From: John Beasley (beasley@austarnet.com.au)
Date: Thu Oct 10 2002 - 08:27:02 BST
Hullo Scott,
SCOTT: "What the intellectual level does is allow us to a) become conscious
of ourselves, and b) become detached from the biological and social
attachments that bedevil us."
Your comment is a description of the world that I see Pirsig inhabits, one
where the isolated intellect is both self conscious and detached from the
biological and social levels. The last three words are a judgement on the
biological and social levels that I doubt even Pirsig would make. He does
not view the lower levels as bad in themselves, only that the domination of
a higher level by a lower is bad. Your take sounds like a version of
original sin. Pirsig, for example, believes that a person can cultivate his
intellect and still be attractive to the ladies, meaning have both
intellectual and biological quality.
SCOTT: "We also need to become detached from intellectual attachments,
meaning the intellect has to learn to look dispassionately on itself. "
I see detachment is the key word here, but again in your view detachment is
also 'dispassionate'. I happen to believe that the path to 'enlightenment'
is not about becoming super-intellectual and super-disconnected, but is
rather a reclamation of our unconscious minds, and our passionate bodies.
The mystic, on my reading, does not deny passion, whether it be in the Zen
master operating as a "happy madman", or Krishnamurti in his extended affair
with his 'manager's' wife, or in the writings of Hameed Ali. Rather he
asserts that the passion is part of the upwelling of what is and is good,
along with everything else. He is just aware that passion is and has its
place, but is not overwhelmed by that. The best book on this is Wilber's 'No
Boundary'.
SCOTT: "On "ironic metaphysics" I (idiosyncratically) mean that we
acknowledge that mystics know what's what and we don't, which means we are,
by definition, insane (out of touch with Reality). But we do have
intellect, which in at least one case (mathematics) we can be confident
that we are not fooling ourselves."
In general terms I would accept your first point as an abstract statement of
how things are. But it is not that we are totally out of touch, just largely
so. And it is precisely those elements of our being that are 'in touch'
which are the key to our path, and it is precisely NOT mathematics that I
have in mind here. Someone else has replied with a very apt quote from
Einstein as to how helpful mathematics is. Einstein, and the bulk of his
fellow physicists actually saw that mathematics did not give them what they
sought in life, hence most of them became mystics of some form or other.
Read their own words in Wilber's 'Quantum Questions'.
SCOTT: "I have faith in mysticism, that it is possible to become sane."
I have too, which only goes to show that I am no mystic, since it is only
when I totally lose hope of becoming sane that I can indeed find my sanity.
Regards,
John B
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