Krimel,
Still wonderful after all these many months...
From: "Case" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 13:48:32 -0500
Subject: [MD] Case's Answer to Marsha: Intro
Case,
I will burn blessings for your success.
Marsha
--------------------------------------
Marsha,
Thanks, your offerings may have borne fruit. I died and was resurrected many
times but only got my entire party killed once. This was because I had a
train of mushrooms following me and was going to die but in that Blink
moment our cleric said "Bring 'em." I did and my corpse was the first on the
pile.
You have expressed an interest in Taoism and its relation to the MoQ. I am
going to trying to tell what I think about this but I am not an authority
and I do not vouch for the accuracy of what follows. It is merely how I see
it.
I think I have violated several unwritten MoQ protocols here.
It is too long.
It creates multiple threads.
I have wander off track.
I have stumbled.
I considered calling it: Scatological Eschatology but that seemed
pretentious and wrong since it does not pretend towards the end of anything.
But I had fun and it used up the better part of my morning. Later I will
read over this and go "Crap you should have proof read it." But, oh well,
consider it the first draft of my 500 word Primer on the MoQ.
My user's wife has been on him several times already today, to fix the
sliding glass door and pick up trash in the yard and something else he
ignored. He growled at her and made her listen to the first two parts of
this. She disappeared and has not come back.
Domestic tranquility is a fragile thing and I am pushing it.
Later
Case
Part One:
Or
What the hell is going on here?
Several years James Burke hosted a PBS series called Connections where he
showed how various advance in technology had lead to deep and racial changes
in culture. For example he claimed that the printing press was more
responsible for the Reformation than theology because it allowed ideas to
travel farther and faster than ever before in history.
You and I are used to seeing knowledge accelerate, doubling and quadrupling
in our lifetimes and we expect this. That's just the way it is. So I think
it is hard for many to imagine a time when knowledge and wisdom did not
change and time stood still. People lived the same lives their parents did
for generation after generation. While it is fashionable to pay homage to
their use of myth and metaphor, we tend to be a bit smug about the
quaintness of their conceptions.
In many parts of the world ancient people, faced to making sense of the
natural world, appealed to the supernatural. They figured, there must be
something out there messing with us this way, what can we do to suck up?
Radiating out of the Middle East and India there are pantheons of gods and
goddess doing what they do.
I think the best example of this comes from the Book of Job. It is one of
the oldest books in the Bible. This is the Case short form summary:
Satan is out walking to and fro upon the earth. He comes into the court of
heaven one day.
God asks him, "What up, down there?"
Satan says, "Not much?"
God says, "So how has my servant Job doing?"
Satan says, "Oh, he fine his praises you all the time. But that's only
because you are nice to him. If you were to fuck with him he would curse
your name."
God says, "No way!"
Satan says, "Betcha, he would."
God says, "You're on!"
Next thing you know Job is having a party downstairs when some servants come
in and tell him all his flocks are dead, and his family has been killed.
Job is like, "Oh shit!"
But he does not curse the Lord. When Satan comes back, God says, "See I told
you."
Satan say, "Yeah but that's only because you only let be fuck with his
stuff, not him personally. If I could hassle him, he would curse you."
God says, "No way!"
Satan say, "Betcha!"
God says, "You're on!"
So for the rest of the book Job is sitting in an ash heap, covered in boils
pissing and moaning about his fate. He is all like, "Why me? What the hell
did I do? I don't deserve this kind of shit!"
His friends come by to cheer him up and they offer all kinds of reasons why
a merciful, just God this would let this happen to his servant.
Bad Karma.
Vanity.
This was God's way of sparing Job from something worse.
On and on they drone and to each argument Job says, "That's bullshit!"
Finally God steps in. Job says, "God, why did to let Satan mess with me this
way?"
God answers, "Who are you to ask me what I can and can not do? I am God. I
don't need a reason. Shit happens. Deal with it."
Now you are no doubt saying to yourself what has this got to do with Taoism
or the MoQ? The short answer is that religion, science and philosophy are
all responses to God's answer to Job.
Shit happens, that is Dynamic Quality.
End of Part One.
Part Two
or
Shit happens. How do we deal with it?
My brother is an earthy kind of guy. But intellectual pretentiousness seems
to run in our family. He used to work on a loading dock and he would be
spouting off to his co-workers about politics and this and that and
generally making himself annoying. Finally one day one of his business
associates interrupted one of his tirades and said, "Look man, don't take
this wrong but if it ain't got to do with fishin' or fuckin' I really don't
give a damn."
Imagine you are a hunter gatherer 15,000 years ago. About all your social
group can offer you is knowledge about fishin' and fuckin'. Nothing else
really matters.
Eat this.
Don't eat that.
Make yourself useful.
If you need to do something smelly, go outside the camp.
Pretty basic stuff.
The game migrates and you either follow it or wait depending on where you
live. The seasons change. Flowers blooms, nuts fall from the trees, the
berries sprout from the thorn bushes. It is said that the oldest profession
in the free market economy is prostitution as in "I trade you some of this
for some of those purple berries." But I tend to think that the second and
third and fourth professions were Pharmacy, Engineering and Astronomy.
