Ham: I think we should be more cautious when labeling perception and thought processes. A "trance" is commonly understood to be a state of suspended animation, profound abstraction or absorption. Our experience of reality, or even our interpretation of its systemic "framework", doesn't require a hypnotic state of mind. After all, if we are walking around in a trance just to have experience, what esoteric state must we enter in order to think intuitively, as in philosophical conceptualization?
Hi Ham and Platt; In NLP the term 'trance' is used very loosely. It refers simply to an 'altered state of consciousness'. As I am composing this post to you I am conscious of/ am experiencing all that enables me to do this as best I can, but when the phone rings (as I am composing my post) and a students says 'Hello', I have to alter my consciousness/experience and focus on the student, when the student asks if I enjoyed yesterday's outing to the lake with them, I have to remember that experience and once again have to alter my consciousness etc etc. If I want to communicate the experience of this outing to a person who did not come with us, I have to alter that person's consciousness, hypnotise them (if you like) ,through the language I use (creating in this person pictures, sounds and feelings that resemble mine). The closer they resemble eachother the better the person understands my experience of this outing. You do the same thing when to tell someone about a holiday you have had, how your workday was etc etc. If you cannot achieve this, i.e. no semblance occurs then that person will not understand a word you have said...literally will not be able to make sense of it, will have no idea what you are talking about. So NLP does not use it as a state of 'suspended animation'. Added to this, and referring to Platt's post about 'culture handing us a set of intellectual glasses', one can interpret this as a collective hypnotic state ( I think Pirsig actually uses this term somewhere in ZMM), i.e. being hynotised into culture's definition/collective experience/ interpretation of reality. In this sense I mean that I am walking around in a hypnotised/ trance-like state. As said before, to have this 'state' challenged by living and working in a completely different culture (which has its own,very different to mine, glasses on) can lead to shock, depression, frustration, but also to dynamically become aware of your glasses and finding that they are not the only true, ligitimate, absolute pair. To use a Mark Knopfler line: ' and there is just one world, but we live in different ones'.( Brothers in Arms , I think?) Which is the truer or the best depends on what outcomes you want and this is where the torch called MoQ comes in. Platt: Good point. The MOQ as a rigid interpretation of experience, like any other single-minded conceptual framework, would qualify as a trance state. But here's the thing about the MOQ. It says that reality is prior to conception and is therefore immediate, intuitive, undeliberate and involuntary. To me the word "trance" assumes a conceptual framework of some sort that filters direct experience. So in that way I would distinguish the MOQ from being a trance state, just as I would distinguish the mystic understanding of reality (ineffable) from the conventional one (symbolic) What do you think? Platt Good point Platt and this is the contradiction, as Pirsig himself says: (Lila pp 66-8) 'Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a 'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity'. In this sense I mean that reality is the way you describe it above (following the MoQ) but to, once again conceptualise 'it', point to 'it' , communicate 'it' and share 'it' with others is to ask the other person to share your conceptualised/ hypnotised/ trance-like state. Please do not misunderstand, I think the MoQ is the best intellectual formulation (Pirsig's words) we have so far but in the same way that we have had the SOM formulation (the SOM intellectual glasses). How does one communicate the DQ (Mystic) experience? The more you know...the less you talk. Perhaps this is a future (evolutionary?) development: pure communication without language. But who is to say that there is not another set of glasses somewhere that will expand on and subsume the MoQ? Have I fallen, once again, into the SOM way of thinking trap? Anyway, for what it is worth. Andre Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
