LS More complications of things

From: Diana McPartlin (diana@hongkong.com)
Date: Thu May 13 1999 - 15:13:59 BST


Squad

Rich wrote
>"He who knows the Tao does not care to speak about it;
>He who is ever ready to speak about it does not know it.
>
>He who knows it will keep his mouth shut and close the portals of his
>nostrils.
>He will blunt his sharp points and unravel the complications of things;
>He will attempt his brightness
>And bring himself into agreement with the obscurity of others.
>
>This is called the
>'Mysterious Agreement'
>
>Such a one cannot be treated familiarly or distantly;
>He is beyond all consideration of profit or injury; of nobility or meanness;
>He is the noblest man under heaven."

To those who don't know

The reason you're struggling is because you are not being bold enough. Your
concepts of dynamic quality are watered down versions of the real thing.
Sure, the dynamic is oneness and preconceptual and undivided. But none of
these is its primary characteristic. You must accept auspiciousness, not
just as a characteristic of dynamic but as its essence. It's a radical shift
and the implications upset practically every deeply held truth that we - the
last of the somites - have. But that's what it is. If you can't swallow it,
well you should at least acknowledge that that is what Pirsig says.

To those who know

Some posts have been dead giveaways of dynamic little busybees working away
at their computers. Oblivious to impending romantic breakdowns, employers
raging and men doing dishes all around us, we have posed apt questions, fine
selections of quotes, fluid dissections and barely even a split infinitive
to interupt the flow of the perfecto mailing list post.

What Pirsig said on the matter of dynamic and static is perfectly clear. All
you have to do is read the book. He's very clear on what dynamic and static
are, and he's good on the reconciliation of the two too. He's also very good on
the morality of the four levels, and what's wrong with the subject-object
metaphysics, and he tackles evolution somewhat, substance and free will to a
lesser extent, but he doesn't take them as far as they can go.

However his book is only a rough sketch of a metaphysics. Obviously it's a
big subject and you can't expect everything. It looks like it might work but
we'll have to fill in the details before we can say for certain. We see the
dynamic-static split he's talking about. We feel
betterness/oneness/auspiciousness too. He's not the only one. It's
empirically verifiable. We accept it and we take it as a starting point. To
further clarify dynamic and static I see three alternatives.

1. We need to look at dynamic and static in a wider context. In my
essay I said that the dynamic-static split has implications for the "self",
causation, space-time and substance. Should add evolution and free will and
no doubt few more, numbers might be interesting. We analyse these in terms
of our new dynamic-static theory, bring academia to its knees and finally
get our parents to pay attention to us.

2. We ignore all that, pile into the lilamobile and cruise for free-falling
dynamically blissed out coolosity

3. We decide that 1 and 2 are the same thing.

Diana

MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org



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