Platt, All
PLATT
> Ever since it's been brought to light that Pirsig (Phaedrus) considers eating meat to be immoral,
My initial response was similar to Platt's, surely hypocrisy, if not
just plain silly. But on a recent trip to the bookstore "The Food
Revolution" by John Robbins caught my eye. But Robbins, (errant heir to
Baskin and Robbins, as in 31 favour of ice cream) work as a hardcore
environmentalist and animal rights activist with a focus on Western
diet,food, and food production would like to bend those hypocritical
fingers back in our faces.
A brief tidbit from Chapter 2:
Ram Dass who after he read Robbin's first best seller " Diet for a New
America" said,
" You've really made it hard for me to eat chicken now. I've alway liked
chicken. But you've left me no excuse. You've made it clear what I need
to do."
A few years later after not acting on his insight we read:
" After his stroke, Ram Dass finished writing his book, 'Still Here' a
moving guide to the final phases of life. In it he talks about his
stroke that left him in a wheelchair and with limited speech, " One of
the reasons for the stroke was that I had been ignoring my body
[biological level]. I had spent most of my life keeping my Awareness
[intellectual level] 'free of my body', as I thought of it then; but I
can see now that I was also ignoring my body, pushing it away. "
It's easy to like Pirsig's quotes such as these:
"If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming
evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored.
Lila - 143"
"Patterns of life do not change solely in accord with causative
'mechanisms' or
'programs' or blind operations of physical laws. They do not just change
valuelessly. They change in ways that evade, override, and circumvent these
laws. The patterns of life are constantly evolving in response to something
'better' than that which these laws have to offer. Lila - 143-144"
The risk of misunderstanding , misapplication, or failure to act such as
illustrated by Ram Dass's experience cannot be understated. If high
levels wish to "evade, overide, or circumvent" lower ones they have
truely be 'better' , truely enfold and transend, because if not the
lower will always in the end trump the higher.
3WD
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