To avoid breaking the rules with to serious a transgression I'll only say
that I agree with David Buchanan when he writes that Pirzig associates
Dynamic Quality with Mysticism. However, I have trouble reading Phaedrus's
Peyote insight at the Peyote ceremony as a full blown mystical experience.
To me it seems that Pirzig brings us right up to the cusp of mystical
experience but then backs out for intellectual insight. The peyote
definitely helps him participate in the ceremony and breaks down some of his
static intellectual patterns. It allows him to feel a unity with his place
that he has not previously felt, as is evidenced by his feeling that he had
come home to a place that he had never been before. But he stops there and
switches to intellectual insight. He says that his analytic side took the
observation that the Indians just did things with no sense of ceremony and
"with his attention having nowhere else to go, he bored in on it with
intensity" (p.39) He reverses the expansion of consciousness associated with
Mystical experience and focuses on an observation, an insight.
William James, who we know Pirzig has read, describes two primary
characteristics of a Mystical experience; ineffability and a noetic quality.
(for those familiar with James, he starts with four distinguishing features
but assigns primacy to the two above) John E. Smith, in his essay "William
James's account of Mysticism; A critical approach" says of ineffability that
it is, "the impossibility of expressing a state of mind by means of words and
concepts" and quoting James, " ' mystical states are more like states of
feeling than like states of intellect', neither their quality nor their worth
can be communicated to a person totally without such experiences". Of the
noetic quality he says " Although such [mystical] experience is akin to
feeling, those who have it claim to know something as a result" and "what
they claim to know is generally described as insight which eludes the
discursive intellect and is felt to be an illumination of great worth." The
combination of the ineffability and noetic quality of the experience lead,
from what I have read, to very metaphorical descriptions of the insight
gained. They run like 'the vessel that housed my consciousness shattered
leaving me to perceive the cosmos directly' or towards the Taoist notion that
the Tao that can be named or described is not the true Tao. Speaking about
Mystical experiences is hard. Trying to understand the noetic quality
through the imperfect vehicle of language is harder. I have seen comparisons
made between describing Mystical experiences and describing colors, or taste,
or music, or the feeling of being in love.
We are brought along on Phaedrus's Peyote experience until he feels a
unity with his place, but instead of stepping into mystical ineffable
knowledge he provides us with a thesis on the influence of Indian culture on
America and Europe. This is a Dynamic insight but it is not what I would
expect a Mystical description of perceiving unmediated Dynamic Quality to
sound like. I can read chapter 3 of Lila and understand and appreciate his
thoughts and insights about Indians and western culture intellectually.
There is nothing ineffable about the prose. I think, as was previously
proposed in this forum, that the Peyote ceremony was the stone around which
the pearl of Dynamic Quality began to form.
Erik Wennberg
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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