Hi Squad,
I still think mysticism in general and Zen in particular have no ascendant
status in the MOQ.
Lithien 12/9:
zen is a discipline that holds
instinct in a higher plane than intellect. in a way, instinct replaces the
intellects ability "to know". only you dont know with the mind but with
your gut.
Lithien 12/9:
i think zen is capturing instinct and realizing its pure knowledge. that is
why it is a form of knowing.
its becoming conscious of the unknowable.
Gene 12/9:
Zen practices do direct us beyond
thinking, but only after a lot of it has been done. koans are a good
example.
Bodvar 12/10:
I am not amused by the turn the
discussion has taken lately. 'Intuition', 'God', 'instincts'. 'zen'!
Don't you see that the MOQ is a liberation from all those SOMish
skyhooks (yes, even 'zen' as used by us Westerns is a red herring).
Lithien on 12/11 quotes me and responds:
This has confused me. If Zen allows one to respond to reality in an
instinctive manner then Zen must reside in the biological level. Is this
what you mean?
i invite you to read the articles on "the zombie within" and then determine
whether its the biological level or not.
I wish you had answered my question.
Fintan 12/11:
What I mean is that Zen/instinct/DQ is from God.
So Fintan, you equate Zen, instinct, and Dynamic Quality. That's fine, but
it's not the MOQ.
Instinct arises from the biological level. As such, it cannot possibly lie
in a higher plane than intellect. QED, Zen disagrees with the tenants of
the MOQ. Lithien seems to be implying that Zen is DQ. But by her own
definition that cannot be. Saying that Zen mind or God is Dynamic Quality
cheapens Dynamic Quality.
Fintan 12/11:
This Zombie stuff is a major chink in the establishment view of reality.
The ZOMBIE is directly analogous to Pirsig's pre-intellectual Quality.
I disagree. The Zombie article is describing expressions of bioPoVs.
Lithien continued in the 12/9 post:
another exponent of this different definition of instinct and intellect is
Jung whose belief in synchronicity and the collective unconscious bypasses
traditional connotations. in many novels like Herman Hesse's Demian in
which he says:
"that which is within you and directs your life knows already. It's good
to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills
everything, does everything better than we ourselves".
I read both Siddartha and Demain when I was a teen-ager. I couldn't buy it
then and I can't buy it now. To say that within us is "someone" who knows
everything, etc.. is hogwash. Yes, there is instinct and intuition, but I
do not believe my instincts and intuition "Know" everything. And I
certainly don't think instinct and intuition do "everything" better than we
ourselves. I would not want to rely on either one to drive my car while I
am blindfolded. As to Jung, his ideas are finding fewer and fewer
proponents in psychiatry, basically because his ideas don't help people
solve the problems they went to see a psychiatrist for. Jung's ideas are so
many intellectual parlour games.
Lithien continues:
this last quote from the book is the same premise that diana's articles on
the zombie. that our conscious mind...the rational intellectual ego, is not
the only part calling the shots. in fact, may not even be calling any shots
at all. in fact, in the article it says that instead of free will, the only
thing we may have is free won't. meaning that we cannot will to do anything
but rather will not to do it. this zombie side of us is called instinct in
the articles too.
"When researchers like Merikle speak of the unconscious, they are referring
to perceptual and information processing skills." The quote you mentioned
from the article appears as a sidebar to the section on "Irresistible
Illusions" which is discussing the mechanisms of visual perception.
"A provocative experiment that was reported in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet
of the University of California at San Francisco suggests that the Zombie
may be in charge of the brain's decision-making, too. Libet asked human
volunteers to make hand movements whenever they felt like doing so as he
measured the electrical activity in their brains. He found that brain
impulses associated with a movement began about 350 milliseconds before the
subjects reported any conscious awareness of their intent to make the
movement. That is, the "voluntary" action did not originate consciously.
The conscious mind was not powerless, however. It could still veto the
proposed movement during a window of 150 to 200 milliseconds between
conscious awareness of the intention and its execution, he found. This
suggests that our conscious minds may not have free will, but rather "free
won't", according to the neurologist and psychologist Vilayanar Ramachandran
of the University of California at San Diego. "
I don't think this statement is backed up by the experiment. It's a pretty
rash statement. Read uncritically it seems to imply that you cannot
consciously think of moving your hand and have it move. But as I sit here
very still I say to myself. Ok, in 1 second I will move my hand - and it
moves. Further, what did the researchers mean by moving "whenever they felt
like doing so"? Emotions and instincts are pre-verbal in the MOQ, so I'm
not particularly surprised if you should have a biological or emotional urge
to move but not express it verbally in your logical static intellectual
level beforehand. After all, according to the MOQ, we had the ability to
move and feel long before we had logic. So I don't find anything here
inconsistent with the MOQ. I agree that our "conscious mind" aka static
intellectual level is not the only thing calling the shots. We take inputs
from all levels.
One quote I haven't seen mentioned yet comes from the end of the "I've Got a
Hunch" section:
So by all means tune in to your inner voice. But don't forget logic. There's
more to winning a Nobel prize than choosing one of the unsolved puzzles of
the Universe and sleeping on it.
Mary
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