LS Static Harmony & Dynamic Evolution

From: rich pretti (richpretti@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Aug 23 1999 - 01:08:14 BST


"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour." - William Blake

Be free, Be live Quality.

Friends, this month we have given ourselves a difficult question. That of
"obtaining" static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously; harmoniously. I'd
like to toss up a few suggestions in the way of overall personal evolution
and improvement of the Quality of life-experience.

After a good bit of thought, with an eye to the pre-eminance of the
evolutionary aspect of human life found in Lila, I feel that for myself a
better way of phrasing our question is:

"How might an individual best evolve into ever more Dynamic (God-like,
Dharmic) states of being; thereby maximizing the potential absolute Quality
of experience available, while maintaining all good actual static patterns
of relative value?"

The evolutionarily psychological (experiential, conscious) aspect of the MOQ
can be seen as in very large part an invitation to Zen Buddhism and related
'esoteric' mystical practices, or experiences.

The whole aim of the MOQ when we get right down to the pragmatic (greek:
pragma = action) aspect, the "so what?" asked of every philosophy, is, to my
feet, a very clear message that 'mysticism', that most elusive 'way of
life', is the next evolutionary advance awaiting the geographically
peaceful, physically healthy, socially adapted, intellectually free and
dynamically open individual human becoming being.

"Yes", one might say, "but I'm a fulltime working parent of two with a
mortgage and a car and a dog and six hundred channels of shit on the t.v...
who has time for years of strict sadhanic practice, turmoil and
alienation... 'abandonment of ego'?... 'I' will certainly never 'be a
mystic'"

Perhaps, but what if today some few trillion flip-flops oned and zeroed
circles of language into those retina, explaining that what is occuring as
your experience right now, and every time you perform metaphysical
intellectual gymnastics, is an activity so similar to working on a zen koan
that it is virtually indistinguishable?

In Lila, Pirsig writes that he believes the MOQ to be a very valuable link
between science (ipov's) and mysticism (m-Dpov's?).

Perhaps "dhyana" may be "found" in the free abandonment of one's self during
the pursuit of the best and most beautiful intellectual truths; where, now
and then, under auspicious omens of fire-breathing metaphysical dragons
forming from clouds of contemplation, falling as rain to the mind below, all
becomes drenched in the very same water, waving glorious transcendence of
Self, of Quality, over all stones of suffering attachment to prior petty
self-relative value-judgements.

We need to see rather than look.
Feel rather than touch.
Savour rather than taste.
Listen rather than hear.
Smell the flowers.
Smell the branches.
Smell leaves.
Smell the roots.
Climb the tree.

How do we achieve static quality and Dymamic quality simultaneously? Where
is Tao? What is Zen? Show me the face you had before you were born. Show me
that tattoo on your ass from some hurricane weekend in the vigour of your
youth.
If your jeans are too tight to remove, then push, I mean -push with all your
might- against those impossibly giant intellectual static platypi which
laughingly worship at your churches of reason, hurtling paradox and
confusion at every idea of Dynamic Quality that springs through your
neurallinguistic structures, which classically fart on your glimpses of
romantic Quality, kick your few precious jewels of flickering insight into
the post-rational wings of experience back into greying, dimming, forgotten
staticity.

You could also,

Roll a bone down cilia road,
Breathe out a green monkey; or too,
Leaving little Jackie Paper in the ashes,
Sigh softly, watching the ebb and flow of the little joint...

"...winking in the dark American night..." (Tom Waits)

Or not.

Now,

"Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysic is an immoral act since
it's a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher, mystic
one." - Lila 457

"The same thing that's wrong with philosophology when it tries to devour
philosophy is wrong with metaphysics when it tries to devour the world
intellectually. It attempts to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern.
But it never does. You never get it right. So why try?" - Lila 457

Well, we must build a raft, not to drag around as a crucifix on the other
side, trying to get admiration for our handiwork from others, but so that we
might simply cross and then be free of cruel attachment to all former
duties, performing now as the hub, as well as the rim or spokes, of a
wheeling dance of Quality.

