On Mar 5, 2009, at 9:52:42 AM, "david buchanan" <[email protected]> wrote:
Willblake said to dmb: Hi, I am trying to understand what you mean by the mystic reality. Is it the mysticism as was written by Aldus Huxley in the Perennial Philosophy, or similarly, the mysticism as written by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience? If this is what you mean by seeing DQ, it will help me to understand Quality since I think I understand those books.. dmb says:Yes, the term "DQ" refers to the mystic reality and the MOQ subscribes to the perennial philosophy. If you've read Huxley's book then you know that it's called "perennial" because this mystic reality is recognized and given expression all over the world. It can be found in all times and places, regardless of culture. Huxley points out that this is not any particular tradition but rather extracted from the esoteric core of all the world's great religions. When James wrote "Varieties" he had not yet worked out his radical empiricism and was a bit clumsy about the philosophical import of these experiences. That's where radical empiricism is so helpful. In that case, terms such as "pure experience" and "the immediate flux of life" refer to the mystic reality. Likewise, Pirsig's terms such as "the primary empirical reality", "the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality", "the pre-conceptual reality" all refer to the mystic reality as well. There are other terms that also refer to this Dynamic reality. Northrop, Pirsig's mentor, it was called "the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". It's also called the Tao, the One, "undivided experience" and a lot of other terms too. Of course these terms, because they ARE terms, are static. These terms are conceptual, intellectual, verbal references and so there is a discrepancy between these names and the reality they refer to, that they point to. The reality itself is experienced directly, prior to any such definitions. And it's no accident that all my favorite radical empiricists (Pirsig, Dewey and James) discovered this in their own experience. They all had mystical experiences. James describes his own in "Varieties", Pirsig describes his at the climax of ZAMM and Dewey, if memory serves, only said so in some letters to a friend rather than published works. It happened to him of Oil City, Pennsylvania of all places. It's what prompted him to become a philosopher. For Huxley, if memory serves, it involved hallucinogens or, as Huston Smith calls these mind-altering substances, "entheogens", which means "god enabling". The variety of terms speaks to the perennial nature of this experience, this realization. Once you see this from several angles and realize that these are just different names for it, you see it everywhere. It's in the Native American culture and Zen Buddhism, East and West, contemporary and ancient. I hear it in Van Morrison, U2, The Gourds, in the psychology of Carl Jung, the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell, in the myths themselves and even David Lynch talk about it as the source of his creativity. There is even a journalist who writes about this in a book called "Rational Mysticism". That phrase is a bit unfortunate but he's only saying, like Pirsig and Zen and so many other forms, that mysticism is natural, which is to say that it's not supernatural. It's an empirical reality, the PRIMARY empirical reality.. As Pirsig says in Lila, once you realize the similarity between DQ and mysticism, it produces "an avalanche of information" about DQ. I hope that helps. Thanks, that helps. I have problems with terminology when I am new to a discipline. 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/
