From: Sebastian Hammer (quinn@indexdata.dk)
Date: Mon Nov 17 2003 - 12:58:41 GMT
At 07:22 17-11-2003 -0500, Nathan Pila wrote:
>When I was younger I read Superman comics. Your idea of a 'larger pattern'
>sounds familiar. It reminds me of the Phantom Zone of the Superman comics,
>where disembodied souls float around in another dimension.
When I read Pirsig's description of his Chris's death, I always took the
'larger pattern' to have more to do with the persistent influences of
person on his environment, primarily on the lives and minds of other
people. These influences remain, like rings remain in water after a stone
has dropped out of sight. You can reach into the water and remove the stone
entirely, but the rings, the larger pattern, remains. The person may be
gone, but his impact on you remains a reality -- you just can't communicate
with him anymore. If you also accept that much of what we perceive to be
'reality' are in fact mental constructs, then the 'ghost' of Chris is
indeed as real as anything else, and for those who knew him, his subsequent
'reincarnation' is an adequate model of reality, even if it has nothing to
do with spirituality in the carnival freak show sense of the word.
In some sense, those few words out of the author's notes in an old
paperback edition of ZAMM have had as large an impact on my thinking about
life and death as anything in his writing, and I'm grateful to him for that.
--Sebastian
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