Here are three methods of maintaining static/dynamic harmony:

1) Meditation
2) Metaphysics
3) Marijuana

These are presented in order of Quality, from my view. The right personal
mix based on experience, advice and research, or all three at once, may be
found to be healthy and invigorating, i.e.- Dynamic. But don't forget
Moderation.

All of the following quotes labelled "- AW" are from Chapter 5 of Alan
Watts' "Psychedelics and Religious Experience", pgs.78-98 from "Does It
Matter? - Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality" Vintage Books, 1951.

Robert Pirsig: Q-quotes from ZMM and Lila are Bantam Paperback Edition.

"The idea of mystical experiences resulting from drug use is not readily
accepted in Western societies. Western culture has, historically, a
particular fascination with the value and virtue of man as an individual,
self-determining, responsible ego, controlling himself and his world by the
power of conscious effort and will. Nothing, then, could be more repugnant
to this cultural tradition than the notion of spiritual or psychological
growth through the use of drugs. A 'drugged' person is by definition dimmed
in consciousness, fogged in judgement, and deprived of will." - AW

"But not all psychotropic (consciousness-changing) chemicals are narcotic
and soporific, as are alcohol, opiates, and barbiturates. The effects of
what are now called psychedelic (mind-manifesting) chemicals differ from
those of alcohol as laughter differs from rage or delight from depression.
There is really no analogy between being 'high' on LSD and 'drunk' on
bourbon. True, no one in either state should drive a car, but neither should
one drive while reading a book, playing a violin, or making love. Certain
creative activities and states of mind demand a concentration and devotion
which are simply incompatible with piloting a death-dealing engine along a
highway." - AW

"It struck me therefore, that if any of the psychedelic chemicals would in
fact predispose my consciousness to the mystical experience, I could use
them as instruments for studying and describing that experience as one uses
a microscope for bacteriology..." - AW

"The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic
understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it, an understanding
that Indians had been deriving through Vision Quests in the past." - Lila
72

"...at one time it looked as though the whole book would center around this
long night's meeting of the Native American Church. The ceremony would be a
kind of spine to hold it all together. From it he would branch out and show
in tangent after tangent the analysis of complex realitites and
transcendental questions that first emerged in his mind there." - Lila 41

"Of the five psychedelics I tried, I found that LSD-25 and cannabis suited
my purposes best... of these two... (cannabis) proved to be the better." -
AW

"The quality of these experiences depends considerably upon one's prior
orientation and attitude to life..." - AW

"People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because
people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two
people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically
every time." - ZMM 224

"Almost invariably, my experiments with psychedelics have had four dominant
characteristics..." - AW

1) "A slowing down of time, a concentration in the present."

"Other people, going about their business on the streets, seem to be
slightly crazy, failing to realize that the whole point of life is to be
fully aware of it as it happens. One therefore relaxes, almost luxuriously,
in studying the colors in a glass of water, or in listening to the now
highly articulate vibration of every note played on an oboe or sung by
voice."

"No one is more fatuously impractical than the 'successful' executive who
spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paperwork with the objective of
retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will be all too late."

2) "Awareness of polarity."

"This is the vivid realization that states, things, and events which we
ordinarily call opposite are interdependent... by polar awareness one sees
that things which are explicitly different are implicitly one: self and
other, subject and object... figure and background, pulse and interval,
saints and sinners... Each is definable only in terms of the other, and they
go together transactionally..."

"As this awareness becomes increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself
are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply each
other. Your push is its pull, and its push is your pull..."

3) "Awareness of relativity."

"I see that I am a link in an infinte hierarchy of processes and beings,
ranging from molecules through bacteria and insects to human beings, and,
maybe, to angels and gods - a hierarchy in which every level is in effect in
the same situation."

"From this it is but a short step to the realization that all forms of life
and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one
being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible... I see,
further, that feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the
same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are feeling this
everywhere, they are all just as much 'I' as myself. Yet the 'I' feeling, to
be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the 'other', to
something beyond its control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and
end. But the intellectual jump which mystical psychedelic experience makes
here is in enabling you to see that all these myriad 'I' centers are
yourself - not, indeed, your personal and superficial conscious ego, but
what Hindus call the paramatman, the Self of all selves. As the retina
enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the
mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single Self."

