Hello everyone
Rob writes:
>Glove,
>
>I just read your post and need some time to digest what you are saying. I
would
>like to go into this further since you seem to understand where I am coming
from
>and you still agree with the levels. I am trying to get there!
>
>To let you know, I was referring to J. Krishnamurti. Krish and Pirsig are
the
>only philosophers I have really studied and I am truely greatful that they
are
>the ones I have been exposed to. Together, they both make sense yet clash.
I
>would like to ask more questions of you, but for now I am curious how you
would
>harmonize the two? Krish talks about never concluding and Pirisig
concludes.
>Krish stresses observation and Pirsig analyzes. I guess it goes way back to
my
>original question: what practical value do the levels have?
Hi Rob
J. Krishnamurti wrote: "You may remember the story of how the devil and a
friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a
man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it
away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, "What did that man pick
up?" "He picked up a piece of Truth," said the devil. "That is a very bad
business for you, then," said his friend. "Oh, not at all," the devil
replied, "I am going to let him organize it."
We organize "pieces of Truth" every waking second of our lives, but it seems
to me the real problem arises when we try and put the truth into our
pockets, holding onto it with smug certainty that it is indeed the truth.
The parable above is wrapped around the notion of good and evil that is
prevalent in Western culture, and the deterministic way that we have all
learned to label truth and falsity with pre-conditioned certainty and it
contains a warning. When we walk around looking for the truth, and picking
up a piece of it here and a piece there, that seeking may seem a good thing
on the surface as we pocket the truth and ignore the rest of what we find,
labeling it lies and deceit and leaving it to lay.
But woe to him who tries to organize those little pieces of truth without
considering the whole picture of reality. Why? Well, it seems to me that it
would be tantamount to attempting to put a jig saw puzzle together without a
surface upon which to lay the pieces, having to balance the entire puzzle in
your hands and yet at the same time digging in your pockets to retrieve the
rest of the pieces you've found.
To me, that is the practical value of Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. It
gives us a table on which to lay little shining pieces of truth that we
happen to find lying about. I know this is a weak analogy, but perhaps it's
a beginning?
Rob:
>I see the beauty of the levels, but they have not changed any of my
>attitudes/behaviors/thoughts in any ethical situations. Does knowledge of
the
>levels *ever* give one a greater grasp of a situation. Would Mother Teresa
[or
>insert name here] have been a better person with knowledge them? If you
can
>give an example I could be easily persuaded. If not, then how can it be a
good
>theory if it has no power?
Glove:
I don't believe the Metaphysics of Quality is about changing any of our
feelings of ethics or values. Those feelings are way too deeply engrained in
us to be changed so easily. The Metaphysics of Quality, to me, is the
controlled folly of picking up little pieces of truth as I find them and
using it to organize them into a more coherent picture of the place that I
happen to find myself at this moment. Would Mother Teresa be a better person
for having knowledge of the Metaphysics of Quality? NO! Of course not. But
she might have been involved in some very interesting conversations about
it!
Seriously though, the way I see it, the four levels are only little pieces
of truth and as such, are impossible to consider into an organized whole in
themselves. Instead of examining only the four levels of which we are aware
of, we must also learn to consider that which we are unaware of, which from
a normal prospective of reality is impossible to do. This is not something
that can be taught in any fashion, though certain practices seem to shove us
individually in that direction, such as zazen, martial arts, the Japanese
Tea ceremony, meditation, yoga, and art. Because we are locked into static
quality everyday reality, we will not go that direction willingly, but it
seems as if once we're shoved, momentum takes over and we just go. That is
why Dynamic Quality is of higher value than static quality. Yet still all we
have really are those little pieces of truth we find. They cannot be
discarded!
To me, this is the power of the Metaphysics of Quality: What we are unaware
of contains higher value than that which we are aware of. This is the
harmony between J. Krishnamurti and Robert Pirsig. Krishnamurti writes:
"Throughout the world it is the same problem. Religions have failed, and
education also. Passing a lot of examinations and putting the alphabet after
your name has not solved your problems. No system, educational, economic,
political, religious or philosophical, has solved our problems which is
obvious, because we are still in conflict. There is appalling poverty,
confusion, strife between man and man, group and group, race and race.
