From: phyllis bergiel (neilfl@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 01:46:13 BST
Hi Paul:
A couple of points about what I think is the very crux of understanding the
MoQ:
>
> In my quest for clarity I've gone back to basics, I've
> been re-reading ZMM and Lila together.
>
> PIRSIG: 'He simply meant that at the cutting edge of
> time, before an object can be distinguished, there
> must be a kind of non-intellectual awareness, which he
> had called awareness of Quality.
Yes, and I think this is where he brings in that Eastern influence most
clearly. This idea of consciousness as not being of something, but rather a
joining with. Again, one of the best discussions of this is Daisetz Suzuki,
prahna and vijnana knowledge. A women goes to the well to get water, sees a
beautiful morning glory growing on the bucket rope, dew glistening. Her
response is O morning glory!. Suzuki says it is before she says anything,
before the o is forming, that is the time of vijnana knowledge, a grasping
of the essence. She is one with the morning glory. In contrast, a
westerner would want to know "flower" and "what kind" and basically dissect
it (prajna knowledge) after which all that is left is a pile of parts. The
women, who values vijnana knowledge, is so profoundly moved that she goes to
a neighbor's well to get water, leaving the flower undisturbed. These are
the two opposing ways of trying to know the flower's essence.
> You can't be aware
> that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the
> tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of
> awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think
> of that time-lag as unimportant, but there's no
> justification for thinking that the time lag is
> unimportant - none whatsoever' ZMM Ch 20
>
> In ZMM, Pirsig spends a lot of time emphasising
> 'non-intellectual awareness', the time-lag. He also
> makes an observation that intellectuals usually have
> the greatest trouble 'seeing' Quality because they are
> so 'swift' in snapping everything into intellectual
> form.
>
> I think the time-lag can be better understood as a
> part of the whole Quality event. My understanding of
> the 'anthropocentric' Quality event is this:
>
> 1. The Quality event creates a response
> 2. The response is to value by something with agency;
> both are created by the Quality event
> 3. Action (or no action) is taken by the something
> with agency
>
> If we look back at the Quality event with the MoQ
> terms created in Lila, the time-lag is magnified.
> There is not just pre-intellectual awareness; there is
> pre-social awareness, pre-biological awareness and
> perhaps a pre-inorganic awareness.
Don't know about this last term. see below.
>
> The evolutionary hierarchy can be applied to the
> Quality event. In this way we can consider the Quality
> event as happening from the bottom up, in terms of the
> hierarchy. To see how this works:
>
> 1. To all Quality events, the first response is
> inorganic through an agency of pre-sensory perception.
Pre-sensory perception. Uh-uh. While I can easily understand a time lag
between the senses and the mind's apprehension, as in the stove, pre-sensory
perception seeems to me an oxymoron. Unless you are positing some time of
"sixth sense," which while not denying completelythe possibility, but it
creates so many problems it destroys the elegance of the theory.
> 2. The second response is biological through an agency
> of sensory and emotional perception
Why include emotional here? Isn't emotion a response to the sensory? Think
baby seal. I'd include it perhaps before intellect, with social or
biological, perhaps in lieu of intellectual.
> 3. The third response is social through an agency of
> symbolic and cultural perception
> 4. The fourth response is intellectual through an
> agency of aesthetic and rational perception
> 5. Each level of response filters the Quality that
> makes its way up to the next level
>
> Seen in this way, the movement off the hot stove can
> happen at the inorganic and biological level - the
> value which may be perceived at a pre-sensory level as
> an atomic excitation is passed up to the biological
> level, which perceives the value as low down in the
> 'pain/pleasure' scale of analogous sensations, which
> creates a highly complex organic 'move away' response
> and perhaps a release of energy in sound waves which
> is perceived at the social level as 'a scream of pain'
> and finally is explained by the intellectual level as
> 'PAUL sitting on a HOT STOVE'.
>
The inorganic again: works for the hot stove example, but how do youexplain
seeing a painting at this level?
> Taking this further, you can see how 'agency' may be
> seen as 'consciousness' which exists at all levels,
> the consciousness at the lower levels has become
> largely the human subconscious but has not always been
> that way.
>
> This all happens so swiftly that the first 'conscious
> awareness' for a human is generally of the
> intellectual response, but it is the last level to
> respond! If we could slow the Quality event down,
> perhaps we could 'experience' the way that it works.
Actually, we often do. Who said, "Poetry is emotion recolleted in leisure"
or something like that? Emerson?
But again, I can't imagine how we could be aware of the inorganic level?
With what would we perceive the movement of individual atoms? How?
(Admittedly questioning thi denial as I type it, certain inexplicable
phenomena come to mind, the smell of "rain on its way," for instance.
> It's like the whole of evolution recurring in every
> Quality event! The human being pops up at the end.
>
> In this way, 'thoughts' can only ever be 'about' what
> has been filtered through all other levels and can
> only reach other levels through the social level.
But, if we can exchange our society, or reject it, then aren't we rejecting
that filter?
> They
> cannot 'think' directly of Dynamic Quality. Only
> analogues of analogues of analogues. That describes
> what my thinking feels like most of the time :-)
>
> Indeed, I feel that the analogues created at the
> intellectual level have cut us off from almost all of
> what was once a conscious holistic response to
> Quality. (I have in mind something similar to
> Barfield's 'original participation' of phenomena) But
> the MoQ provides us with a far better set of analogues
> than SOM.
>
> Anyway, is the Quality event seen in this way by
> others? If not, tell me where I've gone wrong.
>
Actually, lots right, but that inorganic puzzle piece seems a bad fit, but
then again, I'm not a physicist.
>
>Phyllis
>
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