4) "Awareness of eternal energy."

"...often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the
current in your nerves and that mysterious 'e' which equals 'mc-squared'.
This may sound like megalomania or delusion of grandeur but one sees quite
clearly that all existence is a single energy, and that this energy is one's
own being." - AW

"The Dharmakaya light. That was a huge area of human experience cut off by
cultural filtering. Over the years it also had become a burden to him, this
knowledge about the light. It cut off a whole area of rational communion
with others. It was not something that he could talk about without being
slammed by the cultural immune system, being thought crazy, and with his
record it was not good to invite that suspicion. But he had seen it again on
Lila tonight..." - Lila 387

"He didn't think of this light as some sort of supernatural occurrence that
had no grounding in physical reality. In fact he was sure it was grounded in
physical reality... The central terms of Western mysticism,
'enlightenment,'and illumination' refer to it directly. Darsan, a
fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means 'giving of light.'
Descriptions of Zen sartori mention it... Aldous Huxley referred to it as
part of the mescaline experience. Phaedrus remembered it from the time with
Dusenberry at the peyote meeting, although he had assumed that it was just
an optical illusion produced by the drug and not of any great importance." -
Lila 388

"Of course there is death as well as life, because energy is a pulsation,
and just as waves must have both crests and troughs the experience of
existing must go on and off. Basically, therefore there is simply nothing to
worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe
playing hide and seek (off-and-on) with itself. At root, you are the
Godhead, for God is all that there is... This is the sense of the
fundamental tenet of Hinduism, Tat tvam asi - 'THAT (i.e., 'that subtle
Being of which this whole universe is composed') art thou.' (Chandogya
Upanishad 6.15.3)" - AW

"Obviously, these characteristics of the psychedelic experience, as I have
known it, are aspects of a single state of consciousness..." - AW

I have some to say about metaphysics.

I have less to say about meditation.

Presumably, you all like the former already, and I should only serve to
remind that (especially those who say: 'My dog-Ma and I have been hammering
this wonderful idea at the LS/MD group for decades, to no avail...') we must
keep our minds VERY, very open in order to allow the best ideas possible
about some subject to Dynamically manifest themselves in the form of
intellectual "ah-ha!"'s. Once you think you've got it, then attack your idea
from every possible angle. Think of other possible ways of expressing
yourself... evolve...

Meditation - always. Especially when you're not meditating.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as
it is, infinite." - William Blake

When all things are perceived as infinite and holy, as having or being had
by Quality, what motive can we have for covetousness or agressiveness, the
pursuit of power and drearier forms of pleasure?

As for marijuana and other wild flowers, grow it yourself - it's free and
you know what you're smoking or eating. Order the seeds from Holland if you
don't know anyone. Use only in high-quality inorganic, biological and
-especially- social environments. Don't have plans for a few hours or more.
Don't operate heavy machinery. Laugh - out loud. Use in moderation, like
anything else. Bake brownies. Don't feel ashamed. Walk barefoot through the
forest with a good friend. Jog naked down a stream. Take care nearing
craw'daddy's and such other such biological entities. Create something -
poetry, painting, metaphysics, dance. Before, during, after making love. Do
not watch television. Don't forget to smell the lilacs and the roses, the
river and the garden hoses. Sing. Whistle. Look in the mirror and try to
imagine yourself as Mary Poppins. Don't wear her clothing. Order a pizza, go
to bed early and wake with the sun, smiling. Do not try this at home. Author
takes no responsibility for prejudiced cultural wet-blanket "poo-poo's"
received during course of mental mountain-climbing.

Umm... please don't think that I hold any of these activities up as models
of perfection. Perhaps effective means to greater ends, but when either is
taken too far as a goal in itself, danger is imminent, and caution should be
used. Without good, solid but flexible static latches, all one's dynamism
falls into decay and degeneracy.