Neither the Communist nor any other social or economic revolution has solved
this problem, or ever will. Because man is a total entity, he has to be
taken as a totality not partially, at different layers of his existence.
The specialist is only concerned with a particular layer the politician
merely with governing, the economist merely with money values, the
religionist with his own creed, and so on. Apparently nobody considers the
human problem as a whole and tackles it, not partially, but wholly. The
religious person says, "Give up the world if you really want to solve the
problem; but the world is inside oneself. The tears, the innumerable
struggles and fears, they are all inside. Or the social reformer says,
"Forget yourself and do good", and you may work to forget yourself; but the
problem is still there. All the various specialists offer their own
remedies, but no one apparently is concerned with the total transformation
of man himself. All they offer is various forms of thinking. If you leave
one religion and go to another, you only change your mode of thinking. No
one seems to be concerned with the quality of thought, with the quality of
the mind that thinks."
I don't know if the Metaphysics of Quality is really about the total
transformation of man, in fact I doubt that seriously. But it is an attempt,
in my opinion, at concerning ourselves with the Quality of thought and mind
in its totality. Can we agree on this?
Rob:
>
>BTW, your "New Scientist" link did not work. I will spend more time later
>tracking the article, but do you have a copy you could easily email?
Glove:
As a matter of fact, I do:
DOES THE LANGUAGE you speak affect
the way you perceive the world? Jules Davidoff, a
psychologist at Goldsmith College in London, claims
that it does.
His new study challenges the idea that colour
perception is universal. Since 1972 research by
Eleanor Rosch, now at the University of California at
Berkeley, has dominated the field. She compared
colour discrimination by North Americans with that of
the Dani from Irian Jaya, Indonesia. The Dani use
only two words to describe all the colours they see,
whereas English speakers normally distinguish 11
separate colours, including black, white and grey.
Rosch asked the volunteers to remember a colour
they were shown, then pick it out from similar ones.
She concluded from her results that despite
differences in the way the two groups described
colour, the American and Dani volunteers made very
similar errors, evidence that they were perceiving
colours in the same way.
The finding lent powerful support to the idea that
such perception is universal, and not altered by
culture. "It was the first trickle in the flood of the
genetic determinism bandwagon that we're all on
now," says Davidoff.
Davidoff and his colleagues have now repeated the
experiments and come to completely different
conclusions. His group studied the Burinmo of Papua
New Guinea, a remote hunter-gatherer people who
use only five words to describe colours. They found
that both the Burinmo and British volunteers found it
easier to remember colours they could easily name.
Unlike English speakers, the Burinmo don't
distinguish between green and blue, but they
distinguish two colours English speakers don't: nol
(which different English speakers would describe as
green or blue or purple) and wor (in English, yellow,
orange, brown or green). The researchers asked
Burinmo and English volunteers to look at a colour,
remember it for a few seconds, then select the same
colour from a pair of similar alternatives. Not
surprisingly, the Burinmo had trouble distinguishing
between blues and greens, while English subjects had
problems with shades of nol and wor.
In another experiment, Davidoff's team asked both
the English and the Burinmo groups to learn a new
distinction: between two types of green. The
volunteers then had to sort colours into two stacks.
The Burinmo found it just as hard to separate blue
from green as to distinguish between the two greens,
whereas the English volunteers found the nol/wor
distinction most difficult to grasp.
The researchers also took a second look at the data
from Rosch's study, which Davidoff says most people
would interpret differently. People find it easier to
distinguish colours if the division corresponds to a
linguistic, rather than a supposed universal,
distinction, the team concludes in this week's Nature
(vol 398, p 203). "The effects of culture are being
underestimated," says Davidoff.
And here is the homepage url of New Scientist. Maybe it will work better:
http://www.newscientist.com/home.html
Thanks for listening and for your reply.
>Take Care,
>RJS
And you take care as well
Best wishes,
glove
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