Thanks to all the posters! I was glad to see John B's gumption infusion,
Bodvar's return and Rich's remarkable posts. There are lots of
interesting issues and tangents that deserve discussion, but I'd like to
focus this post on the PSYCHOLOGY of the self. Maybe the word "psyche"
is a better description of the focus. I'm going to use a little of that
kind of language, to avoid repeating Rich's spiritual vocabulary if
nothing else. I think it might be useful in distinguishing the levels
within each individual SELF.
No one doubts that our existence includes the physical body, that the
biological organism exists in time and space. In a subject/object
world, the existence of the ego consciousness is painfully clear and
often exaggerated to the point of excluding of everything else.
Re-thinking the ego as the intellectual level seems easy enough. But to
get a whole picture of the MOQ self I think we have to look at the
social level. Its the bridge.
Pirsig's metaphysic is certainly meant to do away with that editor
behind the eyes, but in another sense the MOQ rescues those undeniable
mental and emotional states from being "merely subjective". In the MOQ
the "merely subjective" is evelated to an empirical reality, a "real"
experience. So if I speak of the self as a mind or psyche, please trust
that I understand how radically re-imagined is the self in the MOQ and
please understand that I'm not thinking of the lonely, isolated, SOM
self.
It seems everyone pretty much agrees that we exist as a kind of unique
culture made of all four levels. And I guess its pretty clear that the
social level is the bridge between the mind and body. Both the
biological and intellecual levels come into conflict with the social
level. And as Bodvar pointed out, each level is inextricably linked to
it parent level. Thus the intellect is not an independant or autonomous
mind. Instead the intellectual self in deeply embedded in social level
values and is totally DEPENDANT on its parent. The self is integrated or
glued together by this family lineage. I guess one could say the kinship
of the levels is part of the "coherence" of the self.
It seems that the power of the social level is largely unconscious.
Social values are, among other things, unexamined assumptions given to
you by the culture and language of your world. They can be brought out
into the light and examined by the intellect to a certain extent, but
that's only the tip of the iceberg and there is an immense force hidden
below the ego's awareness.
The workings of this level of reality are no less complicated ,subtle
and mysterious than the biological level. And it must be just as rich
and diverse as life itself too. The mythos is no small thing. Its a
pretty hefty chunk of what we are. I suppose no one can afford to ignore
it. And I think Pirsig makes the case that the big problem with SOM is
exactly that ignorance.
MAYBE MIRRORS ARE ALL YOU EVER GET.
Pirsig says that sex IS TO biology as celebrity IS TO society.
Or something like that. Celebrity is huge. Celebrities are the mirrors
we share collectively, unlike our family and friends. They are the
heros, saviors, saints, gods and monsters that we all recognize.
Celebrities reflect images on hehalf of the Giant. The giant controls
the mirrors for its own purposes. Its a culture's way of unconsciously
communicating which values will be rewarded and which will be punished.
All the myths and legends tell of the deeds of celebrities. Its almost
as if the roles were pre-existing forms of behavior that certain
individuals "play" or act out. Its a role inhabited by different people
over and over with endless variations on the theme. Not that heros are
insincere phonies, but it seems countless people have been cast as
celebrities thru time. The need has to be met continually, generation
after generation, if a culture is to survive and evolve.
Carl Jung imagines that some portion of the unconsious mind contains a
collective unconscious. In it are all the archetypes that are the basis
of our attraction to heros and movie stars. The unconscious role-models
we share are a symbolic expression of the cultures most deeply held
values and an expression of your own desires. What do you want to be
when you grow up?
In what capacity do I want to serve the giant? Do I want to kill the
giant? Has the giant really become a monster or am I just a degenerate
loser? Yes, the revolutionary is archetypical too. As Rich might say,
its the soul's way of objectifying its values, at least on the social
level. The heroic attributes and divine qualities that we value are
projected outward and idealized, so as to be realized, demonstrated and
articulated. It functions to perpetuates a culture like sex perpetuates
the species.
Unfortunately, our contemporary celebrities aren't gods and heros, so
much as movie stars and politicians. Our mirrors seem corrupt and
hollow. This is a symptom of the terrible loneliness of our century. As
Paul Simon put it, "Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio? Our nation turns
it's lonely eyes to you." Not only is God dead, we don't even have good
secular heros. Rambo and Jerry Seinfeld just don't cut it and any
political leader worth a damn gets blown away.
