SQUAD: My addiction is hopeless. This evening I drove to the radio
station, even though its my day off. I fear that Saturday the 31st, the
next time I'm actually scheduled to work here, would have been too late.
Its a sickness I thoroughly enjoy.
Its not that I wish to have the last word or anything, but I've been
very excited by some of these issues and I've recently discovered some
ideas that seem directly connected to the mind/body bridge.
There have been lots of great posts, but you may recall that I've been
trying focus on the social level because it can be seen as that part of
ourselves that connects the intellect (mind) with the biological
organism (body). The underlying premise of this exercise is that the
fictitous little editor behind the eye balls is not REALLY disconnected
or lonely. Instead of the lonely editor, the MOQ self is an aspect of
the total picture of reality. Instead of peering out at a world we can
never know, the MOQ self is inherently involved in nature. The MOQ self
is that very nature. The fully mature human individual participates in
all static levels and DQ itself and is totally immersed in that reality.
And I think a personal resolution of this issue not only clarifies what
Pirsig has tried to say, I believe it has a healing power. It can begin
to eliminate the terrible loneliness of the twentieth century one person
at a time. And it goes a long way toward showing us how to become
ourselves more fully. It is about an expansion of conciousness, a
ripening of the self.
"I was equally sure that none of the theologians I knew had ever seen
"the light that shineth in the darkness" with his own eyes, for if they
had they would not have been abble to teach a "theological religion,"
which seemed quite inadequate to me, since there was nothing to do with
it but believe it without hope. I recognized that this celebrated faith
had played this deadly trick on most of the cultivated and serious
people I knew. The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it
FORESTALLED EXPERIENCE."
This quote from Jung's autobiography could just as accurately read
"rigid static patterns forestall dynamic Quality. Obviously, he didn't
have Pirsig's MOQ vocabulary when he wrote it, but it reminds of
Pirsig's comment about the Bishop getting nervous when a Saint walks
into the church. Jung was not in favor of doing away with the church,
but thought that any Theology all by itself was hardly helpful in
spiritual matters. In a letter to Protestant Theologian, Walter Uhsadel,
he wrote...
"It seems to me that the most important task of anyone who trains souls
in the present is to show people a way of getting to the PRIMAL
EXPERIENCE which for example Paul encountered most clearly on the
Damascus Road. In my experience this way opens up only in the process of
the development of the individual soul." (Psyche)
Again, it pretty darn Pirsigian. Primal experience stikes me as just
another way of saying primary empirical reality or direct experience.
And his mention of Paul's transformation on the road to Damascus reminds
me of Pirsig's own transformational episodes in Chicago and the peyote
teepee. And the nightmares he described in ZAMM, where he was
imprisioned behind glass and disconnected to his family, FEELS like the
need to break out of the static lonely self. It FEELS like a nightmare
because we yearn to gulp life rather that drink it through a straw.
Gerhard Wehr says that all of Jung's work as a psychologist directed him
to see everything as one complex reality, to develop a "universal
picture of reality that embraces human beings and the world, psyche and
matter." Even before the MOQ was born Jung imagined that soul and form
are two aspects of the same reality, that mind and matter are the same
"thing". As Wehr puts it, "What he means is the reality that can at one
time be described as material being and at another as a dyanamic of the
psyche". Its pretty interesting that he even manages to use the word
"dynamic" in a quasi-Pirsigian way. But it gets even better. Wehr
continues...
"This UNUS MUNDUS (the one world) was to play a role above all in Jung's
later works, when he had a fruitful exchange with the physicist and
Nobel prize winner Wolfgang Pauli. The studies produced in this
connection show that the depth psychologist discloses possibliities of
knowledge that point far beyond the original task of the physician and
therapist. The collaboration proved to be fruitful because parallelism
of thought models arose in psychology and physics. Jung became convinced
that the same unconscious that harbors the archetypical images of great
religious relevance must also be connected to INORGANIC matter. He
thought that in the last resort PSYCHE AND MATTER ARE TO BE SEEN AS THE
TWO POLES OF ONE AND THE SAME REALITY..."
I have to say, if this doesn't remind you of the SODV paper you're
really not paying attention. Is this an exciteing parallel or what? In
their collaboration, Jung and Pauli even came to the conclusion that the
evolution of life was not limited to biological evolution and that none
of it was mere chance, but was ordered by "meaningful mutations"
instead.
I don't have the intellectual skills to put it all together in a way
that makes it easy or crystal clear. But if you're willing to read
between the lines...
OOOOps. Gotta go. David B.
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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