From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Mon Jul 21 2003 - 10:26:14 BST
Hello again Khoo.
Are you really from that period? Wow!
On 14 July you wrote: ..as a response to this from me:
> > By the way, do you know Alan Watts' efforts to bridge the East/West
> > gap?
> Unfortunately I am not acquainted with Alan Watts. I made a cursory
> scan of his works and he seems to have written volumes on Zen and
> Buddhism some dating back to the time when I was born.
I'm not going to recommend any reading, but allow me to chat a litle. I
am as you know now an old hand , but back in my relative youth I
made a great effort to understand the Eastern outlook and Alan Watts
was my guide. My copy of his "Way of Zen" is multicolored and dog-
eared, but I don't know if I really understood his explanation of how
the Eastern "mind" was not our kind. Yet one thing did I understand
at that time and when much later reading LILA I immediately
recognized something. He (Watts) said that the Eastern tradition has
realized that to make an individual a (good) member of society
demands a certain "breaking of will" and that an individual necessarily
gets hurt in the process . This is the Confucians part while Taoisms
role is to undo the damage by giving the individual back its freedom.
This as we see a complete reversal of the he Western tradition where
religion is the guardian of SOCIAL morals and there is no "institution"
corresponding to Buddhism/Taoism. Breaking social rules (crime)
demands a rejection of religious truths and have resulted in the
constant upheavals of Western culture. Great revolutions that directed
their force on the unholy Nobility/Church alliance and efforts on
atheism. Futile of course, human beings are searching for greater
contexts and so the pendulum swings back to a belief in a "social"
God (good).
The Metaphysics of Quality bridges this gap and the RT part of LILA
describes how the stability/dynamics tension has been solved long
ago by the Eastern Tradition and brings the well-known stability to the
Far East cultures. But the MOQ even goes further and re-injects a
fruitful "tension" back again by enlarging the morals spectrum from
the social constraint/intellectual freedom "see-saw to the new
QUALITY that put the two into a new context . OK enough
> The funny thing
> is in spite of all the work done on bridging Eastern and Western
> philosophies all these years, and all the intellectual effort that has
> gone into it; there is still this great unbridged "chasm". ZAMM and
> Lila tried to demonstrate the shortcomings of Western SOM by going
> back to its roots and origins in Greece; but said little about other
> societies and cultures and their philosophies. I remember in the early
> days of the MOQ, you asked Diana :
You were listening in at that time? And still store/remember some
posts? Yes, I remember this request and that Diana turned a bit sour
...she did more frequently so as the work-load increased, but she was
a gem to start it all.
> Here I equated the mind with the intellectual level. A primary
> objective of Buddhism is to transcend both the mind and the
> intellectual level.
To transcend mind sounds like Sysofos' task, but transcending
"intellect" (in the subject/object sense) is equal to achieving the
Quality outlook..
> The buddhist monk who tried to get me to meditate
> right made it very clear I was not to achieve insight with intellect.
> Intellectual activity generates work and distraction for the mind and
> does not calm it for the purposes of meditation.
Exactly!
> While intellectual
> activity is required for society to function, it is not valued as an
> individual activity for those who wish to seek enlightenment. Hence we
> have societies and cultures such as found in Tibet and Myanmar where
> the unstated Gross National Product in the broadest MOQ sense is
> measured, by among others, the annual output of buddhasitvas, buddhist
> monks and temples, and all the activities that support them. Ditto for
> Sri Lanka and Thailand.
What is affirmed by my observations at the start. Those societies
COULD use the MOQ to get the Society/Intellect relationship sorted
out so that contemplation don't create poverty.
Is that about the GNP true? Great!. Well, in western countries fires,
air and road accidents with lethal outcome are GNP assets ..so why
not?.
> Of course there are nations like Japan, Korea and Taiwan which have
> soaked up western science and technology like a sponge, affixed the
> products of western intellect to their larger cosmology and made
> subject-object metaphysics a workhorse for their society and culture.
Hmm, interesting observations
> Have they, as Squonk would like to ask, within their collective
> society properly placed intellect at its proper level and are actually
> consciously working at the fifth level; the level of harmony and unity
> ?
If Squonk actually posed it that way he may not be so "bad":-)
> From the western point of view, one may only see the empirical
> data and all too easily miss out on the intangibles.
> It is a shame that we are still bogged down in the 1 per cent and made
> so little headway with the 99 percent that Pirsig speaks of. There is
> a lot more ground to cover and Lila's Child notwithstanding I am sure
> Lila will have lots of grandchildren and great grand children too !!
You should have entered the discussion before Khoo, maybe we
could have made better mileage. Still, I think its basics must be
solidified - and the current definition of its intellect has been THE weak
point. Judging by Pirsig's words he would not be the least dismayed if
it is questioned.
Yours sincerely
Bo
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