Hullo Bo,
I am heading to the UK and Ireland for a month in a day or two, and will
unsubscribe while I am away, so I am responding somewhat hurriedly to your
post and this thread, lest we forget. Just for the record, your title
"Beasley's MOQ" is in my opinion a 'straw man' - perhaps you meant it that
way.
My central point was "You seem oblivious to the contradiction you are
setting up between advocacy of a particular metaphysics, in your case the
MOQ, or your SOLAQI variant, which is fine as far as it goes, and the very
specific understanding of our reality that the MOQ presents". Your response
was "this evades me". I guess this is only to be expected, as we seem to be
talking past each other as always.
You say "This is far into the Catechism". The very start is the
Quality=Reality postulate and then the Dynamic/Static Quality. Do you accept
those?"
What can I say? Your use of the word 'catechism' may have been tongue in
cheek, but it emphasises again the importance you give to the metaphysics,
the bundle of words and ideas that point to reality, whereas I am stressing
yet again that it's just a map (I know you hate that metaphor, but it
remains in my view absolutely central) and the value of the map is always to
be tested against our individual experience of the terrain. When you say
"let me not get too personal", I think you do a disservice to the debate,
for it is only in our personal experience that a metaphysics is tested and
validated.
You say "The map IS the reality if we are willing to draw conclusions". I
find it diffucult to even sympathise with this approach, for at heart I see
it as a form of faith, very much in the Western mould, in which faith
relates to accepting a dogma as given; while my approach is in the Eastern
mode, where any teaching or dogma is tested against my own experience and if
found wanting, discarded. I happen to think that the MOQ is a paradoxical
beast, Western in style yet fundamentally pointing to an Eastern
understanding. Some of our difficulties no doubt arise from that paradox.
You put the core issue as a challenge at the end when you say "Your fault is
believing that it's possible to keep outside a static understanding of
reality, relating only to dynamic experience. DQ (in the MOQ sense) is
something terrifying that no-one can encounter without danger of never
recovering". And I argue that quality, both static and dynamic, is all we
ever encounter [This is surely the meaning of the first statement in your
chatechism, that quality = reality, and yes, I take it as a postulate, and
no more] and that we constantly encounter both. You seem to be suggesting
that the dynamic is somehow dangerous. I would argue that it is the
commonest thing in the world, literally, as it is simply our moment to
moment experience. It's the song on the radio that catches my attention, its
the shock of the hot stove, or the cold snow.
[Almaas entitles one of his essays "Bare Bottoms on Ice", and in it he says,
"We forget reality so thoroughly that we live our lives completely seeking
the values of our conditioned mind, one conditioned goal after another,
whether we call it goodness, love, success or happiness. All these are
creations of our minds. They do not exist; they never existed. They exist
only in our minds. They are mirages." (Indestructible Innocence, p 141)]
It is immediate experience that is dynamic. It is our structured recall of
that that creates the static, the mental creations that come to overwhelm
reality. The static pushes out the dynamic [this may be a general law],
though never completely, and the mystic path is simply reversing this
general tendancy. A metaphysics is a huge static creation, absolutely
destructive of the dynamic unless it is read with intelligence, read between
the lines, as a finger pointing to the moon.
One further issue. You say "I risk the assertion that the MOQ "creates the
universe". Great theories creates new realities". Not so. Great theories
attempt to express new realities, and in so doing can actually make it
harder to move on to yet newer realities. New realities emerge in
experience. Theories do not generate reality. Reality is the cutting edge;
theories follow in their train. Remember Pirsig's analogy of the train? Put
differently, words do not create experience, words are attempts to
communicate experience, and their value is instrumental. Even some animals
have calls that discriminate between different predators, and there is value
in communicating whether an attack is coming from the ground or from the
air. This is basic biological value. But words are not reality. The alarm
signal can be in error. Or it can be meant to deceive, though I think it has
taken humans to perfect that. What becomes vastly more complex in human
society is the hold that ideas, expressed in words, can take on our minds. I
have seen how with the appropriate mindset black is perceived as white. It
can be that obvious, at least to the observer. The person perceiving is
actually oblivious to the error.
This is why I find Pirsig so inadequate. His theory is naive in asserting
that we all know quality when we experience it. Animals may. Humans
generally don't. The static gets in the way. That is what the mystics like
Almaas struggle to say, but they too are tied to communicating with words,
and hence static constructs. Its all very difficult to unravel. But since
even mystics use language to teach, I am prepared to accept there is an
instrumental value in static quality, while at the same time regarding all
static formulations as both useful summaries of previous experience, and
barriers to the dynamic which is experienced in immediacy uninfluenced by
the past.
John B
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