Howdy Focs: There are several ideas that I wanted to respond to. They aren't
part of some overall plan or thesis, just several random items that have
been put out there.
Not sure how to respond to Bodvar without going off the topic. (I'd like to
hear more about the realization you described.) Maybe a few thoughts
genuinely connect to our Giant discussion...
Freedom from the intellectual patterns is the ULITIMATE goal for an
individual person. That's very much a part of what Mysticism is all about.
But as an historical and evolutionary process, which is more of a collective
thing and limited by averages and such. In that sense, the intellectual
level just took charge yesterday and doesn't even yet have a firm grasp on
things. What's more, the particular kind of intellecual patterns that have
recently taken charge is loaded with flaws and gaps. I think that
prison-like feeling is a symptom of SOM in particular, rather than the
intellect in general. In other words, you may be ready for freedom from the
intellect, but the world is very far away from that kind of transcendence.
I'd be willing go along with the idea that Pirsig's Giant is alive and
conscious only in a very special sense of those words. (alive and conscious)
I mean, in SOM life begins and ends with biology, but in the MOQ nothing is
dead or inert. And if we think of "alive" as filled with Dynamism, then the
social level is even more "alive" than biological patterns!
Ants and bees have something LIKE a social structure, but I don't think it
really is quite the same as Pirsig's social patterns. Here's why...
SODV paper describes it as the patterns of culture, family, government and
the church. These things just seem too lofty for bugs. Its easy to make
analogies to our social structures in describing insect organization, as in
army ants and queen bees, but its just as easy to use biological analogies
and they are perhaps more appropriate. I mean, it seems more correct to see
the individual ants as cells in a larger organism rather than people in a
city. The cells in our own bodies are specialized to preform certain tasks
and work in conjunction with other kinds of cells to keep us running, but
that doesn't make it a social organization.
The same idea from a different angle altogether... I think the idea that
social patterns liberate the organism from mere survival, that social
quality frees biological quality, is a principle that helps us see the
difference between the two levels. I really don't know much about ants and
bees, but it seems to me that their form of organization doesn't transcend
biology in any apparent way. I mean, the queen IS the hive. Its all about
her. The rest will follow her into hell if that's where she takes them. And
she can do nothing but lay eggs. Their organization seems to be strictly
biological.
If you wanna talk about chimps, well, that's a completely different story. I
don't think its a stretch to say chimpanzes have something like a culture.
We can see some variation in the social structures as if there were
differences among the tribes. They use highly advanced teaching techinques
with their little ones. They can demonstrate the use of tools and can even
correct their pupils when they get it wrong. Adult individuals who have not
learned to share are like social outcasts and are shunned by the other
adults.
The social values that make cities and cultures and languages and religions
and states and armies are not something different or other than us. We are
the Giant.
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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