From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Oct 29 2003 - 17:17:53 GMT
Hi Scott
Paul prev:
> In the passage above, I think "awareness" correlates with Quality, the
> "process of selection" correlates with static patterns emerging from
> ongoing Dynamic Quality and the "process of discrimination" correlates
> with intellect.
Scott:
Yes, but I disagree with it. I see intellect doing all selection,
discriminating, and so forth, and awareness as another name for the same
thing. That is, awareness is the DQ/SQ divide, just as is intellect,
while
Quality is the undivided (and the undivided is not other than the
divided,
but...). One problem is the tendency to associate awareness with sense
perception, ignoring that acts of intellect are also acts of awareness.
Paul:
Yes, sense perception refers to the creation of biological patterns and
limits what is meant by "static patterns emerging from Dynamic Quality."
I think I see what you are getting at. Whilst the MOQ is an empirical
philosophy, its empirical reality is value, not just biological sense
data. This quote from ZMM..
"The overwhelming majority of facts, the sights and sounds that are
around us every second and the relationships among them and everything
in our memory...these have no Quality, in fact have a negative quality.
If they were all present at once our consciousness would be so jammed
with meaningless data we couldn't think or act. So we pre-select on the
basis of Quality, or, to put it Phædrus' way, the track of Quality
pre-selects what data we're going to be conscious of, and it makes this
selection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we
are becoming." [ZMM p.320]
..is describing a process operating outside of and prior to my
understanding of thinking, but to you it is describing an aspect of
thinking. I can accept that in the limited sense that Quality is at once
the potential for everything we see, feel, think etc. and, as such, is
pre-selecting the inorganic, biological, social and intellectual
patterns that compose static reality. In other words, undifferentiated
value is also all differentiated value, including intellectual patterns.
This is in accordance with a Pirsig comment in Lila's Child:
"In the language of everyday life, reality and intellect are different.
From the language of the Buddha’s world, they are the same, since there
is no intellectual division that governs the Buddha’s world." [Lila's
Child p.567]
It seems to me that thinking in "the world of everyday affairs" is
entirely different from thinking "in Buddha's world," and as such, I
prefer to restrict intellect to the former - conscious, deliberate
activity such as planning, predicting, calculating, reasoning etc. This
is perhaps where our disagreement about intellect lies.
Paul prev:
> To "see" or experience the "process of selection" directly and not
hang
> on to the results of this process as reality [and thus achieve
> "awareness"] is what, I think, Buddha taught.
Scott:
Well, the Buddha, like Jesus and Socrates, never wrote anything down, so
one
is inevitably second guessing what he "really" taught, other than the
Four
Noble Truths.
Paul:
Indeed.
Scott:
But what Buddhists teach, at least Mahayana ones, is that form
is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form. And I
think Pirsig's centric mysticism misses this.
Paul:
I've tried to find your post on centric mysticism to Matt, which one is
it?
Cheers
Paul
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