Modern pharmacy grows from the herbalist traditions that run as far back as
anyone can remember. Herbal lore accumulates over time and generations. It
is essential and must be passed on from generation to generation because
there is just too much to for one person to figure out on their own in a
life time. These leaves can stop that itching. If you suck this root your
head will stop hurting. If you eat this mushroom the world will melt around
you.
Engineering begins with banging rocks together and lo and behold they crack
and the shape changes. Hey, I'll bet we could use a shape like that to dig a
deeper hole. You got another one? Wow, that's sharp! What if we tie it to a
stick? Can you show me how you made that?
But Astronomy? Today most of us ignore or can't see the lights in the sky
but for most of our ancestors they were an ongoing mystery, bright and
unmistakable in the heavens. Almost all prehistoric peoples that we have met
in historic times, that is the native and aboriginal peoples, can mark the
change of seasons by the passage of heavenly bodies. This is essential the
farther from the equator you live. This perception of regular cycles is
critical to knowing when the game is going to pack up and leave or when it
is time to start breaking out the blankets.
While the oldest profession can be learned and mastered in a single life
time these other three require transmission across time. They require the
recognitions of patterns in nature and the ability to see connections
between things that are disconnected.
The position and phase of the moon as it relates to room temperature.
The shape and height of a berry bush and color of its fruit in relation to
whether it tastes good or will make you sick.
The textures and shape of a stone in relationship what kind of arrowhead you
can make from it.
What separated our ancestors from the rest of nature was their ability to
see patterns in nature. They were able to perceive coincidence and to derive
meaning from it. This idea of meaningful coincidence is the beginning of
wisdom. Jung dubbed it Synchronicity. He saw it as meaning derived from
causally unrelated events. For example, you have a dream about an old friend
and the next day to drop in for a visit.
But I think Jung was wrong. Synchronicity is not about deriving meaning from
acausality. Causality is derived from synchronicity. In other words a cause
and effect relationship is one from which meaning can be derived every time.
Individually and collectively what sets us apart from the rest of the
natural word is our ability to perceive patterns and give them meaning. Most
patterns do not have meaning. They are asynchronous. They are just shit
happening. But when we can see a pattern of meaning; when we can see a
persistent relationship, ah ha, now that is some Good Shit. Even if the
pattern tells us that something bad is going to happen, it is good to know.
Good Shit Happens, too: That is Static Quality.
End of Part Two
Part Three
"What does it all mean, Mr. Natural?"
"It don't mean, shit"
-R. Crumb
Most of the primitive and budding civilizations of the planet tended to
follow similar patterns. By collecting patterns of meaning over generations
they eventually discovered agriculture and from there they came up with
writing and counting and then there was History, a written record. Writing
allows people to talk directly to their ancestors and for knowledge of
patterns to accumulate. Pretty soon we are standing on the shoulders of
giants.
But when it comes to the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything
the situation is a bit different. God's answer to Job, make us
uncomfortable. Why would God take Satan's bet in the first place? Many, even
most, of the worlds people have tended to spin fanciful answers to see the
hand of God in the forces of nature and to give it personality. They named
the gods and told stories about them and the stories had meaning.
The Chinese were a bit different. If the ancient Chinese had deities or a
superstitious fixation of the supernatural it didn't have the ongoing
significance it had elsewhere. Rather than look to the great beyond or the
inner realms they tended to say: "Well if Shit is going to happen I wonder
what's next?" There are three great texts that come to us from early China.
They are the I Ching, The Analects of Confucius and the Tao Te Ching.
Far and away the oldest is the I Ching. Ching just means book. I or Yi means
Change. It dates from as early as 2,800 BC. I don't personally put any stock
in the contents of the I Ching. It is kind of a catalog for how to derive
meaning from the patterns you get from rolling dice or in this case tossing
coins or sticks on the ground. There are 64 patterns of three stick long and
short and the book is like a dictionary of what they mean.
It is what the book represents that is important. The Chinese saw the world
as ever changing. It is chaotic and unpredictable. The future is ever
uncertain. The I Ching grew out of the belief that there are patterns in
this flowing stream of chance and that those patterns are manifest all
around us and at every level. So if you could detect a pattern somewhere in
the flow it might tell you about the larger currents streaming around you.
They began by reading patterns in the cracks of turtle shells. The divinator
would heat up a piece of tortoise shell until it began to crack and try to
see meaningful coincidence in the patterns. Over time this may have led to a
shortage of turtle shells or perhaps as a matter of speed and convenience
they eventually switch to tossing coins or pieces of yarrow reed. The I
Ching is the culmination of generations of research into these patterns of
meaning.
Chinese metaphysics did not appeal to the supernatural or the abstract. It
saw right from the start that it was all just shit happening. To figure out
what it was and what it meant they focused on what was manifest and patterns
in the actual.
Confucius the great giver of Chinese ethics talked about one's duty and
relationship to one's family and one's ancestors. His answers to what we
ought to do did not spring from divine authority but from what we know about
the consequences of how we treat each other.
