Hullo Bo, Platt,
Thanks to both of you for your very interesting comments. I was particularly
impressed by one of your opening remarks, Bo, when you said:
"Like Platt I would also equalize "spirituality" with DQ (if hard pressed)
even if I believe that dynamic quality is something much more awesome -
frightening."
So let me press you harder. Can you talk more about the "awesome -
frightening" aspect? If possible can you focus on this, rather than on the
'argumentation' that I will shortly introduce, and that all too easily
becomes stalemated.
To leave the high country again, and return to ordinary argument, I am not
convinced by your next input, which was:
"The levels are static patterns in the dynamic continuum, like waves in an
ocean. Whether they are dynamic at the bottom ...? It's the static aspect
that counts so DQ can very much be discriminated into higher and lower
patterns or levels."
>From an analytical (metaphysical) perspective when Pirsig makes his first
cut in discriminating quality, surely he is not favouring static over
dynamic, as your "It's the static aspect that counts" would suggest. If
anything, his train analogy suggests that the static 'crystallises out' of
the dynamic, which is the more fundamental, though the static is equally
important. This ties in with Platt's "I ... suggest that reactions to
everyday experience depend on established patterns of thought in order to
behave appropriately. Living for us humans requires thinking. We are not
equipped like animals to survive on instinct." The point is obvious at one
level, but it is not quite so clear how this fits with the dynamic.
The mystics talk of "being in the world but not of it". By this I take it
that they mean that they operate at the static levels in such a way that the
static no longer insulates them from the dynamic. Pirsig, (near the end of
Lila?) talks of how in Zen the static is transcended, not by ignoring it,
but by a rigorous immersion in it. I fear it is possible to become
sidetracked by this rigour, and most of the critiques of Zen that I have
read suggest that it is a certain 'uncritical' immersion in the static on
the way to transcendence that can lead to the development of "the happy
madman" type of master, who laughs, shouts, and has fits of irrational
anger, as Aubrey Menen puts it. To be charitable, this looks a lot like an
overdose of DQ with little balancing sq. But you, Bo, seem to be going to
the other extreme, where sq is what we get, and DQ remains almost out of the
picture. Platt does allow for the irruption of the dynamic through art,
which I agree does happen.
My understanding of the whole mystic thing is that it is a 'cleansing of the
doors of perception', as Blake put it. As I see it, the development of our
static values is necessary to live in the world, but it occurs in such a way
that the static insidiously takes over. This is partly because the static
patterns are also tightly bound up with the development of ego, which is
protection against the vulnerability we experience most acutely as infants
and young children, but which is an aspect of existence we would prefer to
avoid even as adults. Hameed Ali's response to a student, who was speaking
about discovering something only when he/she was desperate, was to say that
"it is always desperate". Krishnamurti talks about fear a great deal, and
how enlightenment is living without fear, yet he is able to allow that there
remains a healthy kind of fear, which operates automatically when, for
example, he meets a rattlesnake. It seems to me that if we accept for the
moment Pirsig's static levels, then there is a place for fear at the
biological level, (and probably at the social insofar as society has the
power to impact powerfully on our biology eg the inquisition), which is
quite healthy. But I am not sure that fear at the intellectual level is
healthy. I suspect that the mystic goes through this fear and emerges in a
spacious and clear world where the ego no longer struggles to survive,
because immediate experience just is, and fear is no longer a sensible
response. But I could be wrong.
There is much more in your posts that I would like to respond to, but time
is limited just now, so I will leave it here.
Regards,
John B
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