From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 21 2005 - 21:52:41 BST
Sam and all MOQers:
Sam said:
>I'm genuinely interested in having my lack of understanding corrected. I've
>spent ages bashing my head against it, with various fruitful and
>non-fruitful results. So I'm in a state of beginner's mind. Paul assures me
>that Pirsig's explanation of 'experience' is not SOM (and as I think he is
>generally very sound, I give his views a lot of respect). So how about you
>let go of the karma dumping, and try to actually answer my concern?
dmb replies:
Karma dumping? I think my anger and frustration is pretty darn
understandable and forgiveable and wish you had confessed this little
problem BEFORE I poured tens of thousands of words into this forum on the
topic. You have a very polite and pleasant manner, Sam, but the tardiness of
your confession makes me feel like I've been seriously jerked around. Its
just plain rude to let me waste my time like that and I think my respones
was basically appropriate to the situation. You have complained about the
feeling that your posts are getting sucked into a black hole, right? So you
can imagine how I feel. However I am also encouraged by your admission and
apparent openness so I'll go easy. But I will also ask you to be extremely
careful in your response. As is demonstrated by the very post I'm presently
responding to, you tend to delete my comments and quotes and comeback with
rather vague and oblique replies rather than ask specific questions or
otherwise engage in the specific content. For example,...
Sam asked:
What is the word 'experience' doing in the MoQ? ...As I say, I know what it
means in the standard
Cartesian/Lockean/empirical tradition - which is pretty much how James uses
it - but Pirsig denies the SOM, as demonstrated in the quotations you put
in. I genuinely do not understand what he means. If you understand it,
please could you explain it to me. If you don't or can't explain it, I'll
take that as confirmation that you don't understand it either.
dmb says:
See? You don't give me much to go on here. There is nothing here that let's
me know what it is you don't understand. Maybe you were trying to ask an
open-ended question or something, but it just doesn't work so I'm asking you
to get much more explicit and specific. Until then, let me say a few things
about those quotes you've once again deleted...
In Lila's Child Pirsig says, "in a subject-object metaphysics, this
experience is between a pre-existing object and subject, but in the MOQ,
there is no pre-existing subject and object." And likewise, in ZAMM he says,
"Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object.
The very existence of subjects and objects themselvesis deduced from the
Quality event.". Let's think about that for starters, eh? Both of Pirsig's
sentences are expressing the same basic idea and I would guess this idea as
at the heart of what it is you don't yet get. Both of them are denying the
most basic assumption of SOM. Both of them are denying that subjects and
objects come BEFORE experience. Experience in the MOQ is NOT the result of a
collision between subjects and objects, but rather we interpret experience
in those terms. He's saying that subjects and objects are deduced from an
event that comes before such things can be concieved. This explains his
comment about scientific empiricism being less than pure. Why is it less
than pure? Because it assumes that empirical evidence is all about the
relationship between subjects and objects. Like the usually kind of SOM
philosophical empiricism, it assumes that experience depends upon
pre-existing subjects and objects. These assumptions are built right into
our language and our common sense - experience is just what happens to
people in the world. I guess that why it seems crazy to deny this assumption
and why its so tough to get. But what he's saying is that it is just an
assumption. Its not really an experience so much as a way we've been trained
to habitually think about experience. We habitually and automatically
interpret experience in terms of subjects and objects because of our
language and culture, but Pirsig say, this is an assumption and not a direct
experience. And our minds are so powerful, as Bill Hicks would say, that we
totally believe this assumption and even find it difficult to doubt it or to
imagine anything else. But this is the assumption Pirsig denies.
Now think about this assumption in terms of what Paul said while comparing
mysticism to pragmatism. In the "Rhetoric" thread he said, "enlightenment
isn't about seeing 'the way the world really is' e.g. "it really is an
undivided whole," but is more about being aware that 'the world really isn't
configured in any way in particular'." and "In terms of Zen practice, it is
aimed at experientially showing the lack of inherent self-existence..." As I
understand it, this is only a slightly different way to think about subjects
and objects as metaphysical assumptions rather than the actual starting
point. I think he's saying that subjects and objects are among those
particular ways in which we've configured the world, divided the world, and
that the point of Zen practice is to unconfigure the world, to let go of
those divisions, to put those static patterns to sleep, to shut down that
powerful mind and to stop habitually interpreting the world throug our
assumptions.
And understanding the idea behind this kind of Zen practice is helpful in
understanding Pirsig's pithy little definition. "Philosophical mysticism,
the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by
non-rational means, has been with us since the beginning of history." Pirsig
in ZAMM, p25
Obviously, the kind of "truth" refered to here, the kind that "can be
apprehended only by non-rational means", is not intellectual truth. It can
only be experienced directly as in Zen practice, as in the mystical
experience. Words like pure, primary and direct are used to describe the
kind of experience that doesn't include those assumptons, that leaves out
these inherfited interpretations. That's why Philosophical mysticism asserts
that this truth is beyond all definitions, asserts that it can't be grasped
by the intellect. Its all about letting go of thought in favor of experience
and its is thought that leads us to believe that experience begins with a
thinker in the material world. Intellect is what leads us to believe that
subjects and objects are necessary pre-requisites for experience. The
mystical experience is simply the experience we have all the time anyway,
its just that Zen practices teach the mind to shut the hell up so we can
notice it in the undivided state.
"In the spiritual traditions of both East and West - I am thinking not about
particular religions, but about the mystical element to be found in them all
- we find the claim that eventually one must let go of the activites of
thought and imagination in order to enter a region of consciousness that
such symbolic activity cannot reach." Guidebook to ZAMM, p22
Here again we see the idea of shutting off the interpretations, of an
experience beyond the "symbolic activities" of the intellect. I'll remind
you again that in the MOQ and in philosophical mysticism in general,
subjects and objects are not considered to be primary or pre-existing
pre-requisites for experience. They are instead the products of that
symbolic activity. They're ideas, assumptions, interpretations, they are
patterns of static quality. The mystical experience is, by definition, the
perception of reality without all the static interpretations. That's why we
sometimes refer to this state of consciousness as a pre-intellectual
experience or refer to the perception of reality as undivided. But perhaps
it is now abundantly clear how it is we are NOT talking about a subjective
experience. We trying to get rid of such static quality interpretations in
favor of that "pure" experience. As Pirsig puts it, "the apprehension of
pure Dynamic Quality is the entry into Nirvana and it occurs very rarely."
So "what is the word "experince" doing in the MOQ"? Its being used to
overturn the metaphysical assumptions of SOM and instead use it to establish
an epistemolgy of enlightenment. He is using the word in a copernican
revolution that puts experience before subjects and objects instead of the
other way around. This explains the phrase "radical empiricism". Radical, in
this case, does not refer to the political fringes, to extreme sports and it
is not to be used in conjuction with the word "dude". In this case, radical
means "at the root" of experience. Again the idea being that the MOQ's
empiricism differs from SOM's in that it does not assume pre-existing
subjects and objects but rather sees them as a secondary, as the product of
our symbolic activites.
And finally, I hereby beg you to be very careful in your response. I beg you
to respond specifically and explicitly or otherwise demonstrate that this
answer did not encounter a black hole. There is simply no way I can
successfully communicate these ideas without your co-operation. This is a
long post, but there is really one one question and one answer involved
here. I'm not asking you or anyone else to reply to every little point
because there is really just one big point here anyway. I'm just asking that
you please find a way to keep your eye on that ball.
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