Hi John B:
I asked:
> "Would you consider an aesthetic experience a mystic experience?"
> Yes, but! First of all I don't particularly like the term 'mystic
> experience', as I hinted in the earlier post. For many people the term
> mystic has overtones that suggest an extraordinary state, whereas I suspect
> the mystic experiences the most ordinary states, which are only unusual for
> most of us due to the layers of interpretation and fantasy that our egoic
> development has imposed on ordinary experience. I suppose that an infant
> experiences much as a mystic does, though I do not equate this with
> mysticism, which is an adult state, with all the extra abilities which an
> adult has that a young child does not.
I agree that "mystic experience" is a misnomer in that immediate, direct
experience is probably a more accurate description, although any
description falls short. If one simply stops the conversation going on in
his head for a moment and silently looks, he will have a "mystic"
understanding IMO. But, easier said than done.
> You are probably familiar with the state known as 'flow', common to
> creative types such as artists. It occurs when the complexity of the task
> more or less matches the competence of the operator, and results in an
> absorption in which time often 'disappears', and attention is focusssed so
> intently upon the task at hand that there is a loss of normal ego
> boundaries, fantasies, and attention to past and future issues. Again this
> is a normal experience, but close to the immediacy that the mystic
> apparently experiences in everyday life.
Yes, "flow" is immediate, direct experience extended for a period of
time and thus "mystic."
> So I would place aesthetic experience in the 'intellectual' level of
> experience.
Oops. We've been describing nonintellectual experience and now
suddenly it becomes intellectual? Here is a wonderful description of
the aesthetic experience described by Clement Greenberg, an art critic:
"Esthetic enjoyments are immediate, intuitive, undeliberate and
involuntary and leave no room for conscious application of standards,
criteria, rules or precepts."
No intellect there. Just an instantaneous "value reaction"--a response
of a living being to DQ, as Pirsig might say.
> I can
> appreciate art, enjoy all kinds of understanding, and feel compassion for
> others, and still feel a huge lack in my life. This is also the problem
> with creativity."
>
> I think this is the main problem with setting up art as the fifth level,
> despite what Pirsig said about a 'level of art'.
I value what I feel as a "lack in my life." It motivates my learning. I hope
I never lose it. I'm guessing, but I doubt if a mystic's life would satisfy
you for long. Your intellectual curiosity is far too strong.
>That is why I argue that all three realms of quality at Pirsig's
> fourth level are learned, not instinctive.
>
> Including the song on the radio. If I was in a very different culture and
> heard a song on the radio that was real dynamic quality to a local, almost
> certainly it would be nothing to me (hard to do now that western music is
> taking over almost everywhere). It requires the 'invisible' learning of
> musical traditions and forms that immersion in the culture provides to make
> this quality evident. Pirsig sort of allows for this educational
> requirement, when he accepts that different people experience different
> things as having quality because of their different backgrounds (in his
> SODV paper?). But I think the issue is far more complex than he suggests,
> and have explored some of that in my previous essays.
Undoubtedly what you say is true. But it misses the point. Music and
other forms of art are universal responses to DQ. The particular form of
expression or cultural style is irrelevant to the universality of Quality in
art to which man has responded since his cave days, long before he
could read or write.
Platt
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