even understand myself most days. But I know this:

I would be nothing without Him.
Without His grace, His patience, and His unrelenting mercy, I would fade into the shadows of what I was meant to be.

Even in my restlessness, even in my failures—He forms me. Again and again.

The world didn’t begin with shape or order—it was formless and void.
And so was I, until He began to speak light into me.

Time, Eternity, and the Ache for the Infinite:

 

A Journal Entry After Reading Book XI of Confessions

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." — St. Augustine

Augustine doesn't simply ask what time is—he opens the door to wonder. In Book XI, he turns from his confessional journey and asks: What does it mean to say, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”? What was there before that beginning? Was God doing something? Was He silent?

He rebukes the sharp-tongued answer—"God was preparing hell for those who ask such questions"—not because it’s irreverent, but because it’s impatient. For Augustine, every question that arises from awe should be met with reverence. So he sits with the mystery.

And he says: God did not create in time; He created with time. Time is part of creation itself. God is outside of it—not bound to before or after, past or future. For God, all things are present. That which is yet to come and that which has passed—He sees them as one eternal now.

But we humans—oh, how we struggle. We measure time with clocks, the sun, the ticking of atoms, or the tremble of our own hearts. But time isn't only measured in motion. Augustine says we measure time in the soul: past as memory, present as attention, future as expectation.

I resonate with his wondering. Time slips through our fingers even as we try to hold it down. A good day can vanish in a blink. A moment of suffering can feel eternal. Does time move, or do we move through it?

Sometimes I wish I had someone beside me to pause over every paragraph, to sit in the wonder together. But even in solitude, I wrestle. And in that wrestling, I think:

Time may be a created shadow of eternity—a holy echo. Perhaps it exists not to trap us, but to teach us: that we were made for something more than seconds. We were made for the forever-present.

"You are my eternity, but I am divided in time." — Augustine

So, I wait in this time, with my heart stretched across memory and hope. And I trust that while time may pass, grace does not.

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This reflection is not a system, but a longing. Not an answer, but a window. Not a timeline, but a turning toward the Timeless One.

Desire, Memory, and the Mirror: Wrestling with Augustine, Lewis, and the Imago Dei

 

There’s a haunting question Augustine asks in Confessions, Book X:

"How can I seek God unless I already know something of Him?"

It lingers not as an academic puzzle, but as a spiritual ache. How can we long for something we've never seen? How does the soul ache for a presence it has never embraced?

Augustine proposes that the answer lies deep within the memory—a mysterious, recondite storehouse where truth might be hiding, waiting to be unearthed. We are drawn toward God, he says, because something of Him is already imprinted in us. Not in a pantheistic sense, but as an echo of the One in whose image we were made.

C.S. Lewis would echo this centuries later:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

The longing is the evidence.

But I wrestle with this: Is God truly buried somewhere within me, waiting to be uncovered like a coin in a dusty drawer? Or is it that the desire for Him, the yearning, is the sign that He stands outside of me, calling me home?

This is where my understanding of the Imago Dei comes in.

The Mirror, Not the Spark

I've long been drawn to the interpretation of Imago Dei taught by N.T. Wright and John Walton: not that we carry a divine spark, but that we are angled mirrors. Our vocation is to reflect God’s justice, love, and beauty into the world—and to reflect the praises of creation back to Him.

In this sense, the image of God is functional and relational, not ontological. It’s not that God is in us like a divine shard, but that we are designed to be creatures-in-communion, capable of mirroring heaven to earth and earth back to heaven.

Augustine, with his Neo-Platonic leanings, might push closer to the soul as containing divine traces—reason, memory, and will being the inner trinity that images the Divine Trinity. But even he stops short of saying the divine is inherent. Instead, he emphasizes that our souls are restless until they rest in God. That rest, for him, comes from outside, even if its hunger stirs within.

So perhaps both are true:

• Desire is born from the memory of what we were made for.

• And we remember—not clearly, but like a dream we can’t quite name—that we were made to mirror Love Himself.

Restless, but Anchored

Reading Augustine in a heavy season of my own, I feel his ache. I, too, am searching—sometimes through study, sometimes through silence. Some memories rise easily. Others hide in those "recondite receptacles"—the dark, unreachable rooms of the soul. But even there, God can dwell.

And maybe that’s the good news: even when we forget, God remembers. Even when the mirror is cracked, it can still catch the light.

"You were more inward than my innermost self." — St. Augustine

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This journal entry is a humble wrestling—not a conclusion. A glimpse, not a system. A whisper of that other world our hearts keep aching for.

Living in a Digital Panopticon — And Still Asking, “Why So Much Chaos?”

 

Lately, a strange phrase has been echoing in my head—digital panopticon.

I heard it in a podcast, possibly while the speaker was reflecting on the ideas of Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher. The phrase may not be his invention, but the concept fits seamlessly into his worldview: a society of hyper-transparency, where surveillance is no longer imposed from above but internalized by individuals. We post, we perform, we curate—and call it freedom. But in truth, we are burning out under the weight of self-exposure.

Han’s work is striking—not only because of its piercing insight, but also because it comes from an Asian intellectual voice in a conversation so often dominated by the West. As someone who has mostly read Western thinkers, I find something deeply affirming in that. It’s a reminder: wisdom has no borders.

This thought connected itself to another one that’s been lingering in my mind: Neil Postman’s warning that we are amusing ourselves to death. Entertainment isn’t the enemy. But in a world so saturated with fun, with the addictive drip-feed of reels and endless scrolling, we’ve forgotten how to be still. To sit in silence. To ask hard questions. To feel anything deeply.

And what a strange world we live in.

