MD What have you freed lately?

From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Mar 30 2004 - 22:35:57 BST

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    All:

    "Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of realty, the
    source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral
    force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. It contains no pattern of
    fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its
    only perceived evil is static quality itself—any pattern of one-sided
    fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of
    life." (Lila-9)

    Of all the passages in Lila, none is more significant than this one. It
    describes how Pirsig views the mysterious mystic force he calls Dynamic
    Quality.
    First, it is a force, an energy, drawing all creatures great and small
    towards betterness.
    Second, it created and continues to create everything new under the sun.
    Third, its highest good is freedom from static patterns.

    It’s this last point that I find most intriguing because as I look
    history, it is the individuals who somehow broke a static pattern to free
    something new that has propelled the human race towards betterness or who,
    to use an apt adage, "made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.".

    Examples:

    Aristotle who broke the pattern of thinking without reasoning and freed
    thought from irrational errors.
    Kepler and Galileo who broke the pattern of observing without measuring
    and freed observation from sole dependence on classification.
    Newton who broke the pattern of trying to comprehend the physical world
    without mathematics and freed physics from the alchemists.
    Einstein who broke the pattern of space-time separation and freed physics
    from the Newtonian machine.
    Chagall who broke the pattern of imitating the colors in nature and freed
    painting from dull, predictable coloration.
    Picasso who broke the pattern of holding a mirror up to nature and freed
    painting from photographic realism.
    Mozart who broke the pattern of church music and freed melody from somber
    Medieval chants.
    Watt who broke the pattern of locomotion and freed travel from the pace of
    horse and sail.
    The Wright Brothers who broke the pattern of gravity and freed man to fly.
    Henry Ford who broke the pattern of manufacturing and freed production
    from slow, expensive hand-made processes.
    Calder who broke the pattern of statues resting on a pedestal and freed
    sculpture to respond to air currents.
    The Founding Fathers who broke the pattern of European class society and
    freed individuals from government enforced class divisions.
    Robert Pirsig who broke the pattern of morality limited to social behavior
    and freed morals to explain all reality.

    So I keep asking myself, "What have you freed from a static pattern
    lately?" Unfortunately I can only answer, "Nothing special."

    Perhaps in raising two children I’ve had a hand in freeing them from the
    static patterns of childhood dependency. That’s about it, but at least
    it’s something.

    What patterns have you broken? What have you set free? How have you
    responded to DQ? Is there a brujo among us?

    Platt

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