From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Tue May 11 2004 - 03:50:45 BST
MSH and all deadly forcers:
About the ZAMM quote below, dmb had said:
As I read it, young Phaedrus is giving up because he's disgusted by
the professor's lack of moral outrage.
"But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was
blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for
what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked
coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor
smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange."
(ZMM-PB, Page 126)
msh replied:
Sure that's part of it. But if you read on he says something like,
Well that sort of philosophy is fine for some people, people who
don't read books and newspapers, and have little to do with the daily
world. But for anyone who cares about massive human suffering, it's
woefully inadequate... I don't have the book in front of me. so
can't quote exactly, sorry. The point is, he's rejecting the
philosophy, bath water and baby both.
dmb says:
You certainly have the idea and quote is almost exactly right. I looked it
up and found that it says, "Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that
answer may have been correct, but for Phaedrus and for anyone else who reads
newspapers regularly and is concerned with such thngs as mass destruction of
human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom,
left India and gave up." Thought the "Guidebook to ZAMM" might shed some
light. It said, "The departure is readily understood as a young man's
concsientious response to an un conscionable point of view; but what about
the professor's response? Is that the authentic and inevitable conclusion of
the philosophic tradition that the professor was expounding?" These two
passages confirm that there is an element of moral outrage. But I also found
something else. The Guidebook continues with...
..."I think it important to point out that he might have answered
differently without doing injustice to the tradition. He might have said,
for example, that there are levels of truth and reality. A higher-level
truth might delete a lower-level truth ON THE HIGHER LEVEL without deleting
the lower-level truth ON ITS OWN LEVEL; a higher level reality might cause a
lower-level reality to vanish ON THE HIGHER LEVEL without rendering the
lower-level reality illusory ON ITS OWN LEVEL. Thus, we who live on the
lower level the level of empirical consciousness, must rgard as real and
take very seriously events like Hirshima, even though we believe that such
events disappear on the highest level. We are where we are, and we shouldn't
pretend to be where we aren't. When we say the things of the world are
mayic, illusory, we are speaking of what is true from a standpoint of the
highest level"
The paragraph just prior to the brief exchange expresses this same idea;
that there are "levels of truth and reality". There (page 126) it is
discussed in terms of shedding the illusion through meditation practices
like Zen. "The illusion of separation of subject from object," he writes,
"is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity
and emotional activity". And later, on page 265, he says,..
"This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical
quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels
of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried
alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering
thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value
quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs
the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest."
Not only can we see the MOQ pre-figured in this discussion of levels, we can
see that the moral outrage young Phaedrus experienced was correct on a
certain level, the level where he was at the time. In that same paragraph on
page 126 he also says that meditation made no sense to him at the time and
that he "couldn't find any honest way to abandon his belief" in logical
consistency. So his outrage was based on intellectual values, as the MOQ
would call them. This does not contradict the mystical truth that such an
outrage was just an illusion provided we keep the idea in mind that "there
are levels of truth and reality". This idea, which Ken Wilber calls
"epistemological pluralism", is included in nearly every major thought
system in the world except the Modern West, except SOM, which insists on a
single 'objective' truth based on the physical senses.
I know this is all pretty sketchy, but I suspect you can connect the dots.
Thanks,
dmb
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