Hello to you all. Posting from Huntington Beach, California., this is
Bill Justin, a contractor and Pirsig student since the mid-70's.
I've been reading here for a week and am very impressed. Some comments on the topic of power and the MOQ:
Diana McPartlin describes power as a synonym for Quality. For me the two notions have been merged very closely with a few other terms. You might be able to say Quality is the bloom and perfume of Power-in some sense a result of its expression in space and time.
David Buchanan suggests that this monthly topic of power is very broad. He mentions some of the many categories of power and how they feature condensed energy that is rightly seen as being both positive and negative. The thought of defining all of the variants of "power" here in this thread isn't too appealing.
Richpretti on the other hand sounds very attracted to the general idea of stretching out all of these benchmarks of DQ when he writes: "We really ought to jointly create a chronology of significant Dynamic improvements and static latching. Is this somehow possible on this site...a continually expanding and improving list of (Quality) events and space-time locations, to which anyone can add according to his or her knowledge?
I don't exactly know what Rich has in mind, but it makes me think of this project I got involved in early one morning back in the eighties. It might be a more static version of what he's thinking about. Let me offer the gist of it.
I had made a list of 7 positions on a…. Totem pole if you will. The seven positions mirrored the classic 7 positions said to be represented on the human spine-the chakras.
At the top of the list I made spaces for six other horizontal positions which were to represent intellectual categories-static intellectual values. The idea was to fill up all the blank spaces with words that somehow fit their individual position between the two sets of terms. So, I thought this was quite a brainstorm I was having and sat there and filled up all the spaces with words-42 of them. Outside of this strange matrix I placed a 43rd position I called Quality (this was before I was thinking in Pirsig terms of Static and dynamic).
When I'd finished the whole thing I naturally wondered what it was good for! It looked sort of interesting with all its lines and positions, but I began to wonder about its ultimate value to anyone but me. If nothing else, it seemed like a pretty nifty devise for studying terms and values. But the whole thing was pretty sketchy and it depended on an understanding of the classic values that have been assigned to the 7 developments or chakras that brings about this "totem pole". I always thought I'd go back and refine the scheme but I never did. I continued to think about though.
I'll call this thing I described "a matrix" (the one with all the names I put to the positions I call "Bill's matrix" and I keep it locked away where nobody can see it).
A few years later I was again smitten by this "a matrix" notion when I happened to pick up a strange object on a rocky stretch of beach. It was sort of square but its squareness was falling away at one corner-dripping a bit outward. I couldn't tell if it was metal or stone or just what it was. It had an aqua blue squarish surface on one side that was set into it. There were small holes set into the surface but not through it. There were maybe three or four lines of holes horizontally and vertically. I showed it to some friends and kept it as a talisman on shelves and in coin jars and fantasized that maybe it was some lost "power chip" from Atlantis or something. I haven't seen it for a while and think it might've gotten lost but the object itself was never as important to me as the notion of this "a matrix" thing.
When Lila came out and talked about four levels of value, I got interested in the notion again. The four levels-like boxes in a row-made my strange scheme easier to grasp. When I spread out the 7 levels of the totem pole into the four value categories of intellect,
social, biological and inorganic, my "a matrix" started to look less half-baked then ever!
If I were to label a category of the third position on the totem pole that was on the biological level , I could for instance, use the word "stomach". The space next to it on the social level might allow me to use the word "guts". Anyway, what Rich said reminded me of all of this so I thought I'd mention it here.
These many years later, the best I can say about this "a matrix" is that perhaps it might be useful in helping to focus one's attention on how to arrive at a quality curriculum for teaching little kids some of the basics for life. Maybe a page with pictures they can click on which opens other pages filled with content that evokes them to some pursuit of knowledge. I don't know. That would make the "a matrix" a kind of table of contents/index sort of thing. I've heard some mystics speak against indexes but I've also seen more scientific mystics use various sets of values as an overview. At any rate, comments would be very interesting to me.
Once again, great work here!
Best regards,
Bill Justin mailto:elg14@earthlink.net
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:56 BST