Donald T Palmgren (lonewolf@utkux.utcc.utk.edu)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 13:41:15 +0100
Hello,
First I want to thank Bodvar for his extremly good summery of
what's been said. I know I found that very usefull. You win the gold
star.
Now on to other stuff:
On Sat, 25 Jul 1998 diana@asiantravel.com wrote:
> Hi Platt and squad
>
>
> Platt Holden wrote:
> > Pirsig, on the other hand, brings
> > Spirit into everyday life, showing how it is implicit in choice and
> > action, the stuff of life itself. To see Spirit (Quality) we need not
> > become Buddhists. All we have to do is look and it's there. In fact, we
> > are it.
>
> With regard to Ken Wilber and Pirsig, I don't doubt that Wilber's ideas
> are consistent with Pirsig's dynamic and static as are other writers,
> because they aren't exactly original concepts.
Diana, this is something I think is pretty important but often
missed in discusiing the MoQ. P is undoubtably an original thinker and
an
extrordanry writer, but many of the ideas he thinks and writes about are
prety old. P contributed his own unique ideas to metaphisics and the
MoQ,
but in a certain sense, the MoQ has a long geneology that stretches well
beyond just P. Not only does P acknowledge this, but he even trys to
play-down his own personal contrabutions. He doesn't seem to me to be
somebody who wants the MoQ to be synonomis w/ his name. I've really
enjoyed the Ken Wilber discussion (More gold stars!!), and speaking for
myself, it's a great help and intrest to compare and synthacize P's
ideas
rather than to isolate them. I have reloctants to put P in a class all
of
his own and lump everybody else "in the bath tub" -- to borrow from
Magnus' wonderful bar of soap analogy from a while back.
Pirsig says himself that
> DQ is associated with Eastern mysticism: the flowing changing universe.
> >From that it's easy enough to see that SQ is what Hindus call illusion
> (maya) and what Westerners call reality, ie things we have names for. We
> can split hairs over whether freedom/order change/permenance etc are the
> best abstractions of this, but essentially we're talking about the same
> thing and people have been making this distinction for thousands of
> years.
>
> What Pirsig adds to this is a moral structure, namely that DQ is the
> highest moral value. The Hinudus say this too, but unlike the Hindus, he
> insists that SQ is moral too and defines four levels of it.
First off, as Phedrus discovered to his own displeasure (ZMM),
there isn't really any single set of truth that are set for all of
"Hinduism" -- There really isn't a "Hinduism" at all; it's a general
grouping of a mass of socio-cultural-mythic-philosophical ideas and
practices. "Hinduism" is a lot like talking about "tha American Way" --
that's a big area that touches on everything and contains a lot of
contradictions.
Now spicifically about the idea of maya=unreal, nivana=real vs.
how in MoQ both SQ and DQ are real: Consider, please, Mahayana Buddhism.
I'll quote again from Joe Campbell bacause he puts this stuff so
well: "However, if any one could follow all the way, to the ultimate
term of all these teachings of trancendence -- with the Buddha passing
beyond desire and fear and with the crucified Christ to at-one-ment w/
the Father -- surely it would be found that when *all* pairs of opposits
have been left behind, then duality and non-duality, egolessness and
egohood, heavenly truth and earthly truth have been left behind as
well."
The older form of Buddhism is called Hyneyana, "Little
Fairyboat" because, w/ its focus on meditation and withdrawel from the
world, only a smale number of people can take it over to the "yonder
shore" of Nirvana.
The latter form of Buddhism (c. 1st cen AD) is called Mahayana, the "Big
Fairyboat." This is what expanded Buddhism from a fairly small sect to a
big world realigion present throughout the East. The diffrence is that
Mahayana focuses on the identity of *samsara* (the realm of maya) and
nirvana. Once you trancend all opposits you trancend this distinction as
well and so the reality and the illusion are one in the same. There is
no fundamental distinction between DQ and SQ. Only there is. There is
and there isn't. *Mu*. So it's like: First you encounter DQ and say
"This is it! This is the Absolute." But you're not done yet. You also
have to look at SQ and say, "This too is the Absolute."
There's a point where you go beyond SQ to encounter pure,
nameless, formless, uncatagorical DQ. But then there's a point where you
leave DQ for just Quality. Maybe that's the best way to express it.
>
> And, as you pointed out, he shows how DQ is a part of everyday life
> which is something that both the Hindus and the Western scientific
> realityists miss. One of his key examples of DQ is listening to a song
> on a radio. (Pirsig had 11 years to think about which examples he would
> use to illustrate DQ and SQ, we really ought to take them more
> seriously!) This experience, he says, is the same transcendant reality
> that the mystics are always going on about. He demystifies mysticism, if
> you like.
Chan, or "zen," Buddhism developed out of this Mahayana/Hyneyana
distinction. In the school of zen founded by Dogen the focuses is on
meditation and the working out of non-sensical, paradoxical riddles to
reach *satori*, enlightenment. But in the school of zen founded by Eisai
the focus can be anything -- you realize satori by doing whatever it is
you are doing (that doesn't matter) w/ "the highest degree of
perfection" (Ninian Smart). That's the idea behind the zen tea
ceramony. The tradition of the dry (or "rock") garden is a meatting
ground for both these traditions: First you DO something (build the
garden); then you meditate upon your creation. If you want you could
look at this as the far end of an evolution of mysticism that began a
long time ago w/ the (pre-Hindu) Vedic religion... or earlier. Or you
could say that the MoQ is the next, latest stage.
As for "missing the boat" by leaving morality out of the
picture:
One trick here is that "morality" (or "ethics") has a
specifically social connotation. "Quality," or "the highest degree of
perfection," is broader than that. Maybe if you substitute "the higest
degree of perfection" (HDoP) back into the MoQ that might help.
The universe is, at each stage, the seeking of the HDoP. It
seeks inorganic perfection; evolution is the serch for biological
perfection; ethics/morality is the serch for social perfection; the
correct picture of the world would presumably be intellectual perfection
I suppose.
But the universe *is* the HDoP. At least implicitly. It only goes
through a process of making explicit for itself what was implicitly
there all along, as if reality were just the process of self-recognition
/ self-realization. And if you define "God" as "the HDoP" then you can
instantly see where the lingo of a lot of religious mysticism (Meister
Eckhart, for instance) comes from.
>
> I think the trouble is that these just aren't very skientific sounding
> explanations. Aesthetics and morals are not "real" in the SOM and that's
> why we have an aversion to building a theory around them. Yet without
> them Pirsig is just one more Western interpreter of Eastern philosophy
> with nothing particularly new of his own to say.
Well, I would submit that you couldn't have a very good
interpreter of Eastern phil. who left out aesthetics/morality anyway.
But P, by and large, is a very good interpreter and then some.
TTFN (ta-ta for now)
Donny
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