COMPLETE SILENCE
JON WROTE:
Why do they think so highly of science? Since Truth is supreme, there must be
a way of arriving at the Truth....hence science. Science over God. Science
over Wonder. Science over Goodness and Morality. This placing of Truth above
Good is having a profound effect on our lives. Yet no one here ever wants to
talk about it.
It's almost as if this is the one part of Pirsig's book that is a taboo
subject.
Truth above Good. This is a major point near the end of ZMM. Pirsig says
placing Truth above Good is wrong. Why is everyone scared to talk about it?
Especially when the essence of Pirsig's philosophy is this: Good over Truth.
It's a really simple concept, and maybe that's why so many people have a
problem with it. It's not "defined" enough.
ROGER:
Actually, we have discussed this issue (truth vs Good) so exhaustively that
many of us have nothing new to add. It is a central tenet of the MOQ with
which many of us are quite comfortable. Science and metaphysics and the
intellect in general are rooted in division, distinction and duality which
can never accurately represent dynamic, flowing reality.
JON WROTE:
I don't have anything against science, despite how this sounds. I know it can
be a very fascinating and wondrous journey. But like it or not, more people
have faith in science these days than God, and it is showing in today's
society.
ROGER:
Science and truth are a very high quality. But again, as Godel, Heisenberg,
Bohr, Shroedinger and Whitehead came to realize, the intellect's inherent
subject/object duality distorts, deletes, divides, and omits much of the
reality it attempts to understand. The world of science/intellect (and of
this forum) is in the end, both incomplete and uncertain.
The MOQ would point to that which is beyond the intellect, to what Pirsig
refers to as Direct Experience or DQ, and Ken Wilber calls nondual knowing,
Whitehead calls Prehension, James calls Pure Experience, and Lao Tzu calls
'clasping the Primal Unity". The magic of Lila for me was how RMP showed
that science descends from direct experience (Quality), not vice versa.
Whitehead coined a term for confusing the map with the territory --The
Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Most people, almost all people, confuse
bifurcated abstractions of reality (ie things or patterns) with reality
itself. How many decades will it take until these "truths" of Pirsig and
Whitehead and the great mystics of the East become part of our everyday
mythos?
BTW, should people have more faith in God or Science.....?
Rog
.
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