Hi John,
I think you're going too far here, and in doing so you're ignoring a
well-founded mystical path, jnana yoga. Shankara is the classic example,
Franklin Merrell-Wolff (whom I've mentioned before) is a modern one.
You're restricting ideas to ideas as viewed from within SOM. When viewed
in MOQ, they can become living entities (or at least that's how I see
it). A typical modern (SOM-ish) scientist works with ideas about plant
growth. Goethe thinks of ideas that grow plants.
One makes a mistake to read Nagarjuna's ideas as ideas about emptiness.
Rather, they are "skillful means" to help one to realize one's own
emptiness, i.e., to overcome the S of SOM.
Somewhat more familiar, there is mathematics. Coleridge notes that
mathematical "objects" (circles, lines, etc.) are "acts of the
imagination that are one with the product of those acts". That is,
mathematical ideas are not about anything but themselves. I think
philosophy can be treated similarly (not in the sense of being
mathematically precise, but in the sense that one ceases to philosophize
under the banner of truth by correspondence. What I mean by this I'm
still trying to figure out.)
So yes, immediate experience is the prime desideratum, but that goes for
thinking as well as perceiving.
- Scott
John Beasley wrote:
>
> Hi David,
>
> With so much high quality discussion going on at present, I am finding it
> hard to keep up. But I want to tease out a bit more from your message of
> 31.3.02, where you said,
>
> "The experiential and intellectual paths are one. Or at least they aren't
> incompatible. Reading and writing and thinking is doing something, its a
> real experience..."
>
> Almost. What is needed here is an appreciation of neurosis and fantasy. For
> while ideas may be exciting and certainly having or exploring an idea is a
> 'real
> experience', we must beware of what Wilber so tellingly calls "thought
> without evidence". Pirsig himself becomes quite critical of Phaedrus' (or
> his) obsession with ideas. In his Afterword in ZMM he says "I tend to become
> taken with philosophic questions, going over them and over them and over
> them again in loops that go round and round and round until they either
> produce an answer or become so repetitively locked on they become
> psychiatrically dangerous".
>
> So we need to discriminate between having an idea, or discovering an idea,
> which is an experience and often dynamic, and becoming obsessed with
> ideas, to the extent that we lose touch with immediate reality (This is what
> Pirsig means by the hung-over feeling that accompanies writing a
> metaphysics. It IS decadent.) Ideas are very high level abstractions from
> reality. They are generally couched in language which is similarly distanced
> from reality. The word 'tree' and the 'object' outside my window which I
> describe using this word are very
> different indeed, and Pirsig correctly makes clear that the subject-object
> viewpoint which underlies the objectification of language is itself limited
> and untrue to the most fundamental level of what is, which he calls quality.
>
> The mystic is concerned with the immediacy of reality, including "the
> ability to notice the slightest of breezes". To attend to the sensations it
> creates without even labelling them as a 'breeze'. To the mystic there is no
> 'me' feeling the 'breeze', but the immediate experience of the moment, which
> may include the sensations which we can conveniently label as 'feeling a
> breeze'. The problem with the intellectual level is that there can develop
> there an addiction to ideas, which only poorly, at second or third hand,
> refer to immediate reality. Perls saw the dominant neurosis of America in
> the middle of last century as a loss of contact, or immediacy, where people
> had become so lost in the pseudo-world of ideas that they hardly functioned
> any more in the world of experience, where we continue to live as organisms.
> Hence it is possible to eat meal after meal in good restaurants, and even
> describe these meals to others, while actually almost never tasting
> anything. This is neurosis.
>
> Wilber has explored the key to this puzzle in his book, 'No Boundary'. If
> you have not read it I strongly recommend it, even though Wilber himself
> sees it as somewhat dated. The first half of life almost inevitably involves
> setting boundaries for the self; the ego, a necessary construct which helps
> us function in an inhospitable world. The second half of a life which
> continues to develop is spent in undoing those same boundaries, and
> encountering as an adult those same experiences which seemed intolerable to
> the child, and learning a new way of dealing with experience that does not
> involve a mental 'splitting'. While this might seem rather trivial, it is
> extremely difficult to achieve, and the consequences are in fact enormous.
