Hullo Scott, Wim, Platt, Bo,
Scott, I am interested in a few things in your most recent post to Bo.
I agree with you that Pirsig largely ignored consciousness, and therefore
his metaphysics is incomplete.
You say "SOL language cannot, in fact, describe perception". I think this is
quite true. Perception is unified, while language and intellect
discriminate.
You mention Kant's "the macroscopic world is a product of our perception".
This seems to me almost true, and I will get back to this point.
In one sense I agree that "one needs to live the metaphysics, i.e., go
through the discipline to arrive at transcendence of S/O". It seems to me
that S/O thinking is not altered by ideas about alternatives, but only
through experience of alternatives. Hence a discipline, a praxis, which can
reconnect us with the immediacy of experience is needed. Sometimes,
particularly in near-death experiences, an experience is powerful enough to
shake the whole mental construct, and in rare cases, such as with John
Wren-Lewis, is sufficient to catapult a person into a mystic way of being.
I would like to comment more on your statement that "One of SOM's
mistakes is to think that what we treat as the objective is not a set of
concepts, but a non-thinking reality". In doing this, I take issue with your
statement that "the Ideas filter through our egos to produce both our
thoughts
and our perceptions, and our SOM mistake is to think of the former as our
productions and the latter as not our productions". This appears to be where
we disagree fundamentally.
And this leads to your criticism of my position, in which you say "SOM is,
more or less, how we find ourselves, but the MOQ is something we have to
achieve on our own. This is why I object to John B. when he says we should
drop metaphysics and concentrate on "immediate experience". Such experience
is the gaol, but it requires changing one's metaphysics".
Since I am no mystic myself, I am forced to quote others in defence of my
position. I am currently re-reading A.H. Almaas's book 'Indestructible
Innocence', where he deals with some of these issues from the mystic
perspective. In an essay entitled "Our Knowledge is the World We Live" he
explores our 'knowledge' of the world, how it influences us, and how we
might escape from its corruption of experience.
Almaas (Hameed Ali) begins by looking at how the human infant becomes aware
of itself and the world, and believes that it knows that world. Even as
adults exploring spirituality, when it seems the world has taken on more
dimensions, "basically the world you live in remains the same".(p 215) "Even
when we learn about ourselves psychologically, although we believe we have
gained in knowledge, the kind of knowledge we have gained is simply seeing
new connections in the world that we already know". (p 218) "The categories
never change, we just see different relationships between them". (p 221)
"The world that you're learning about is nothing but words added to your
mind". (p 228)
He goes on "So we are seeing that the elements of the world don't exist in
the way we assume they do - they exist only because we discriminate them
from other things. As separate things, they don't really exist. This is a
tricky point." (p 231) "In the process of conceptualizing and naming the
world, we forget that these elements didn't exist for us until we
differentiated them, separated them, isolated them, and named them. We don't
remember what happened before that, because there wasn't enough conceptual
capacity to remember things before that. What we remember is the notions we
have developed. We cannot remember things that had no concepts associated
with them ... What we call our world is nothing but the content of our
knowledge. And our world becomes as fixed as the content of our knowledge
... It's no longer a fresh world ... Your world becomes more narrow, and
increasing complexity is further narrowing, adding to the rigidity of the
world you inhabit." (pp 232 - 233) "As the weaving of our concepts becomes
thicker and denser, so the fabric of our world becomes even more set, which
gives us a firmer sense of security. At the same time, we lose the dynamic
quality of who we are, and of what the world is." (p 233)
So we have lost "dynamic quality", which we experienced pre-verbally in
infancy. He goes on "The more we make the world concrete, the more dead our
world is, and the more dead we become. But we usually don't think of
spiritual freedom as confronting what we call our world, or our minds. We
think of it as something that will happen within that world. We don't
confront the whole question of what this world is. We don't confront the
most obvious thing. We want to find some mysterious something that brings us
freshness, freedom, a sense of dynamism, not realizing that the dynamism is
right here. We have deadened the world by giving everything a name and
believing that the name is the ultimate truth". (p 235)
This is why I find a metaphysics a fundamental error - it is just more of
the same. Naming.
He takes an interesting look at art, without naming it as such, when he says
"When we realise that different cultures conceptualize things differently,
we might begin to confront and challenge our assumption that our known world
is the actual world ... When we first see a Japanese garden, for example,
our perception is that it is alive and fresh ... But the more you see it,
the more you get used to it; you end up seeing not the actual garden but 'a
Japanese garden', and after a while, it's just rocks over there. So a new
arrangement of things can bring us some aliveness and freshness because it
jiggles our minds a little ... after a while, however, it becomes stale and
uninteresting ... it is the same with philosophy, with religion, with
science." (p 237)
Pirsig would probably agree with the staleness; the hangover, as he calls
it. This fits my experience well enough to convince me, unlike Platt, that
art is not the answer. It's just jiggling our minds a little.
In exploring the reality beyond mind, beyond metaphysics, Almaas suggests we
must confront "all the concepts that have evolved, all the various
combinations of ideas, the physical knowledge, social knowledge, religious
knowledge, [which] have become the world which is our knowledge." "At this
level the Work is not a matter of exotic experiences, but of seeing the
reality of the things we already know ... To see through the concepts that
have calcified our minds and our perceptions is to see reality freshly,
immediately, to see it the way it is, not the way our minds have defined it.
At the beginning, this might sound like an intellectual exploration, but
actually we are confronting the intellectual". "Penetrating the mental world
is not easy". (p 238)
If there is a motto that I would want to adopt in this forum at present, it
would be "confronting the intellectual". It is the fundamental error of a
metaphysics, and particularly one like the MOQ which places intellect at
some pinnacle of static patterns of value. It is no coincidence, I think,
that Bo and others find the dynamic fearful. It fits with the words quoted
above; "As the weaving of our concepts becomes thicker and denser, so the
fabric of our world becomes even more set, which gives us a firmer sense of
security. At the same time, we lose the dynamic quality of who we are, and
of what the world is." The security of a metaphysics is the very antithesis
of the dynamic quality which supposedly the MOQ promotes. This, I repeat, is
a fundamental error.
It is also the fundamental error of postmodernism. From within a tapestry of
words it makes sense to reach the assumption that you support, Scott, when
you assume that "the Ideas filter through our egos to produce both our
thoughts and our perceptions". But I argue that it simply is not so. Our
perceptions, by which I mean our ability to "see reality freshly,
immediately, to see it the way it is, not the way our minds have defined
it", these precede our ideas and our thoughts. I see Pirsig as saying just
this. The perception of the hot stove IS reality. Pols argues in his book
'Radical Realism', which is a sustained critique of the postmodern morass,
that what is required is "a restorative access to reality".(p 41) This is
what the mystics claim is available, not through ever more thought and ever
more clever metaphysics, but through directly challenging all that mental
'knowledge'. The whole approach is wrong. It really does give us the thirty
thousand page menu and no food.
Confronting the intellectual. Of course it can't be done in words. I'll let
Almaas put it his way. "In a sense, what we are talking about is something
that cannot be talked about. How can you talk about something if you don't
use concepts? ... We have tried to live according to those concepts ... what
will happen if we don't do it that way? What will happen if our knowing is
one hundred percent spontaneous?" (p 240)
John B
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