Hullo Platt and Wim,
Thanks for your recent comments.
PLATT: What I found somewhat puzzling was
your assertion that values didn't come about until the biological level,
being tied exclusively to the survival urge and expanding from there. For
a metaphysics to ignore the billions of years prior to the arrival of life
on
this planet (from whatever source) seems to me to be no metaphysics
at all. If you are going to explain reality, you better explain the Big Bang
and everything subsequent. I take it that you don't buy Pirsig's
explanation of life's beginnings.
JOHN B: When I say that values only make sense in terms of living things,
Platt, I am not denying that in our best static understanding of the
evolution of our experienced world, there was something before life emerged.
But as Pirsig himself has stated (in one of his letters?) the whole
scientific worldview is at the end of the day an intellectual construct, and
quality is something in my immediate experience, hence primary. The Big Bang
theory is credible right now, but it would be a brave person who would
guarantee it remains the orthodox view of science indefinitely. It's a high
quality theory, but nothing prohibits a higher one coming along.
I actually have come to see recently that what we need is not so much a
metaphysics, but an epistemology, a way of exploring what we can know, and
how we know it is true. Metaphysics is the wrong discipline to assist with
discriminating values, and Pirsig has just muddied the waters by using the
word 'value' (or quality) as the basic term in a metaphysics, then not
allowing the term to be open to scrutiny. I have argued this last point
consistently in my essays. The point I keep making is that Pirsig reifies
quality and value, so that the words become, in my view, meaningless. Only
in the context of life can I find them meaningful.
That's one reason I find Whitehead so interesting, with his assumption that
the important things are to be found at the highest levels, and can be
traced down the levels to some extent, but that understanding and wisdom are
found by accessing the higher level structures, not by exploring the
material world in which they exist. So I agree with Pirsig that quality is a
fundamental quality, but that doesn't mean quality makes it all the way down
to inanimate matter. Nor value. So yes, his explanation of life's beginnings
seems weak to me.
WIM: I doubt the wisdom of investing time and effort in trying to experience
Dynamic Quality... I would thoroughly distrust anyone who tells me that I
have to follow his path to DQ, that the part of the path that I still have
to follow after having backtracked to his point of departure is very long
and that meanwhile I have to regard him as better, more excellent, then me.
That's just a static social pattern of value and no more. A really
enlightened teacher (who therefore refuses to be deified, regarded as guru
etc.) tells me to start from where I am and follow my own path and suggests
me from own experience that DQ is there for the taking ... if only I let go
of the "I" that does the taking.
JOHN B: There are several issues wrapped up together in this.
The first, if I read you correctly, is that dynamic quality is only ever
encountered in a happenstance sort of way. Exploration and education
therefore can't lead to the dynamic. I fundamentally disagree. Most dynamic
quality in our lives is linked to an earlier investment in often rather
boring mastery of skills and techniques. The dynamism of reading Pirsig's
MOQ is predicated on having first learnt to read, as is all enjoyment of
literature. Learning to fly aeroplanes, learning to play musical
instruments, etc, are all in themselves often boring and repetitive tasks
that we engage in because we see others who have mastered those skills are
enjoying a dynamism that we lack. Education is as much preparation for
future dynamic experience as it is about mastering "existing static
quality".
Secondly, you seem to suggest that there is something wrong with regarding
another person as "better, more excellent" than me. Sorry, but again I
cannot agree. Most everyone in the world is better at sport than me, and
while this does not concern me, it remains a fact. As Ken Wilber says, "All
excellence is elitist. And that includes spiritual excellence as well. But
spiritual excellence is an elitism to which we are all invited... You start
elitist, always; you end up egalitarian, always." Frankly, why would I go to
any teacher unless I saw him/her as "better, more excellent" than me? I
suspect you have been brainwashed with the postmodern orthodoxy which
declares that one man's quality is as good as another man's quality. Pirsig
doesn't agree. He talks about saviours and degenerates. He even suggests we
might discriminate them on the basis of their energy and vitality - a faint
hope, in my view. But at least he sees the problem.
