Hullo Erin,
Thanks for your response to my effort to educate myself on postmodernism.
You ask, "Can you expand on what you mean "uniquely mine" is a fantasy."
I asked for that, talking about something I do not know. I said "While the
quality that I experience is uniquely mine, the developmental path is not
unique, but can be shared with others, and the surprise at the end is that
the "uniquely mine" is a fantasy, too."
What I meant is that a mystic would say that the word 'mine' points to a
fantasy of a self that is me. The me that experiences quality is not
essentially real. It is a fantasy, a construction of the mind, driven by
fear to label and judge and thus to seek to control the world. But the
mystic says that when I get down to what can actually be experienced, the
world and I are 'not two', and so to discriminate between 'mine' and 'yours'
and the world is just an error.
This has implications for Pirsig's theory. He argues that we can only know
quality. He goes further and says that out of the experience of quality
emerges the 'I' that knows, as well as the objects of its knowing. (My post
to Marco also deals with this.) Pirsig himself is not immune to speaking as
though the self and objects exist prior to knowing, as for example where he
says that only a living being can experience quality. This statement is
fine, so long as it is 'bracketed', and put into a context of understanding
the world which we call science or evolutionary theory, or some such. I
constantly have to use similar sorts of language to make a point, but Pirsig
is clear which is basic, and I agree with him on that.
I find that A.H. Almaas is the most thorough investigator I know of this
level of mystery, but to me there is no way that the whole mystery can be
explicated in words. Always there is a residue that does not fit. For me it
is understanding how the 'self' that evolves in each one of us in childhood,
takes on the appearance of reality. But this is truly a huge problem. It
underlies dreams, madness, fantasy, and so on. While I am dreaming, the
dream is real. When I wake it isn't. What changed? When I am in love, I see
my lover as beautiful, and when I fall out of love the beauty has gone.
Where?
So I must admit this is talking of something that seems right, but I really
don't know it, or perhaps, I am in the process of regaining a deeper way of
knowing that will one day convince me that this is so, even if I cannot use
words to convince someone of it who does not have experience similar to
mine. Very messy. Fortunately, it does not make any great difference to what
I had to say about postmodernism, I think, though I could be wrong there
too.
Regards,
John B
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:12 BST