Hullo all,
I have been playing with a few thoughts which are beginning to coalesce.
Whether there is any quality in them remains to be seen. (I twice tried to
post these to the forum and both times they disappeared, so some dynamic
force obviously didn't like the first draft...)
WARNING: High density of content. Adults only.
We appear to live in two worlds, one time-constrained, the other timeless.
Both are valid, though most of us experience only the world of time, and
tend to view it as the 'real' world. The mystic, though, whose primary value
is immediacy, experiences both the world of the timeless and our ordinary
time-constrained world. Our ignorance of the immediate world of the mystic
is obnubilation, which Wei Wu Wei defines as "an inability to perceive the
obvious owing to a conditioned reflex, which causes us persistently to look
in the wrong direction".
Dynamic quality is encountered in the immediacy of experience. As children
we experienced the dynamic almost constantly. But we learned to deny the
obvious and to plan and hope and manipulate, which are future directed
activities. This conditioning is self reinforcing, so that it becomes more
and more difficult to simply be in the present, to be in touch with what is.
Ultimately it may take a near death experience to bring us back to our
senses, or perhaps not even that can shake our perceptual prison.
Nonetheless, immediate experience still is, and while we may ignore or
trivialize it, it can still reach us from time to time. Probably this
happens many times a day, but typically we choose not to focus on these
moments, or shrug them off.
Static quality rules our time-bound existence. Memory and judgment create
static values, which then dominate even our sensory input, so that
increasingly we are aware only of what conforms to these time patterned
values. These static values are not bogus or useless - they are what allow
us to function in the world. But they do create problems for us, despite
facilitating our everyday life. For a start, they are driven by powerful
emotions, particularly fear, which were experienced as overwhelming in our
early childhood when these patterns were established. Our neediness and fear
cause us to constantly project upon the world fantasies of having our needs
met, or having our fears realised. So both the egoic self that emerges from
childhood, and the world it constructs, are mediated by these fantasies. The
society we inhabit also reinforces these fantasies in particular ways, and
so further influences our perceptions of what is.
We can assume, if we take an evolutionary stance for a moment, that there
has been some survival value in the development of our time sense, so that
on balance the fear and need driven fantasies did work to protect us from
some threats, and obtain for us some of the necessities of life. The
question the mystic raises is whether there is any more to be gained through
further development within time, or whether it is just this development that
now constitutes our greatest difficulty?
In the West we are living in a period when the presuppositions of our static
value systems have been explored and formalised as never before. We see this
most clearly in the sciences, but they permeate all our pursuits and
scholarship. Language and mathematics and intellect are the tools, but also
the straightjacket of this exploration. So the world of common sense is far
more constrained than we care to imagine, and subject to fashions, including
intellectual fashions, to which we are largely oblivious.
During the last century our most eminent scientists have become aware of the
limitations of science, and many have taken a mystic stance, acknowledging
that science operates only in a narrow field, mathematically defined, that
is incapable of resolving our issues and concerns at other levels. In
particular, science is singularly unsuccessful in resolving disputes about
value, since it attempts to take a value neutral stance in an attempt to
more accurately explore the world. Since many values are indeed conditioned
by individual fears and needs, and by learned social patterns, this attempt
to eliminate values was helpful in freeing scince from social and religious
bondage, but the limitations of this course are only now becoming apparent.
Gregory Bateson in his "Last Lecture", made one of the most helpful comments
in information theory, when he said that "information is difference that
makes a difference". He elaborates that of the infinite number of
differences immanent in any situation, very few become information. To do
that, they have to "enter into an information processing system. This is
basic to our notion of what is life, our notion of what is death. It is
basic for religion."
I want to stress that the first "difference" in his statement is 'different'
to the second. The first is a matter of analysis, the second of value.
'Life' and 'religion' are value bound terms. In effect he is pointing to
Whitehead's view, as I interpret it, that value operates in the opposite
direction to evolution. That is, from the scientific perspective, value
emerges in some way from the evolutionary algorithm, whereas for Whitehead,
(whose general argument I have appended, in the form developed by Ken
Wilber), we can only understand evolution by starting with the highest
values accessible to us, and seeing how far down the levels they extend.
'Analytic' difference only becomes significant in the presence of 'value'
difference, and the value realm is primary. Or put another way, there can be
no information without an information processing system, and such a system
is fundamentally a value system. [This seems to fit well with Pirsig's
general argument.]
