Part two of ??
There are three books you should read to understand Dynamic and static quality: "Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", "Lila" and "Zen in the Art of Archery".
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M Pirsig talks us through the
spiritual experience he feels towards his motorcycle. His experiences are of two
types. First, and most obviously, when riding his bike though America's backcountry he
feels elated and deeply in touch with his surroundings. It is a wonderful feeling, but
you get the impression that it is just slightly subordinate to his other great joy -
fixing his bike up. When he is in his garage completely absorbed with maintaining his
bike he experiences oneness. He believes it is because of this oneness that he is able
to intuitively fix and keep his bike in perfect condition. He rationalizes that in
order to maintain a bike correctly one must dedicate oneself to it, concentrating
completely and genuinely caring about it.
He separates these two experiences into romantic, which is the bliss of riding his
bike, and classic, which is the joy of fixing its underlying structure. In the sequel
to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" however, he discovers that at their
highest point these two are really the same thing. The high quality experience is the
same regardless of how it is achieved. In Lila he names this experience Dynamic
Quality and he names all other experience static quality.
"Zen and the Art of Archery" is a book by Eugen Herrigel that so inspired Pirsig that
he echoed the title of it in his own novel. "Zen and the Art of Archery" tells the
true story of a German philosopher who went to Japan to learn Zen Buddhism. He was
advised that the best way to learn it would be to first learn one of the Zen arts -
in this case archery. Agreeing to this he then embarked on six tedious and frustrating
years of learning how to pull a bow and release the arrow without any deliberate
thought. He had to learn that the arrow would simply hit the target without any
intentional aim or even any effort from him. He should not release the arrow but let
the arrow release him. The archer and the target are one reality.
Dynamic quality is something that everyone experiences although we don't all
experience it to the same degree. Whenever something unexpected happens and shakes you
out of your routine, the excitement that you feel is Dynamic. When you hear a record
on the radio that suddenly catches your attention and has you feeling good and humming
along even though you've never heard it before, that is Dynamic Quality. And when you
find there is something on your mind, or something you want to do and you just can't
let it go - like taking a course in computers, or changing your job, or campaigning
for safer driving laws - that desire is Dynamic too. Dynamic Quality is whatever seems
better to you. It appears to manifest itself in a thousand different ways but actually
it is always the same. The Dynamic Quality is not really in the things but in the
experience that you feel towards the things. So on Tuesday the most Dynamic experience
may be the idea of taking a trip to Mexico, on Wednesday !
!
!
it may be California. The things change but the Dynamic Quality is the same. It is
always oneness, it is always compelling and it is always empowering. It is fascination
and it manifests itself in whatever fascinates us. (thanks Maggie)
Some people understand Dynamic Quality very well. It is really just another name for
intuition or art - not in the sense of paintings and drawings but in the sense of
caring about and perfecting whatever endeavor you have embarked on. It's very obvious
and simple, but still many people struggle terribly with the idea. This struggle is
not because it is difficult but because phenomena such as liking, caring and
auspiciousness have been deemed not to exist by our "scientific" twentieth century
culture. There is no well-known scientific explanation of why you like one thing
better than something else. That's not to say that these people don't experience
Dynamic Quality, it's just that they have been taught to attach more importance to
what is written in books or what the culture says is important, than what they see
directly in their own lives. They see it, but they have no name for it so they shut it
out or assume it must be something else.
The purpose of the MOQ is to reinstate these concepts as valid and empirically
verifiable phenomena. Liking, goodness, caring, auspiciousness really do exist, Pirsig
argues, and he appropriates the word "Quality" with a capital Q to describe them.
Dynamic Quality is not all quality, only one subset of it. All things are good, he
says, but only some things are better. Dynamic Quality is that point at which the
betterness manifests itself. Static quality is everything else.
Diana
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
