Hi Sam, Platt, and others,
Platt was curious to know if I endorsed Sam's commentary on my position, and
now Sam has also asked if he is correct. And the answer is, "I don't know".
As a Gestalt person from way back I am of course familiar with the old
woman/young girl image, but I was not aware that you can be trained to see
one of these images in preference to the other. Your point seems to be that
some things cannot be seen without training.
I agree, and in the essay I am currently working on I have taken up two
aspects of this understanding. One is that our early experience as children
is our training for seeing, in a very general sense, and this training is
profoundly social and emotional. The scientific ideal of objective,
impartial observation is therefore a highly artificial ideal, which is
always less than perfect because the 'things' we see are always learned and
described in language which itself assumes a certain way of seeing. Wilber
argues that the formation of boundaries is part of this early training, and
these boundaries are in our minds, not in the world as such. The most
profound is the perception of myself as different to what is 'other', or
Pirsig's much lamented subject/object divide in its earliest expression. And
my understanding is that the mystic is about challenging the reality of this
boundary, and hence undoing the early training in how to see. So in a sense
this is not really a training of how to see, so much as an untraining, a via
negativa.
Secondly, I argue that in the higher levels of human development there are
three broad areas that have been repeatedly discriminated since Kant, who
devoted a treatise to each, namely the interior subjective appreciation of
the good as beauty, the intersubjective but still interior valuing of the
good, as morals, and the exterior objective valuing of the good, as truth.
In Wilber's view, these cannot be reduced any further without loss, though
the exterior may be subdivided into the study of things, that is science,
and groups, such as in social systems science and some forms of 'objective'
approaches to anthropology.
In each area, (arts, morality and science,) the good or the beautiful or the
true is not just sitting there, waiting to be observed, but is discovered
through participation in an educational process. Pirsig argues that what is
good in art is a matter of personal taste, and that the same can be so in
the world of ideas. This is a partial truth, because one aspect of quality
is the discernment of excellence, and this is not an individual judgement,
but an appeal to a standard that is ultimately social and intellectual, and
must be learned. So people are not born with a passion for the opera, or
surrealism, but are taught to see the value in these arts, and so develop a
way of seeing that relates not just to the object or sound in immediate
experience, but also to social values that must first be learned. A cow
looking at a painting is apparently completely unmoved, even if the painting
is of another cow. (There is a famous painting of this being tested.) Even
the dynamic quality of the song on the radio might have no appeal to someone
from a very different culture, since the basic educational background is not
there, but with time, and guidance, it can indeed be taught.
What Pirsig has recognised is that, beyond all the learned disciplines,
there is a more fundamental place for value, or quality, as experienced in
the immediacy of the here and now moment. This brings us to beginners mind,
which Sam mentioned. For the problem with learned quality is that it can
become a prison, and Pirsig uses a very telling example of the anomie of the
middle class man who suffers a heart attack on the way to work, and who
looks at his hand with wonder and delight as he regains consciousness in
hospital. Gestalt therapy was developed to deal with the mass of Westerners
in the middle of the Twentieth Century who had become imprisoned within
hyperactive, and very neurotic, minds, and had lost touch with their bodies.
It uses the 'wisdom of the organism' to speak to the muddled cranium, and in
my view works very well to undo what has been overconditioned and become
unhealthy, though the early credo 'Lose your mind and come to your senses'
is surely an over-reaction.
But the mystics are asking us to take a bigger jump in unlearning, and this
is where Squonk is actually pointing in the right direction, when he advises
us to go and lie in the grass. The problem for Squonk's theory is that
beginner's mind is not something that rises up the moment I attend to the
sunset. See Pirsig's little story on 'Cruising Blues and Their Cure', which
I only discovered this week. As he says "depression ... is inevitable". "You
can see just so many beautiful sunsets ... and you become adjusted." Pirsig
goes onto describe what he calls "the learning of virtue" "that rises out of
a slow process of self discovery", where the person, who would rather do
anything than confront his "vanity, cowardice, boredom, self-pity ... " is
forced by his situation to do this inner work. "I think it's in the
day-after-day, week-after-week confrontation of this person that the most
valuable learning of virtue takes place." To which many a Zen master, (and
perhaps not a few 'religious'?), would say 'Amen'.
To return briefly to Wilber, the idealist movement in the West intuited the
transpersonal domain, but could only express it in vision-logic, thus
burdening Reason with a task it could never carry. The ideal was to
reintegrate science, morality and art, as "integral expressions and moments
of spirit" (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, p 507), and he argues that to some
extent they actually succeeded in "the seemingly impossible task of
reconciling ... Subjective Freedom and Objective Union." Not too different
to what Pirsig attempts. But they lacked, and Pirsig does not provide,
(though in Cruising Blues he does offer a suggestion), what Wilber describes
as "truly injunctive practices", or what I prefer to call a
praxis. This is a yoga, a contemplative practice, a meditative paradigm, an
experimental methodology - all learned paths. Pirsig's is the loneliest of
all, and this says something about the man, but it too takes time and
discipline.
I've gone on a bit, as usual, but I find glib one-liners don't do justice to
the complexity of our world. When you say, Sam, that "the major spiritual
traditions are (amongst other things) ways of training people in different
ways of seeing", I do agree, but I would rather stress that this is achieved
through the undoing of our existing ways of seeing. A via negativa. Fritz
Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, would use frustration to bring his
unhappy client to actually face the 'hole' in their personality, and the
feared catastrophe would not occur if the client could stay with the
emptiness, and the dreaded void becomes, without any effort on their part,
the fertile void. This can happen unexpectedly in extreme situations, such
as near death experiences, so we have a scientist such as John Wren-Lewis
being tipped willy-nilly into a mystic world which he would never have
chosen. But if I wish to 'find' this state, I can do better than play
Russian Roulette, which as Grahame Green (I think) discovered, also palls
with repetition, and find a teacher and an injunctive practice, which is
what I am doing, with no expectation of any quick transformation.
Hoping this has clarified something.
Regards,
John B
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