"Process theology" is the name given to a theology that grew directly from
the thought of Whitehead, and which stressed the centrality of processes
over things. Value meant that the ultimate aim of all occasions (to
Whitehead, all reality is composed of 'actual occasions' having a mental and
a physical pole) is 'beauty', a certain harmony of proportions and
relations, while evil is the thwarting of this aim - the mutually
obstructive character of things. "Salvation means a progressive response to
the lure of God toward the realization of beauty, and the peace which is the
preservation of beauty." (James M Lapsley, Salvation and Health, p57)
The use of the word 'lure' implies an attractor, and while I have problems
with traditional God talk, this is the next step in fleshing out a way of
understanding in which value has priority. Pirsig mentions a 'level of art',
and more or less abandons it, but Whitehead and the process theologians had
already developed a way of talking (albeit theological) which develops this
further. 'Beauty' is an attractor, which establishes a pull in a certain
direction.
Wilber uses similar language when he asserts that "deeper and wider contexts
exert a pull, a telos, on present limited contexts." (SES p78) While today's
scientific orthodoxy is to see everything pushed by the aftermath of the big
bang, such a view is completely unable to talk meaningfully about the value
issues that 'matter' to us. At best they are regarded as epiphenomena, not
really real, as in Ryle's 'Concept of Mind'. Which is why Chalmers'
suggestion that to understand consciousness may actually require us to add a
new fundamental to science has created such controversy.
Bateson, in developing what he called a 'biological epistemology', used the
understanding of Fechner and Weber that mental life is dependant upon the
ability to receive news from the outside (this is very SOM jargon, but bear
with me) and this supposes that we can discriminate differences that are in
fact ratios. "This means that our entire mental life is one degree more
abstract than the physical world around us", says Bateson; "we deal in ...
derivatives, and not in quantities - in ratios between quantities but not in
quantities. This, you see, is a bridge between mind and body, or between
mind and matter, but, at the same time, it differentiates mind from matter."
He goes on to show how everyday language is not very helpful in establishing
relationships, and more importantly, if you were to begin looking at the
world "with a biological epistemology, you will come into contact with
concepts which the biologists don't look at at all. You will meet with
beauty and ugliness. These may be real components in the world
that you as a living creature live in. It's not a new idea that living
things have imminent beauty, but it is revolutionary to assert, as a
scientist, that matters of beauty are really highly formal, very real, and
crucial to the entire political and ethical system in which we live." (A
Sacred Unity, p311) Bateson seems to be saying that if we could 'cleanse the
doors of perception' (in Blake's apt phrase), we would encounter a reality
that is value based.
To pull all this together, it seems that the value patterns that obtain in a
time-constrained world are valid enough in their own sphere, but become a
prison as they dominate and overwhelm the dynamic values that are
encountered in immediate experience. This occlusion of the dynamic is
assisted by the strong emotional substrate of the static values, and the
warping effect of this on perception.
Pirsig views static and dynamic as a conceptual division, and the values are
viewed as different but equally necessary. I am arguing that the static has
a tendency to overwhelm the dynamic, and that recovery of access to dynamic
quality is not simple. Many people have found meditation to be valuable, not
least in reducing the eternal chatter of our 'monkey minds', accessing our
alpha and theta rhythms and the calm they create, and so on, but the mystics
suggest there are much more difficult issues in regaining access to the
dynamic. Both the egoic self and the constructed world must be unravelled if
we are to regain the immediacy of access to the dynamic, which we enjoyed as
children. While this can occur (rarely) through a spontaneous event such as
a near death experience, as John Wren-Lewis testifies, mostly it is a slow
and often painful process of inquiring into the patterns that dominate our
moment by moment existence, and which prevent us from being present. The
pain is twofold, a working through of the childhood terrors that helped
create these patterns, and the loss of all time constrained benefits, which
equates with death. One of the losses is our fiercely defended set of social
and intellectual values, which for most of us are so closely identified with
our selves that they may have more value for us than life itself. They too
must go, if immediacy is to be regained.
Such a painful process is not immediately attractive. Traditionally it was
expected that candidates for mystic enlightenment would be mature people who
had lost their faith in social or intellectual values to offer meaning or
any real reward. In this regard, it was thought that those who had
experienced success in worldly endeavours made the best candidates, since
they were less likely to believe that just a bit more success would resolve
their issues. It is worth asking then, how it is that anyone would take this
path? Here the lure of the deeper and wider contexts must be seen as the
key. While the painful reality of time-constrained values can goad us into
seeking something better, only the lure of the "dim apprehensions of things
too obscure for ... existing language" (Whitehead, quoted by Pirsig in Lila,
Ch 9) can guide us through such a dificult and extended process. Pirsig says
these dim apprehensions are dynamic quality itself.
