Gary and John,
First there were a couple of misunderstandings in Gary's post, so let me
tackle them first:
[Gary:]If you and Bo want to keep 'non-reflective'/ auto pilot mind
processes as not part of Q-Intellect, that's okay by me. For now, I
will give you this. Let's see where it takes us. I would have to
assume, and you can correct me, that this 'non-reflectiveauto
pilot/sub-conscious and/or unconscious mental processing has to be
accounted for somewhere, since Pirsig game rules are that everything is
accounted for in his four levels. This leaves all that mental
processing as 2nd level biological activities of the individual
human brain. That's fine. But this seems to make Q-intellect only
conscious thinking and leaving all un & sub conscious 'thinking' as
brain process solely. Not something I'm all that fond of but I can go
along with the program.
[Still Gary:]As you are explaining all maps, SOM & MOQ are a products of
SOT? are also products of SOLAQI? Since SOLAQI is the equivalent of
Q-Intellect?
[Scott:] You're misunderstanding here. What I refer to as non-reflective
thinking is not subconscious or unconscious. It is perfectly conscious,
just not "mindful". It is the kind of thinking one does when angry at
someone, the "When he said that I should have responded..." or "I wonder
what to get for dinner", what Buddhists call monkey-mind. It is not
reflective, and is generally driven by social or biological issues. The
intellectual level ("q-intellect"), in my opinion, refers only to
reflective thinking, which includes what you have to do to properly
understand a scientific argument, philosophy, and so forth. So no,
q-intellect is not ALL thinking, just reflective thinking. It produced
SOM and MOQ, and all other metaphysics.
[GARY:] It seems to me that Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism
posited no difference between matter & mind. They seem to dissolve
matter as an illusion seen by mind. All was mind or all was spirit.
[Which is what you will be saying shortly.] Thus half of the s/o divide
does not exist in the 'Eastern' version of Q-Intellect. But, you seem
to be saying that if they were aware of this issue which they were at
pains to explain away they are thus actually caught in SO thinking.
Thus they were 'really' using a SOM. Which I guess means that MOQ is
also a SOM! It too is working to explain away SO and thus must be
caught in SOM?? Is that what you mean to be saying? That all human
thinking is caught in SO framework?
[Scott:] Again, you've misunderstood what I said. What the Eastern
philosophers were SAYING was as you describe. What I am saying is that
all this SAYING is in SOT-mode, so to speak. After all, I can now say
"Everything is One", but I am now partaking in a SOT
framework. They weren't explaining anything away. They were saying that
the SOT mind is an illusory mind (maya). But to say it they had to be in
a SOT framework, since that is what their audience is in.
Now to the business at hand, which is to make it clearer what position I
hold with respect to q-intellect, that is, intellect as the fourth
level, freed from the social and biological. And how that fits in with
mysticism.
First, SOLAQI. I take this as given, that Subject/Object Logic is
Q-Intellect, but see this as a definition. We are (from a mystical point
of view) stuck in the four levels, and in particular our intellect is
unavoidably dualist: I think ABOUT things, because that is how all my
experience is structured. This is, in philosophy, known as the
intentional stance. We can't, except in moments of "mystical experience"
get above it. We CAN, however, descend below it, and we do that all the
time, when we let our thinking be driven by social and biological
concerns, again, what the Buddhists call monkey-mind.
This is why I (and Bo, I believe) insist on the high value of SOT: it is
training in detachment. (And why I argued (to Rog) that SOT in service
to society is less important than SOT in service to itself, so to speak,
or maybe one should say in service to the individual in fostering
detachment.)
Now to the question: how does q-intellect relate to mystical
understanding? As follows:
1. The mystics emphasize that Ultimate Reality (by whatever name) is
ineffable, that SOT can never describe or explain it, and that SOT (or
more generally, dualism) is maya. I take this as given, and have never
said otherwise.
2. What SOT can do is examine itself, however, and in doing so it finds
the paradoxes that SOM engenders. This is, then, support for the
mystical claim that SOT is maya, and it is to strengthen our awareness
of this paradoxicality that I urge the q-intellectual activity of
deconstruction. The more we weaken our unthinking BELIEF in dualism, the
better (the more detached we become). Among these beliefs -- the main
one -- is the belief in an independent objective reality. And this is
why I continually recommend Barfield's book, since it shows how this
strict S/O dualism has come about within historical time. It came about
with and in correlation to the development of SOT. It also points to the
transcendence of SOT, that SOT is a stage, albeit a necessary one, in
the evolution of consciousness to what he calls "final participation".
3. The mystics (the better ones, in my opinion) also emphasize that
"nirvana is samsara". I understand this to mean, in part, that while SOT
and observable existence in general are maya, we make a mistake in
thinking that SOT should just go away. Patterns are "static patterns of
value" and the creation of patterns is Good. That includes patterns of
q-intellect. We do have to learn that patterns of q-intellect, like all
patterns, are not Ultimately Real, and that all patterns are contingent,
but we make a fundamental mistake in denigrating the intellect in favor
of non-intellectual patterns, and that is why I dislike the phrase "the
map is not the territory". It tends to reinforce the pre/trans fallacy,
that if we could only stop thinking we would restore the experience of
DQ "out there" as was the case in "original participation". Rather we
can learn to experience DQ in our thinking (N.B., this is not something
we can "learn" in the way we learn, say, science or mathematics. Rather
it is itself a meditative technique, and we "learn" it by detaching the
ego from our thinking. Again, I mention the books of Georg Kuhlewind who
goes into this in depth. To experience DQ in thinking (my MOQ
translation) implies transcendence of duality.)
So, in sum, I regard all that concern with words to be beside the point.
We need to get beyond the language/reality distinction. Our words are
objects like any other, but what is more important is to realize that
ALL objects are words: DQ speaking to us, or Quality speaking to itself
in the form of humans (and no doubt in many other ways). Here I'm
getting mythological, so I'd better stop.
[to John:] You criticize my saying that to "experience" DQ "I" must
dissolve all static patterns. (First, you are ignoring my use of scare
quotes. I used them to emphasize that in this context the words lose
their ordinary connotations. And so of course I beg the question of what
"I" dissolves anything. I could just as well have said that a Higher
Power dissolves, and begged that question as well). On the other hand,
if taken as given you are partially correct to say this is nonsense. I
should have added, that "dissolving all static patterns" does NOT mean
that they just "go away", as mistaken notions of Nirvana sometimes
suggest. Rather, they "go away" as objective reality, and along with it,
"I" as subject also "go away". To the extent that static patterns are
experienced as objects, they are NOT experienced as Quality.
- Scott
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