Our tabloid press makes sure no celebrity is left un-soiled. Its a very
sad state of affairs. Don't get me wrong. There are people worthy of
admiration, but these are skeptical, cynical times and our culture seems
to have lost the capacity to trust its heros. In SOM they are just
illusions, stories and dreams fit for children at christmas, but not to
be taken seriously by rational adults. But we never really outgrow the
need for heros and celebrities anymore than we outgrow the need for our
physical bodies. Both need to be nourished and maintained.
As Pirsig points out this bleakness began after WW1, because it marks
the loss of faith in traditional societies and values. It had been a
long time in the making, from Descartes isolated thinker, Newton's
mechanical universe, the Deism of Enlightenment political thinkers and
the de-humanizing effects of industrial life to Darwinian theory and
relativity. But when the world witnessed the slaughter of millions it
broke the camels back, so to speak. It was the final blow against faith
and trust. Its destroyed our collective ability to believe in heros,
which is felt as a loss of our own identity. And it is a real loss. The
mirrors that show our best side have been shattered and maybe all we get
is bad luck.
Jung's MODERN MAN IN SEARCH OF A SOUL points to the same period as the
point of a cultural shift. The same loss described by Pirsig is
addressed as a psychological problem by Jung. That isn't very suprising
by itself, but the similarities with Pirsig's idea of celebrity is
really quite striking. They both describe the horrors of the twentieth
century as the result of a disruption in society's ability to control
the mirrors. In Jung's terms, the archetypes can no longer be projected
in any meaningful way. In Pirsig's terms, the intellect has rendered the
mirrors as mere dreamy-eyed fiction.
In either case, the heros have all been dethroned or scandalized and the
social values that they embody have gone down the drain with them.
That's why 20th century man feels isolated and disconnected, and feels
as if he were drinking life through a straw. His heart has been
dismissed and ignored. His connection to others has been severed and
even feels at war with himself. Jung predicted further catastrophe would
result in that book, which was written in 1933. His warnings about
fascism proved to be correct.
The problems of the self and the problems of the larger culture bear a
striking resemblance, eh? In both cases, integration of the values from
all four levels is required for an overall picture of health and
vitality. The good news is that both irsig and Jung see this traumatic
event as evolutionary. The crisis forces growth. The pain acts as a
catalyst and precipitates dynamic change, not unlike jumping off the hot
stove.
Maybe we can even start at the inorganic level. Its hard to say, but
breath and thirst seem to have a feeling associated with them. There is
an emotional Quality to even the first level, eh? I don't know why fresh
air should smell like freedom or why curiosity feels like a thirst for
knowledge or why can describe the weight of experience or the gravity of
the situation. Maybe these are merely metaphors. Maybe not.
The organism itself exerts a force upon the psyche. The biological level
is in the psyche too. You don't have to be a cigar smoking incest
survivor to see that Freud was at least partially correct. The
biological level is felt by the self as an unconscious urge or instinct.
The psychic effects of the stomach and the genitals are most conspicous,
but every part of the organism must exert its own pressure on the
unconscious mind. This part of the self is entirley non-rational. We
feel the urges and instincts as base emotions. It's very animalistic.
It seems to me that the social level is still non-rational but is felt
as a different type of emotional quality. There is still attraction and
revulsion but its at a more evolved and refined level. Its closer to the
surface of our conscious awareness and some of it can be expressed in
terms understood by the intellect. And why should the intellect be left
out? Don't we have feelings for the quality in ideas too? Aren't there
elegant equations and beautiful machines? Our SOM intellect is
supposedly a cold, calculating, rational analyst, but I don't think the
MOQ intellect is divorced from the feeling associated with Quality at
all the other levels. So I'm not sure if the distinction between
thoughts and feelings is all that crucial. Feelings can be translated
into thoughts and thoughts have an emotional compotent.
The MOQ's self is made of all four levels of static patterns and
hopefully there's some Dynamic Quality involved in each one's existence
too. But the problem to be overcome is bridging that gap between mind
and body. The unconscious social level is that bridge. So the trick is
to properly integrate the unconscious social values into the entire
personality. Presently there's a huge force welling up out of this
unconscious, but we hardly know what to do with it. We've no place to
put it. There is trustworthy mirror to reflect that aspect of ourselves
and so we become blinded to our identities. We get a distorted image of
ourselves.
B.divaD
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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