Marsha asks:
Ron, Is your position that the self is patterned experience?
Ron responds:
More or less ... I'd like to interject that my own position is that even though the self does not exist as an entity and that it is an illusion or invention, that it still holds contextual value, it's useful and if it has value it has a kind of realness in context which as we have established, is about as "real" as any experience. The self as entity, does not exist inherently. The self as experience does, it is value. It is Quality. Quality "is".
See, this is the kind of nonsense that passes as philosophy. A philosopher wants to "overcome" the nuisance of duality, so he comes up with an abstract term ("pattern") which is supposed to make everything "unreal" except Quality. Not only does his thesis do away with subjects and objects, it eliminates the possibility of realized Quality which is the only value there is!
Marsha plays this game well. She accepts without question the premise that existents are "patterns" and finds mystical quotes and poems that seem to support the concept.
Ron tries to make the concept logical without raising any controversial questions. The most he can say about the self is that "it's useful and ...has a kind of realness in context which ...is about as "real" as any experience. Now, there's a compromising definition if I've ever heard one!
Folks, if you can't believe in your own "self", then nothing is real -- not consciousness, not experience, not the universe, not evolution, and certainly not Quality. Even Pirsig concedes that "experience is the cutting edge of reality." And experience is the objective content of the conscious self. I ask you, can it be anything else? C'mon people! How long are we going to delude ourselves with this myth?
Your world, your existential reality, begins and ends with your self. You are the cognizant locus of all that you experience. That locus is primary to everything you know or feel -- including value. Does the word "pattern" add any meaning to this self-evident truth? And by what logic does it make the self synonomous with Quality?
For the sake of clarity, consider this logic. Everything known or apprehended by the self is either an object/event (existent) or an essent (something which cannot be defined as an existent). Awareness, Value, Sensibility, Experience, Intellect, Judgment, Emotion, Ego and Libido are all 'essents' identified with Selfness. They constitute the "subjective" contingency (not-other) of existence. Everything else is Otherness. OK?
Now, by this logic, existence is an Other/Not-other dichotomy, which is to say, the differential manifestation (creation) of a primary Source about which we have no empirical knowledge. It would seem to me that the aim of Philosophy (and/or Metaphysics) is to reveal or intuit the nature of that Source.
Are we, or are we not, in agreement with this objective? Essentially yours, Ham 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/
