John B. and fellow existentialists;
The moment of first self-awareness...? I guess its hard to tell if we're
both talking about the same thing or not. Maybe we can isolate such a moment
in our recollections, but it seems to me that we simply expand our awareness
over time, in stages of development. I think our sense of our selves as
seperate creatures is much, much older than the terrible loneliness of the
20th century. Subjects and objects are so much a part of our language and
thinking that its nearly impossible to communicate anything without them.
Language is older than intellect, and the secret psychiatric isolation is
the result of a flawed intellect.
SOM's effect has been to amplify our basic sense of self-awareness into an
exaggerated distortion. There is a new respect for the individual, resulting
in good things like rights and democracy, but it's also created a kind of
"atomization", a hyper-individualism and ego-mania. Paradoxically, this
amoral scientific objectivity dismisses our most profound experiences as
merely subjective, not quite real. It also uproots us from our context
because of its blindness to social values, which are seen as mere
convention, just subjectivity with a history. SOM asks us to give up our
"inner experiences" in favor of "objective reality". That's the source of
the alienation. That's the source of the loneliness and the alienating
ugliness of our machines and cities. That's what is behind the amorality of
nuclear weapons. As I mentioned last time, its not just a bad idea, its a
world-view that developed in an historical process. And I tried to suggest
that existentialism arose along side of that process as a reaction to it.
The existentialists were reacting to the development of a world-view that
increasingly dismissed the most deeply felt human values. Step by step, our
"subjective" experiences were rendered meaningless. Dieism, Darwinism, the
Death of God, two world wars and then Hydrogen bombs. Tick, tick, tick... It
seems less human every day. Once upon a time the entire cosmos was engaged
in a epic battle for your immortal soul, now one mad-man can make the whole
thing disappear in a flash, you and your world turned to ash, for no good
reason. That's the intellectual system used to run the world ?!? God help
us! Oh yea,.. there's no such thing.
I'm sure 7 year-old children have a sense of themselves, but an "existential
moment" would seem to require some maturity. Maybe I'm slow, but it seems I
was 12 or 13 when it first dawned on me that there were lots of unanswered
questions like "What's the meaning of life?". By then I'd begun to realize
that the scientists didn't even pretend to have answers about meaning and
purpose and Churchianity just seemed kinda dumb. "Does anything matter?", I
wondered.
Felt like I was inside a bubble the whole time I was growing up, not unlike
those glass doors between Phaedrus and Chris. I saw an old friend for the
first time in 4 or 5 years, we had dated in high school, and she asked me if
I was still in "the bubble". This startled me because I didn't recall ever
telling her about that, but said, instantly and without thought, "Yea, but
it's OK. Now I kind of like it." Ironically, there seemed to be a genuine
closeness and connection as we discussed this strange loneliness. We were
together in it. I'm not even sure if its MOQ, but it seems possible to turn
that prison into a refuge, a sanctuary. And its certainly safe to say that
the MOQ DOES put our experience at the center of things. The MOQ doesn't
dismiss our inner lives as mere subjectivity, it doesn't ask us to give up
our sense of awareness and self. It just wants to remove the distortions
caused by SOM, the secret loneliness is caused by this distortion.
I guess I can't say that the MOQ puts "the existential moment" into the
picture specifically, but it certainly re-images SOM's vision of our inner
states. Mere subjectivity is radically reinterpeted as the two highest
levels of reality, the most evolved kind of static quality, and this stuff
is as real as rocks, not just fleeting illusions in a ruthless and
meaningless universe. We don't just have thoughts and ideas, we ARE thoughts
and ideas, among other things. We're not peering out at an indifferent
world, we ARE the pinnacle of that world. And insofar as the intellect is at
the cutting edge of reality, we participate in the ongoing act of creation.
Thou art That. Feel at home yet?
Lifting the illusion of isolation doesn't require a mystical experience, a
new metaphysics is enough to fix a metaphysical error. BUT a mystical
experience would remove any doubt about the theory. And the theory INCLUDES
the mystical experience. That's one of the main reason Pirsig abandonded his
classic/romantic split. It failed to explain mysticism and insanity, those
radically "subjective" experiences that are almost totally invalid in SOM.
Those alarm bells that go off when you hear the word "mysticism" are the
sound of SOM and the cultural immune system. But that's OK. Anything that
violates conventional wisdom so dramatically ought to be accepted slowly and
carefully. Conventional wisdom isn't ALWAYS wrong, but in the case of the
mystical experience I think it is quite mistaken. I think its too deep and
wide to be ignored and the yearning for it is probably what is ultimately
behind your quest for intimacy. As the shamefully corny Jackson Brown
wrote...
What became of the changes we waited for love to bring?
Were they only the fitful dreams of some greater awakening?
How many different words did the ancient Greeks have for LOVE? I think there
is a longing and a yearning for connection and communion. The love people
feel for one another is not just some comforting sentiment, its just one set
of mainfestations of a principle that pervades all of reality.
Quality is just a metaphor, and its probably the best one, but imagine the
unthinkable; The metaphysics of love. That would never, ever sell. But just
imagine for a while that Pirsig is saying that reality is composed of
nothing but love, created by love and for love. Compare that notion to
amoral scientific objectivity of SOM. It the most extreme opposite that I
can image.
DMB
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