The first fall is the big thrill. For one or two seconds your train is in space, there is no gravity. A theory is experienced in reality, a mental concept is confirmed by the pit of your stomach. And your heart and lungs and kidneys and toes. It all adds up to the truths of the laws of momentum and gravity you read about. Confirmation. Confirmation from the experience of the body for what is riding up on top in the brain. But your brain is not usually supplying you much abstractly conceptual high-level thinking during such moments; your brain is recording sensory inputs faster than they can be thought about. Not faster than conceptualization, but faster than intellectualization. The concepts come, the intellect stays quiet. The track blurs by, the bottom is reached quickly and g-forces pin you to your seat and screams arise in your ears. Something else happens on the Big Dipper, your wide-open eyes see 12 bright, strobing flashes in rapid sequence, in an instant. What has happened is your picture has been taken, but we are taking this ride in sequence and seeing pictures is what happens when you get off the ride. Right now you are immersed in it and the immediate experience is of a succession of ups and downs. Your body, playing games with gravity.
And metaphysically, when I swoop down from the intellectual heights of a new idea or with a new consciousness and carrying with me my new perspective of the whole, there is a thrill I feel and there is a happiness that stays with me through the ups and downs. On the roller coaster, gravity is god. In life's roller coaster, what we experience in our ups and downs is a valuistic relation to what is good. When things are good, we feel high. When things are bad, we feel low. A physical roller coaster, constrained by the static laws of physics, will follow every up with a down and every down with an up. The roller coaster of life is not so predictable. Some people seem to find an upward path with very few dips - short shallow ones and others just fall screaming into endless holes. On the other hand, the physical roller coaster is not very responsive to your momentary will. There's a place of fear or two where you want to get off, you ask the train to stop and it doesn't. Knowing all about the laws of gravity does not mean you can change them. On my metaphysical roller coaster of life, I can. My thoughts themselves make up the shape and structure of the world-view paradigm metaphysical outlook of life that I am riding. Perspective brings knowledge brings choice. That is part of the perspective of Quality as the underlying, over-riding, dynamic generator of my world. The power of the up. Sure, you've got ups and downs, but the only reason you have any momentum at all is because you start out going up - a force outside your narrow self takes you up. LIke wise, metaphysical Quality has a good that put you here, or you wouldn't be here. This has to be a positive force, empirically experienced as self-evident. Royce and Pirsig, by placing Good as absolute and letting the metaphysical map flow from that point, solve all my philosophical problems which grants me perfect perspective. Ok, "perfect" is a super-exaggeration - only good perspective. Quality gives me Good perspective. But then, how is perspective that is good, any different than perfection? Often in construction when a cut is right on the money, it's "perfect", even though we know that with a microscope you could detect lines wavering and slight deviation. But we mean perfect when it works to specification, that's all we really need. With the right perspective, we can make the right choices and solve the social ills of our world. And we will. Just as soon as we get off this stupid roller coaster and get back to real life. 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/
