GLEN, ROGER, GLOVE, BODVAR, LITHIEN, MAGGIE AND MARY:
I hope y'all don't mind my adddressing you all at the same time. I've
read all the posts since I joined about 6 weeks ago, including all the
recent ones, and have reason to believe you'll be interested in this. It
may seem like a monolog, but that is only because I don't know how to
reproduce the posts of others and I'm a slow typist. To compensate for
my incompetence I just think about the ideas being debated for a few
hours and then I try to post something that addresses the main subjects
and ideas. By that time I've forgotten who said it, but not what they
said.
I'll leave it to each of you to recognize your influence on my reply.
I think that there are tangled knots in our debate on the levels,
particularly the social and intellectual levels, because of
disagreements on SOM. I hope you'll all take my attempt to untangle the
knots seriously, as I've been working hard on it, I sincerely believe it
will be helpful and relevant and its rather dear to me.
"He seemed to remember a book he'd always wanted to read called "The
Masks of God". You could discover a lot about a culture by what it said
about its idols. The idols would be objectification of the culture's
innermost values, which is its reality."
That's from the hard back Bantam edition of Lila, page 401. "The Masks
of God" is a huge, multi-volume set of books written by Joe Campbell.
I'm sure you know. I've read that and lots of his other books. In fact,
I'm quite a fan of Campbell's work. Pirsig confesses his ignorance of
"Masks", yet his MOQ fits with it beautifully. Campbell and Pirsig are
intellectual soulmates. My favorite intellectual fantasy is to have
dinner with the two of them. Campbell's analysis of the world's
mythologies unlocks the secrets of many things, as well as the MOQ.
So what I'll try to do is explain the levels and SOM with Campbell as a
key. I will focus on a single hypothetical individual as an example. You
can cover all the levels this way because an individual is a symphony of
static patterns from all four of the levels. Each of the levels exists
in every human being. Lila herself was said to have Quality at the
biological level, but not so much at the social and intellectual levels.
She had all four of the levels in her, just like the rest of us, it was
only a question of weather or not she had quality at those top two
levels. My apologies in advance for anything I repeat from past posts. I
want to go step by step.
The fifth moral code governs the balance or ratio of static and
Dynamic. The ratio between these two is different at each level. The
inorganic level is so static that it seems absolutely fixed. It a good
thing that the inorganic level is seemingly 100% static. Anything else
would literally be earth-shattering, if you know waht I mean. Biological
evolution demonstates the Dynamic Quality at work in that level, but
sometimes requires millions or billions of years to occur. The
biological level is relatively stable, but not as static as the
inorganic level. It follows in a similar way in the third level. The
social level of values, what Cambell and Pirsig call the mythos, is more
dynamic and evolves more quickly than the bio level. Naturally the
intellectual level evolves most quickly, is the most dynamic, and is at
the leading edge of the universe's movement toward Dynamic Quality
itself. The fifth moral code says this is as it should be. Each level
needs its own ratio of static and dynamic quality to be moral. And I
think everybody knows that the other four moral codes correspond to the
levels and govern the relationship between them when they conflict.
We'll say our hypothetical person is Lila's good twin and call her Lola.
Unlike her evil twin, Lola has quality at all four levels. We're not
asking about the quality of Lola, we're just going to identify the
levels in her, regardless of their quality.
Most of the disagreement is at the top two levels, but I've got to back
up at least one, to the bio level, to really describe all of Lola. I
think the inorganic level of Lola is not in dispute and poses no serious
problem.
Lola is a fine physical specimen, in fact she's beautifully healthy,
just gave birth today, is married to a man of means and uses her rather
extensive education to make a good living as a book editor. Her primary
biological function has been carried out, she has social status and a
quality intellect to boot.What a babe!
When Lola was pregnant, she felt all kind of pressure from her body. The
biological level's values were presented to her in the urge to eat,
drink and sleep like never before. She felt like her whole being had
been given over to being a baby factory. It's like her womb and other
female organs screamed out their demands and Lola heard and obeyed. This
is not just about pregnant women though, even men are captive to the
demands of their bodies. Every individual is a collection of evolved
organs, each with their own different static patterns of value. All the
organs and the entire organism is a symphony of slightly different
patterns of value, even though they all exist at the biological level
together. Just like cat and dogs are both organisms and are more alike
than different, but are still antagonistic toward each other and compete
to have their own way.
The organs of Lola's body each exert their own pressure on the total
organism. It's an expanded version of Freud's idea that the sex organs
create unconscious motivations in the individual. In truth all of the
organs create unconscious motivations. Each variation of static
biological patterns, each organ is demanding that it's values be
recognized by the total organism. The stomach certainly makes itself
felt.It doesn't seem unconscious to us intellectually oriented modern
humans cause we recognize the sensation and say to ourselves, "better
start cookin". Our ancestors experienced hunger even before the social
and intellectual levels emerged. Our existence now is proof that
pre-social and pre-intellectual organisms can act successfully upon
these motivations and got themselves fed. The heart, the the eyes, ears,
nose and mouth, the brain, the skin and even the humble rectum each
represent static biological patterns that make demands on the total
organism.
Here's where the fun begins. C.G. Jung analyzed over ten thousand dreams
in his career as a Psychoanalyst. He noticed that there were certain
recurring images, themes and motifs common among the dreams. He also
noticed that these same patterns could be seen in the myths and stories
from all times and in all places. He surmised that dreams and myths were
both the products of the "collective unconscious", an unseen inheritance
given to all human beings. Dreams and religions are both from the same
source and that source is literally in each of us. People objected,
saying things like "where does this collective unconscious come from?"
and "Did god give us all subliminal intructions on what to dream about
and what images to worship?". I don't know that Jung was ever able to
answer those kinds of questions and many are still unconvinced such a
thing is possible, but I think Campbell and Pirsig can answer those
charges.
