ELEPHANT TO 3WD:
I must keep this breif (a thousand times: i must keep this breif).
I HAD EARLIER WRITTEN:
>> At this stage it is enough to point out that there is more than one
>> kind of truth, and that the second mystical kind is a crucial theme in
>> Prisig's work, every bit as much center-stage as the pragmatic kind:
3WD
> Agreed, to continue with the computer analogy IMO Pirsig's proposes
> running the "application" (Radicial Empiricism+Pragmatism) on the
> "operating system" Zen.
ELEPHANT:
That's an interesting use of the analogy. The first place I think it falls
down is in supposing that Radical Empiricism and Zen have a different scope
or importance in Prisig's thought. That's not so: Prisig wrote in order to
integrate both as revelations of the same truth. The idea of Pragmatism as
an application is an informative one, because applications are tools, and
pragmatic thinking is tool-like thinking. But 'operating system' is
ingeneral a bad name for consciousness or the mystical reality of which
consciousness, in quiet minds, is aware. This is because there is no
'system' or process here, and no exterior goal at which an 'operation' could
aim: reality is now.
3WD WROTE:
> While in their "class" they each maybe the
> "best" programs available, the practical difficulties of getting all the
> East to switch "applications" and all the West to switch "operating
> systems" is not to be overlooked. Imagine 200 million Chinese with
> placards saying "its Greek to me." circling an equal number of
> Westerners bearing, "I'll show you where to point!" signs. Add to that
> philosophers from a zillion different schools all proposing opposing
> meanings of "point" and you get the picture.
ELEPHANT:
I get the picture. Is it better to face the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune, to meet our troubles and by opposing end them? 'No' quoth he.
Besides, you exagerate the troubles in two ways. First with this flawed
analogy of applications and operating systems, and second by overlooking the
Greek, that is to say Platonic, roots of western christian culture and
religion. Many theses have been written about the coincidence of sanskrit
and greek though of a similar age, and it should be remembered that
politically there was less of a gulf between those two parts of the world
than there is now: both bordered the Persian Empire and trade of all kinds
was conducted through Egypt and the arabian gulf. Since my interest is in
Plato, let me quote you something:
"[god's] power of wonder moves in all things -puppets in a play of shadows-
whirling them onwards on the stream of time"
Both the imagery here an it's philosophical content are characteristically
Platonic: rivers for the continuity and directionality of time, theatre and
shadows for the apparent world, the mysterious divine powers that are beyond
and outside of both time and shadows, the idea that those divine realities
are the true realities and causes. But the passage is not from Plato. It
is from the Bhagavad Gita.
There are disputes in indian classical philosophy that almost exactly
parallel the greek. It has even been seriously suggested that Pythagoras, a
mysterious cultish figure about whom very little is known, has a name
derived from 'guru'.
Since Plato is the philosophical and spiritual cornerstone of christian
thought, and shares such an ancient inheritance of thought with the east, I
think you will find that the 'operating system', if there could ever be such
a thing, is something held very much in-common east-west.
There are heathens in every part of the world (I like the word 'heathen' -
such a powerful word in Bob Marley's vocabulary). I suspect what tolerant C
of E (Church of England, for the colonials) types have always suspected:
that true religion knows no sects.
Elephant
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