Hi Khoo, Thank you for your opinion. While your post is similar in tone to those of Bo, I find many more hand-holds and toe-holds that I can cling to as I scale around the cliffs of understanding, and I learned something.
You have an interesting perspective of MoQ, and I find instructive the direction you take with Dr. Batra's interpretation of the cycles of man. It could be seen as the four expressions of the human animal's brain. Donning the hat of metaphysical biologist, I can provide another prism for this understanding, that is the interaction of the brain with the environment, with social overtones. The first case you discuss is man' immediate direct awareness of experience, that of the laborer, which is in essence man's fundamental interaction. We then get into the warrior's interaction. This is one step removed. That is, the brain begins to isolate and reflect. The warrior deals with personal interaction on the scale of control. That is effecting an outcome, as you say, subduing matter. The experience is no longer one of Taoist flow, but of self importance. The self distances itself from the experience. I would then present the acquisition type experience. Here the mind has fully distanced itself from direct interaction, and comprehends reality in a purely objective manner. That is, what brings a sense of comfort lies outside. This type of interaction becomes difficult to satisfy unless there is constant and increasing distraction by the objective. Finally, the intellectual's mind tries to embody the subjective with the objective, but in doing so creates an elaborate objective world which distances the experience. Such intellectualization becomes reflective in an objective way, and creates a reality which replaces knowing. Literal interpretations of MoQ create such a displacement. For me, it is illuminating to know that such intellectualization is fabrication. I believe that if we are to divide man's nature into these categories, all four exist at all times within. A stabilizing approach is to find balance. It is the imbalance that creates cycles in society. A good example, for those who are chemists, are oscillating chemical reactions that are always rising and falling. Evolution of species is another example of such oscillation. Whether there is a progressive trend which is encompassed by Quality is certainly open for discussion, provided rules are followed. It is the manufacture of these rules that resides in the nature of these posts. An amalgamation of disparate views or philosophies is certainly most useful. Thanks again, Mark On Feb 18, 2010, at 10:26:23 PM, "Khoo Hock Aun" <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Mary and all, Khoo said on 11 Feb: But the Metaphysics of Quality has yet to be fully formed and is only at is preliminary stages of development. Mary subsequently requested: Care to expand on that? ________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Metaphyics of Quality is an explanatory tool for the evolution of human civilization and less a pathway for individual salvation. In this respect, I would like to re-introduce PR Sarkar’s Theory of Social Cycle to illustrate the possible further directions the Metaphysics of Quality could take. I take liberty in paraphrasing Dr Ravi Batra from his self-published book “The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism” of 1978. Briefly, it begins with the view that society is composed of four basic types, each with a different frame of mind. Some by nature are warriors, some intellectuals; some are capitalists/acquisitors and some laborers. Society evolves by rule of one type to another. It is interesting how Sarkar explains the laborer: one whose mind is dominated by the environment surrounding it. It is ruled by materialistic thoughts. A physical worker cannot subjugate material forces or the physical environment in which he or she resides. A laborer is simply one, even though imbued with physical strength, who lacks the initiative, ambition and drive to subdue matter and to succeed in the world. The mind moved by the spirit of subduing matter is the warrior mind. The warrior loves adventure, is full of courage and high-spiritedness, has natural curiosity to learn new ways and applies his physical strength and skills to solve his or her problems. Those endowed with superlative martial qualities want to leave their mark on history, seek eternity through their exploits. The warrior type, Sarkar observes is usually composed of army officers, skilled workers, adventurers and professional athletes – anyone who struggles to solve problems through a direct fight or through physical prowess. An intellectual’s mind is one more prone to scholarly pursuits than the warrior mind. The intellectual too wants to subjugate matter, but unlike the warrior, he uses his intellectual abilities to attain the comforts of life. His mind is subtler than the martial mind and eventually comes to sway the warrior. They devise theories, cults and dogmas to confuse the warrior and take advantage of his straightforwardness. Priests, scribes, poets, scientists, lawyers, physicians, teachers and the like constitute this group. Thus whenever the intellectuals rule, they rule by winning over the warriors, who alone are physically and mentally equipped to maintain order in society. Finally, the acquisitors, who we know as capitalists, have a penchant for accumulating material things. They constantly seek to amass wealth and at some point in time, the affluent acquisitor comes to dominate the other three groups by purchasing their services with his opulence. Since warriors can be controlled by intellectuals and laborers by warriors, all the other types will readily submit to ambitious men and women of fortune. Sarkar maintains that wherever civilization developed, in Africa, Asia or Europe or anywhere else, an examination of history will reveal this quadri-divisional social system.He postulates that a society evolves over time