LS Self or soul

From: John and Ruth Beasley (beasley@internetnorth.com.au)
Date: Fri Jul 02 1999 - 01:33:45 BST


Self or soul?

'I,' 'he,' and 'they' are fictitious terms, according to Pirsig. "They're terms for collections of

patterns and not some independant primary reality of their own." (Lila Ch 12) This view is
also apparent in the 1984 Afterword to Zen, in which he speaks of Chris's death and his
obsessive question "Where did he go?" "Do real things just disappear like that? If they do,
then the conservation laws of physics are in trouble. But if we stay with the laws of physics,
then the Chris that disappeared was unreal. Round and round and round." He concludes;
"what had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern,
and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was
to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us
understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of."

Later Pirsig suggests that "if you take that part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones
of Chris and call it the 'spirit' of Chris or the 'ghost' of Chris, then you can say without furthe
r
translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new body to enter." In his view, thi
s
occurs with the birth of his daughter Nell: "although the names keep changing and the bodies
keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us together goes on and on."

So it seems clear that Pirsig views both self and soul in terms of patterns which are larger
than the flesh and blood objects to which we generally attach these terms. The 'spirit', 'ghost'
or 'soul' is that part of the pattern which remains even when the body is removed, and it may
become attached to another body. This 'larger pattern' has its own ongoing reality; and
maybe in some sense it is eternal. What is clear is that the pattern is not controlled by the
biological entities, the persons, to which it becomes attached.

Patterns of what?

The glib answer must be - patterns of quality. Static or dynamic, then?

"It isn't Lila that has quality; it's Quality that has Lila... She's created by it. She's a cohesio
n
of changing static patterns of this Quality. There isn't any more to her than that. The words
Lila uses, the thoughts she thinks, the values she holds, are the end product of three and a
half billion years of the history of the entire world. She's a kind of jungle of evolutionary
patterns of value."

Is this all?

"It ignored the whole dynamic aspect. There is always this open end of Dynamic
indeterminacy." "Lila is composed of static patterns of value and these patterns are evolving
toward a Dynamic Quality." "Patterns of life ... do not just change valuelessly. They change in
ways that evade, over-ride and circumvent these [physical] laws. The patterns of life are
constantly evolving in response to something 'better' than that which these laws have to
offer." (All quotes from Lila Ch 11)

Individual selves, then, are more or less convenient fictions, necessary constructs when we
use language shaped by millennia of subject/object discriminations. "Our intellectual
description of nature is always culturally derived." (Lila Ch 12) When Pirsig says "patterns
can't by themselves perceive or adjust to Dynamic Quality. Only a living being can do that."
(Lila Ch 13), we may interpret this to mean that the value patterns must be 'embodied' to be
effective, without assuming that the body is a 'self'.

This, I think, just about summarises Pirsig's views. And just as Phaedrus rose from the
lecture at Benares Hindu University after years of searching, only to give up, unsatisfied, I
must say that this is the point where I leave Pirsig, equally unsatisfied, and for similar
reasons.

The core of Phaedrus' argument with Oriental philosophy was the issue of the illusory nature
of the world. If Hiroshima was illusory, there is no such thing as responsibility, for there is
nothing for which one could ever be responsible. Morality, too, would be an illusion. If so,
Susan Blackmore's view of human beings as playthings of memes, culturally derived ideas
which themselves are engaged in an evolutionary struggle for existence, may well be correct.
Dawkins saw individuals as the playthings of our genes, naively believing that we were the
significant beings of our universe, while actually we were only gene machines. I do not find
Pirsig's assertion that we are the playthings of patterns of static quality any more reassuring,
even if he believes that there is some larger dynamic good in the background.

And just as Pirsig's whole metaphysics is driven by the urge to confront the idol of a value
free science, which he saw as destructive of humanity, so I would want to confront his
equally soulless world view. Pirsig bases his metaphysics upon the primacy of experienced
value over a rational division into subjects and objects. 'Value' is an abstraction, as real or
unreal as 'God', without experience. Pirsig is right to assert that our primary experience is
NOT neutral, hence value free science is a human construct, useful as far as it goes, but
always less than primary experience. Science is put in its place by attending to what is more
primary than ideas or concepts or world-views.

But there is a missing part to this equation. What attends? Attending is a dialogue. Our
experience is not just a flow of sensory impressions. It is the interaction of a mind, an order
making entity, with its environment. (I would like to avoid obviously subject-object, scientific-
evolutionary language here, but we have nothing better. So please be generous and read
between the lines, which according to Krishnamurti and David Bohm is where intelligence
lurks anyway.) While the mystic values the immediate non-judgmental 'isness' of experience,
my reality includes an entity that records, assesses, judges, remembers, amends, alters,
reshapes and generally interacts with what I encounter. Call it illusory if you like - my self is
as real as the quality it encounters, and just as primary. How else can static values arise, if
not through the activity of this self? And there is nothing more convincing in this regard than
to have what I would call 'intellectual mystics', believers in a 'mystic' world view, challenge
what I have just asserted. That challenge affirms my point more directly than I ever could. If
there are such people as 'experiential mystics', as it seems there are, I doubt that they are
spending their time on intellectual discussions such as these.

To explore the nature of the 'self' I am asserting requires another Pirsig. However it will not
do to relegate this consciousness, this painful existential awareness, to a formula such as
'patterns of value'. It is just this sort of erosion of human qualities that led to the "secret
loneliness", the "scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility" that Pirsig deplores. (Lila Ch 22
)
There is a particularly poignant sentence, itself isolated, in Chapter 17 of Lila. It reads "All
these different patterns of people's lives passing through each other without any contact at
all." No contact. That is the price paid for a loss of self.

John B

MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org



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