Ron, For all the talk about the rejection by mystics, it still seems that Buddhism's non-theistic, multi-perspectives, using wisdom-insight, encouragement and the technique of meditation, have moved countless numbers of individuals towards quality.
Marsha -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of X Acto Sent: Sunday, September 13, 2009 8:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [MD] on defining Quality "Phasdrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that both mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite reasons. It suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the understanding of the Indians and the understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is located. Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics' hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the door to metaphysics you can say goodbye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding. The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. 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. It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or 'zero,' or 'space' for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with 'nothing.' 'Zero' and 'space' are complex relationships of 'somethingness.' If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone. What made all this so formidable to Phaedrus was that he himself had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define it. Was this some kind of a sell-out? His mind went over this many times. A part of it said, 'Don't do it. You'll get into nothing but trouble. You're just going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something that was perfectly clear until you came along. You're going to make ten-thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole set of enemies who've already said reality is something else.' The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, 'Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting.' This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long. Or Lila last night. It isn't anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity. But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoid ance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's the degeneracy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born — and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life. That was all he had to say to the mystic objections to a Metaphysics of Quality. -lila ch5 re-ephasis "But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoid ance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's the degeneracy fanatics are made of." 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