From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sat Aug 09 2003 - 15:36:45 BST
Hi Platt and Squonk
Platt:
What I'm trying to describe is the creative PROCESS and to me the
intellectual LEVEL doesn't contain the catalyst, the energy if you
will, that's needed to create new harmonies. Sure, intellect is related
to DQ as are all the levels, but only secondarily.
Paul:
Precisely. Immediate apprehension of Dynamic Quality is necessarily
pre-intellectual. The static aesthetic that remains is the intellectual
harmony, or "truth".
Platt:
As Pirsig put it:
"In the MOQ Quality comes first which produces ideas which produce what
we know has matter." (Note 67, Lila's Child) To me, intellect is the
"home" for static intellectual patterns or "repertoire." To put it in
musical terms, the intellectual level contains the notes, the chords,
the tempos, the keys, the progressions and all the other musical
paraphernalia which an experiencing human being, responding to DQ,
combines into a creative composition. But the actual act of combining
is beyond the intellectual level. It's ahead of all levels. It's at the
front of the train. It's more a part of pure experiencing than
intellectualizing if you know what I mean. It's in the realm of
aesthetics, wherever that is.
Paul:
Yes, the pre-intellectual process of evaluating explanations of
experience is closer to the dharma than the explanations themselves.
Platt:
Maybe I'm being too picky, Squonk. But you, I, Paul and I'm sure others
are circling around the flame that's at the heart of the MOQ. I've been
convinced for a long time that the fuel for that flame emanates from
the realm of beauty and that DQ is the spark that lights it for us.
But, like everyone else who attempts it, I find it terribly hard to
pattern it intellectually, i.e., to put it into words. I need all the
help I can get and appreciate those who feel as I do more than I can
say.
Paul:
I think you exemplify the DQ-SQ tension inherent in being thinking
beings, as summed up in the following quotes:
"Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path
because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior
to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It
carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a
tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy
real understanding." Lila p.73
"As long as you're inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you
can't escape metaphysics." Lila p.75
Paul:
Nonetheless, I think we can gain from avoiding exclusive attachment to
either intellectual understanding or Dynamic understanding, but the
method of achieving this seems to be necessarily beyond verbal or
written instruction - hence Squonk's reference to "teaching without
teaching".
Paradoxically, I think that the "intellectual elusiveness" of the DQ-SQ
tension is really evidence of undifferentiated experience, ignored for
cultural rather than empirical reasons.
Cheers
Paul
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