Rob and Squaddites!
The exchange at the LS site is not very fast, but that's good for
thinking things through. Your piece of June 16 needed a lot of such
activity.
I agree with what you say under the condition that MOQ 's social
level is more than people meeting each other face to face, but let's
take it systematically. You wrote:
> I had a similar thought to this a few week's ago. I've always been perplexed why
> the MOQ levels seemed to *explain* everything I had learned from Eastern philosophy
> about being in the moment, not living in fear, and so forth. The MOQ
> categorization-into-levels approach seemed fundamentally different. To me, it
> brought back the "objective", disconnected, false sense of confidence that Pisig
> associated with SO thinking. "I do this because it is more dynamic / a higher
> level" seemed to replace "I do this because I am very experienced, sensitive to the
> situation, knowlegable and am following my intuition."
These are subtle matters and I may misunderstand you totally, but
what I hear you saying is: Any world view that brings you a
"blueprint" of reality that makes you able to analyze all situations
in its light will do you good. If so, yes definitely, that's what
the Intellectual level - and thus the human existence - is all about.
Yet, the world view has to get your confidence and that is what
counts. I don't know what brought all the people of the LS to
Pirsig's metaphysics, but for me it was his pointing out the SOM as a
mere metaphysics and not all of reality.
> An answer hit me. Yes, it is our fears, insecurities and insensitivities that cause
> us to do wrong when we otherwise know better. Yet, what causes our fears -- other
> people or society!!! That is the link between the levels and Eastern philosophy.
> I've never heard:
> a) A man being insecure when others noticed his dog was faster than him.
> b) A woman being jealous because a bird had a prettier voice.
> c) A boy hating the television set because everyone liked it more than him.
"Other people are hell" was Sartre's thesis, but then they are
heaven too. The social component of reality is as powerful as the
other three, but it's only the MOQ that recognize it as an integral
part of reality. Something that removes the riddle (of SOM) that we
don't exist alone. That is, a human being may well live alone; in a
house; in the country, even like Robinson Crusoe on an island
for twenty-some years, but society hovers in the background; he does
not revert to a pure biological existence.
Yes, society causes fear and insecurities and all sorts of emotions
(my hunch is that emotion IS the social level. Not its means of
expression or anything like that - that division don't exist in the
MOQ. Also that it makes us do wrong. There is of course a code of
right and wrong for all the MOQ levels, but only at the social level
is it recognized as MORAL by the SOM (or Intellect in my view).
> These are silly examples but I am very serious! Take away other people and 98% of
> our insecurities/insensitivties are gone. Pirisigism would, for example,
> categorize the mean things we do to be popular as the social level fighting the
> intellectual level. Isn't it more meaningful to categorize it as fear? Our mental
> *comparisions* to other people make us insensitive to reality.
I fully agree with the examples you bring: we aren't affronted
by such trans-level comparisons. And yes fear is a social stick, but
there are carrots too. But again, at the human scale Intellect makes
itself heavily felt at the social level, as SOM it has (up to now)
claimed to be all of reality so it's terribly difficult to say what
is what.
> Our remedy is to teach sensitivity, introspection, meditation. To foster
> unconditional love so that we are not obsessed with thoughts of others. These
> things are the catalyst for righteousness -- not teaching levels.
In my view it amounts to the same. The saints and sages of all
cultures have strived to overcome the social straightjacket.The
MOQ's greatness is that these connections are revealed. In a SOM view
the otherwordly effort is noble, but bound to failure: no matter how
world-rejecting the connection can't be broken completely. The Q-view
is that Intellect is the highest value, but rests upon the lower ones
with society as the next most prominent value. I don't know, but this
was a theory that satisfied my requirements.
Regards from the too-long-as-usual
Bo
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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