[LM]
In it, Professor Pirsig explains the easy/easier
way of motorcycle maintenance: don't try to
impose your terms or experience from another
situation/time - get in "touch" with the
motorcycle and its workings *on its own terms*
(i.e. don't try to treat a motorcycle like a bicycle or a car).
[Arlo]
Off hand, this sounds like the part on the
internal gumption trap he calls "value rigidity".
Here is a passage, is this what you are referring to?
"Of the value traps, the most widespread and
pernicious is value rigidity. This is an
inability to revalue what one sees because of
commitment to previous values. In motorcycle
maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as
you go. Rigid values make this impossible.
The typical situation is that the motorcycle
doesn't work. The facts are there but you don't
see them. You're looking right at them, but they
don't yet have enough value. This is what Phædrus
was talking about. Quality, value, creates the
subjects and objects of the world. The facts do
not exist until value has created them. If your
values are rigid you can't really learn new facts.
This often shows up in premature diagnosis, when
you're sure you know what the trouble is, and
then when it isn't, you're stuck. Then you've got
to find some new clues, but before you can find
them you've got to clear your head of old
opinions. If you're plagued with value rigidity
you can fail to see the real answer even when
it's staring you right in the face because you
can't see the new answer's importance.
The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful
thing to experience. It's dualistically called a
"discovery" because of the presumption that it
has an existence independent of anyone's
awareness of it. When it comes along, it always
has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on
the value-looseness of the observer and the
potential quality of the fact, its value
increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value
wanes and the fact disappears.
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
preselect on the basis of Quality, or, to put it
Phædrus' way, the track of Quality preselects
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." (Pirsig)
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