I think meditation and marijuana are most effective when used in order to
create ever more aesthetically pleasing metaphysics. And all three M's,
perhaps, offer one at least fleeting glimpses of the unspeakable M - Dynamic
Mysticism.

"I don't doubt -your- existence" - DQ, pg.!.

Static latches such as motorcycle maintenance, metaphysics, painting, poems,
gardening, mathematics, a peaceful and cared-for environment, etc... these
can be seen as belonging to a higher code of morality - a code of Art.
Fueled "from above", so to speak, by something greater than the socio-egoic
"self", these activities when humbly practiced with gumption and care;
following the Eightfold path, the Tao of Lao-Tzu, the Holy Spirit of Jesus,
Purity of Mohammed, etc... can allow the attainment of the highest Quality
Maintenance of Stable Harmony and Dynamic Evolution.

According to the MOQ, metaphysics is not a search for the "ultimate"
rational "Truth". Metaphysics, through my Pirsigian window, is a process of
creating and reviewing many systems of intellectual reality and carefully
and joyfully judging them.

"The Metaphysics of Quality says that if moral judgements are essentially
assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the
world, then moral judgements are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world."
- Lila 180

On what basis? That of Quality, of course. However, the value of an idea (a
metaphysic) will change according to the perceiving level of value held by
the individual, and of course said judge's autobiographical analogue-engined
train of consciousness.

One could judge Pirsig's MOQ from a social angle. This is immoral and
dangerous.

"Phaedrus had always believed science is a search for truth. A real
scientist is not supposed to sell out that goal to corporations who are
searching for mere profit.... Phaedrus had suddenly seen a tentacle of the
Giant reaching out and he was the only one who could see it." - Lila 251

One could judge a metaphysic from an intellectual angle, seen through the
windows of the Church of Reason. Surely this view must be taken into
account, as a culturally intellectual being often needs the assurance of
logic, symmetry, simplicity, unity, etc., in the acceptance of new ideas.
But dust grows thick in the church, and if the doors are locked and windows
pained, the mind becomes dull and blind.

One could judge a metaphysic from an angle neither inorganic (grounded in
spacetime), biological, social -or- intellectual. If we aren't looking for
"ultimate rational truth", or even "best intellectual quality", but
something else... if we create, accept or reject metaphysics in such a way
that one is free of any unnecessary known static latches, in such a way that
one was in as Dynamic a state as possible, we might appear to be engaged in
an activity suitably termed "art".
We might most nobly be in hot pursuit of Dynamic Quality.

"In a metaphysics in which static universal laws are considered fundamental,
the idea that life is evolving away from any law just draws a baffled
question mark... Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not
chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by static patterns." - Lila
164

If we could create and destroy metaphysics in a state of freedom from
cultural prejudice and choking preconceptions, we could be seen to be
evolving.

"What Phaedrus saw... was that the good to which truth is subordinate is
intellectual and Dynamic Quality..." - Lila 417

"The Metaphysics Quality says there are not just two codes of morals, there
are actually five: inorganic-chaotic, biological-inorganic,
social-biological, intellectual-social, and Dynamic-static. This last, the
Dynamic-static code, says what's good in life isn't defined by society or
intellect or biology. What's good is freedom from domination by any static
pattern, but that freedom doesn't have to be obtained by the destruction of
the patterns themselves." - Lila 345

Will thee remaain a human being, or blossom in human becoming?

"Do a little dance...
Make a little love...
Get down tonight...
Get down tonight..." - Lila 19

Lyrics from "Get Down Tonight" by Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch.
Copyright 1975 by Longtitude Music Company. All rights reserved. Even human
ones. Reprinted without permission from Longtitude Music Company.

Lyrics from "Warm Beer and Cold Women" - Nighthawks at the Diner - by Tom
Waits copied right from the sound waves in the air to the screen of the
computer monitor, with the gracious help of static patterns of inorganic,
biological, social and intellectual value.

"Good is a noun." - Lila 468

Best is a verb.

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



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jan 17 2002 - 13:08:49 GMT