in terms of four distinct eras. Sometimes warriors, sometimes intellectuals and sometimes acquisitors dominate the social and political system. Laborers never hold the reins, but at times the ruling class becomes so self-centred and decadent that for a while society languishes through disorder, marking the laboring times. Thus no single group exercises social supremacy and power forever. The movement of society from one epoch to another follows a clear-cut pattern, and this is observed in every civilization: the laborer era is to be followed by a warrior era, the warrior era by the intellectual era and the intellectual era by the acquisitive era, culminating in a social revolution. Dr Batra tests this against the histories of Western and Hindu civilization and Russian society in his book and observes the following cycles. It is observed that when society lacks all purpose and the ruling elite oppresses the masses to the maximum that the laborer era begins. A state or government exists but its dominion is not respected. The important point is that this arises because of the self-conceit of dominant groups who care nothing for how their actions affect others. In the martial era, the warriors dominate society as well as the government. Political authority is extremely centralized, people are highly disciplined. Intellectuals and acquisitors enjoy some respect but have little say in governance. The intellectual era is marked by the rise of priests and secular intellectuals. Many new theories dealing with the various aspects of life are formed and used. The initial benign leadership of selfless intellectuals gives way eventually to unscrupulous intellectuals who exploit warriors and laborers until it becomes oppressive. The intellectual in order to rule, will always endeavor to subjugate other groups, much less allow them equal rights. In the acquisitive era, which comes next, scholars work for the affluent class when their corruption by material gain is complete. Everything is reduced to dollars and cents. Human values begin to recede. Art, music, religion, sports; everything is commercialized. Concentration of wealth is at its highest and at the end of the acquisitive era, all non-acquisitive groups are remorsely exploited by the acquisitors. The ideas of the intellectuals help acquisitors stay in power and prop up their rule. Of all forms of government, the one loved by the acquisitors is that where the central authority is the weakest. In the acquisitive era, when the acquisitor’s mentality comes to infect their subjects, moral degeneration comes to pervade the entire society. This results not only from the lewdness of the rich, but also from the looseness of family ties, excessive stress on individualism and a general lack of social discipline that springs from a decentralized political structure. I think most, especially Pirsig himself in ZAMM can recognise this era in the present state of the world. To this, I would add my own observations with respect to the long wave economic cycles first observed by Kondratieff over a period of 200 years. Each 60 year cycle covers roughly two generations; the first generally good at producing “widgets and stuff” and making a lot of money in the economic expansion of the real sector. The second generation inherits the money and invests in all kinds of financial instruments resulting in a rapid expansion of the financial sector. When technological infrastructure on which the initial expansion was based becomes marginally productive as new technology emerges, asset bubbles emerge in the second phase due to over speculation and eventually the financial sector collapses, freeing up capital and resources to be deployed in the sunrise industries. In this sense, financial crisis and economic depressions are the great levellers that enables brings down established structures and allows an economy to metamorphosise from one level to another. In global terms, the world gains a new superstructure with each long wave cycle. It so happens acquisitors, intellectuals and warriors each play their roles in the evolution of human civilization. The picture we derive from this is that within each phase/era/cycle is a time of increasing moral value, where society becomes better organized, leading to a time of decreasing moral value where decadence sets in until chaos and disorder prevails until order is imposed again. Dynamic values manifest eventually as movements, develop stasis as institutions and ossify into restrictive dogmas/ideologies setting the stage for the next revolution when humanity driven by new dynamic values sweep the slate clean again. The explanatory power of the Metaphysics of Quality partially accounts for the evolution of society through various stages described above and the evolutionary spiral of increasingly complex development and organization in terms of the oscillation between dynamic and static quality. In Lila, Pirsig makes a number of statements like: “Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of “rightness” which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life and to the evolving understanding of the universe which life has created.” Another is as such: “The physical order of the universe is also the moral order” and another “All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality.” It is important to make the distinction that the Metaphysics of Quality attempts to explain the overall evolution of a society while Quality is the individual’s compass to guide him or her through life in the choice of values. In a karmic sense, we are the sum total of all the choices we make. The pathways to achieve the direct experience of Quality may emerge with the further development in the science of the consciousness through the study of introspection and comtemplation. Pirsig has not developed a specific manual with the attendant prerequsites or provided the support structures for this; and this will be necessary if we want to approach