Thirdly, you seem to assume that if I just "start from where I am and follow
my own path ... DQ is there for the taking." This is surely a myth. If it
all works out well in the end, how come most people seem so unliberated? Of
course DQ is potentially available to us all at any moment. The mystic
proclaims "thou art that" and almost nobody gets it. Our normal experience
is of being blocked from quality, by what we carry within. Even if I
understand intellectually that DQ is available to me provided I let go of my
"I", it still doesn't happen, for the most part. Krishnamurti said after
decades of teaching that not one person had been fundamentally changed by
his talks.
So can we return to your mistrust, with which I have great sympathy. It
seems obvious to me that most gurus are less than enlightened on closer
acquaintance. This is one reason I am not interested in Zen. The inside
story of Zen, particularly in the US, where relevatory books are written, is
not very nice. Of course it's much wider than that. "In 1985, a survey of
gurus and spiritual teachers in America found that thirty-four of
thirty-nine who were not celibate admitted to at least occasional sexual
relationships with one or more students." "Serious allegations of abuse of
power- nearly all sexual and financial- have been lodged against the leaders
of more than a dozen of the largent spiritual communities in America during
the past decade." (Tony Schwartz, What Really Matters, p 136)
Stan Trout, one of Swami Muktananda's closest advisers until he resigned in
the early 1980's wrote "Our mistake is to deify another being and attribute
perfection to him. From that point on everything is admissible ... there is
no absolute assurance that enlightenment necessitates the moral virtue of a
person." (Schwartz, p 137) So when I go to a Diamond Essence workshop, I do
not put the teacher in the role of guru. I trust that the teacher has skills
that I can learn. Buyer beware; not all do. I look for any suggestion that
this is a cult, treating those outside as the enemy. I ask if anything must
be taken on faith, as a matter of belief. I look for clear evidence of a
'professional' attitude to money and sexual involvement. Are the obligations
of the teacher and the students clearly specified? I am currently satisfied
with my observation of Diamond Essence in this country.
The real difficulty is more obtuse. The mystic path, as I understand it, is
a method of focussing attention, developing awareness. But the levels of
experience that can potentially be accessed in this way are often at
varience with our normal 'egoic' experience. So this is, in Matthew Fox's
words, a Via Negativa, a way of letting go, becoming empty. It is not an
education in the traditional sense, where I work to obtain the skills the
teacher demonstrates. It is rather a practice, a discipline, which I enter
in the hope and expectation that it will ultimately provide me with the
resources I need to experience the world, and quality, differently. The
teacher can assist me to orient myself, but only I can do the work. This
work is the undoing of the whole project of my ego up to this point in time.
It is not sudden or immediately rewarding. So how do I know it is necessary,
or that this teacher will be of value to me?
I suspect that at the intellectual level, I can never be assured of this.
There is, though, a push and a pull towards such a path. The push comes from
increasing dissatisfaction with other options I have tried, and in
particular, the option of talking about quality while not experiencing it.
This is where I see a fundamental limitation in groups such as moq_discuss.
Unless the talk leads somewhere, we all end up defending our own prejudices.
Recent debates on gun control, the death penalty, and so on, give me no
cause to believe that talking about quality makes one whit of difference to
the often ugly ways in which people behave.
The pull is more subtle. Lapsley, in his book Salvation and Health, calls it
"the lure of God". This is derived from Whitehead, who sees an attraction to
quality (in MOQ terms) underlying the whole structure of the universe. I
think this is harder to pin down conceptually, but at one level it is just
the immediate valuing of quality when it does occur in our experience.
I don't think there is any more to add just now. I enjoyed the workshop last
week, and gained some new understanding of myself. Nothing very exciting
happened, and I suspect that is the way it will be, mostly.
Regards,
John B
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