The images in Lola's unconscious mind were effectively created by the
demands of the organs of her body. The figures in her dreams are, among
other things, representations of their will in her unconscious mind. The
symbolic images and their interactions in her dreams are, at least in
part, an expression the the interactions of the biological values
patterns within the total organism. In concert these interactions create
the unconscious mind. We can say that you and I have essentially the
same unconscious mind as does Lola because we have essential the sam
body as Lola.
We all have two arms, two legs, ten fingers and toes, and all the same
organs except the sexual ones. Since the unconscious mind is a creation
of the organism, and since we are all the same kind of organism, we all
have the same kind of unconscious mind. Thus the collective unconscious.
As the total organism and its collective unconscious evolve together the
mythos begins to emerge. As our ancestors evolved the collective
unconscious helped in their struggle to survive by co-ordinating the
various demands of the organs within them. Their interactions with the
enviroment were sstill unconscious and were organically and dynamically
directed. It was natural and before "the fall".
The mythos, the culture, the rudiments of language, which are the social
patterns of value begin to emerge out of this collective unconscious as
bands of humans begins to sort out basic biological issues. Who gets fed
first, or best, or most when food is procured? Who gets to mate with
who? Who takes care of the young? Just as the competeing organs created
the collective unconscious, the competeing individuals, acting out
unconsciously and dynamically, create the mythos. The social patterns
of value can evolve in slightly different directions in spite of their
common base, as the difference between East and West demonstates. Each
language group, with its variation on the gods, idols and myths,
represents a slight variation in social level patterns. Even then the
differences are mostly a matter of style and the underlying mythos of
all the world's human cultures are strikingly similar in spite of
outward appearances. All evolution up to this point has taken place
naturally and dynamically and unconsciously.
As the mythos evolved it grew in complexity and in freedom. Perhaps the
increasing complexity of the mythos is what caused the recent rapid
expansion in the size of the brain. I don't know. In any case, the
intellectual level, the logos as both Pirsig and Campbell call it, has
come along very recently and emerged out of the the third level in the
same way. Just as the mythos was built by the organic level, the logos
is built by the social level. Or you could just say all thoughts and
ideas are culturally derived. The intelluctual level exist within the
social level just as the biological level exists within the inorganic
level. The organism can't exist without those static inorganic patterns
we call atoms, molecules and chemicals. The intellect can't exist
without social patterns. The intellect's reality is the mythos and all
it can do is examine the mythos. The intellect divides and analyzes the
mythos, all those social patterns that evolved naturally. Pirsig
describes the death of Socrates as the first recorded case of the
intellect actually asserting its independence from the social patterns.
This is a time in history when the unconscious power of the mythos first
came under intellectual scrutiny.
Before that though, all evolution was dynamic and the first three levels
are in direct contact with Dynamic Quality, unmediated by the intellect.
How could it be? The intellectual level had not yet emerged.
The intellectual level of patterns of value can divide the mythos in any
number of ways. It can makes lots of different kinds of maps for the
same territory. You can see this in the debates of the early Greeks.
It's Pirsig's contention that some ways of intellectualizing the social
patterns won and others lost. As you know, he thinks the wrong side lost
way back there in ancient Greece and we've suffered for it ever since.
Remnants of the loosing side have always been with us and re-emerges
periodically in the form of idealism, mysticism, romanticism,
transcendentalism and a host of other forms of neo-Platonism. Aristotole
won and Plato lost. That victory, through the course of Westeren
philosophy, has resulted in SOM. SOM is not the only way intellect can
percieve reality. Non-SOM forms of thinking exist not only among
Westerners who have taken up alternative views, but also as a rule in
the East and in many primary cultures. SOM is so dominant that it's
difficult for many people in the West to imagine reality any other way.
If the intellectual level of values is equated with and identicle to the
SOM, them even Asian cultures would share our concepts of reality. But
clearly they do not operate on subject object metaphysics. SOM is not a
naturally, dynamically created phenomenon, it is a choice made by the
intellect and that decision can be re-examined by the intellect, as
Pirsig does. We are not inevitable trapped in SOM and Pirsig's work is
an attempt to lead the intellect away from it and toward a higher
quality way of divideing reality. The MOQ is an set of intellectual
patterns that is something other than SOM. The conscious parts of our
minds can be changed. The intellectual level is different than all the
others in this respect. The freedom enjoyed by the fourth level is
really quite radical by comparison to the first three levels. Its moral
for this level to have a lot of dynamic quality and very little static
qualities. Like memorizing the times tables so you can rely on them in
dynamic situations, etc.
The price the intellectual level pays for this freedom is loss of direct
contact with Dynamic Quality. Intellect comes after the fall, or rather
the fall comes because of the intellect. Now all experience is mediated
through the intellect and as a result there is a split between the
intellect and its ground of being. But this is not exactly the same as
the subject/object dicotomy. It is however, part of the reason mistakes
like SOM can occur. The intellect feels this alienation from nature and
constructs pictures that give those feelings of alienation validation.
Its a part of the mythos that the intellect is very interested is
explaining. The intellect wants a picture of reality that confirms the
sense of seperateness and SOM does a fine job of that, but the MOQ does
it better. The other three levels are still in contact with Dynamic
quality directly. Since those levels exist within us, we sense dynamic
quality throughout our being and the intellect is very interested in
explaining that too. In this way the intellect is compelled to look for
concepts that will accomodate the sense of alienation and the sense of
connectedness at the same time. The collective unconscious, as a product
of dymanic quality, guides the intellect's quest for reconciliation of
the two sensations and is the source of all intuitions, mystical visions
and other non-rational ways of knowing.
David B.
homepage - http://www.moq.org
queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in
body of email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:49 BST