To my favorite motorcycle gang:
This is my first posting. I read the Dec 12 and 13 entries and am
astonished and amazed. The conversation is better than I hoped for,
although surprized at the scatology and brutality. I'm very psyched to
chime in.
Please count me among the mystics. Even further, I see the MOQ as a good
picture of mysticism. MOQ is a good explaination of the underlying or
transcendent reality that mystics describe. Further still, I think
philosophical mysticism isn't the only valid kind. Each of the world's
great religious traditions have an esoteric core of thinkers who are
mystics, and at that esoteric core all the great religions agree. The
mystics see the apparent differences between theologies as merely a
matter of style. Its the same person in different clothes, so to speak.
The differences are only cultural inflections.
I'd love to go on, but the topic is brain, mind, and intellect, isn't
it?
The neurosciences are inherently reductionist. I can't believe that even
a perfectly valid scientific experiment on the brain could ever make
claims about the nature of human consciousness. Chemistry could never
explain shakephere or the blues. Besides the brain/mind split is classic
SO thinking. Its the old mind/body problem.It becomes an impossible
situation when the subject is also and object. I think it's at the heart
of what Pirsig was trying to overcome in his quest for Quality. His
copernican revolution in consciousness was meant to overthrow this exact
problem.
In the real world history has shown repeatedly that biological
explainations for human nature and behavior have been used by
authoritarian governments to justify exploitation, slavery, war and
genocide. Reductionism is a right-wing thing and it gets alot of people
killed. In Pirsig's MOQ it would be a matter of confusing the various
levels of Quality; that it confuses the biological, social, and
intellectual levels.
Joseph Campbell's last book, "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space", sheds
light on the issue and i think its consistent with the MOQ. He was a
scholar, a post-Jungian mythologist and a mystic. He make a case for
Freud's view that the sex organs exerted a certain pressure on the mind,
and that resulted in unconscious motivations. But Campbell goes much
further. He says that all the organs exert their own kind of pressure on
the total organism. Each organ has its own needs and issues demands on
the mind. And here's the fun part. THE BRAIN IS AN ORGAN. Its just one
of many organs in competition to effect the will of the whole organism.
The brain is the king of organs and my personal favorite. It seems to
run things, and that is a big part of the confusion. Again - the
biological level is confused with the intellectual level when brains are
confused with minds. The mind and the intellect are dependant on the
brain, and have grown out of the organ to reach a new level of Quality.
Within every brain are areas more primitive and wild. Remnants of former
brains lie beneath as building blocks of our present state. One could
even say there are levels of quality within the organ itself and levels
of quality in the mind that grows out of it. Who wanted to talk about
complexity? Nature seems to be inclined to produce our kind of
consciousness. DQ is the underlying evolutionary force and it created
our brains and minds. The MOQ is very flattering to human consciousness.
One more idea. This one is from Robert Thurman. He's a Tibetan Buddhist
scholar and Uma's dad. He studied with the Dali Lama... Blah Blah Blah
In "Inner Revolution" he says if you want to understand consciousness
you gotta go East.
He says Western science has mastered material reality and was able to
put a man on the moon, but that the East has achieved an equally
stunning feat in the inner realm.
That's it for now.
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