Hello David,
A warm welcome abroad the raft called 'Lila'! I'm so sorry, but this is just a
bigger one than your own. But maybe we can pick up some debris, to make it
stronger.
The reactions and experiences you made, in talking with people about 'Lila' and
'ZAMM' sound quite familiar to me. I assume the reason for this is, that most
people, exactly the ones who do feel comfortably with the society they live in,
are lacking of a sense for DQ; You have to feel something is wrong.
David Sater wrote:
>
> Hello to all,
>
> I just wanted to say how awesome it is to finally find this website and how thankful I am that it exists. As > a fan (really a zealot) of ZMM and Lila for many years, it is so refreshing to find others who feel
> passionately enough about the MOQ to join this group and grapple with the questions it attempts to answer.
> And does quite well, I might add.
>
> My fiancée, family and close friends humor me. Some have read ZMM and less have read Lila but usually I find > myself holding back in most philosophical discussions because I start to say, "Yes, but, Pirsig says in > Lila..." and then I realize they either:
>
> a) haven't read it,
> b) read it but weren't impressed (a phenomenon I'm just starting to understand) or
> c) probably won't read it and are getting tired of me bringing it up... again!
How true this is. In the meantime, I'd given up trying to bring people closer to
Pirsigs ideas. More than once,people were just smiling about what I said.
> So, to those of you who might relate, I'll share my journey of discovering the MOQ:
>
> I read ZMM in the mid-eighties and was completely blown away with its depth. I found Pirsig's willingness to > speak his truth incredibly refreshing... and about such important topics in such an intellectually
> vulnerable way! I really respect the fact that he presents his ideas as chautauquas emanating from the mind > of a fallible, fractured human being rather than as "Absolute Truth".
>
> Then, as I read Lila in the mid-nineties, I felt a kind of culmination... a profound sense of enthusiasm
> from his presentation of the MOQ. Having found myself slowly sinking into the quicksand of
> information-overload and post-modernism in the early nineties, his willingness to present the "Best"
> argument he was capable of at the time- while still remembering that its all just words. Wow... what can I > say? It really IS a better map of reality as far as I can tell.
>
> But even Pirsig admits that, "To the intellect, the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of > its own. It produces a certain excitement- even though it leaves a hangover afterward... Writing a
> metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity." (Ch.5, page 74)
>
> Pirsig is a true educator who honors the reader's ability to find Quality from within and on his/her own
> terms... possibly because he knows that was how Pheadrus discovered it in the first place.
>
> So, again, thank you all. I've felt so alone at times. I've wondered why everyone doesn't have the same "Ah > hah!" experience from Lila that I had. I've wondered why people look at me like I'm "crazy" when I share
> these ideas. I can really relate with the "Captain" as I navigate my sailboat on a seemingly infinite sea of > Subject/Object thinking- with only the kindred spirit of Robert Pirsig to remind me that insanity isn't so
> bad after all. It might even lead somewhere "better".
>
> And so, instead of "falling off the edge of the earth", I've finally spotted land.
Me too, I sometimes have the feeling a deeper understanding of MoQ, a constant
strolling in the outskirts of the mapped area, slowly moves me away from the
'normal' way of thinking and, as a result makes it even harder to explain others
what's this all about. To use a different metaphore, one can say, that it takes
a lot of effort and time to build another raft from the parts of the old one,
while being on sea.
>
> Land Ho! (I hope the natives are friendly.)
They are! They've been quite helpful to get me abroad, by the time I arrived in
last year.
> David Sater
> dsater@emergingmind.com
>
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>
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