>
> Pirsig sub-titled his second book 'An Inquiry into Morals'. While his use of
> the term 'morals' is often broader than the conventional use, let's for the
> moment just look at the conventional understanding, where morals refers to
> my way of relating to other people. At the intellectual level my 'moral'
> choices are often driven by ideas. ("Do unto others ... ", "the greatest
> good for the greatest number", or such like.) For the mystic this would
> appear immoral. For the mystic, action issues from my experience of 'what
> is'. If I am truly open to experience, (Pirsig's 'dynamic quality'), then
> there is no need to consider or think about what I should do. My doing flows
> from the experience. It simply arises. I do not need a moral code. I do not
> need to debate moral issues. (In my latest essay which should eventually
> appear on the forum, I argue that for the mystic immediacy is the only moral
> imperative, though I also point out some of the paradoxes of mystic
> morality.)
>
> Now we (and I include myself here) find this hard to accept. We believe that
> the way to make a difference in the world is to form clear moral opinions,
> and work to have them implemented in our society or world. (This is assuming
> we have progressed beyond those low level moral stages of development which
> cannot see beyond self interest.) All sorts of human organisations are
> founded on just such an understanding, or at least incorporate it in part. I
> suspect most if not all of the people who contribute to this forum, no
> matter how much they disagree, feel quite strongly they are doing it for
> some 'worthwhile' purpose. And a mystic is as capable as anyone else of
> acting purposefully for some long term goal. It is just that he/she does not
> confuse this with the 'good'. Any long term goal is a 'fantasy', in the
> technical sense of a mental construct. It is not real. It has no immediacy.
> And most of the worst crimes of humanity have been committed by people who
> honestly believed they were doing what was right.
>
> To return to ideas and the intellect. Ideas are fantasies. They are
> inevitably 'static', though encountering a new idea can be a dynamic
> experience. There is some debate going on about it being the ideas that
> contend in science. The memes compete. The high quality ones survive. This
> is actually a nonsense, however convincing it sounds. It is a nonsense
> because ideas have no immediacy. They are the static derivative of people's
> experience, and while they have their own role and reality, it is not
> fundamental. The mystic is fundamentally at odds with the intellectual
> level, since the mystic encounters quality in his/her immediate experience,
> and acts morally insofar as this is so. The intellectual must categorise
> his/her experience in terms of his/her ideas, which then (hopefully) offer
> guidance as to the appropriate action which 'should' occur. To the mystic
> this is immoral. It is a fantasy about a fantasy. What happens has been
> categorised, and categorisation is a fantasy. Then it is tested against a
> second order fantasy, the moral ideal, or scientific method, or whatever.
>
> Now this is not to say there is no place for scientific method, for example.
> But you have only to read the writings of the most eminent physicists of
> last century to realise that they did not for one minute believe that
> science was anything other than a fantasy. A mathematical fantasy. What a
> numberof them said was that at last we now recognise that these are
> fantasies. (see 'Quantum Questions', edited by Wilber, on this.)
> Unfortunately it is taking some time for the rest of us to get that message.
> Pirsig actually sees this and says it in his SODV paper. It has been
> fascinating to see others writhe over this. They feel convinced that he
> couldn't mean what he says - but he does. (This is not to say that Pirsig
> himself does not at times get caught in this trap too. His use of evolution
> as a mainstay of his metaphysics, and his desire for a 'scientific'
> morality, are two huge fantasies.)
>
> So I must take issue with your words quoted above. You assert that thinking
> is a real experience. I say beware. The brain "can process falsehood just as
> easily as truth" (SODV p 15) Metaphysics can be "thought without
> evidence"(Wilber). Ideas are meta-constructs. Their "reality is ultimately a
> deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and supported by the
> culture in which the infant grows up." (SODV p 21) Sure, ideas exist. But
> their existence is of a different order to here and now immediacy. (They are
> static quality, not dynamic.) The ego 'exists', yet the mystic claims at
> base it is all smoke and mirrors. This is one of the most difficult things
> to accept, since acceptance is an ego activity. So here we run into the real
> limitations of language to progress our understanding. What the mystic
> asserts is ultimately beyond language and intellect. Sure, mystics
> communicate using language like the rest of us, but what they point to with
> words is beyond the capacity of words to capture, or intellect to grasp.
>
> It is extremely difficult to argue something as complex as this without
> making many jumps which confuse levels, and of course any use of language is
> SOM tainted. I hope you have been able to follow my argument, even though
> following an argument such as this does absolutely nothing to introduce
> anyone to the reality the mystics speak of. At most it is a clearing of the
> barriers at the intellectual level to actually attending to what is, and all
> the consequences that can flow from that.
>
> Regards,
>
> John B
>
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