In one part of the globe, there’s war—bombs falling, lives ripped apart, families fleeing rubble. Meanwhile, in another part, there’s celebration—a FIFA Club World Cup, stadium lights, chants and cheers. Locally, people are dying by suicide, communities are divided, natural disasters sweep through, and news of violence barely shakes us anymore.

And I? I’m somewhere in between. Watching. Scrolling. Worrying. Wondering. I grieve for the world, and yet I’m not sure if I really feel it—because I have my own struggles to deal with. Maybe numbness is part of the burnout too.

So, here’s the age-old ache that keeps surfacing:
Why is there so much unhappiness, chaos, and disunity in the world?

It’s a question that has made many walk away from belief. If there’s a God—and if He is good and wise—how could He allow this?

The simplest answer offered in Christian thought is this: free will. We are not puppets. God gave us the freedom to love, to create, to choose—and in doing so, also the freedom to destroy. We often talk about sin as a private thing, but in Scripture, sin is also corporate. One person’s failure can devastate a community. The fall of one spills outward. Pain echoes across relationships, generations, and even creation itself.

The world is fractured, not because God isn’t good, but because freedom is real—and sin is heavy.

But here’s the quiet hope: in noticing the brokenness, maybe we’re also resisting it. In feeling the sorrow, we are still human. In stepping away from the noise, even for a moment, we make space for something deeper.

Maybe, just maybe, these questions—uncomfortable as they are—are where healing begins.

 

Journal Reflection – Book VII: When the Light Begins to Tremble Through

I have finished reading Book VII. Augustine is standing at a threshold—his mind awakened, but his heart still wrestling. He is shedding the false gods of his past—Manicheism, astrology, the idea that evil is a thing created by God. And yet, he is not yet fully ready to bow. Not yet.

I understand this space. I, too, feel like I’m waiting for something to break open—longing for clarity while standing in the fog. My heart is heavy these days. A prayer I hoped would be answered… wasn’t. Not in the way I wanted. It’s not romantic grief, but the kind that presses on the chest, quietly, with disappointment and confusion. A sacred ache.

Augustine spoke of God and evil, quoting Scripture, weighing ideas with the minds of Plato and Plotinus. But it wasn’t enough to know truth—he wanted to meet Truth.
And I think, maybe, I’m like that too.

"You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You."

That line rings truer than ever—not as a quote, but as my soul’s quiet cry.
I, too, have chased understanding. I, too, have run from my own pain.
And even now, I find myself saying:

“Turn Your gaze away from me, Lord… for I feel unworthy.”
But also:
“Don’t go too far… I won’t survive without You.”

Augustine begins to grasp something in this chapter—not yet full surrender, but a trembling light breaking through the cracks. He sees Christ not just as a teacher of truth, but as the Truth made flesh, the One who alone can lift the burden between divinity and humanity.

I don’t have answers right now.
But I have tears. And I have hope.
And like Augustine, maybe that is enough for now.

Because apart from You, Lord, I will never flourish.
And maybe… just maybe… someone is still praying for me.

The Little Thief and the Plums

 🍃 

I’ve been reading Augustine’s Confessions, and somewhere between his grand theology and his stolen pears, I found myself unexpectedly disarmed.

Augustine—this giant of Christian thought—paused to reflect not on some dramatic crime, but on a moment from his youth when he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor’s tree. He didn’t even eat them. He threw them away. And yet, he confessed it as sin—not because of the fruit, but because of what the act revealed about his heart. He did it because others did it. He did it for the thrill of transgression itself.

That moment took me back.

I must have been in Standard VI when a few of us, just kids with more energy than wisdom, found ourselves wandering near a garden. There was a plum tree inside. It started as a joke—someone said, “Let’s take some,” and the idea gained traction not because we were hungry, but because we were together. The peer pressure was gentle, disguised as play. One friend warned us that the owner was known to use poison arrows on thieves. That should have ended the idea, but somehow it made it all the more daring. We hesitated. Then we crossed the line.

After we took the fruit, we ate it, half-laughing, thinking we had gotten away with it. But one of us started running—we were fleeing from someone or something harder to name. I remember running faster than anyone, not because I feared punishment, but because the owner knew me. If he had seen me, it wouldn’t have been scolding I feared—it was the shame of being recognized. I wasn’t just escaping his eyes; I was running from the version of myself I didn’t want to be seen! 

Funny how the moments we later laugh about often carry more weight than we admit. Back then, we called it mischief. But now, through Augustine’s eyes, I see something else: a moment where my desire to belong was stronger than my desire to be good. A time when I traded conscience for company, knowing deep down that I wouldn’t have done it alone.

That’s the power of Confessions. It doesn't just make us think about Augustine’s life—it quietly calls us to examine our own. And so, as I continued journaling, I wrote this small psalm as a response—not to the plum, but to the pattern it revealed.

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🕊️ Journal Psalm: On the Day I Stole Fruit with Friends

O Lord of the orchard and the heart,
You saw me when I was still small,
barely taller than the bush I trespassed.

I ran with the pack—
not for hunger,
not for hatred of the owner,
but for the thrill of doing what we whispered we should not.

It was not the plum I loved,
but the moment we plucked it—together,
like rebels against a law
we only half-believed.

I laughed,
but even in laughter, I knew—
This is not mine.
And yet, I ate.
Not from need, but from belonging.

You did not strike me with a poison arrow,
though I feared it.
You let me run, legs burning,
heart louder than footsteps—
and still, You watched with mercy.

What fruit have I stolen since then, Lord,
not from gardens,
but from truth,
from love,
from time that was Yours?

Let me no longer be the boy
who runs after what is wrong
just to run with others.

Let me be the one who runs to You,
even if it means standing alone,
even if the fruit stays hanging
where it belongs.

Amen.