Hullo Gavin, Platt, Angus, Elliott, Glen,
It was nice to get so much feedback. Thanks, Platt, for the information on
the book. I looked it up and enjoyed the review, but I am afraid solitude is
not my path.
Gavin - I found your response most in line with my own thinking and very
useful indeed. This raises for me the same issue that always comes up around
mysticism, in that if immediacy is central, what happens about conventional
morality? As I read the mystics, they seem to be saying that debating the
Israel/Palestine conflict is simply nothing to do with morals. It is a game,
an intellectual stimulus, but achieves no outcomes of any significance,
hence is a waste of time. If I was actually involved in negotiating an
agreement, presumedly it would be in my immediate contact with negotiators
from the other side that any moral stance would occur. (This is not unlike
the thinking of a great Jewish educator, Martin Buber, [who, incidentally,
refused the presidency of the state of Israel] who spoke of just this
immediacy in interpersonal communication as the essence of morality. He used
the term 'I-thou' to point to this form of communication.)
I am still thinking about this whole topic, and also reading a most
interesting book, 'Soul Without Shame', by Byron Brown, which is giving me
much to contemplate in a slightly different domain, but which has big
implications for moral issues. I find it hard to accept intellectually the
mystic position as I read it. There are those like Ken Wilber who claim a
mystic stance while wholeheartedly endorsing a full commitment to social and
other issues, but I am not yet clear how that all hangs together. I suspect
any progress I make in this area will depend upon transformative practice,
not thinking, though.
You suggest we have an obligation to have a moral stance on issues at a
distance. Could you elaborate on this? This gets to the heart of my dilemma.
Elliott - I agree with you that the quality event is primary.
Glen - I appreciate your concerns but I think Elliott has done a better job
of answering them than I could. However, I do agree with your last comment,
where you said "I think that it is important to try and experience dynamic
quality more directly than just talking and thinking about it." Of course it
is my thinking about it that I share in a discussion group such as this, but
the transformative practice is actually much more important in my view.
Angus - Perhaps you are right about not being too far apart. Your pithy
position, as you put it, was "Lila viewed as integrated MOQ and Story
answers
your call. We need to all write our OWN stories while maintaining a sense of
the MOQ to avoid a solipsistic pratfall. What are your thoughts?"
I am less happy with Lila the story than you are. I see what you are getting
at, but even a story is a long way from the immediacy which I see as central
to the mystic position. I actually find Pirsig's "Cruisin' Blues" (if that
was the title) a much better vehicle for what you call 'story' than Lila is.
Lila seems to me a very contrived story, and I half wonder if there was a
filing system developed to construct it, and not just the metaphysics.
You say "in the reading of a story we can experience a bit of our own DQ by
our own interpretations", and I concede this may well be true. But a story,
a play, a film, are pseudo reality. We know as we read or watch that the
characters are not real people, even though we become emotionally involved
in their adventures. It is this issue of immediacy and distance that is
critical to the mystic position, as I read it, and which puts a story in a
very similar situation to a dream. It has some sort of reality, undeniably,
yet when I wake I realise that it was not 'real'. The mystic would say that
my egoic experience, which seems so real to me, is also a dream.
To put it somewhat differently, the immediate quality of experience is of
the greatest value, quality mediated through words, be they mental dialogue,
or a story, is of much less value, while the quality represented by any
grand scheme, be it religious or philosophical, is of even less value. The
value of experience is directly related to its immediacy.
You lose me when you say "Pirsig does not make Wilber's fabled "pre/trans"
mistake". I don't think he does, but largely because he seems oblivious to
the issues where it arises, though I suppose in his treatment of the Hippie
phenomenon he actually is elucidating a similar point. Wilber asserts that
many theorists make the mistake of assuming that, for example, the
pre-rational is equivalent to the trans-rational, since both are
non-rational. Pirsig asserts that in their dislike of social strictures, the
Hippies thought they had moved beyond society, when in fact much of their
culture was a reversion to pre-social biological values. I think Pirsig is
correct in this, and his understanding is similar to Wilber's. But the
really interesting areas that Wilber explores are largely foreign to
Pirsig's thought.
As a postscript, the ideas I presented in my first post on this topic are
not nearly so clear and unambiguous as I make them appear. The whole area is
incredibly difficult, and made more so by the fact that I am doing the very
thing that my logic condemns, which is to talk about reality, rather than
experience it in its immediacy. Logically, if I were to become
'enlightened', I would assume that I would cease to speak about it, since
the attempt to communicate in words would be to totally distort the
experience. Is that Wittgenstein? (About that which I cannot speak, I must
needs be silent - or some such)
John B
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