Roger,
To make sure, If by mysticism you mean Dynamic Quality then I agree with
your post completely.
Roger said:
Mystical, pure
undifferentiated experience is DQ, but intellectual advancement(a form of
DQ)
enlarges the universe that is experienced. Mystical experience and
intellectual advancement are two self re-enforcing dimensions of the path.
Clark said:
I read the Varela and Maturana paper last night but their prose is so
dense that I am going to have to read it ten or fifteen times to be sure I
follow but I think that you drew roughly the same conclusions that I did.
Roger said:
Both Nishida and Pirsig mention that the perfect example of unfiltered
experience is a new-born baby.
Horse and Diana said:
The self could, quite reasonably, be described as the product of our
experiences. This
would agree with Diana's comment:
> Diana wrote
> >I think the problem you're having with it might be that in Pirsig's self
> >there is no center of the self which is the way the SOM presents it.
> >Pirsig's concept is just a convergence of patterns jostling with each
> >other with no particular location of a knowing self.
as the product of the interaction of the patterns of different levels from
where we derive
our experiences and which creates the self has no centre. It is a massivly
complex network
of different patterns.
Clark said:
It must be apparent to anyone who has raised a newborn baby that there is
no self at the moment of birth. We impose a self on the newvborn but the
baby is obviously just a living entity who has no input except direct
experience through the senses. If we watched and recorded closely enough we
could trace the development of the 'self' of the baby. If one did this I
would be curious to know at what point they reached the conclusion that the
newborn had become a 'self''. On thinking back on the experience of raising
my daughter I am not in a position to make that judgement, still it would
be interesting to make an effort to find that point. This is a sobering
idea because it implies that, along with genetics, the parents are
responsible for the initial forming of the baby's 'self'.
On another line of thought, I got to wondering the other day - What if
the supposed meteor nad not struck the Earth and wiped out the Dinosaurs?
What would sentient life on the Earth looked like in that case. In my
opinion, the evolution of the Biosphere demanded the development of
sentience eventually. If the Dinosaurs had run their course would sentient
life now be the Dinosaur or some other organism. In my opinion it would
have not been the Dinosaur family because they would not have been
compatible with a sustained existence. Too large and demanding on the
environment. I think that sentience would have appeared in some middle
level size animal because it would limit the size of serious predators.
Perhaps the Porpoise or some such. There is no particular reason why
sentience should exist only on land. It could have equally been confined to
the oceans. It could also have been another branch of the Simians. We could
use a prehensile tail to good advantage. It amuses me to think what "Romeo
and Juliet' would have read like in that case. What do you think? Ken
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