DAVID B TRIES TO ACT LIKE A KNOW-IT-ALL and WRITE LIKE NIETZSCHE, AT THREE IN THE MORNING, AFTER A PARTY, WHILE OPERATING A RADIO STATION. Don't try this at home. Dynamic Quality is the sound of one hand clapping: it is the silent ground of being beyond all pairs of opposites, beyond all concepts, where no "thing" exists. DQ is the primary reality out of which all noisey "things" spring. ZMM began as an attempt to persuade a romantic thinker that his prejudice against technological things could be overcome by rethinking the notion of quality. Pirsig's artistic friend saw no beauty in machines, but that's just a matter of perception. Right is right. The classic/romantic split blinded the painter to Quality's omnipresence. What's moral and what is correct are the same thing. The subject/object cleavage hides the fact. An aesthetically correct painting "works" and efficiently running motorcycle is a beautiful thing. Conversely, it doesn't matter if the accountant is morally corrupt or simply incompetant, his books won't add up either way. Wrong is wrong. Sin is originally a term that comes from archery and means "to miss the target". Repent originally meant "to re-think your thoughts" and it's meaning included a moral imperitive, as in... "Hey, you're pretty mixed up! You better think again". What moral and what is correct are the same thing. An imperfect, but vivid and valuable analogy... Dynamic Quality is like the equation underlying a fractal image and Static Quality is the image itself. Static Quality is the actualized, visual representation of that underlying mathematical principle. They are one and the same, but we can see they are different. A most imaginable paradox. We can see the math. Correct is beautiful. The four levels of static patterns can then be seen as an infinite fractal progession, always growing and expanding, spiraling outward with new variations on the equation. The evolution of reality is the unfolding of Quality into all possible permutations. I thought it was Thou art That, but whatever. Atman and Brahman are Thou and That. William James' notion that experience depends on context reminds me of the mystic's saying that "the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere". Like Nishida's "distinctive sphere of limited experience", a single permutation is a limited, smaller version of the totality represented by the underlying principle. The Santiago theory holds that the worlds brought forth by living things "always depend on the organism's structure", but the organism's structure only reflects the single underlying principle; Quality. It's structure is both morally proper and factually correct. It's structure is the fruit of experience. It's form is the shape of experience. Formerly we'd say mind and matter arise mutually, but now we see they are the same thing. The Copernican revolution turned intellectual maps upside down, but the sun is warm on my face either way. Now the sun is within our reach, although it farther and bigger and hotter and more ancient than once imagined, but flowers bloom all the same. My skin burns either way. Horses and unicorns are both real, but unicorns exist only at the top two levels. Formerly we'd say that unicorns are merely subjective, but now we know myths and ideas are as real as rocks, they're just at different levels of existence. Precognitive sensory data is not the same as direct nonintellectual experience, sensory data is primary experience MEDIATED thru inorganic and biological static patterns. A cloud is so much more than white, but eyes are limited. EAch level adds further filters thru which direct experience is mediated. There no way to step outside the mythos, the complex of social level patterns of value is the very context of our thoughts. The values we unconsciosly inherit from the language we speak can't be objectified enought to effect escape. All concepts are mediated thru language. Ideas need words like packs need dogs. Intellectual patterns of value are out at the edge of that fractal progression, but still perfectly reflect the equation. That single principle describes the entire image, as well as each and every detail. Each and every detail is an expression of the one thing it really is; Quality. We, the details, can identify with the total image and the underlying equation because ultimately they are all the same "thing". (Experience is a verb, but you know what I mean.) Good is a noun. When "Dynamic Quality is identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is." LILA HB PAGE 377 There is a huge body of scholarship on the subject, no one needs to take my word for it. You can look it up, as they say. The similarities between the mystical view of reality and the MOQ is striking and undeniable. But Pirsig goes further than they are traditionally willing to go. He connects that unmediated primary experience and the very structure of reality into a coherent picture. He not only salvages the mystical experience from the merely subjective, he demonstrates that such experience is the basis of all reality. But the fractal analogy is flawed because unlike an elegant mathematical equation, DQ is beyond all static patterns and therefore beyond all concepts. DQ is a metaphor for a mystery, as is God. MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