Dynamic Quality individually. I doubt if a “simple snap out of it” will suffice. As a starting point for the explanation of human evolution, where all individuals and beings find themselves playing their roles and bit parts, the Metaphysics of Quality, where Value is the fundamental point of view, needs the overlay of other explanations such as cyclical nature of collective human behavior in terms of the rise and decline of the power structures, moral development and decadence, the potential of human consciousness to direct evolution itself, inter-civilisational integration, morphogenetic fields in all levels and ultimately the Gaia hypothesis, universal consciousness among many. We have seen how in the ebbs and flows, the relationship of the social, intellectual and even the biological, is a lot more complicated and complex; and in Pirsigian terms, where each level is demarcated by their dominance in directing human evolution. One of my favorite quotes is Victor Hugo’s “there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come”. Indeed, one idea can change the world if its time has come. And to change the world, all you have to do is think THAT idea. I would add, a first condition, when a whole host of complementary ideas, theories and technology are in place as well. The second condition is that human society itself must be conditioned, ready and receptive to the idea. Various iterations of the Quality idea may have preceded ZAMM and LILA but if none of the above conditions are met, they and the Quality idea itself would not be regarded as more than an idiosyncratic novelty. If SOM continues to dominate the Western mindset, the notion of a Metaphysics of Quality will not take root. Of course it is a misintepretation of the Metaphysics of Quality to define the Intellectual level solely as the subject-object metaphysics when it is just one out of many possible intellectual patterns that could come to dominate society. No doubt in America and in Western civilization , subject object metaphysics had become dominant and Pirsig in Lila asked from that context: “From the perspective of subject-object science, the world is a completely, valueless place. There is nothing morally wrong because there are no morals, just functions. Now that intellect was in command of society for the first time in history, was this the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with ?” Pirsig for all intents and purposes developed the MOQ as an alternative intellectual pattern for Western civilization drawing on American experiences and the bedrock of American Indian culture. There are alternative holistic worldviews with which to run society with. Their time may not have yet come, but previews of such are tantalizing. Just at about the time Peter Russell wrote the Global Brain and in between ZAMM and LILA, in 1986, the world reached its overshoot point. Before that time the global community consumed resources and produced carbon dioxide at a rate consistent with what the planet could produce and reabsorb. By 1996, however, humanity was using 15 percent more resources in a year than the planet could supply. This year, two and one half decades since we first went into overshoot, we are now demanding resources at a rate of 40 percent faster than the planet can produce them. At this rate we need another Earth by 2030. Sustainability and harmony with the living planet could indeed be the new intellectual patterns for a global preservation whose time has come and where they would take the lead in human evolution. Sustainability, it seems, will now be the basis of all innovation. When the equivalent of 10 billion neurons manifest through our interlinked and computer networked individual brains; a global brain would have emerged on our planet. Already a global consciousness exist each time a global event takes place through the communications infrastructure. Our collective memories and knowledge increasingly reside in global databases and communications networks: even when we die as individuals, our collective experiences are stored and manipulated as part of a larger life. We each lose our individuality in our specialized function in the larger whole but gain a global perspective that we are one functioning part of an all-encompassing organism. Our lives as humans on the planet become like the lives of a cell. Morphogenesis is a fascinating aspect of this development: how do each of us, like the cells, develop our own specializations to become part of a larger whole. If this is the mechanism of evolution of human civilization, what then is its purpose ? Intellect leads this evolution and as we are each individually the sum of all our choices, the evolution of our living planet is then collectively the sum of all of humanity’s choices. The act of making such choices is a dynamic event; of propensities and probabilities. We can snuff out life on Earth in a nuclear Armageddon; and it would not matter a jot on a universal scale. There are billions of other planets out there, each evolving as well. However if an Earth-based global morphogenetic field is successfully achieved, morphic resonance may find its way ultimately in the terraforming of planets, nearby and afar, tailored for the needs of human civilization. We will invariably find ourselves, after such flights of fancy, again at the level of the individual and ask of the meaning of it all. As we journey through the various bardos, especially that of becoming, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, instructs us to recognize the choices that are before us, of the wombs that present themselves and to choose correctly so that we may find liberation: “The true, profound, essential secret is to enter into the supreme state of equilibrium in which there is no good or bad, acceptance or rejection, passion or aggression”. Best regards Khoo Hock Aun 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/ 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/
