From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Sat Nov 30 2002 - 22:51:52 GMT
Dear Platt (and Sam and others),
What Glenn referred to with 'the devil is a biological pattern' is a quote
from Pirsig in chapter 30 of 'Lila'. Its context is his discussion of
insanity. It is worth rereading. It also illuminates other discussions we
are involved in, e.g. about mysticism and maybe even the one about the value
of the eucharist, Sam.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
>From chapter 30 of 'Lila':
What's wrong with insanity is that she's outside any culture. She's a
culture of one. She has her own reality which no other culture is able to
see. That's what had to be reconciled. It could be that if he just didn't
give her any problems for the next few days her culture of one might just
clear the whole thing up by itself.
He wasn't going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital
they'd just start shooting her fill of drugs and tell her to adjust. What
they wouldn't see is that she is adjusting. That's what the insanity is.
She's adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn't
necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in
a right direction. It wasn't necessarily a disease. It could be part of a
cure.
He was no expert on the subject but it seemed to him that the problem of
"curing" an insane person is like the problem of "curing" a Moslem or
"curing" a communist or "curing" a Republican or Democrat. You're not going
to make much progress by telling them how wrong they are. If you can
convince a mullah that everything will be of higher value if he changes his
beliefs to those of Christianity, then a change is not only possible but
likely. But if you can't, forget it. And if you can convince Lila that it's
more valuable to consider her "baby" to be a doll than it is to consider her
doll to be a baby, then her condition of "insanity" will be alleviated. But
not before.
That doll thing was a solution to something, some child thing, but he didn't
know what it was. The important thing was to support her delusions and then
slowly wean her away from them rather than fight them.
The catch here, which almost any philosopher would spot, is the word,
"delusion." It's always the other person who's "deluded." Or ourselves in
the past. Ourselves in the present are never "deluded." Delusions can be
held by whole groups of people, as long as we're not a part of that group.
If we're a member then the delusion becomes a "minority opinion."
An insane delusion can't be held by a group at all. A person isn't
considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way.
Insanity isn't supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person
starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.
Thus, when sane grown men in Italy and Spain carry statues of Christ through
the streets, that's not an insane delusion. That's a meaningful religious
activity because there are so many of them. But if Lila carries a rubber
statue of a child with her wherever she goes, that's an insane delusion
because there's only one of her.
If you ask a Catholic priest if the wafer he holds at mass is really the
flesh of Jesus Christ, he will say yes. If you ask, "Do you mean
symbolically'?" he will answer, "No, I mean actually." Similarly if you ask
Lila whether the doll she holds is a dead baby she will say yes. If you ask,
"Do you mean symbolically?" she would also answer, "No, I mean 'actually."
It is considered correct to say that until you understand that the wafer is
really the body of Christ you will not understand the Mass. With equal force
it is possible to say that until you understand that this doll is really a
baby you will never understand Lila. She's a culture of one. She's a
religion of one. The main difference is that the Christian, since the time
of Constantine, has been supported by huge social patterns of authority.
Lila isn't. Lila's religion of one doesn't have a chance.
That isn't a completely fair comparison, though. If the major religions of
the world consisted of nothing but statues and wafers and other such
paraphernalia they would have disappeared long ago in the face of scientific
knowledge and cultural change, Phaedrus thought. What keeps them going is
something else.
It. sounds quite blasphemous to put religion and insanity on an equal
footing for comparison, but his point was not to undercut religion, only to
illuminate insanity. He thought the intellectual separation of the topic of
"sanity" from the topic of "religion" has weakened our understanding of
both.
The current subject-object point of view of religion, conventionally muted
so as not to stir up the fanatics, is that religious mysticism and insanity
are the same. Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It's a vestige of
the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything and the whole
world was sinking deeper and deeper into filth and disease and poverty and
ignorance. It is one of those delusions that isn't called insane only
because there are so many people involved.
Until quite recently Oriental religions and Oriental cultures have been
similarly grouped as "backward," suffering from disease and poverty
and-ignorance because they were sunk into a demented mysticism. If it were
not for the phenomenon of Japan suddenly leaving the subject-object cultures
looking a little backward, the cultural immune system surrounding this view
would be impregnable.
