From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Mon May 16 2005 - 10:54:09 BST
Hi David(MB),
On 15 May 2005 at 20:13, David Buchanan wrote:
msh continued:
My personal and pragmatic interpretation of the MOQ relies on a pair
of what I claim to be two empirically verifiable statements:
"Evolution occurs" and "Some things serve evolution better than
others." From these, I can derive the moral hierarchy, and that's
all I need. As I've said many times, I DON'T think that Quality is
literally the source of subjects and objects, and don't even
understand what that would mean.
dmb said:
I was in that same place. Its good enough for all practical purposes. Its
the static side of things, the side of conventional realities, but I also
have to insist that there is more to the MOQ. Ask Paul Turner about Quality
as the source of subjects and objects. He explained it to me. Ask Ant. He
wrote the book. I don't expect you to take my word for it, but I think
philosophical mysticism is well worth discovering and exploring.
msh now says:
I appreciate your patience. You might be glad to know that I'm not
as mystically null and void as I sometimes sound in my posts. Art is
often an expression of the mystical one beneath the many, no? I've
written and played music all my life; I've written a thousand poems,
many of them published, back in the day when I bothered to send them
out; I've penned a hundred short stories. And I think my idea of the
fully-realized human is not much different from the Buddhist's idea
of an enlightened man. The FRH emphasizes action over meditation,
that's all, and the reason is simple: people who are dead can't
meditate, and there are forces at work in the world bent on making a
lot of people dead.
I also understand and appreciate that, as you say, "one of the
features of this view [philosophical mysticism] is that lots of
people have "seen" what Phaedrus and Lao Tzu saw, that a version of
this "truth" exists in every culture and is and the heart of all the
world's great religious. Its really quite magnificent, the way it
flowers everywhere and yet is always hidden." I'm just not yet
convinced that the steps taken to achieve this understanding can be
codified, as is believed by adherents of the world's "great"
religions.
msh said before:
It was only AFTER Pirsig had arrived at his notion of Quality that
he picked up Tao Te Ching and was blown away by the perfect
comparison. He and Lao Tzu had arrived at the same place via
different routes. So, a person can believe in the Dao without having
read Lao Tzu, just as a person can believe in Quality without having
read Pirsig.
dmb:
In other words, philosophical mysticism really embraces the idea of multiple
truths. It doesn't say this or that revelation or depiction is the only
correct one, but instead looks at them like works of art. And one of the
advantages of this pluralistic perspective is that is decreases one's desire
to nuke the other guy.
msh says:
There you go. But we gotta work to keep people alive so they can
embrace philosophical mysticism and gain that valuable pluralistic
perspective. This is what will allow us to continue to evolve.
Best,
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
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