From: Erin N. (enoonan@kent.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2002 - 15:53:31 GMT
Wim,
PIRSIG: 'Karma is the pain, the suffering that results from clinging to the
static patterns of the world. The only exit from the suffering is to detach
yourself from these static patterns, that is, to kill them.
A common way taken to kill them is suicide, but suicide only kills
biological patterns. That's like destroying a computer because you can't
stand the program it's running. The social and intellectual patterns that
caused the suicide have to be carried on by others. From an evolutionary
point of view it's really a backward and therefore immoral step. Another
immoral way of killing the static patterns is to pass the patterns to
someone else, in what Phaedrus called a "karma dump." You invent a devil
group, Jews or blacks or whites or capitalists or communists-it doesn't
matter -then say that group is responsible for all your suffering, and then
hate it and try to destroy it. On a daily personal level everyone has things
or people they hate and blame for their suffering and this hatred and blame
brings a kind of relief.'
PIRSIG:'If you take all this karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by
passing it on to others that's normal. That's the way the world works. But
if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that's the highest moral
conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you. The whole
world. If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of
history-Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi, and others- you'll see that that's what
they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the
absorption of karmic garbage. They didn't pass it on. Their followers
sometimes did, but they didn't.
On the other hand, Phaedrus supposed, when you're on the receiving end of
some karma dump like that it sets you free.'
ERIN: can somebody explain what this last sentence means?
WIM:It's very interesting to take a real life case to think through the
consequences of this 'final' morality Pirsig offers in the last chapter of
'Lila'. Say 11 September and the 'war on terrorism'... Who is dumping karma
on whom? What if a group is 'really' responsible for some of the suffering
of some of the people you identify with and may become responsible for a lot
more suffering? To what extent should a devil group be fantasy and to what
extent can they be 'really' responsible before we consider retaliation to be
'karma dump' and ... before NOT retaliating is the highest moral conduct?
It seems to me that in normal situations, in which any 'devil group' is
partly wrongly and partly rightly blamed for our suffering, something more
may be needed than just 'absorbing' their 'karmic garbage'. Helping the
static patterns to which 'they' and 'we' cling to migrate towards DQ for
instance. 'Killing them' doesn't seem a very helpful metaphor to me here.
Just retaliating, going to war, 'ending a regime' won't do. We must be aware
of our own 'clinging to static patterns', too and strive to dynamise our
reactions.
ERIN: Could you expand on the difference of killing a
static pattern and helping the static pattern
migrate towards DQ.
Or in context of Rudy's question--
difference in killing a SOM pattern and helping
an SOM migrate
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