The Metaphysics of Quality identifies religious mysticism with Dynamic
Quality. It says the subject-object people are almost right when they
identify religious mysticism with insanity. The two are almost the same.
Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static
intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the
lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, whereas the
mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality.
The Metaphysics of Quality says that as long as the psychiatric approach is
encased within a subject-object metaphysical understanding it will always
seek a patterned solution to insanity, never a mystic one. For exactly the
same reasons that Choctaw Indians don't distinguish blue from green and
Hindi speaking people don't distinguish ice from snow, modem psychology
cannot distinguish between a patterned reality and an unpattemed reality and
thus cannot distinguish lunatics from mystics. They seem to be the same.
When Socrates says in one of his dialogues, "Our greatest blessings come to
us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift," the
psychiatric profession doesn't know what in the world he is talking about Or
when traces of this identification are found in the expression "touched in
the head" meaning touched by God, the roots of this expression are ignored
as ignorant and superstitious.
It's another case of the Cleveland Harbor Effect, where you don't see what
you don't look for, because when one looks through the record of our culture
for connections between insane understanding and religious understanding one
soon finds them everywhere. Even the idea of insanity as "possession by the
Devil" can be explained by the Metaphysics of Quality as a lower biological
pattern, "the Devil," trying to overcome a higher pattern of conformity to
cultural belief.
"The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that in addition to the customary
solutions to insanity-conform to cultural patterns or stay locked up-there
is another one. This solution is to dissolve all static patterns, both sane
and insane, and find the base of reality. Dynamic Quality, that is
independent of all of them. The Metaphysics of Quality says that it is
immoral for sane people to force cultural conformity by suppressing the
Dynamic drives that produce insanity. Such suppression is a lower form of
evolution trying to devour a higher one. Static social and intellectual
patterns are only an intermediate level of evolution. They are good servants
of the process of life but if allowed to turn into masters they destroy it.
Once this theoretical structure is available, it offers solutions to some
mysteries in the present treatment of the insane. For example, doctors know
that shock treatment "works," but are fond of saying that no one knows why.
The Metaphysics of Quality offers an explanation. The value of shock
treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It
certainly does not do that. Its value is that it destroys all patterns, both
cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state.
All the shock does is duplicate the effects of hitting the patient over the
head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks him senseless. In fact it was to
imitate the effect of hitting someone over the head with a baseball bat
without the risk of skull injury that Ugo Cerletti developed shock treatment
in the first place.
But what goes unrecognized in a subject-object theoretical structure is the
fact that this senseless unpatterned state is a valuable state of existence.
Once the patient is in this state the psychiatrists of course don't know
what to do with it, and so the patient often slips back into lunacy and has
to be knocked senseless again and again. But sometimes the patient, in a
moment of Zen wisdom, sees the superficiality of both his own contrary
patterns and the cultural patterns, sees that the one gets him electrically
clubbed day after day and the other sets him free from the institution, and
thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by
whatever avenue is available.
Another mystery in the treatment of the insane explained by a value-centered
metaphysics is the value of peace and quiet and isolation. For centuries
that has been the primary treatment of the insane. Leave them alone.
Ironically the one thing the mental hospitals and doctors do best is the one
thing they never take credit for. Maybe they're afraid some crusading
journalist or other reformer will come along and say, "Look at all those
poor crazies in there with nothing to do. Inhuman treatment," so they don't
play that part of it up. They know it works, but there's no way of
justifying that because the whole cultural set they have to operate in says
that doing nothing is the same as doing something wrong.
The Metaphysics of Quality says that what sometimes accidentally occurs in
an insane asylum but occurs deliberately in a mystic retreat is a natural
human process called dhyana in Sanskrit. In our culture dhyana is
ambiguously called "meditation." Just as mystics traditionally seek
monasteries and ashrams and hermitages as retreats into isolation and
silence, so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm
and austerity and silence. Sometimes, as a result of this monastic retreat
into silence and isolation the patient arrives at a state Karl Menninger has
described as "better than cured." He is actually in better condition than he
was before the insanity started. Phaedrus guessed that in many of these
"accidental" cases, the patient had learned by himself not to cling to any
static patterns of ideas-cultural, private or any other.
