Krimel said: What Pirsig says is that Quality is like the Tao and SQ and DQ are opposites that reveal an understanding of that underling unity. It is never one or the other in isolation but always a mixture of both. I think this can be stated more simply as: Order is a subset of Chaos.
dmb says:The open lines of the Tao Te Ching, which Marsh paraphrased for you recently, says that the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao. Pirsig says that you can go through that book replacing the term "Tao" with the term "Quality" and it works every time. The opening lines are no exception. The Tao that can be named is a verbal description (a static concept) while reality itself is Dynamic. This is what it means to say that Quality can't be defined. It is reality as it is immediately experienced, not the concepts that are derived from it. Pirsig also calls this the cutting edge of experience and it hardly matters what the content of that experience is. You could be spinning in a tornado, reading a book, bouncing off a wall or anything else. DQ is at the front edge of all experience. And here I think it's worth pointing out that passive and active and all the other opposites represented by the symbol of Taoism are conceptual categories. The union of opposites is not so much about being both sides at the same time so much as realizing that these opposites are not inherent to the structure of reality itself but rather static divisions we impose upon experience. Or, to think of it another way, reality is all the sand on all the beaches but we pick up a handful of that sand, sort it out in various ways and call that reality. Or, to put it in terms of philosophical mysticism, Dynamic reality is undivided while static reality is the divisions we impose upon it conceptually and verbally. This is what it means to say that reality is too rich, thick and overflowing to be pinned down with our definitions. Here the gap is not between a pre-existing objective reality and our perception of it but between the richness of experience and the relatively few features we notice consciously and conceptualize. And of course what gets noticed will depend on who you are and what your interests are at the moment. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009 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/
