On Dec 15, 2009, at 12:28:11 AM, [email protected] wrote: Can't believe I have described "intellect as that which senses SOM". Intellect IS the subject/object distinction .. or aggregate. Full stop.
Hi Bo, Thanks for the response. I will just post an opinion on this small part above. Again I may have trouble with the poetic way you use words. I will talk about intellect. In my opinion, the intellect, as defined by me for MoQ, is the sum total of the minds ability to know. The way this intellect achieves knowing is through the mechanics of the brain and the body. So in this way, the intellect is the "soul". The brain/body itself has no subject object concept in the same way a computer doesn't. I think we are on the same page here. My interpretation goes a little beyond this. The intellect is the personal sense of self. It can have a subject/object view, a Cartesian skeptical view, a solipsistic view. It can have a nondual view, it can have no view. I would describe Pirsig's Intellect to be Quality itself. Quality uses the human incarnation as a way to experience the physical world. For me, then, Quality is the same thing as Atman (for lack of a better word, and soul has Christian connotations). Now if Quality is everything in a non-definable manner, then Quality is experiencing itself. This would be similar (I believe) to Ham's negation of Essence. Since the human body appears to limited as an object, there is no way the brain/body can understand Quality, but the intellect or mind can. While the mind cannot define Quality, it knows exactly what it is, because it is exactly what the mind is. Such Such understanding can be taught from teacher to student, through non-logical means. This has been achieved through the ages through disciplined study. Such understanding is much more than just another way of thinking, it is actually non-thinking with the intellect (as I define it here). Others use the word Consciousness for this intellect, and in the end we are all talking about the same thing. Call it the soul, intellect, Quality, Atman, that which experiences the Ego, the spirit, God, it is all the same thing at the personal "knowing" level. In our attempts to define it, we may branch off in subtle semantic distinctions, and the more we define what we are talking about, the farther away we get from it. In my opinion, MoQ has gotten pretty far away from its origin in ZAMM, and there is now a lot of bullshit traveling around. If we get back to basics, I believe we can find commonality between MoQ and a variety of other metaphysical philosophies. This is often my attempt in this forum. Mark 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/