This may be an over simplification. Wilber argues against any simple
transition from "the divisive and analytic and rational and nasty ego,
straight to the expansive and liberated and and cosmic God consciousness"
(BHE p 151), as a variant of what he calls the pre/trans fallacy, which is
to assume that anything that is not ego is post egoic enlightenment, when in
reality it may be regression to an ugly pre-egoic state. Wilber argues that
"there are stages in all growth, including human. These basic stages - I
have listed nine of them, but that's just a summary - are based on massive
amounts of empirical, phenomenological, interpretive, contemplative, and
cross-cultural evidence." (Ibid) If he is correct then dynamic quality
itself is layered and structured in ways that can be teased out. The lure is
to a dynamic unfolding as the individual progresses holarchically through a
patterned sequence that is roughly similar for each of us, and which cannot
be bypassed. It may even be that the near death transition that John
Wren-Lewis reports could only occur to one who had already reached a high
level of moral and spiritual development. More evidence is needed on this
point.
To sum up, I want to emphasise the significance of time in the
static/dynamic split that Pirsig suggests. I argue that a balance between
static and dynamic values is not readily achievable, due to the tendency of
static patterns to dominate our experience, excluding awareness of the
dynamic. I draw on the conclusions of a number of authors to support the
idea that quality is experienced as a lure away from static patterns, and I
use the experience of mystics to suggest that even though this lure exists,
it remains a very difficult path to undo the conditioning of the static,
time based quality that ultimately imprisons us in an unsatisfying
existence. I agree with Wilber that a holarchical developmental sequence
seems best to describe the process that can lead to a reintegration of the
dynamic in our moment by moment experience, which is effectively outside
time. I would argue that the lure of quality is the tug towards a time free
experience of the dynamic, this lure being felt in the time bonded arena of
the static patterns of value that build an egoic self and its world, and
that it is only through the laborious and often painful undoing of early
conditioning that we again are enabled to access immediacy freely. With this
achieved, it is now possible to return to the 'marketplace' of time
constrained human activity, and to live in the world but not of it.
The human sequence thus implied begins with an immersion in immediate
experience in early infancy, with this immediacy gradually lost and replaced
by an increasingly rigid entrapment in time-constrained egoic behaviour,
which facilitates survival but drives out the immediacy which permits the
experience of the dynamic. In some people, disenchantment with this sterile
reality, together with the lure of the dynamic, will assist them to move
through a difficult and often painful examination of their behaviour, which
results in the clearing away of the static constructs and a new and deeper
experience of immediacy, which if stabilised can allow a new balance of
static and dynamic values to occur. These static values would be
instrumental in character, rather than driven by needs and fantasies as in
the past.
If anyone has followed this rather dense thesis to this point, I would be
interested in your response.
John B
[My previous posting on Whitehead, as interpreted by Wilber, follows.]
Whitehead "said that if you want to know the general principles of
existence, you must start at the top and use the highest occasions to
illumine the lowest, not the other way around, which of course is the common
reductionist reflex. So he said you could learn more about the world from
biology than you could from physics; and so he introduced the organismic
viewpoint which has revolutionized philosophy. And he said you could learn
more from social psychology than from biology, and then introduced the
notion of things being a society of occasions - the notion of compound
individuality. Naturally, he held that the apex of exemplary pattern was
God, and it was in God, the ultimate compound individual, that you would
ground any laws or patterns found reflected in reduced versions in the lower
dimensions of psychology, then biology, then physics. The idea, which was
brilliant in its statement, was that you first look to the higher levels for
the general principles of existence, and then, by subtraction, you see how
far down the hierarchy they extend. You don't start at the bottom and try to
move up by addition of the lower parts, because some of the higher parts
simply don't show up very well, or at all, on the lower rungs. Perhaps his
favourite examples were creativity and love - God, for Whitehead, was
especially love and creativity. But in the lower dimensions, the creativity
gets reduced, appearing in humans as a modicum of free will but being almost
entirely lost by the time you get to atomic particles... So Whitehead, by
looking to illuminate the lower by the higher, and not vice versa, could
make creativity the general principle, and then understand determinism as a
partial restriction or reduction of primary creativity. If, on the other
hand, you start at the bottom, then you have to figure out a way to get free
will and creativity out of rocks, and it just won't work."
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