From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jan 08 2005 - 21:11:37 GMT
Hi Scott,
Just so I understand your view of mystic experience a bit better, would
you say the following passage from Lila is descriptive of such an
experience?
"He found an example within the field of music. He said, imagine that you
walk down a street past, say, a car where someone has the radio on and it
plays a tune you've never heard before but which is so fantastically good
it just stops you in your tracks. You listen until it's done. Days later
you remember exactly what that street looked like when you heard that
music. You remember what was in the store window you stood in front of.
You remember what the colors of the cars in the street were, where the
clouds were in the sky above the buildings across the street, and it all
comes back so vividly you wonder what song they were playing, and so you
wait until you hear it again. . . . The first good, that made you want to
buy the record, was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality comes as a sort of
surprise. What the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static
patterns in such a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone
through. It was free, without static forms." (Lila, 9)
From what you said below, I take it this is NOT descriptive of mystic
experience.
> From all this, I hope you see why I don't find much value in Pirsig's view
> of mysticism, for two reasons. One, he makes too much of "pure experience",
> i.e., of experiencing DQ by removing all static patterns. Many mystics
> report something like this, but as the Wilber quote shows, that isn't the
> goal. One might say that the goal is to experience SQ without attachment to
> any particular SQ. The second reason is that Pirsig denigrates intellect
> with respect to DQ. Given what Merrell-Wolff and Plotinus say, I think it
> better to treat intellect as DQ/SQ, but it needs to be purified, i.e, fully
> detached. But intellect is the tool by which one purifies one's intellect
> -- meditation is concentrated practice of this.
Platt
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