In the insane asylum this dhyana is underrated and often undermined because
there is no metaphysical basis for understanding it scientifically. But
among religious mystics, particularly Oriental mystics, dhyana has been one
of the most intensely studied practices of all.
This Western treatment of dhyana is a beautiful example of how the static
patterns of a culture can make something not exist, even when it does exist.
People in this culture axe hypnotized into thinking they do not meditate
when in fact they do.
Dhyana was what this boat was all about. It's what Phaedrus had bought it
for, a place to be alone and quiet and inconspicuous and able to settle down
into himself and be what he really was and not what he was thought to be or
supposed to be. In doing this he didn't think he was putting this boat to
any special purpose. That's what the purpose of boats like this has always
been . . . and seaside cottages too . . . and lake cabins . . . and hiking
trails . . . .and golf courses. . . . It's the need for dhyana that is
behind all these.
Vacations too . . . how perfectly named that is . . . a vacation, an
emptying out . . . that's what dhyana is, an emptying out of all the static
clutter and junk of one's life and Just settling into an undefined sort of
tranquillity.
That's what Lila's Involved in now, a huge vacation, an emptying out of the
junk of her life. She's clinging to some new pattern because she thinks it
holds back the old pattern. But what she has to do is take a vacation from
all patterns, old and new, and just settle into a kind of emptiness for a
while. And if she does, the culture has a moral obligation not to bother
her. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to
move onward.
The Metaphysics of Quality associates religious mysticism with Dynamic
Quality but it would certainly be a mistake to think that the Metaphysics of
Quality endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious sect.
Phaedrus thought sectarian religion was a static social fallout from Dynamic
Quality and that while some sects had fallen less than others, none of them
told the whole truth.
His favorite Christian mystic was Johannes Eckhart, who said, "Wouldst thou
be perfect, do not yelp about God." Eckhart was pointing to a profound
mystic truth, but you can guess what a hand of applause it got from the
static authorities of the Church. "Ill-sounding, rash, and probably
heretical," was the general verdict.
>From what Phaedrus had been able to observe, mystics and priests tend to
have a cat-and-dog-like coexistence within almost every religious
organization. Both groups need each other but neither group likes the other
at all.
There's an adage that, "Nothing disturbs a bishop quite so much as the
presence of a saint in the parish." It was one of Phaedrus's favorites. The
saint's Dynamic understanding makes him unpredictable and uncontrollable,
but the bishop's got a whole calendar of static ceremonies to attend to;
fund-raising projects to push forward, bills to pay, parishioners to meet
That saint's going to up-end everything if he isn't bandied diplomatically.
And even then he do something wildly unpredictable that upsets everybody.
What a quandary. It can take the bishops years, decades, even centuries to
put down the hell that a saint can raise in a single day. Joan of Arc is the
prime example.
In all religions bishops tend to gild Dynamic Quality with all sorts of
static interpretations because their cultures require it. But these
interpretations become like golden vines that cling to a tree, shut out its
sunlight and eventually strange it.
Phaedrus heard the sound of a car coming closer from behind. When it
approached he held out his thumb and it stopped. He told the driver he was
looking for groceries and the driver took him to Atlantic Highlands where
the car was going anyway. At a supermarket Phaedrus filled the tote bags
with all the food he could find that looked good, then found another ride
back as far as the junction in the road where Sandy Hook started. He
shouldered his bags, now pretty heavy, hoping another ride would come along,
but none came.
He thought some more about Lila's insanity and how it was related to
religious mysticism and how both were integrated into reason by the
Metaphysics of Quality. He thought about bow once this integration occurs
and Dynamic Quality is identified with religious mysticism it produces an
avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this
religious mysticism is just low-grade "yelping about God" of course, but if
you search for the sources of it and don't take the yelps too literally a
lot of interesting things turn up.'
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