The Tao Te Ching is The Book of the Way of Virtue. It is about how to
understand the world and how to recognize and pursue of Virtue. Tao means
The Way and Te means Virtue. It is marvelously ambiguous in its structure
and in its translations. There are dozens of translations and it has always
amazed me that I have seen at least one copy in nearly every book store I
have ever gone into. It sits there ever present and ever vague. I have at
least four translations on my book shelf and three or four more on my
computer. Pirsig uses one that me copied for himself by hand in ZMM and then
gives his own translated translation in the culmination of his pursuit of
Quality.
But see for yourself. Here are four versions of the first verse of the book.
The last one is ripped off from ZMM.
"The spirit one can talk about is not the eternal spirit, and what you can
name is not the eternal name. Nameless-Tao is the beginning of the heavens
and the Earth. If you name it-it is no more than Matter."
"Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself. Even the finest name is
insufficient to define it. Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known. To conduct one's life according to the
Tao, is to conduct one's life without regrets; to realize that potential
within oneself which is of benefit to all."
"The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The
name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. (Conceived
of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived
of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things."
"The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality. The names that
can be given it are not Absolute names. It is the origin of heaven and
earth. When named it is the mother of all things."
The Tao is a spirit, a teaching, a path, a name. It is undefined. Each
translation, each attempt at definition, seems to say as much about the
translator as the text itself. To find its meaning for yourself you have to
stalk it in the thoughts of others.
Quality is a bunch of Shit
End of Part Three
Part Four:
B.S. - Bull Shit
M.S - More of Same
Ph.D - Piled higher and Deeper
Even the structure of the Tao Te Ching is ambiguous. It is divided into two
parts. The first part is about The Way: Tao. The second part is about
Virtue: Te. I have one translation based on a recently found ancient
manuscript where the order is reversed and the second part comes first so
the book is the Te Tao Ching or the Book of the Virtuous Way.
As it is most commonly characterized the Tao Te Ching is about the union of
opposites. It holds that unity is undefined and knowable only though its
manifestations generally in pairs. These pairs or dualisms are known or
appreciated mainly through their relationships to each other. Yin-Moon and
Yang-Sun are the classic catchalls for this.
The Yin-Yang symbol of Taoism is a familiar icon. It shows up everywhere
from the Korean flag to surfboards, popular jewelry, posters and T-shirts.
It is a circle divided into swirls of white and black. Each swirl includes a
dot of its opposite in the fat part of its swirl. It actually comes from a
representation of Chinese solar observation. They would drive an eight foot
long pole in the ground and measure the length of its shadow throughout the
year. The light and dark patterns in the circle come from the lengthening
and shortening of the shadow through out the course of the year. This is
text and I can't draw you a picture but you can see it here:
<http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/yinyang.htm>http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/yinyang.htm
Although the Chinese recognized an essential dualism in the world they did
not see the kind of conflict that westerners see in opposition. Day becomes
night and night divides the day. What goes around, comes around. Opposites
compliment and define each other, they do not conquer or obliterate each
other.
In the balance or proper relationship between opposites one finds harmony or
The Way. But this should not suggest that balance mean equal measure. It can
be found in the hint of shadows on a sunlit day or the glimmer of moonlight
on a darkened pond.
That is The Way. But so what? The Taoist approach to life is to go with the
flow. Rather than trying to force the world to behave in a certain way the
wise man or the Sage is shapeless and adjusts himself to the shape of the
world. There are versions of this in the west of course, the willow is
stronger than the oak in a high wind because it bends rather than breaks.
The value of a cup is not the hard container itself but the hollow emptiness
it surrounds.
What Pirsig seems to have recognized in this is the Taoist ability to
reconcile opposites. He first sees it in the Classical Romantic spilt but
that is only one duality. The Tao reconciles all duality. It is not about
reconciliation through victory it is about sustaining the cycles of nature.
It is not about directing the flow or forming patterns it is about the flow
itself.
Several times I have pointed out my objections to Pirsig's use of the term
Quality to name the Tao. The term Quality serves his purpose in his
discussion of Value but by giving it a name we know he creates the illusion
that we know it. He basically defines the undefined. By naming it after an
abstraction like Quality he emphasizes one aspect of the Tao. But in so
doing he turns our attention away from other aspects. Recognizing full well
that I would be committing the same error, I would prefer to call it The
Way. But my first choice would be to simply leave alone and call it Tao. The
word is familiar to the western mind but it still seems alien. We don't
pretend so much to understand its meaning and it retains an element of
Dynamic Quality as a result.
Still given the teleological bent of so many MoQers and the mystical bent of
others I think The Way is a much better way of naming the unnamable Quality.
It implies a path or a journey, movement through space and time. A path
wanders over and around obstacles. We see it ahead of us and it guides our
steps but we still do not know where it is leading or if we will get there.
The Way is a mystery but we are tuned by nature to recognize it in the
patterns of meaningful coincidence that arise with every step we take.
When the Shit hits the Fan
Hold your breath, close your eyes and walk on.
End of Part Four
-------------------
.
_____________
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.........
.
.
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